Campaign Mastery

Today’s question comes from all the way back in June 2010 – I’m sorry it’s taken so long to answer it! The question comes from Brett, who wrote: “I am an extremely new DM, but I have played for 7 years now. I am looking to put my players in conflict with Drow. At one […]

There is a pub in Soho that still bears the name, “The John Snow”. It is named for the brave physician who proved that Cholera was spread through drinking water, ending an outbreak in the district. And that sparks a thought: Every place name is – or at least can be – a memorial to […]

Politics is one of those inevitable conditions, like death and taxes, that every GM has to master to some extent because it will make its presence felt in every campaign. There’s always something more to say on the subject. In this article, I’m going to look at the basics of political relations between similarly-scaled entities; […]

There are lots of things that are hard to do, or at least to do well. This article is about two of them, and a Kickstarter project that looks like a serious attempt to do both to a very high standard. Challenge The First The first is low-level adventures. Many GMs find these difficult to […]

I was half-listening to the commentary from the Tour De France a few moments ago (as I write the first draft of this opening paragraph), and I misheard something. No great surprise there, that happens all the time when you’re only half-listening. But what I thought I heard gave me a great idea for a […]

What’s the first thing you think about when considering a location in an RPG? There’s no one right answer to that question. A lot depends on why I’m thinking about that location at all. Location: a place for things to happen A location is not a simple thing to pin down. Let’s say that we’re […]

Dwarves make the ideal illustration of how range of motion, aka Kinesiology, can affect the anatomical profile of a race. And that affects everything else…

Ergonomics is one of those little things that can greatly add to the verisimilitude of any campaign. This article will show how to get maximum bang for minimum effort.

There’s a new trend in online news that is creating waves. It’s called Native Advertising and it’s already all around you.

The sheer scale of a modern urban environment is something that we all tend to take for granted. It’s so hard to grasp it, because we only ever see the very tip of a very large iceberg – with far more than nine-tenths of it removed from our sight. In any city there are the […]

A guest article by G.F. Pace Additional contributions & Editing by Mike Bourke I recently moved to London from Italy. After a good beer (or several) in a London pub, I can easily imagine the environment in which Tolkien and Lewis (and so many of the other Gods of the fantasy genre) began to perceive […]

There are certain words whose literal translation can be considered telling when defining the mindset of a nation or culture. Most of these are identified after the fact, when a scholar matches a literal translation with a key insight into the profile of a particular group, but for roleplaying purposes we can define and redefine as necessary to employ selected terms as key indicators and giveaways to the psychology of a group or race.