Campaign Mastery

Part 1: Introduction This is the first Campaign Mastery post for 2018, and that’s rather significant. New Years are always a strange synthesis of two things: beginnings and retrospectives. The first is fairly obvious, but the significance of the second often gets overlooked as everyone gets wrapped up in newness and new beginnings. But for […]

Every GM experiences deadlines and deadline stress. There comes a point at which you have to be ready to play, whether you are or not, and whether you feel adequately prepared or not. In learning how to cope with that situation, you also learn how to manage – at least somewhat – the many analogous […]

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 […]

I wasn’t going to write and publish this until later in the week, but a mis-remembered schedule means that there will otherwise be no article today, so this seemed the practical solution. After all, the odds of a late entry coming in grow vanishingly smaller with each passing day; the carnival itself has well-and-truly moved […]

An article that is only indirectly gaming-related today. Most of that relationship is narcissist in nature, because this is an article about Campaign Mastery itself, and about the environment – the internet – in which it resides. But I thought it sufficiently important, in light of recent events, to publish anyway. The recent DDoS (Distributed […]

In addition to everything else I have going on here at Campaign Mastery, next month we are scheduled to host the Blog Carnival. The current carnival over at of Dice and Dragons is all about potions, and – despite having covered that subject in depth in the first part of the Spell Storage Solutions series […]

It started with a very simple idea. I had, some years previously, published a list of my top-twenty 3.x supplements (Part 1, Parts 2, 3 and 4, Part 5) – why not do the same thing for pulp reference books? Approach Because I don’t consider myself an expert on the genre (even after co-GMing a […]

This is Campaign Mastery’s 800th post! But it didn’t feel right to make a big celebration out of that milestone after touting the 750th-post anniversary so prominently last year. Instead, it’s business as usual – except that this particular article is, of course, a celebration of the achievements that helped get the blog to this […]

It gets harder and harder to cull these lists down to something reasonable. This problem is exacerbated this time around because there were a lot of standalone articles in this period, and not many series. Which actually placed me on the horns of a dilemma that I had managed to avoid even noticing previously – […]

The Backstory Michael (aka @TheRPGAcademy on Twitter) has been a supporter of Campaign Mastery and an occasional conversationalist on the subject of gaming for several years now. He is also one of the people behind the RPG Academy podcasts. Several months ago, he flattered me outrageously with an offer to be interviewed for the show […]

I was recently invited to review the Morgalad Starter Book by John McNabb, available through DrivethruRPG. Publication of Morgalad is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign which, like the result, is an interesting mixture of flawed ambition and success. The initial attempt at funding Morgalad sought to raise $20,000 and was a dismal failure; […]

A large part of 2013 was given over to expanding the background of my Fumanor campaign by telling the story of the origins of Elves and Orcs. But there was quite a lot of other great stuff along the way! Milestones within the year include the absolutely massive 500th post (so big that it broke […]