Archive for the ‘World Design’ Category

Obscurity and the Wellspring Of Uniqueness

Obscure Knowledge can be a great source of uniqueness in an RPG Campaign, but it needs to be handled with care. No-one enjoys being lectured to, and the more obscure the subject, the less likely it is to be of obvious interest to those receiving it. There are ways around the difficulties and problems, and […]

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Shape with a Feather, not a Bludgeon

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

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The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 3: Winter (cont)

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series The Diversity Of Seasons

With the 2nd part of the series containing some of the locations of greatest climatic diversity or other significant recent history that needed discussion, it threatened to grow far too large for ready consumption. That necessitated a restructuring of this series into twenty parts instead of the sixteen originally planned. Actually, the original plan was […]

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IQ and Intelligence in RPGs

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

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The Inevitability of Extraordinary Characters

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the […]

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The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 2 – Winter (cont)

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series The Diversity Of Seasons

Since day one of the first part being published, this series has consistently had an entry amongst the top ten here at Campaign Mastery. Whether that magic continues or is subject-dependent remains to be seen, but – for now – I have to consider the serial blog format a success! Part 1 of this series […]

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Trends and other tricks in Campaign Design

This weekend’s session of the Zenith-3 campaign was a great success, and one of the big reasons for that was the real sense that the PCs were fully integrated elements within the game world. This article is going to look at some of the major reasons for that so that you can do it in […]

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Fear Itself and the GM

Fear Itself Fear is an enemy every GM will have to deal with on occasion; that’s simple reality. But fear comes in many different shapes and sizes, and many different intensities. The level of Fear that few of us ever have to deal with (phobias excepted) is the sort of fear that paralyzes, that washes […]

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The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 1: Winter

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series The Diversity Of Seasons

I’ll be honest about this. I originally put Winter first on my agenda for this series because I thought that it would resonate with the majority of my readers, who live in the Northern Hemisphere. That was before the incredibly brutal conditions descended upon them, however. When that happened, I contemplated starting with Summer, instead, […]

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The Improbable Dances of Space and Time

Let me challenge your perceptions. Almost everything modern physics thinks it knows about reality is wrong, and I can prove it! The last time I did one of these articles, it was looking at Parallel Worlds, and it was such fun that I have turned around to go again! A long time ago (August 2011, […]

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Memory Lane: Nov 2017 Blog Carnival Roundup

Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles. The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link […]

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Comparative Underpinnings Of Campaign

While this article builds on some others that I’ve done here at Campaign Mastery, I didn’t feel it was enough of a sequel to any of them to qualify for the Blog Carnival. But I wanted to remind readers that if you’re thinking of doing so, there’s still time to submit a late entry! I’ll […]

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