Campaign Mastery

Like all GMs, there are times when I know I need an idea, I know what the reason is and what will be done with it – I just don’t know what it is. There’s this empty spot in my mind labelled “Idea goes here”, but I’m absolutely bereft of inspiration, and the deadline is […]

Nobis is a game supplement about to be released by Pantheon Press for the d20/ D&D 3.x game system. Campaign Mastery was priviliged to be amongst a selected number of blog sites given a pre-release glimpse of the new release for review. Although this commentary will focus on the Background to the city-state that is […]

An Elf, a Dwarf, and a Goblin go into a bar… Oh, you’ve heard that one? Good, then you can tell it to me sometime! Humour is really hard to do WELL in an RPG, some types of humour moreso than others. Silly jokes, like Orcs in tutus, are easy, but are more likely to […]

Let’s talk for a minute about the law. Most legal systems are based on two things: the protection of certain general principles that are considered fundamental truths by the society in question, and a long history of precedents matching punishments with violations. Criminal law, for the most part, is fairly straightforward. Not much has changed […]

How do you give your campaign realistic weather without overloading the GM with Admin tasks? Hi, both of you, First I would like to praise you for a wonderfully done job! My question is about weather in role-playing games. Let me expain: I’ve been running a campaing for a while now where the PCs evolve […]

Recently, Campaign Mastery recieved a comment to one of our blogs informing us of an online monster/NPC generator available at Dingle Games. While the comment was not approved as it was unrelated to the post in question, we felt the product itself was worth a look: http://www.dinglesgames.com/tools/MonsterGenerator/dnd35/

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these […]

This is the third part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined the first two, Expression […]

What exactly is the soul? No, I’m not getting all existential and metaphysical on you, I’m asking the question objectively and literally. You see, one of my D&D campaigns has this question of the nature of the soul as one of its key themes. More, it states that the answer is different for each race, […]

As I write this, the Holiday Season is fast approaching. Johnn, my collaborator on this blog (and vice-versa) has written an excellent book on holidays in rpgs, but I thought it worth exploring some of the options for drawing inspiration from real holidays. (Obviously, since many are religious in nature, some people may be offended. […]

I had my spring cleaning just the other day (living in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are the reverse of what most readers would consider normal), and it reminded me of something that should be an annual tradition with gamers – spring cleaning of their games. For Players, that means looking at any long-standing character […]

Got writer’s block? Draw a map. This is one of the best ways to get focus, organize your thoughts, and get moving again on your campaign preparation. Sometimes I’ll stare at a blank computer screen with a game session only a couple days away and wonder if I’ll have anything designed in time. What always […]