Campaign Mastery

This is the fourth of five articles scheduled to be part of the November 2016 Blog Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is hosting. The carnival subject is “ordinary life” – in this case, how I create and manage subplots based on the ordinary lives of the PCs in my Zenith-3 campaign, how they connect seamlessly to […]

This is the second half of this article; the first dealt with character backstories during character generation, and this deals with making use of them once play has started. It is also the third of five articles scheduled to be part of the November 2016 Blog Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is hosting. The carnival subject […]

This is an article in two parts – the first dealing with character backstories during character generation, and the second dealing with them during play. It is also the second of five articles scheduled to be part of the November 2016 Blog Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is hosting. The carnival subject is “ordinary life” – […]

The Sixth Shelf: Hardware I: Weapons, Things, and Science – Introduction by Mike Pulp technology and science is a very strange animal. It can encompass everything from steampunk to space opera, Monoplanes to UFOs, and yet it remains grounded in the very real technology available in the 1920s and 1930s. The difficulty is always not […]

Finally, it’s done! This has turned into the largest single post ever published by Campaign Mastery, and by a huge margin. So, what happened? Well, when the initial blowout took place I calculated, based on the Europe results, that I could expect to have to add another 216 entries or so, at an average of […]

The Fourth Shelf: The Exotic Places Another delayed post, caused by the same expansion that caused trouble last time – and will again cause delays once more. Reluctantly, it has become necessary to revise both the breakdown and publishing schedule to insert an additional shelf. For consistency, Part Zero will be revised accordingly at the […]

The Third Shelf: More-Ordinary Places We struggled a little in trying to find a good summary for this shelf’s contents, the first of two dealing with locations and geography. Locations are important to any RPG – that’s why Campaign Mastery devoted an entire Blog Carnival to the subject a while back (you can read summaries […]

This is the (almost-) final part of a very intermittent series that examines alternatives and possible implications to the standard spell storage solutions built into D&D, Pathfinder, and, in fact, most fantasy games. Today, We look at Relics and Artifacts. Artifacts are some of the most misused magic items, amongst the most controversial, and most […]

The First Shelf: Heroes & PCs Heroes are at the heart of a Pulp campaign, as much if not more than any other genre (with the possible exception of Superheroes – but you could draw a continuous line running from Pulp Heroes through to powerless heroes like Batman, Green Arrow, Hawkeye, the Black Panther and […]

I was watching an episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” (a show that has inspired other articles here at Campaign Mastery) in which a number of photographs featuring the grandmother of the central focus* of the episode were presented, with the observation that his grandfather appeared in none of them (* I watched […]

This is the fourth part of a very intermittent series that is examining alternatives and possible implications to the standard spell storage solutions built into D&D, Pathfinder, and, in fact, most fantasy games. Today, We look at Permanent Magic Items. Permanent magic items are like the energizer bunny, they just keep going. That makes them […]

This is the third part of an intermittent series that will examine alternatives and possible implications to the standard spell storage solutions built into D&D, Pathfinder, and, in fact, most fantasy games. Unfortunately, it has grown so large that I have no choice but to split it in two. The second half will be published […]