Campaign Mastery

I steal inspiration and technique from anywhere that I can find it, but I’m always careful to credit my sources (especially when the application is a bit left-of-field). In the past that has given me articles such as Growing The Perfect Family Tree (Part 1, Part 2), The Ashes: Understanding Brit and Aussie Characters, and Lessons […]

I have said before that you can never have too many approaches to determining the characterization of an NPC up your sleeve. Today’s article offers a new one, and a systematic way of looking at simpler approaches that can also be useful. Let’s start by setting a baseline for comparison… 0. Going Nowhere: The Null […]

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way). This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and […]

Hopefully, my internet connection is now fixed. It’s been functioning perfectly since Friday when a technician attended the hardware connection – at least, I assume they did; I was notified that they were on their way, and then notified some time later that the call was completed, without ever seeing them or being informed about […]

My internet connection is still fraught. It will sometimes work for hours, and then not be available for days. Which makes this article fraught with potential problems. I’ll do my best – but it’s worth noting that less than an hour after last week’s post, the internet crashed and stayed down for about seven hours. […]

The Glass Spider – metagame It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game. So […]

You may not know it, but it’s possible to be too creative. Last week, as usual, I spent some time thinking about what I would be writing about in this post, and almost immediately, three different ideas came to mind in what felt like a single flash of inspiration. Well, by the time I had […]

I hadn’t intended to publish another math-heavy article so soon, but when the muse strikes you have to follow it… To be a top-class GM, you need to have an almost instinctive understanding of probability. Such understanding rarely comes naturally; you have to work at it, exploring different ways of looking at odds and outcomes. […]

This article contains material generated as background reference in Mike’s Doctor Who: A Vortex Of War campaign, but it holds relevance to most campaigns including those of the Fantasy genre. Introduction Space is big – really, really, big. I’m sure most readers will have come across that phrase, or something very like it, on numerous […]

The story so far… This is the last in a set of mini-posts that I have written and published as quickly as possible (given a number of health-related interruptions), something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series. Each of the posts so far has examined one […]

So this was all ready to post – and then my internet connection went out. Thankfully that was only a problem for a day or two. But it has delayed the series slightly. The story so far… This is the sixth in a set of mini-posts that I’m writing and publishing as quickly as possible, […]

The story so far… This is the fifth in a set of mini-posts that I’m writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series. Each post examines one of the specific image categories nominated in the first post of the […]