Campaign Mastery

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 […]

Looking at the photographs of the “March For Our Lives”/”Never Again” rallies, you can’t help but feel that an entire generation, who have grown up under the shadow of gun violence in schools since Colombine (April 20, 1999), have run out of patience and been energized. Calls for compromise, like those of Mark Rubio, who […]

This idea came to me while watching the fifth and final Ashes test on the television. At first, I didn’t quite know exactly what I had, which is why this post has landed in the “short but profound” category! Let’s try something radical (trust me)! Pick your favorite low-to-mid-level D&D monster. Now, halve it’s AC […]

You can never tell where inspiration is going to come from. The best you can do is remain alert to the world around you and leap in with both feet whenever you find it. That’s what I was thinking while enjoying a chocolate treat – A mint Aero bar – the other day. For some […]

The Thirteenth Shelf: Odds & Sods I – GMing, Tools, and Fiction – Introduction by Mike Being the GM can be isolating at the Game table, especially when a problem strikes. It’s usually too late when you’re in the hot seat to do much research into solutions (unless the problem is so grave that you […]

The Twelfth Shelf: Beliefs III – Superstition, Mysticism, and More – Introduction by Mike Strange creatures. Strange beliefs. We pass no judgment on the reality of any of them; in fact, from a game point of view (and regardless of any personal opinion) there’s always room for the fantastic in an RPG. In the Adventurer’s […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the size of creatures lately, because it seems to me that size poses unexpected problems for the GM. This is a subject that’s been at the back of my mind for years, ever since it was pointed out to me that Dragons are never as tough as they are […]