Campaign Mastery

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; […]

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. This will probably be the last in the series for a little while, I don’t […]

Some background Before I can get to the main subject of today’s article, I need to tell a few short real-life stories to set the scene, putting the article into context. The Story Of Canterbury Road When I look out my front window, I am confronted by the somewhat depressing site of one of Sydney’s […]

Here in Australia, there has recently been a confrontation between the media and politics within the courts in the form of the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, suing one of our newspapers for defamation over a story which appeared both in print and on their website, and two tweets promoting that story. The story alleged that Hockey […]

It started in the course of a planning session for the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, “Prison Of Jade”. We were fleshing out the villain’s motivations, and I (Mike) made a comment about the nature of Evil. Blair disagreed, saying “I don’t think that’s true evil at all” (or words to that […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines in detail the process of creating a new campaign. What more do you need? You’ve got the basic plot, you’ve got the basic world, you have these organized so as to spread the developmental workload over the life of the campaign, you’re ready to […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail. Last time, I went through the development process of taking ideas and some indications of direction and welding them together into a campaign plan. Now it’s time to think about the game world… I am […]

There are times when we all have to make a fresh start. This series examines the process in detail. So you’ve got some general ideas, and you’ve vetted the legacies of the past to see what to keep and what to throw away (with a few ‘wait and see’ items that will only stay if the […]

I was reading reports concerning the credibility problem of Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott (at least, he was PM as this article was being written – I also read many reports of challengers circling for his position) (see update below), when a Vagrant Thought wandered through my head: “He was credible enough to be elected […]

There are times when we all have to make a fresh start. This series is going to examine the process in detail. The table of contents was in the introduction (part 0). In Phase 2, short-term measures were used to buy time while doing some fairly tedious work in performing the last rites over large […]

There are times when we all have to make a fresh start. This series is going to examine the process in detail. The table of contents was in part 0. While there are always going to be things that you will want to bring forward from your previous game, there will be a lot of […]

A Message from the Writer/Publisher: As I write, a hostage situation continues to unfold in Sydney, as it has for almost 15 hours, capturing world attention for all the worst reasons. For those who may be concerned, I am completely fine. But I must share my contempt for those who have attempted to politicize events […]