Campaign Mastery

In November 2016,. Campaign Mastery hosted the Blog Carnival with the subject being Everyday Lives. Today I have a new technique for integrating the everyday lives of your PCs into the campaign that is virtually effortless, has virtually zero impact on game-play, and yet makes the life of the PC affected more substantially real. Where […]

With this item, I continue the practice of offering shorter articles to start the week. Usually, this is to make room for a longer article later (and from time to time, the sequence has been temporarily inverted), but for much of the next year, that’s the plan. This week, though, it’s not for that reason […]

It’s one of the easiest techniques to follow – you simply copy a character or a plotline from some other source, be it Television, a Movie, or a literary source. If you’re particular clever, you might go so far as to rename the character. There are a number of reasons why a GM might be […]

Sometimes, you want to hit your players with a problem that can be solved only with action of the most violent kind. In D&D, a monster that presents a kill-or-be-killed situation; in a superhero game, a violent threat that has to be stopped before innocents are harmed. But it’s never a good idea to do […]

There is a principle of script-writing and fiction writing that says that if you want to grab the audience’s attention, you should start the story in the middle. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this principle is the James Bond teaser. I’m not sure if it’s the case with the most recent movies – I’m not […]

There are two different visions of a typical winter’s day. If altitude and latitude permit, you have your snowy day with bitter winds and flurries and whiteouts and snow getting down your back; if not, then cold and wet with howling winds and driving rain that sheets horizontally and in which the only cover is […]

It’s easy to fall into the trap of having a singular arch-enemy in a campaign. If anything happens to that enemy, it can leave the GM casting around for a direction. What’s more, having one central villain who is responsible for all that ails the world (and his flunkies, of course) is inherently a harder […]

So you’ve come up with a great character for your game and want to gain maximum value for your creativity? No problem. TV has been doing that in one-hour dramas for decades. There are two paths to follow: the Good Guy path, and the Bad Guy Path. The ‘Good Guy Path’ is all about establishing […]

I’ve seen all sorts of ways to ignite your creativity, nudging your mental capacities into a completely different orbit to their usual. I’ve even offered a few, myself, here at Campaign Mastery, that work best when you have some idea of what it is that you’re trying to create. They don’t work that well, however, […]

“He skulked down the alleyway, blending into the shadows and taking care to avoid the occasional patche of loose cobblestones…”   Sounds good, doesn’t it. Sounds literary, the way you would read – or write – it in a novel or short story. Let’s translate that into typical Game dialogue, and see how well it […]

This is being written a little under the deadline pump; I’m still playing catch-up from my week away at the Family Reunion / 40th Birthday party for my nephew. So it may not quite live up to my usual standards, but I’ll do my best. Actually, I’m cheating for a lot of this article, which […]

In part 1, I identified AERO, four roles that the majority of significant NPCs occupy in most adventures or encounters: Ally Enemy Resource, and Opportunist …and then considered the combinations, demonstrating how rich the in-game plot functions of characters became when one of these roles adopted one of the other roles as a secondary function. […]