Campaign Mastery

Dialogue: Essential Techniques There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue. 1. Canned Dialogue This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide. There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, […]

Welcome to 2023: A status update So here we are in 2023! Funny, but it feels a lot like 2022 to me. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and are all revved up for the year to come. My holiday period was great, meeting new relatives and catching up with others […]

So November has come and gone, and with it, Campaign Mastery’s bonus hosting of the Blog Carnival. Those who got inspired by the topic did a stellar job with some very interesting contributions, which I’ll summarize later in this wrap-up post. Sadly, there weren’t really enough participants for that to fill this article. Possibly, misunderstanding […]

I steal inspiration and technique from anywhere that I can find it, but I’m always careful to credit my sources (especially when the application is a bit left-of-field). In the past that has given me articles such as Growing The Perfect Family Tree (Part 1, Part 2), The Ashes: Understanding Brit and Aussie Characters, and Lessons […]

I have said before that you can never have too many approaches to determining the characterization of an NPC up your sleeve. Today’s article offers a new one, and a systematic way of looking at simpler approaches that can also be useful. Let’s start by setting a baseline for comparison… 0. Going Nowhere: The Null […]

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way). This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and […]

This is being written more in hope than expectation. Last week (Wednesday night, to be exact), my internet connection became suddenly unreliable. Because it happened late at night, I had the not unreasonable theory that this was because of network upgrades; not only does my ISP not notify customers of such outages in advance, but […]

You may not know it, but it’s possible to be too creative. Last week, as usual, I spent some time thinking about what I would be writing about in this post, and almost immediately, three different ideas came to mind in what felt like a single flash of inspiration. Well, by the time I had […]

I realized, the other day, that it has been a while since I posted a fantasy-dominated article, so I set about thinking of one. In no time at all, in a singular flash, today’s article came to me, inspired by the singular concepts of D&D / Pathfinder character classes. But it didn’t take me long […]

This article contains material generated as background reference in Mike’s Doctor Who: A Vortex Of War campaign, but it holds relevance to most campaigns including those of the Fantasy genre. Introduction Space is big – really, really, big. I’m sure most readers will have come across that phrase, or something very like it, on numerous […]

I came across a remarkable mathematical fact the other day, which immediately gave me the idea for this post. Yet, while I noted the fact, and roughed out a structure for this article, when the time came to actually write it, the gaming relevance that had been so obvious and self-evident that I had not […]

It happens to everyone eventually – you look at your plot and realize that one of your PCs is going to have to interact with an NPC in a one-off scene, an NPC with whom they might never come into contact again. There are many different ways of handling this. Some GMs will use a […]