Campaign Mastery

A bit of a fill-in article this week (and maybe next week, too), so that I can put additional effort into a larger article on Economies in RPGs. In the original version of this article, it was illustrated with a composite image created from three DALL-E (Ai-generated) images. Part of the reason for doing so […]

This post features a composite of three AI-generated images. If you disapprove of AI-generated content, you may prefer to view a version without the AI-Content. If so, just click on This Link: https://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/the-land-of-green-no-dall-e-version Having searched for jungle images before, I knew that finding the right one would be problematic, so I turned to DALL-E. The […]

There are three facts about a character that can be considered definitive of what sort of person they are, diagnostic of what sort of mistakes they will make, and instrumental in defining what sorts of adventures will consume their attention. These are not the whole sum of the substance of the character or his personality, […]

I’ve been fortunate enough to write a number of very well-regarded articles on how to run mysteries in RPGs. There was The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs (even WOTC linked to this one), The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, which builds on the earlier article, Delving Deeper Into […]

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 – […]