Campaign Mastery

An Earworm is one of those songs that you can’t get out of your head. Often, the only cure is to expose yourself to “just enough” of another earworm! For the last two months, I’ve been afflicted with a case of the far less-known Dreaded Plotworm. This is when a plot idea that doesn’t quite […]

Today’s post comes courtesy of an ear-worm. I recently played Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and the theme from the John Wayne movie “true Grit” stuck in my head (not for the first time). Not at the time, mind, but afterwards, when it was triggered by writing about gritty reality in a Quora post and mentioning […]

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’ […]

I saw a question on Quora the other day asking how you could give an RPG a particular style. I thought about giving an answer, but the more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became. No campaign is imbued with its own unique style right from the get-go. It takes time, and […]

Today’s article was originally going to be just an example of using logical structures to construct an adventure from the middle out, but that should be fairly standard (and possibly dull) fare for anyone with a reasonable amount of experience – so I was looking for a way to dress it up and add to […]

A necessary preamble For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a […]

This continues the article that I started last week, offering a simple technique for the quick and easy generation of families for RPGs. Most of the time, this would be used for the families of PCs, occasionally it might be used for the family of an important NPC. I should also note that most of […]

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles. Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article. That article changed and morphed several […]

A couple of days ago I came across a Quora post by Deb Paul describing some experiments exploring hope as a motivational force. The experiments in question were both revolting and enlightening, and I immediately shared the post with the Dungeon Masters Deep Dive group because I could see a connection to group behavior in […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]

Integration. What does that mean, exactly? Well, in mathematical terms, it means – essentially – accumulation of results from designated start point to designated end-point. In social terms, it roughly translates to incorporating or mixing one thing with another so well that the results appear completely uniform and consistent. Both are on speaking terms with […]

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that. A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their […]