Campaign Mastery

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 […]

How to tell compelling stories about your campaign to non-gamers. This month’s RPG carnival, held at Mad Brew Labs, covers the topic of growing the hobby. Topics of new player recruitment and teaching come to mind. We might also consider the industry’s image, how game companies market their products, which companies get shelf space in […]

I thought I’d talk a bit about Drama vs Melodrama and how the two function in an RPG. This subject came to mind when reading “Hooked” by Les Edgerton, a book which I would not recommend for most aspiring authors because the author defines “good writing” as something suitable only for general fiction and posessing […]

Like all GMs, there are times when I know I need an idea, I know what the reason is and what will be done with it – I just don’t know what it is. There’s this empty spot in my mind labelled “Idea goes here”, but I’m absolutely bereft of inspiration, and the deadline is […]

Nobis is a game supplement about to be released by Pantheon Press for the d20/ D&D 3.x game system. Campaign Mastery was priviliged to be amongst a selected number of blog sites given a pre-release glimpse of the new release for review. Although this commentary will focus on the Background to the city-state that is […]

The following essay has been written as my contribution to this month’s Blog Carnival, hosted by RoleplayingPro. It contains a great many personal opinions. These may be wrong; feel free to disagree with me. No offence is intended towards anyone involved, and I apologise for any offence inadvertantly caused. Comments and discussion are welcomed, but […]