Campaign Mastery

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail, a process that is approaching its conclusion. Campaign Structure There isn’t much of a structural nature left undone, or so it must seem – and, truthfully, the bulk of the work is done. But there […]

Having established in part one of this series that a pause or interruption to play or to the primary plot being deployed within the game can be more than a necessary inconvenience, it can be a tool whose manipulation by a savvy GM or TV producer can enhance the game or production, it’s time to […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the systematic process of creating a new campaign in detail, from start to finish. The contents (updated with each post) can be found in “part zero” of the series. Bone, Cartilage, and Flesh: A metaphor Everything that’s been done so far has been in […]

Discovering The Principles This was originally envisaged as one small and relatively quick article. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, this is the first part of three… I was watching a repeat of an old TV show the other week – one that had been subsequently re-cut to facilitate more ad breaks – and […]

Another filler article today, I’m afraid. By skipping half the things I was supposed to do over the weekend I finally got my sleep schedule back to something approaching my standards of normality. One of the things skipped was preliminary work on the next part of the New Beginnings series, leaving me with just enough […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail. So far, we have a campaign plan and a development plan for the game world along with a schedule for that development. We’re now dotting i’s and crossing t’s and building up the foundations of […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines in detail the process of creating a new campaign. What more do you need? You’ve got the basic plot, you’ve got the basic world, you have these organized so as to spread the developmental workload over the life of the campaign, you’re ready to […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail. Last time, I went through the development process of taking ideas and some indications of direction and welding them together into a campaign plan. Now it’s time to think about the game world… I am […]

There are times when we all have to make a fresh start. This series examines the process in detail. So you’ve got some general ideas, and you’ve vetted the legacies of the past to see what to keep and what to throw away (with a few ‘wait and see’ items that will only stay if the […]

This morning (as I write this) I was chasing down a vague notion about an emotional “color wheel” that wouldn’t quite come together. While pondering it, I realized that GMs sometimes think that they can end adventures on just about any emotional note that seems appropriate to the circumstances, and that I had never seen […]

There are times when we all have to make a fresh start. This series is going to examine the process in detail. The table of contents was in the introduction (part 0). In Phase 2, short-term measures were used to buy time while doing some fairly tedious work in performing the last rites over large […]

A brief recap: This is the final part in a detailed reexamination of singe-player campaigns. If you want to see the full Table Of Contents, it was included in Part One (though it has definitely been updated since that was published). So far, we’ve looked at the effects on combat, characters, roleplay, and how those […]