Campaign Mastery

Some weeks ago, I was offered a review copy of a “solo-player RPG”. I was hesitant at first because it sounded like a computer RPG, which is not the meat-and-potatoes of Campaign Mastery, but reading the invitation more closely made it clear that this was a tabletop game, and that intrigued me, in particular with […]

This continues the article that I started last week, offering a simple technique for the quick and easy generation of families for RPGs. Most of the time, this would be used for the families of PCs, occasionally it might be used for the family of an important NPC. I should also note that most of […]

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles. Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article. That article changed and morphed several […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer. Despite the official discontinuation, every release of […]

This article started in my mind when I was thinking about the Covid-19 situation here in Australia (and elsewhere where the virus has been close to eliminated) but I’ve since broadened and generalized it to some extent. It began with my imagining a set of random tables to describe someone’s interaction with Covid-19. Such-and-such a […]

Just to prove that the recent two-and-a-half-part article RPGs In Technicolor (part 1,part 2, part 2a) weren’t the last word on the subject, I thought of this topic of discussion. Picture a room in which your character is located. A partially-closed door leads to a corridor beyond. Somewhere down that corridor, something is glowing in […]

Something of a bare-bones post this time around, necessitated by the fact that I’m away from home and all its resources. I haven’t been idle while away; I had prepared more than enough RPG work in advance to see me through. Part of that work involves… well, that’s a little more complicated. You see, the […]

I’m going to zip right along under the assumption that you’ve read Part 1 of this article because I don’t really have the time to recap. Color impacts on Cognition There have been studies that showed that exposure to the color red can impact scholastic performance by as much as 20%; other studies looking at […]

In Pigment On Canvas – Six GMing Lessons from Oil Painting I drew inspiration from the oil painting techniques of two TV programs, Masterclass In Oils with Ken Harris and The Joy Of Painting with Bob Ross. In the course of Episode 7 of Season 7 (1985) of the latter, Bob made a very interesting […]

The First Frontier: Appearance Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those […]

Whew! Finished at last!! This is a long one, folks – more than 16 thousand words, or about four normal Campaign Mastery articles. Heck, that’s approaching game supplement levels… Needless to say, I had no idea it would be anything like that long when I started. I Hope it’s worth the wait! Awakened Trees Most […]