Campaign Mastery

1000 posts: a personal milestone So. 1000 posts. Four figures. That’s no small achievement. It’s something to be proud of. I’ve been casting about for suggestions on how to commemorate this milestone for the last few months, but the few suggestions I’ve received haven’t really been all that helpful – “Something reflective”, “Something forward-looking”, “Something […]

  This is my 998th post at CM! Two more to the 4-figure milestone!   In my superhero campaign, the PCs are currently shopping for a building to convert into a base of operations for a second set of superhero/civilian Identities that UNTIL has prompted them to create so that they can deal with problems […]

Finished at last – this is only about 90 minutes late! Enjoy :) Anytime a product with the combined talents of multiple industry heavy-hitters like Ed Greenwood and Skip Williams comes onto your horizon, you pay attention. When that product made its funding targets in just 2 1/2 hours, you pay even closer attention. Clearly, […]

Many of my campaigns either do not feature “dungeons” or employ transformative conceptualizations to justify their existence within the campaign world, because – to be frank – they don’t make a lot of sense, otherwise. But there can be other structural concepts that don’t obey all the technical principles of the generic ‘dungeon,’ in other […]

Whew, finished at last! Six hrs overdue, but it’s more than twice the usual length, so hopefully that can be forgiven! Is it too easy to cure disease in RPGs? I analyzed that question from various angles last week and came to the conclusion that the answer was arguably ‘yes’ – and also arguably ‘no’ […]

A Post In Two Parts This is a post in two parts. The first is the traditional blog carnival roundup; the carnival has now moved on to a new host. Turnout for July was disappointing, though, so that wouldn’t be enough to reward readers for taking the trouble to check in. So I was already […]

Some weeks ago, I was offered a review copy of a “solo-player RPG”. I was hesitant at first because it sounded like a computer RPG, which is not the meat-and-potatoes of Campaign Mastery, but reading the invitation more closely made it clear that this was a tabletop game, and that intrigued me, in particular with […]

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer. Despite the official discontinuation, every release of […]

This article started in my mind when I was thinking about the Covid-19 situation here in Australia (and elsewhere where the virus has been close to eliminated) but I’ve since broadened and generalized it to some extent. It began with my imagining a set of random tables to describe someone’s interaction with Covid-19. Such-and-such a […]

I generated two images to accompany this article (actually, I generated 10, but these were the two that made the cut) – and could not pick between them; they both reflected the content and title in equally-compelling but distinctly-different ways. So I’m using both of them. The second image will appear a bit later. While […]

I try very hard to provide balance in my coverage of different genres here at Campaign Mastery, guided by the relative popularity. Out of every 15 posts, 6 should be Fantasy oriented, 4 should be sci-fi oriented, 2 should be ‘realistic’ (Modern-day or Pulp, hence the inverted commas), 2 should be Superhero/Secret Agent oriented, and […]

Something of a bare-bones post this time around, necessitated by the fact that I’m away from home and all its resources. I haven’t been idle while away; I had prepared more than enough RPG work in advance to see me through. Part of that work involves… well, that’s a little more complicated. You see, the […]