Campaign Mastery

The 4th chapter of the Trade In Fantasy series looks at Modes Of Transport and trade route planning (9th post in the series). Table Of Contents: In today’s post: Chapter 4: Modes Of Transport 4.0 A Word about Routes 4.0.1 Baseline Model 4.0.2 Relative Sizes 4.0.3 Competitors 4.0.4 Terrain I 4.0.5 Terrain II 4.0.6 Multi-paths […]

Landscapes are wonderful things, more significant & useful than many GMs realize. This post focuses on using Landscapes, both literal and metaphoric, using the lessons from the first part of the article. This is Part t 2 of 2. This is the 4th of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series, which […]

Certain fundamental questions need to be answered about any business operation that the PCs get involved with, either as employees or owners before we can get into game mechanics for the actual operation of an in-game business. Credit where it’s due: The series title graphic combines three images: The Clipper Ship Image is by Brigitte […]

The subject this week is adventure writing and structure. I have evolved a fairly functional process to translating ideas into ready-to-run plots over the years, and today I’m going to share it. This can be viewed as a companion piece to One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post, which has […]

Cuisine is one of the ultimate distillations of culture. This is how RPGs can harness this fact. Introduction I watch a lot of travel documentaries and short videos, especially those that compare cultures. Not only are they inherently interesting to me, they give me vital cultural reference for games that take place in those nations, […]

In Part 1, I shared a simple technique for creating immersion within the specific genre of a campaign, and applied it to Fantasy campaigns. Part 2 took a solid look at Science Fiction campaigns (and was supposed to also include everything I cover this time around. These genres were not chosen capriciously; between the four […]

In Part 1, I shared a simple technique for creating immersion within the specific genre of a campaign, and applied it to Fantasy campaigns. This time, Science Fiction! Recapping The Process 0. Make a list of possible Mundane Activities (optional, but it helps). 1. Pick A Mundane Activity. 2. If it’s not something the PCs […]

It goes without saying that we want players to sense the distinctive ‘aura’ of a campaign’s genre, but all sorts of things get in the way of that, so it only happens occasionally and fleetingly. But there’s an easy solution, and it works in literary applications as well! When I broke this article down into […]

Sub-stories are akin to small anecdotes of a dramatic nature that can add interest, depth, color, and backstory to encounters. What’s not to like? I’ve started writing this article at least half-a-dozen times over the years, but it’s always fallen apart on me before I got to the interesting parts, simply because it’s been so […]

It seems natural to me to follow an article about campaign structures with one about adventure structures. So that’s what I’m going to do. Furthermore, since the campaign structures addressed were specifically about Sandboxed campaigns, so will be this Adventure Structures post – though it can easily have relevance beyond those limits, that’s just a […]

Today, I get to focus on one of my favorite subjects, campaign structure! There are lots of choices out there, but today I’m going to focus on one that I don’t use all that often, the improv sandbox. This article was prompted by something I saw on the screenwriter’s blog that I linked to an […]

Introduction This wasn’t intended to be a separate post at all; it is the second half of the response to a guest article published back in March, before the unwanted disruption of my life caused by relocating to a new apartment (I’m still unpacking!) Rather than repeat a lot of material from Part II, I […]