Campaign Mastery

It’s an important question, and one not easy to answer. Too much description can not only be boring to listen to, it can obscure important details and confuse the players. Not enough and players will not be able to differentiate between the NPC being described and any others they happen to encounter – or a […]

Every time there’s a fifth Saturday in the month (with the occasional exception), I run my Dr Who campaign. This uses a simple home-brew game system that I’ve been tinkering with for more than a decade. As the game proceeded (a good time was had by both GM and Player), I noticed the way that […]

In the first half of this two-part article I described a game-show format designed for my use in an RPG. A quick reminder: The License The game-show format and key elements thereof, as described in this blog post and its predecessor, are © 2018 Mike Bourke. Licensing is free for any RPG-related purpose. Licensing for […]

A month or two back, I perceived the plot need in my superhero campaign to have one of the PCs appear on the celebrity edition of a game show. The complication: Licensing of formats The problem was that Game Shows are licensed for big money and the owners are very protective of their rights. While […]

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 […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame. The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters. While it contained a lot […]

Obscure Knowledge can be a great source of uniqueness in an RPG Campaign, but it needs to be handled with care. No-one enjoys being lectured to, and the more obscure the subject, the less likely it is to be of obvious interest to those receiving it. There are ways around the difficulties and problems, and […]

A short post this week, cobbled together at the last minute when the article I was going to write fell apart on me, and at the same time, I contracted a massive head cold that’s impairing me mentally. It happens. And yes, I have hidden a ninja in the image to the left. Subtle, but […]

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the […]

This weekend’s session of the Zenith-3 campaign was a great success, and one of the big reasons for that was the real sense that the PCs were fully integrated elements within the game world. This article is going to look at some of the major reasons for that so that you can do it in […]