Campaign Mastery

This is an article about a technique for repairing continuity and plot problems that is especially suited to long-running campaigns and to campaigns deriving from published sources. I’m not going to leave anyone who hasn’t mastered telepathy in suspense: the technique is Patching one plot hole with another. For some that will be enough of […]

Distillations Of Personality is an unfinished series at Campaign Mastery about the tips and tricks that I use for designing NPCs in my campaigns. As originally conceived, and as it will be executed, this article was not part of the 3-part series. So don’t bother searching for parts 2 and 3 – they haven’t been […]

This month’s Blog Carnival is being hosted by Pitfalls & Pixies, and the subject is all things Fey. I’ve never been very satisfied with the way D&D handles Fey. There was not enough information in AD&D to run them properly; they seemed to be just dressed-up humans, or monsters like any other (just a little […]

Style without substance is a soap bubble, all surface glitz and no depth – and just as fragile. Substance without style is utilitarian and contains no room for fun. For anything – including RPGs – to succeed, you need something of both. I once saw an interview with a comedy TV writer – I forget […]

This article was prompted by last Saturday’s play in my Zenith-3 (superheroes) game, but I use the techniques in all my campaigns. But I want to start by quoting a question that I answered over the weekend on Quora, because it’s also relevant. When running an AD&D game, what do you do to really make […]

In the current Adventurer’s Club plotline, my co-GM and I needed to create a fabulous gem to be at the heart of the story-line, the Kalhoolie Diamond. To go with this fabulous gemstone, and lend authenticity to the fabled gemstone, we needed to create a history for it. Today’s article will examine the legend of […]

Pocket dimensions have been an important element of my superhero campaign for decades. Over that span of time, the understanding of their origins and properties have evolved in richness and complexity. Pocket dimensions were also much-sought-after magic items in my Fumanor campaigns, in the form of Bags Of Holding. And so I applied the conceptual […]

The March 2019 Blog Carnival challenges GMs to revisit and re-purpose material from the first half of their career behind the scene. For Campaign Mastery’s first entry (I have another in mind but might not have time to write it) I’m going Waaaay back – all the way, in fact, to my very first AD&D […]

The February 2019 Blog Carnival is being hosted by Sea Of Stars, with the subject of Making Magic Wondrous. This wasn’t an easy subject, because I’ve already done so much in this area regarding magic items of various types. I suspect others may have found it so, too, because entries are thin on the ground […]

I hardly ever start plotting a story or an adventure at the beginning. There’s too great a chance of chasing yourself down a blind alley when you do so. The First Pass: Back To Front Instead, I leap ahead to the next significant development and ask “what do the star(s) of the story – the […]

Over the Christmas break, and for some weeks prior, I read “First Contact” by Ben Bova and Byron Preiss, and three or four times in the course of doing so, I found myself mentally yelling at the page, “that makes no sense”. There are some logical errors in the assumptions upon which SETI is founded, […]

Because I was able push the latest mega-update to the Blogdex out a day earlier than expected, I’ve had time to work on this article for the January Blog Carnival. I love a good, provocative turn of phrase, a coupling of words that stimulates the creative juices, tantalizes the imagination, and makes you think of […]