Campaign Mastery

There are five attributes to any encounter that define it, and any one of them can be the foundation of that encounter. In the old days of D&D, it used to be that there was relatively limited flexibility. You chose an encounter based on one of these five criteria and everything else was more-or-less dictated […]

The Eleventh Shelf: Beliefs II – Ghosts, Poltergeists, and Apparitions – Introduction by Mike Wouldn’t the world be dull if everything was predictable? That’s as true of the world in a pulp game as it is of the so-called objective reality that surrounds us. And from the cracks and crannies of what is usually a […]

On twitter the other day, one of my regular contacts (Rising Stars Press) posted a meme that read something along the lines of “All right folks, give yourselves 500 xp for surviving 2016” and an image of Gary Jackson. And, as sometimes happens, one stray thought had a whirlwind romance with another, and before you […]

Well, that didn’t take long! It seems like only a couple of days since I made noise about the new plans for Campaign Mastery… wait, it has only been a couple of days! Having realized late in the day that there is absolutely no chance of finishing the first big article in time for publishing […]

This article was started way back when I was submitting articles to Roleplaying Tips, in fact, more than ten years ago, but it was never finished – until now. So “recently” means “relative to 2006″… I recently read a book describing the calamities that befell Lloyds of London in the early 80s and 90s and […]

The Tenth Shelf: Beliefs I (Religions, Nazi Occultism, & Cthulhu) – Introduction by Mike It’s always difficult when you need to take something that was supposed to be whole and split it in two, usually for reasons of practicality. Take this shelf and the next as a case in point: No-one can argue that Religion, […]

As part of the recent Blog Carnival, I shared a tool that I had developed for creating a character’s background (Blog Carnival November 2016: The Ordinary Life of a Fantasy PC). As part of that article, I originally had a section (entitled “An Alternative Route”) discussing playing a pre-game to enable players to develop the […]

I wasn’t going to write and publish this until later in the week, but a mis-remembered schedule means that there will otherwise be no article today, so this seemed the practical solution. After all, the odds of a late entry coming in grow vanishingly smaller with each passing day; the carnival itself has well-and-truly moved […]

Once again I’m daring to tackle a topic without the counsel of my friends and fellow GMs, largely because I had a clear answer in mind. Today’s question comes courtesy of Jason B, who asked, “Hey, I was about to start up a campaign that would ultimately take characters to all ends of the world. […]

This is an article in two halves, but the two should segue together seamlessly. The first is partially a rebuttal, partially a sequel, and partially a reply, to Clark Timmins’ thought-provoking submission to the Carnival, The Real Life of Heroes. The second half looks at how the ordinary lives of the PCs are depicted in […]

The Eighth Shelf – Life In The Pulp Era I: Civilian Life – Introduction by Mike This month’s blog carnival is about “Ordinary Life” and is being hosted by Campaign Mastery, so its’ fitting that the vagaries of chance and publication schedules has this shelf of the reference library appearing in the course of it. […]

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 […]