Campaign Mastery

This is not the article that I intended to post today (that’s still somewhere in the pipeline). Real-world events have overtaken my planning and this post is in response to those events. Some of the language may be provocative or even incendiary; I make no apologies for that – this is a subject that has […]

It has always been my opinion that of all the pantheons, the Norse are the most suited to application within a superhero campaign. The Greek deities are too whimsical, the Romans too arrogant; the Norse are the most level-headed in many respects. What’s more, the Vikings had a sense of the rule of law that […]

What if you held a Blog Carnival and no-one came? Until quite late in the most recent carnival, that’s what I thought I might be faced with. In the wash-up, only one person besides me proved willing to take the challenge. To be fair, that’s not a total surprise; I knew it was a difficult […]

Progress reports are located at the bottom of the article. When the Blogdex was first published, it was brilliant. It made it easy to find the exact article I wanted to refer to, enabling rich cross-linking that would lead the reader to other relevant content and began creating a broader overview from the individual articles. […]

Being invited recently to participate in play-testing for Pathfinder 2.0 (or whatever they are calling it) – an invitation that I had to, regretfully, decline – has, nevertheless, fired my imagination. I keep returning to the question, “If I were one of the authors tasked with updating the game system, what would I do?” Surprisingly, […]

I get far more invitations to review products and Kickstarter campaigns and the like than I could ever hope to satisfy. Every few months I gather several of these together for a round-up set of mini-reviews. This time around, with Christmas Shopping on the immediate horizon, I have no less than 25 products to bring […]

In the course of the 750th-post anniversary article here at Campaign Mastery (almost 50 posts ago, how time flies!), I became aware of The Dark Eye, an RPG that was more popular than D&D in Germany and had been around for over 30 years! The fact that I didn’t know about the game greatly surprised […]

I get offered more product to review than I possibly have time to read, other than superficially. Sometimes that product is already commercially available, sometimes it’s the center of a fundraising campaign, sometimes it just comes out of the blue. While I would love to give every review it’s own post of prominence, reality dictates […]

Recently, for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, my co-GM and I had to construct a number of small plotlines – one for each character – simply to mark the passage of a period of time in which the PCs should be doing something. We employed an old technique of mine – but one that has never […]

There are some projects that excite because of their content. There are others that entice because of the track record of the creators. And some projects simply ooze style and content. Today, I’m going to write about a project that ticks all three boxes. It’s another product from Embers Design Studios, and its called Yrisa’s […]

The Backstory Michael (aka @TheRPGAcademy on Twitter) has been a supporter of Campaign Mastery and an occasional conversationalist on the subject of gaming for several years now. He is also one of the people behind the RPG Academy podcasts. Several months ago, he flattered me outrageously with an offer to be interviewed for the show […]

I was recently invited to review the Morgalad Starter Book by John McNabb, available through DrivethruRPG. Publication of Morgalad is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign which, like the result, is an interesting mixture of flawed ambition and success. The initial attempt at funding Morgalad sought to raise $20,000 and was a dismal failure; […]