Campaign Mastery

How do you design your dungeons? For me, the only technique worth contemplating is the Narrative Approach, in which the dungeon’s location and structure derive from the adventure in which they are to be found, and the encounter content and similar details derive from the location, structure, and adventure. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But, as […]

I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D. This relatively hard-to-find book from Oxford University Press deals with the biological processes by which humans react to various conditions, and hence the hazards posed by those conditions, in a way that is both technically accurate and yet […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that I love concepts that re-imagine standard game elements like races and classes through the prism of a completely new context. During a conversation at the game table a month or two back, I found just such a new context for a staple D&D/Pathfinder race, Dwarves. Traditionally, D&D […]

I’m interrupting my planned schedule of posts to talk about what happened this weekend past in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, because it will be relevant to all campaigns regardless of genre. I was notified on Friday Afternoon that one of the regular players could not make it that weekend. My first thought was to whether […]

Inspiration I have to be honest and say I’m not completely sure who to thank for inspiring this article. At some point in the last month or so, a tweet appeared in my Twitterfeed proclaiming that the GM sending the tweet always liked to hand out useless magic items – or possibly it was a […]

In the first half of this two-part article I described a game-show format designed for my use in an RPG. A quick reminder: The License The game-show format and key elements thereof, as described in this blog post and its predecessor, are © 2018 Mike Bourke. Licensing is free for any RPG-related purpose. Licensing for […]

A month or two back, I perceived the plot need in my superhero campaign to have one of the PCs appear on the celebrity edition of a game show. The complication: Licensing of formats The problem was that Game Shows are licensed for big money and the owners are very protective of their rights. While […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame. The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters. While it contained a lot […]

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the […]

I was reflecting on the process that I use to design NPCs for my campaigns, the other day, and I don’t think that I’ve ever described it here at Campaign Mastery, let alone explained it. That simply won’t do. There are a number of considerations that go into the design of an NPC, and I […]