Campaign Mastery

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November. That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that […]

I was reading something on Quora the other day that offered a fairly convincing argument that most people wouldn’t recognize real randomness if it bit them on the toe (in less colorful language). Now, most GMs are not ‘most people’; we work with randomness all the time. But the more I thought about it, the […]

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there are some creature types that automatically get tagged as the villains as soon as they appear. This is true in D&D, in Pathfinder, in a superhero game, a pulp / horror game – you name it. These are ‘the obvious villains’ and today’s article is all […]

So November has come and gone, and with it, Campaign Mastery’s bonus hosting of the Blog Carnival. Those who got inspired by the topic did a stellar job with some very interesting contributions, which I’ll summarize later in this wrap-up post. Sadly, there weren’t really enough participants for that to fill this article. Possibly, misunderstanding […]

I steal inspiration and technique from anywhere that I can find it, but I’m always careful to credit my sources (especially when the application is a bit left-of-field). In the past that has given me articles such as Growing The Perfect Family Tree (Part 1, Part 2), The Ashes: Understanding Brit and Aussie Characters, and Lessons […]

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way). This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and […]

Campaign Mastery has already hosted the Blog Carnival once this year, but when Scot (who runs the Carnival for us) asked me to fill an empty slot, how could I say no? Especially when I already had a list of carnival subjects to draw on? So, this is Art-spiration. Pick a painting or drawing and […]

This weekend was the big finish to the Zener Gate campaign (exactly on schedule). Guest starring the Governator and James Cameron and the Mythbusters duo, it involved the PCs trying to convince Xi Jinping that the Chinese temporal agency was attempting to replace him with a perfect duplicate in order to abort the program – […]

I realized, the other day, that it has been a while since I posted a fantasy-dominated article, so I set about thinking of one. In no time at all, in a singular flash, today’s article came to me, inspired by the singular concepts of D&D / Pathfinder character classes. But it didn’t take me long […]

This article contains material generated as background reference in Mike’s Doctor Who: A Vortex Of War campaign, but it holds relevance to most campaigns including those of the Fantasy genre. Introduction Space is big – really, really, big. I’m sure most readers will have come across that phrase, or something very like it, on numerous […]

I came across a remarkable mathematical fact the other day, which immediately gave me the idea for this post. Yet, while I noted the fact, and roughed out a structure for this article, when the time came to actually write it, the gaming relevance that had been so obvious and self-evident that I had not […]

It happens to everyone eventually – you look at your plot and realize that one of your PCs is going to have to interact with an NPC in a one-off scene, an NPC with whom they might never come into contact again. There are many different ways of handling this. Some GMs will use a […]