Archive for the ‘Writing & Authoring & The Games Industry’ Category

A Long Road – Zenith-3 Notes for all Pt 1

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Zenith-3 synopsis & notes

This article started out as a way to save time and at the same time present some tips and tricks that often get overlooked in my scramble to get material ready for publication here. It was also intended (originally) to be part of last week’s 1000th-post celebration – so there are certain themes that will […]

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The Price of Bricks and Soil (and more)

  This is my 998th post at CM! Two more to the 4-figure milestone!   In my superhero campaign, the PCs are currently shopping for a building to convert into a base of operations for a second set of superhero/civilian Identities that UNTIL has prompted them to create so that they can deal with problems […]

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Extrapolations Of Function: Road-maps to Structures

The Unexpected Microcosm A department store is a near perfect-simulation of, well, just about everything, really. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration – but much less so than most people realize. This article will seek to simultaniously demonstrate the truth of the general statement and show readers how to use the microcosm of the Department Store […]

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Teasers Of History and Other Tips

A shorter article today (by CM standards), but one with a lot of impact to offer. The head of the ruined statue lay on its side, half-buried in soil and vegetation. Three meters from crown to chin, the sculpture of which it was originally a part must have been enormous. The left side of the […]

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Four Ways of Encounter Thinking

The adventurers are moving over rugged grasslands punctuated here and there by the leaves of a wild melon. One of the PCs has been gathering these as they traveled to add a touch of flavor to the goat’s meat purchased in the last town, which has the flavor and consistency of stringy bark, in his […]

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RPG Quora Answers By Mike – Part 2

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series RPG Quora Answers By Mike

The article that I intended to publish today didn’t just go pear-shaped on me, it went prickly-pear shaped. Nothing was salvageable. That’s Okay – I have this series as a backup for that very contingency. So, today, I present another 40 or so of my RPG-related answers on Quora. Some of these will be little […]

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Parity Hole: When Cyberware Goes Bad

Back in the mid-90s, when I was preparing the campaign background for my rebooted superhero campaign, I had to think about cyberware – not the relatively reliable and semi-routine stuff that you would find in a Cyberpunk campaign, but the stuff that you would have before all the bugs were worked out. I wasn’t interested […]

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The Dreaded Plotworm

An Earworm is one of those songs that you can’t get out of your head. Often, the only cure is to expose yourself to “just enough” of another earworm! For the last two months, I’ve been afflicted with a case of the far less-known Dreaded Plotworm. This is when a plot idea that doesn’t quite […]

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Grit in RPGs: Separating Plausibility from Realism

Today’s post comes courtesy of an ear-worm. I recently played Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and the theme from the John Wayne movie “true Grit” stuck in my head (not for the first time). Not at the time, mind, but afterwards, when it was triggered by writing about gritty reality in a Quora post and mentioning […]

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Journeys Of Discovery

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 […]

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The Power Of Blur: Blog Carnival June ’21

I love doing art-related posts for Campaign Mastery because they give me an opportunity to flex my artistic muscles and have some fun. As a result, I’m afraid that the example that I planned to use as an introduction to this post has grown rather larger than expected. It’s worth reading, though :) One of […]

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Quintessentially, About Wealth

Once again, the wheel of days has traversed the circle of time to Campaign Mastery’s turn at hosting the Blog Carnival, following on from Full Moon Storytelling’s Festivals, Holidays, and Birthdays. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a post up for that Carnival (sorry, Dave) – I had a post run over two weeks when it was […]

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