Campaign Mastery

Lots still to get through, so as usual I’m going to dive right in. While I’ll try to have this make sense in a standalone mode, it would be preferable for you to have read Chapter 8.1 and last week’s Chapter 8.2 before continuing. The Digital Age, Fourth Period 00s-2010s Most of the decade that […]

As usual in this series, I’ve decided to just push on from where we left off, without the preambles and without a synopsis. You should read Chapter 8.1 before starting this continuation of the article to get the most out of it. But you can dive right in if you want to – at your […]

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article. In this case, though, that “previous part” is actually the […]

For the first time since I started it, when I went to draft the penultimate(?) parts of the Economics in RPGs series today, I found myself unsure of how best to structure the post. While I have total confidence that, given enough time, I would have found a satisfactory sequence to bring out the key […]

Because the last part of the Economics in RPGs Series ran to three parts, I’ve decided to throw in an extra non-series article before continuing with it next week. Fortunately, I had an idea on tap. The Holistic NPC “Holistic” essentially means ‘complete’. The term derives from Holism, which is a philosophic notion that focusing […]

I’ve clearly decided to push on and get this trilogy of posts out of the way before interrupting the series for another break. As usual, because this is a direct continuation of what’s already been posted, I’m going to skip the usual preamble, so make sure that you have read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 […]

This is literally the second part of the article I posted last week, so I’ll forego all the usual preamble bits and pieces, just as I did the last time this happened, diving straight in from where I left off – well, almost. Writing like this sometimes has strange confluences and coincidences, and in this […]

“Show, don’t tell” is a common maxim when it comes to literary entertainments, and something that has been gleefully expropriated as good advice for other media. That includes TV, Movies, and, of course, Roleplaying Games. I was thinking about that during the last week, and noting how much easier it was for the other two […]

A Status Update It can be readily observed that this is not part 3 of the ongoing series on Economics in RPGs that I’ve been publishing for the last couple of weeks. Right up until the last moment, I was uncertain as to whether or not to continue with that series this week, but two […]

This post details two Empires contending with each other in the Warcry campaign at the moment. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. There’s also some discussion of when a Kingdom needs to become an Empire, and a mysterious religious body that seems entwined in events. The working title of the article was […]

There are three facts about a character that can be considered definitive of what sort of person they are, diagnostic of what sort of mistakes they will make, and instrumental in defining what sorts of adventures will consume their attention. These are not the whole sum of the substance of the character or his personality, […]

I was thinking about the perception of time and how that doesn’t match up with the mechanism of time-keeping in the standard initiative systems in games. I mean, it’s certainly possible to design additional mechanics to take these variations into account, and reinvigorate a system that has become predictable. More interesting AND more realistic at […]