Campaign Mastery

The King of a troubled land and his weakling allies face a troubled future. In a distant land, two dark Princes ally with the aim of overthrowing the King and his forces. Slowly, both sides build up their forces, making moves and countermoves in secret. One by one, each recruits secret allies, seemingly headed for […]

Human nature never changes. That’s what makes science fiction and fantasy accessible to modern audiences. Often, it is by denying that fundamental truth that poor science fiction and fantasy are created. This was especially rife in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (in terms of television and movies) and the 30s, 40s, and 50s in terms […]

The alternative damage-handling subsystem proposed in last week’s article suffers from one major flaw, as some of our commentators have pointed out – it involves additional processes and bookkeeping that can adversely impact the flow of combat. This flaw is present to a much smaller extent in this proposal. Once again, this is not a […]

What are hit points? The most obvious answer is that hit points are a numeric index between healthy and imminent death, but there are other interpretations of the significance of this ubiquitous character statistic, and some of them lead the GM down interesting paths. This article will examine the first of these options, while parts […]

Last week, I proposed an alternate approach to plotting mysteries that made them more suitable for RPGs and could also be of benefit to mystery writers generally. Due to time pressures, I didn’t include examples – and I wasn’t entirely sure they would be necessary (that’s why I spent some time working on the diagrams; […]

I was running an adventure this weekend from a module that I had downloaded from the net. Central to the plotline was a mystery, a political situation in a small town, stories of an ancient Curse, all calculated to drive the PCs to an above-ground dungeon which could also be called a Mansion. While the […]

Campaign Mastery was down for a few hours this week due to a configuration issue resulting from a server restore by our host. This manifested as an offer to download a file instead of opening the site. Diagnosing and solving the problem meant that this article couldn’t be finished in time to upload it on […]

Introduction (reprised from Part 1) I use scenario/adventure titles all the time. Used correctly, they can put players into the correct frame of mind to react in the “right” way to the events in a scenario, conceal the identity of a villain until or hide a plot twist until the big reveal, heighten the drama […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns. All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia Commons, or derivations of such works. This article is a work of fiction and […]

I use scenario/adventure titles all the time. Used correctly, they can put players into the correct frame of mind to react in the “right” way to the events in a scenario, conceal the identity of a villain until or hide a plot twist until the big reveal, heighten the drama of a situation and/or raise […]

At my workplace there’s a poker group. At my previous job there was a group. Players in my Riddleport campaign play in such groups. Games are even broadcast during prime time TV. When did this game become so popular? If you have a player in your group who is a raving poker fan, I thought […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns. All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia, Wikipedia Commons, or derivations of such works, except as noted, and except for the […]