Campaign Mastery

Something got me thinking the other day about the villains trilogy that I wrote last year – Part 1 – The Mastermind, Part 2 – The Combat Monster, and Part 3 – the Character Villain and about something that wasn’t included. What makes the scariest villain? Beginning at the Beginning: What is Fear? Wikipedia has […]

About the Casual Opportunities series: I realized recently that something is missing from my campaigns, and has been for a long time: casual opportunities for the PCs to establish their primary role within the campaign. Casual opportunities for heroes to be heroes, for villains to be villains, for geeks to be geeks. It’s easy to […]

In celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, this month’s blog carnival, hosted by Nearly Enough Dice is all about Gunpowder, Treason, and Plots. I decided to take a comprehensive look at treason and betrayal as Campaign Mastery’s contribution…

I buy cheap books of trivia all the time. The quality of them as reading material varies from excellent to abysmal, but they can be an excellent source of ideas. Did You Know… The spruce trees in the forest of the Canadian Lakes district is so densely populated that winter snow stays on top of […]

How to describe wonders and monuments.

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question. Today, the […]

For today’s entry into the Blog Carnival, I’m going to review a series of new products from Moebius Adventures – one free, and two at the low, low price of $1 (US) that collectively offer a trio of locations to drop into your campaigns. The candy bar of RPG Supplements Tiny PDF game supplements are […]

52+ techniques to vastly increase the scope of what you can depict on your battlemaps.

How do you choose a location? Where do events transpire? What considerations should you take into account, and what is the process and the chain of logic that gives the best answers most rapidly? These are questions that Blair and I will have to tackle repeatedly tomorrow, as I write this, because our next pulp […]

Everything has to happen somewhere, and that means that locations are an essential element of RPGs and RPG settings. And that makes locations a worthy subject for this month’s Blog Carnival. Posts I would like to see as part of this month’s carnival are:- How do you choose a location? How do you represent a […]

A real-life example of solving a plot problem for an RPG.

Let’s talk about institutional secrecy. Organizations have all sorts of reasons for keeping secrets. Good ones. Necessary ones. Bad ones. I’ve watching repeats of JAG lately and recently they aired the Season 8 episode “Need to know” which is about a submarine which was lost at sea 34 years earlier, with the loss of all […]