Campaign Mastery

To begin this article, I need to share a story and a recent insight relating to it. Bear with me, and it will all become relevant in the end… An excerpt from my musical history When I was growing up, the family lived first 38 miles (61 km) out of, and then within, a small […]

You don’t have to read Campaign Mastery for very long to realize that I advocate careful planning, strategically targeted, in everything that I do. That can become a problem when you want to have a villain who is smarter than you are and whose primary objective is not to be noticeable over the background chaos […]

Last week, I wrote about creating adventures based on what a character could do. This week I’m going to look at the far more difficult proposition of basing a mini-adventure on what a character can’t do. This task is much trickier; just because a character is incapable of the action that would resolve whatever problem […]

Recently, for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, my co-GM and I had to construct a number of small plotlines – one for each character – simply to mark the passage of a period of time in which the PCs should be doing something. We employed an old technique of mine – but one that has never […]

Heroism is part and parcel of most fantasy campaigns and certainly central to Pulp and Superheroic Campaigns. In fact, most campaigns, driven by the need for drama, will incorporate heroism in some fashion, whether that be from greed / opportunity, enlightened self-interest, or the real deal. How can heroism stem from greed/opportunity? Heroism is doing […]

A Guest Article by Jack Hank You’re a GM in charge of new campaign featuring a group of novices that aren’t quite sure how to assume the guise of a character. So what’s your next move? Ingratiating new players into a game in the hope of building a successful campaign is never easy and there […]

I had a lot of trouble finishing this article – my laptop has started powering down of its own accord without warning, then immediately booting up again. Sometimes, it will run without a problem for hours, on other occasions it will function for only seconds. What it means is that the laptop rebooted multiple times […]

Back in Campaign Mastery’s special 750th post, I included some correspondence between myself and Tracey Snow which I reformatted into an interview format. Part of that “interview” went like this: Do you have a glossary for terms that you use in your articles? Your recent article where you try to define an adventure talks a […]

There are certain topics that are classics, because you never seem to run out of questions being asked about them, or out of different answers with which to respond. For the most part, Campaign Mastery steers clear of those, simply because so many others have provided good advice on the subject. But every now and […]

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. This is the middle part of the current block of three articles, spaced fortnightly. Characters […]

This is the second of these Ask-The-GMs that I’m tackling without recourse to my usual allies and fellow-GMs. Today’s question is asks about something I’ve described using a number of different terms over the years. My current euphemism is “Iceberg Plots”, because 9/10ths (or more) of the plot doesn’t show in any given adventure. The […]

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. I plan to complete the series in blocks of three articles, with fortnightly spacing. I’ve […]