Campaign Mastery

Pocket dimensions have been an important element of my superhero campaign for decades. Over that span of time, the understanding of their origins and properties have evolved in richness and complexity. Pocket dimensions were also much-sought-after magic items in my Fumanor campaigns, in the form of Bags Of Holding. And so I applied the conceptual […]

This started off as a simple idea for a quick little article. It grew….. How rulers gain their offices should be reflected in the society around them. Think about that for a moment. How rulers gain their offices should also be reflected in the personality and capabilities of the ruler, either at the time of […]

The March 2019 Blog Carnival challenges GMs to revisit and re-purpose material from the first half of their career behind the scene. For Campaign Mastery’s first entry (I have another in mind but might not have time to write it) I’m going Waaaay back – all the way, in fact, to my very first AD&D […]

One problem. Two characters with the same Skill. How do they combine abilities to make the problem easier to solve? Or are two heads no better than one? This is the Dual Competence rules problem. Another problem. One character has the Skill needed to solve it, another who doesn’t – but who has to actually […]

It’s a funny thing, but once you’ve thought of two or three tips on an important subject, other thoughts on the same subject start crowding in. This was going to be a quick article listing a handful of tips, things that I always keep in mind when creating an NPC, but then the ideas started […]

Anarchy. Chaos. Flexibility. Uncertainty. Control. Challenge. Unpredictability. All of these words can be used to describe the influence of Randomness within an RPG. Every GM uses randomness in all seven of these ways, the relative significance being the primary variant. But why do RPGs contain a random element? Randomness in RPGs derives from two sources, […]

Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is founded – having more fun at the gaming table. That make’s this post (again, technically*) the 1001st – a number that itself both the seeds […]

There are lots of good reasons to have a strong supporting cast in an RPG. They permit interactions which reveal or highlight aspects of a PC that otherwise might get an infrequent airing, for one thing. Trusted NPCs can serve as proxies for the PCs, or can supplement their skill-base. Or, fourth, they can facilitate […]

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 […]

Although I’ve lived in the state capital for more than half my life, and am a creature of thoroughly urbanized habits and propensities, at my core, I come from a small town almost 600km away named Nyngan, as explained in Location, Location, Location: Nyngan, in which I describe the township and how to adapt it […]

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 […]

We all roleplay our character’s professions or character classes, right? Actually, we don’t. What we usually roleplay is someone pretending to belong to a profession, because that’s a lot faster and easier. The difference between the two might seem small, but the impact when you compare the two is like night and day. Awareness of […]