Campaign Mastery

I was reflecting on the process that I use to design NPCs for my campaigns, the other day, and I don’t think that I’ve ever described it here at Campaign Mastery, let alone explained it. That simply won’t do. There are a number of considerations that go into the design of an NPC, and I […]

There’s a documentary series that airs on Australian TV sourced from an American Cable channel, or maybe an Internet platform, called Cyberwar. As part of the advertising for the series, one of the people interviewed offers the statement, “The next war will be cyber.” And that got me thinking: what if there was a global […]

Why should the GM care about Marching Order? After all, it’s purely in the hands of the players what order their characters are in. Well, as usual, it’s not quite that simple. First, if you can anticipate the marching order, you can plan encounters either to take advantage of it, or to share the spotlight […]

Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles. The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link […]

I originally intended to publish the Blog Carnival round-up today, but last week’s computer failure has messed up my plans quite a bit, so I’ve given myself a couple of extra days to get that finished. This is another article that I wrote while my internet was dead, and could be viewed as something of […]

Late last night (as I write this), one of my favorite Anime movies (outside of the works of Studio Ghibli) was repeated on television. The Castle Of Cagliostro is a complex interaction of several different plotlines, but at it’s heart is a variation on that old plot standard, The Heist. More pure representations of that […]

This article won’t be very helpful to readers who are visually-impaired. I apologize for that, I know I have at least one reader who falls into that category. Maybe if you could get someone to describe the diagrams to you…? I tried including such descriptions, but found that the meaning of the article became buried. […]

I’m listing this as an entry in the Blog Carnival because it builds on several past articles about villains and villainy. See: The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain? Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil Making a Great Villain Part 1 of 3 – The Mastermind Making a Great […]

I’ve been thinking about Influences, Styles, Trends and Oscillations. It started when I was thinking about Nostalgia and the “death” of Disco and its subsequent morphing into “Electronic Dance Music” in the very early 80s. All fads and styles have a natural lifetime; the length varies, but at the conclusion, they are clearly recognized as […]

When first I listed this article as a to-do, it represented a very straightforward concept, but I’ve taken so long to get around to writing it that other notions have presented themselves. I now find myself in possession of three distinct and – at first glance – mutually contradictory ideas on the subject. With these […]

I’m tagging this post as part of the Blog Carnival. The theme is sequels, and I think that being the third part in a series qualifies. The first two parts of this small series (Part 1, Part 2) looked at the tremendous impact of a community being located close to the major social, political, and […]

Introduction Since I first participated in my first session of D&D 3.5, what I enjoyed most was the feeling of sharing a fantasy with other people. There is something liberating in the idea of a bunch of people participating in a history, shaping and characterizing it in every moment. 15 years later, I remain fascinated […]