Campaign Mastery

Sub-stories are akin to small anecdotes of a dramatic nature that can add interest, depth, color, and backstory to encounters. What’s not to like? I’ve started writing this article at least half-a-dozen times over the years, but it’s always fallen apart on me before I got to the interesting parts, simply because it’s been so […]

So, here we are, back again for another serving of 2 more dangerous creatures based on sound. In fact, these are potentially even deadlier than last time’s offerings, the Humming Bee and Hissing Wyrm. First up, there’s the Whisper Willow, the perfect place to catch a quiet nap between adventures. Or not. And then there’s […]

It’s been quite a while since I sat down at the keyboard to write one of these articles without a clear idea in mind of what the subject matter would be – usually from weeks in advance of publication date. When a deadline is looming, that experience can be extremely stressful and unwelcome, but when […]

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 […]

Many of my campaigns either do not feature “dungeons” or employ transformative conceptualizations to justify their existence within the campaign world, because – to be frank – they don’t make a lot of sense, otherwise. But there can be other structural concepts that don’t obey all the technical principles of the generic ‘dungeon,’ in other […]

The First Frontier: Appearance Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those […]

This is a post in three parts, all gathered together right here for your convenience. You see, I was very rushed for time when completing last week’s article on exotic creatures for TTRPGs, and almost immediately, afterthoughts started coming to me – things that would have been added if I’d had a few more hours. […]

Of late, I’ve had to create fantastic creatures for several of my campaigns, and despite the clear and obvious differences between the game systems employed, I found myself struck by a number of similarities in the process employed. When I tried to articulate those similarities for an article here at Campaign Mastery, it refused to […]

This month’s Blog Carnival is being hosted by Pitfalls & Pixies, and the subject is all things Fey. I’ve never been very satisfied with the way D&D handles Fey. There was not enough information in AD&D to run them properly; they seemed to be just dressed-up humans, or monsters like any other (just a little […]

Or, “Dwarves are from Marz, Elves are from Venusia”, which was almost the title of this article! I was thinking about another post (that you will hopefully see in a week or so) when an idea for a completely original D&D/Pathfinder cosmology occurred to me. In a matter of minutes, it had become a fully-fledged […]

This is something of an unusual article. As many of you know, I got my start submitting guest articles for Roleplaying Tips, and eventually co-founded Campaign Mastery with the writer/editor/publisher of that email newsletter, Johnn Four. A recent article was about “How To Think Like An Alien” – Johnn no longer numbers the issues in […]

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 […]