Campaign Mastery

I was catching up on a Documentary series recently aired on Australian TV over the weekend just passed, called “The Sixties”. Each episode attempts to encapsulate one aspect of the singular decade of my birth, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement, the War in Vietnam, or – in this case – the Space Race. […]

Tomorrow (as I write this), as usual on the final Friday of the month, I will be deep into prep for the next session of the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Unlike the usual situation, this won’t be final prep – we usually play that campaign on the first Saturday of the month. This article will look […]

This is not the post that I expected to write today (an ATGMs article), nor is it the backup idea (about getting into character) that I expected to use next week but was ready to bring forward – look for those next week. A confluence of completely independent events has sent my thoughts surging down […]

The Timing 500 Posts. Wow. Really, Wow. Of course, it’s all in how you count them. You could argue that by a strict numeric count, the 500th post was a couple of months ago, and you would be right, but only because a problem with an earlier version of WordPress forced us to break articles […]

With contributions from Ian Mackinder, Ian Gray, Steven Beekon, Saxon Brenton, & Blair Ramage This article has been sitting around in my to-do stack for a little over three years. I simply never got around to finishing it – until now. I do find myself wondering if the additional experience has given the contributors any […]

2011 was a great year and a terrible year for me for writing and gaming. I suffered a bit of burn out, got a couple of awesome gaming products published and gamed monthly instead of every other week for much of 2011. Let’s delve into my goals for last year, and then I’ll reveal my […]

Two of the most important skills that I added to the Hero System when I was writing my House Rules for my Champions campaign were Paranormal Physics and Paranormal Biology. The first explains how powers work using game physics – and therefore can also be used to determine potentials that the character had not thought […]

I’ve put the “Reinventing Pulp” series on hold for a week in order to do a short article for this month’s Blog Carnival, which is all about life and death in RPGs. The series will return next week. One of the problems with a campaign that spans multiple game systems is that there are parts […]

Life’s full of surprises. Some are pleasant; others challenge us, and may even seem overwhelming. Take me, for example: I’ve been living in the same rented unit for the last 20 years or so. Last week, I was sent a termination of lease by the landlord; the place needs serious renovations, and he had forewarned […]

How to undo major events in your campaign without destroying it. The worst case scenario in my games has to be erasing gameplay, rewinding and replaying that part of the game again. I’ve only done that several times and it’s always felt horrible. A logic flaw pops up, or an inconsistency conflicts with what has […]

In many respects, it’s easier being a player than a GM. Since the player determines the personality of the character, as well as what the character says and does, there is in fact no ‘right way’ or ‘wrong way’ to roleplay any given character – only ‘better’ or ‘worse’. It’s a bit like being able […]

Some mistakes you (hopefully) only make once; the mistakes that I’ve blogged about so far as part of this month’s carnival fall into that category. But some mistakes are bound to recur by their nature, and it is just as important to know how to recover from those. These mistakes might derive from a flawed […]