Campaign Mastery

Watching the Australian performance in the Women’s Ashes cricket series last night, where they absolutely destroyed the English opposition, inspired this article. Australia batted first, and set England a target of 270 from their 50 overs (refer to this post if you don’t know enough about Cricket to know what I’m talking about). This is […]

One of the oldest plots in the RPG canon is the search for a lost treasure, guided either by a map or trail of clues. This, like any other puzzle, gets solved like a detective novel or TV show – a mystery to be divined, one clue or step at a time. But there are […]

This month’s Blog Carnival is being hosted by Pitfalls & Pixies, and the subject is all things Fey. I’ve never been very satisfied with the way D&D handles Fey. There was not enough information in AD&D to run them properly; they seemed to be just dressed-up humans, or monsters like any other (just a little […]

Style without substance is a soap bubble, all surface glitz and no depth – and just as fragile. Substance without style is utilitarian and contains no room for fun. For anything – including RPGs – to succeed, you need something of both. I once saw an interview with a comedy TV writer – I forget […]

Over the weekend, Campaign Mastery was described by the very flattering term, “one of the best Treasure Troves for a DM”. Aside from feeling very chuffed at the compliment, my mind immediately started to think about Treasure Troves. This article is the result. The Map So, how do you find a treasure trove? The two […]

This article was prompted by last Saturday’s play in my Zenith-3 (superheroes) game, but I use the techniques in all my campaigns. But I want to start by quoting a question that I answered over the weekend on Quora, because it’s also relevant. When running an AD&D game, what do you do to really make […]

All players expect to be thrown into the deep end from time to time by the GM, with no idea of how to solve the conundrum that confronts them. Most commonly, this results from characters not having the skills that would solve the problem via the most straightforward course. Instead, the character has to take […]

In the current Adventurer’s Club plotline, my co-GM and I needed to create a fabulous gem to be at the heart of the story-line, the Kalhoolie Diamond. To go with this fabulous gemstone, and lend authenticity to the fabled gemstone, we needed to create a history for it. Today’s article will examine the legend of […]

The Genesis Of An Article A little more than two weeks ago, as I write this, I had an unusual dream (a known side-effect of some of my medications) in which I wrote two articles for Campaign Mastery. When I awoke, I remembered them, and immediately made the appropriate notes. In the dream, one had […]

Pocket dimensions have been an important element of my superhero campaign for decades. Over that span of time, the understanding of their origins and properties have evolved in richness and complexity. Pocket dimensions were also much-sought-after magic items in my Fumanor campaigns, in the form of Bags Of Holding. And so I applied the conceptual […]

What if you held a Blog Carnival and no-one came? Until quite late in the most recent carnival, that’s what I thought I might be faced with. In the wash-up, only one person besides me proved willing to take the challenge. To be fair, that’s not a total surprise; I knew it was a difficult […]

This started off as a simple idea for a quick little article. It grew….. How rulers gain their offices should be reflected in the society around them. Think about that for a moment. How rulers gain their offices should also be reflected in the personality and capabilities of the ruler, either at the time of […]