Campaign Mastery

The break / disruption caused by my forced migration has been longer than expected, but at long last I’m back, with a reasonable expectation of being able to resume posting regularly. That disruption hasn’t quite run it’s course, so there may be one or two late / missed posts still to come, but it’s a […]

I’ve clearly decided to push on and get this trilogy of posts out of the way before interrupting the series for another break. As usual, because this is a direct continuation of what’s already been posted, I’m going to skip the usual preamble, so make sure that you have read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 […]

I love being able to bring something new to the attention of others. So much so that I’m diverging from the intended schedule (which called for the next part of the series on Economics on RPGs) to bring news of something exciting to readers. The subject of today’s article has so many new elements to […]

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact. Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I […]

In the first part of this series, I detailed the compositing modes that I use most frequently, along with a few other hints and techniques. The second part detailed project number 1, taking a black and white photograph (grayscale) and adding unconventional colors to transform the image into a blue-skinned alien on some strange other […]

Over the years, there have been many attempts to combine RPGs and Board Games, with varying degrees of success. So pervasive is this pattern that it can only be concluded that it’s a far harder bridge to cross than seems initially apparent. Attempts… …like Monopoly, for which I developed variant rules within 6 months of […]

Today is a Public Holiday in Australia, so I’m posting something far more concise than usual. The reason for the Public Holiday is that yesterday was Australia Day, which celebrates the arrival of white colonists from Britain, most of them transportees, in 1788 – the equivalent of the American 4th of July. While the country […]

I have a professional interest in Runes. The Mage in my superhero campaign (Zenith-3) uses Runes as the focus of his spell-casting, and I’m always looking for ways to invoke the resulting flavor, and for the implied limitations and benefits that come from this approach. It has been established, for example, that it’s not enough […]

This article started with an invitation to write a review of RPGSmith. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is, all will be clear by article’s end. After an introduction, and a summary of what the product was, the co-founder who made the offer threw in a provocative statement: “I would like to note […]

The fundamentals of what a campaign is and how to manage one.

Although this article is written from a D&D / Pathfinder perspective, since they are the two biggest games in terms of global popularity, the contents should be appliccable to any game system with a little tweaking as necessary. RPG sourcebooks these days can easily cost $80-$100 or more Australian – $40-60 US. In a conversation […]

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 […]