Campaign Mastery

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.” That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article. First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation: Four […]

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”. After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’. Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s […]

Some article ideas are simply not big enough to sustain an entire post on their own. From time to time, I gather these mini-posts together to form one more substantial post. The last time I did this was in Eight Little Tips: A Confection Of Miniature Posts, 6 months ago. It’s time I did it […]

I’ve been an active Quora user for the last few years, as long-time readers would know. Since August 2017, more than 1200 answers have been viewed almost 250,000 times. My content there averages more than 2000 readers a month (my content here averages more than three times that number). I’ve even built whole articles here […]

This article is likely to ramble a bit. There will be times when I have to talk around the subject so as not to give away any surprises to my players, or to provide a proper foundation for the point of discussion. That’s an unfortunate reality for life as an RPG Blogger; the only alternative […]

Just to prove that the recent two-and-a-half-part article RPGs In Technicolor (part 1,part 2, part 2a) weren’t the last word on the subject, I thought of this topic of discussion. Picture a room in which your character is located. A partially-closed door leads to a corridor beyond. Somewhere down that corridor, something is glowing in […]

When I first started playing & running RPGs, prep was simply for “the game”. Then, with a little more experience, and in particular when I spread my wings from D&D to running a superhero campaign at the same time, it became prep for “the x campaign”. As the number of campaigns under my belt (and […]

I’m going to start this article with a bit of tooting of my own horn. One of the many steps that led to the creation of Campaign Mastery in November 2008 was the publication in early 2007 of a two-part article on “Scenario and Story Arc creation” called “Hipbone’s Connected To The Thighbone”. These days […]

There’s a little-known curse that sometimes afflicts GMs. It reads, “may you have far more prep time than you need.” It’s not a situation that is encountered very often; more frequently, the converse is the norm, and almost every GM would give a good d20 for an extra hour a day. Or even an hour […]

The First Frontier: Appearance Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those […]

There have been three shows that seriously went into oil painting on Australian TV. The first was the Rolf Harris Show, in which Rolf used house-paints on a large board, paining in just two or three pigments; his art was often comprised of abstract shapes until the whole image came together in a fairly impressionistic […]

Yesterday, I took the day off (actually, this was back in April 2018 – this post has sat around unfinished for quite a while, I’;m probably due to do it again!) This morning (April 2018 again), I was reflecting on how much I enjoyed setting aside the stresses and strains of daily life and just […]