Campaign Mastery

The last installment of the third Chapter of the series looks as worker productivity and how race and other factors influence it. It’s been an interesting 2025 so far, characterized by things going wrong in unexpected and unusual ways and recovering from those problems. It actually started on New Year’s Eve, when I rebooted my […]

Before you can use a landscape, you have to understand them. Have no fear, this post will equip you with everything you need to know. Pt 1 of 2. This is the third of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series. I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The […]

The 3rd of 4 posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade focuses on the Labor Unit and how to use it to make GMing a business easier. Today’s post starts with a couple of short sections that were inadvertently left out of last week’s examination of carts. They had been written, but not where they […]

It’s my contention that with every encounter, the canny GM will expand on the lore surrounding the creatures encountered. I’ve been plugging away steadily at the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series, in which a lot of the elements discussed start to come together into a coherent picture of the processes, but it’s […]

The 2nd of likely four posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade. In this part, Beasts of Burden, Provisions, Carts, and Wagons. For anyone wondering at the cause of the delay, just look at the number of tables that I’ve ended up using in this post – then remember that each of them has to […]

The first of at least three posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade. This covers everything from wagon drivers to guards to dock-hands and farmhands. Anybody who can be considered a faceless cog in the trade machine, in fact! Credit where it’s due: The series title graphic combines three images: The Clipper Ship Image is […]

Gamemasters are human, and just like everyone else, vulnerable to mental health problems. It’s entirely possible that the active participation in an immersive hobby like TTRPGs provides a measure of relief from, and insulation from, such problems, but reducing them in frequency and/or severity does not mean that they are eliminated. My evidence for the […]

There are six types of skill roll modifier that I take into account when assessing any attempt by a character – PC or NPC – to carry out some task. Past articles have focused on just a few of them; this post is intended to provide an overview of the whole. I worked on the […]

The subject this week is adventure writing and structure. I have evolved a fairly functional process to translating ideas into ready-to-run plots over the years, and today I’m going to share it. This can be viewed as a companion piece to One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post, which has […]

I employ a structured and systematic approach to NPC design. Today, I’m going to give readers the low-down – everything they need to use it for themselves. The system revolves around a text document or sheet of notepaper, and an 8×4 grid on another sheet of notepaper – and something to write with. As ideas […]

Cuisine is one of the ultimate distillations of culture. This is how RPGs can harness this fact. Introduction I watch a lot of travel documentaries and short videos, especially those that compare cultures. Not only are they inherently interesting to me, they give me vital cultural reference for games that take place in those nations, […]

What is INT, and (in practical terms), what can it be used for? I was strolling down the street the other day and noticed a logo consisting of a name and a number of dots, and for some reason, it sparked a new way of looking at INT scores, one that emphasized a practical application […]