Campaign Mastery

I’m not possessed of any special abilities when it comes to prognostication, but I’m as capable of forming opinions as anyone else. Two stray thoughts occasionally click together for me to form a new idea, and when that happened recently, the implications spelt out an unexpectedly rosy future for RPGs and the recording and media […]

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. From December 2006: There’s never enough time to do everything right – so concentrate on the little things that make everything else tolerable. It’s easy to underestimate how big a contribution […]

Assassin’s Amulet is now on sale! For more information on how and where to purchase it, just check the link at the bottom of this article! But first:                 Legacy Items are one of the conceptual planks that form the infrastructure of the Legacies series. “A player’s Guide to Legacy Items” excerpts 15 pages from […]

Recalling the creation of a Divinity We’re continuing to build up to the big release of Assassin’s Amulet, and my excitement is reaching fever pitch (I can’t speak for Johnn & Michael). As part of that buildup, next week I’m going to present you with another excerpt from the book – but before I do, […]

Intro Rather than present another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet, I thought that today I would take the time to extract a few valuable lessons from the experience of writing it. Several reasons commend themselves for doing so: first, there are some ideas there that we would be happy to see adopted by our peers in […]

Our Biggest Contest Ever? I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated. Unless I am misremembering, this is our biggest contest ever with 102 entries – if not, it’s certainly right up there. The Results After tabulating all the votes, including the preferances of Johnn and myself, Cover #6 has won the […]

Here’s another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet while you’re all waiting for the announcement of the winner of the cover contest. This is taken from the GM Advice chapter and first appeared in this week’s Roleplaying Tips. Many GMs struggle with running killer NPCs. One big goal of the book is to arm you with enough […]

I’m as proud as punch to announce the forthcoming release of Assassin’s Amulet by Michael Tumey, Johnn Four, and myself. Currently weighing in at well over 200 pages (we’re still doing layout so there’s no final page count yet), this game supplement will give you everything you need to integrate assassins into an existing campaign. […]

Introduction Back in late February or early March, Holly Lisle’s books came to my attention – I’m no longer sure how, but it was probably a Twitter link to her blog. Several of her e-books sounded interesting, so I passed the information on to Johnn, who surprised me in late March by giving me several […]

As someone who writes about RPGs a lot, I am naturally interested in game design techniques and philosophy. As a former I.T. professional, I have discovered that a lot of the principles of sound program design practice also apply to rules design. With those as my starting point, I thought I would have a stab at defining […]

Anyone who has visited Campaign Mastery over the last few months will have noticed the advert for our book “Filling The Empty Chair“. Written by Johnn Four with contributions and editing by myself, it’s packed with strategies and techniques for finding and recruiting new players for your games. And it’s yours for the bargain price […]

It is time for you to get selfish here and get some GM advice customized just for you. What ebook would you like me to write next that you would use to make your GMing better, easier, more fun? I am wrapping up the editing on my latest product. It’ll be released in 2011, though […]