Campaign Mastery

This isn’t the post I expected to be writing today. There are two reasons why you’re reading this and not the first of a three-part article about Priests: the first is a documentary (part 3 of The Fabric Of The Cosmos) and the second is the explosion of inspiration that it produced. I wanted to […]

Last time around, James Senecal posed a double-question. Because it was the easier of the two, and I was flying solo, I chose the easier question for ATGMs #27. But now it’s time to bite the bullet… How can you have substantial time pass within a campaign? “If death is to have a consequence, if […]

Ian Gray contributed to this article. Anniversaries have a way of reminding you of the promises on which you have yet to deliver, and so does the start of a New Year. “Ask The GMs” is one of the cornerstones of what got Campaign Mastery to it’s 5th anniversary. It’s now 2014 and for two […]

Introduction to Part 2 This post – or maybe it was the last one – marks Campaign Mastery’s 5th Birthday (I don’t really count the articles that were posted before the public could read them). CM is the culmination of all my experience and expertise both as a GM and in life; I try to […]

Introduction It’s hard to pin down a beginning for Campaign Mastery. The idea had been in development for three or four months before the first article was posted, and had emerged from protracted discussions between Johnn and Myself about the future evolution of Roleplaying Tips, where I had been an occasional – almost semi-regular – […]

There are a number of valuable lessons for any RPG that can be observed in the looking at how Terry Pratchett achieved the success of the Discworld series of novels. Introduce the Key Concepts Early In the first entry in the series, he introduced the Discworld itself, established its basic physical and conceptual parameters, and […]

“Negative Space” sounds like the sort of thing that pretentious art critics fill the air with when they have nothing of substance to contribute. It’s not some antimatter or “mirror, mirror” universe, either – though it can be either or both those things if you want. It may come as some surprise to those with […]

Something got me thinking the other day about the villains trilogy that I wrote last year – Part 1 – The Mastermind, Part 2 – The Combat Monster, and Part 3 – the Character Villain and about something that wasn’t included. What makes the scariest villain? Beginning at the Beginning: What is Fear? Wikipedia has […]

About the Casual Opportunities series: I realized recently that something is missing from my campaigns, and has been for a long time: casual opportunities for the PCs to establish their primary role within the campaign. Casual opportunities for heroes to be heroes, for villains to be villains, for geeks to be geeks. It’s easy to […]

In celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, this month’s blog carnival, hosted by Nearly Enough Dice is all about Gunpowder, Treason, and Plots. I decided to take a comprehensive look at treason and betrayal as Campaign Mastery’s contribution…

James Seals asked in the comments to Places to go and people to meet: The One Spot series from Moebius Adventures (responding to my comments about magic shops),   Mike, Can I ask – what do you do when your players want to sell magic weapons? In the past I have just allowed them to […]

In this article, I list the subgenres of sci-fi that could be encountered/created for an RPG campaign, or for a particular adventure, with lots of examples from movies and TV and more than a few original campaign concepts.