Campaign Mastery

Today’s post focuses on Rafts and small boats like Kayaks and Canoes. The defining trait of such vessels is that while they can have sails, their primary motive power derives from the use of oars or paddles. It’s taken quite a bit longer than I intended, due to a fundamental truism of publishing, at least […]

So your character has a cooking skill. What dishes can he prepare? What will be inedible? What does that mean? Adaptable all systems. We’ve all grown up with the concept of a recipe being utterly reliable. If you do the same thing every time, you will get the same result, every time. Most of us […]

“I attack him while he’s distracted.” That’s not an appropriate response to an antagonist Monologing, but it happened once. There came a time when a new player, unfamiliar with the genre, joined the Adventurer’s Club campaign. At one point, in an adventure, the villain began to Monologue – and that was this player’s response. This […]

Rivers provide a natural alternative to roads and overland travel, if the river happens to go where you want it to. That’s more likely than it might initially seem, because rivers provide natural resources and defenses that make them natural locations for settlements, with transportation of cargo a bonus on top of those advantages. Table […]

The last installment of the third Chapter of the series looks as worker productivity and how race and other factors influence it. It’s been an interesting 2025 so far, characterized by things going wrong in unexpected and unusual ways and recovering from those problems. It actually started on New Year’s Eve, when I rebooted my […]

The 3rd of 4 posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade focuses on the Labor Unit and how to use it to make GMing a business easier. Today’s post starts with a couple of short sections that were inadvertently left out of last week’s examination of carts. They had been written, but not where they […]

The first of at least three posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade. This covers everything from wagon drivers to guards to dock-hands and farmhands. Anybody who can be considered a faceless cog in the trade machine, in fact! Credit where it’s due: The series title graphic combines three images: The Clipper Ship Image is […]

There are six types of skill roll modifier that I take into account when assessing any attempt by a character – PC or NPC – to carry out some task. Past articles have focused on just a few of them; this post is intended to provide an overview of the whole. I worked on the […]

Preliminaries: A long time ago, I wrote “Trade In Traveler”. This week (and in the weeks to come) I’m starting a companion piece, “Trade In Fantasy”. Non-Fantasy GMs – I suggest either using the Trade in Traveler rules or updating them using this series as a guide. Depending on how long winded I get in […]

What is INT, and (in practical terms), what can it be used for? I was strolling down the street the other day and noticed a logo consisting of a name and a number of dots, and for some reason, it sparked a new way of looking at INT scores, one that emphasized a practical application […]

Sub-stories are akin to small anecdotes of a dramatic nature that can add interest, depth, color, and backstory to encounters. What’s not to like? I’ve started writing this article at least half-a-dozen times over the years, but it’s always fallen apart on me before I got to the interesting parts, simply because it’s been so […]

This post details a more tactical combat system for D&D and similar rules systems than the standard one. At the heart of the system lies not d20 or 3d6, but a standard deck of 52 cards. The core concept of the mechanism came to me when I was shuffling cards for a game of patience […]