Campaign Mastery

The article that I intended to publish today didn’t just go pear-shaped on me, it went prickly-pear shaped. Nothing was salvageable. That’s Okay – I have this series as a backup for that very contingency. So, today, I present another 40 or so of my RPG-related answers on Quora. Some of these will be little […]

Back in the mid-90s, when I was preparing the campaign background for my rebooted superhero campaign, I had to think about cyberware – not the relatively reliable and semi-routine stuff that you would find in a Cyberpunk campaign, but the stuff that you would have before all the bugs were worked out. I wasn’t interested […]

Today’s post comes courtesy of an ear-worm. I recently played Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and the theme from the John Wayne movie “true Grit” stuck in my head (not for the first time). Not at the time, mind, but afterwards, when it was triggered by writing about gritty reality in a Quora post and mentioning […]

Whew, finished at last! Six hrs overdue, but it’s more than twice the usual length, so hopefully that can be forgiven! Is it too easy to cure disease in RPGs? I analyzed that question from various angles last week and came to the conclusion that the answer was arguably ‘yes’ – and also arguably ‘no’ […]

I saw a question on Quora the other day asking how you could give an RPG a particular style. I thought about giving an answer, but the more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became. No campaign is imbued with its own unique style right from the get-go. It takes time, and […]

Some weeks ago, I was offered a review copy of a “solo-player RPG”. I was hesitant at first because it sounded like a computer RPG, which is not the meat-and-potatoes of Campaign Mastery, but reading the invitation more closely made it clear that this was a tabletop game, and that intrigued me, in particular with […]

Once again, the wheel of days has traversed the circle of time to Campaign Mastery’s turn at hosting the Blog Carnival, following on from Full Moon Storytelling’s Festivals, Holidays, and Birthdays. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a post up for that Carnival (sorry, Dave) – I had a post run over two weeks when it was […]

A necessary preamble For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a […]

This continues the article that I started last week, offering a simple technique for the quick and easy generation of families for RPGs. Most of the time, this would be used for the families of PCs, occasionally it might be used for the family of an important NPC. I should also note that most of […]

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles. Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article. That article changed and morphed several […]

A couple of days ago I came across a Quora post by Deb Paul describing some experiments exploring hope as a motivational force. The experiments in question were both revolting and enlightening, and I immediately shared the post with the Dungeon Masters Deep Dive group because I could see a connection to group behavior in […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]