Campaign Mastery

Because this is literally the second half of the article I posted last week, I’ll forego all the usual introductory bits and pieces and dive straight in from where I left off. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression Many of the economic influences that defined the era came together in the First World War, and […]

This is not the article that I intended to post today (that’s still somewhere in the pipeline). Real-world events have overtaken my planning and this post is in response to those events. Some of the language may be provocative or even incendiary; I make no apologies for that – this is a subject that has […]

I hadn’t intended to publish another math-heavy article so soon, but when the muse strikes you have to follow it… To be a top-class GM, you need to have an almost instinctive understanding of probability. Such understanding rarely comes naturally; you have to work at it, exploring different ways of looking at odds and outcomes. […]

While introducing the players to the characters for the chase mechanics playtest a couple of weeks ago, I found myself ruminating on (of all things) the Charisma stat and what it represented. You might think that this is a simple question – but it’s not, as readers will see by the end of this article. […]

It took so much longer to plan out the article that I intended to publsh today, and it contains so many sections that I hasd grave doubts that I could finish it in time. Rather than risk having nothing to post in what is already shaping up to be a very busy week, I decided […]

Not long ago, I saw a game result that bucked the established trend in outcomes, a potent reminder of the unpredictability of sports. After losing the first four games of a five-game series against Australia (T20 International Cricket), the Sri Lanka team posted a comprehensive win to salvage some pride and deflate Australian egos just […]

Why are dystopian settings so popular? Is that a good thing? What are the consequences and what are the alternatives? Another relatively short post this week (in theory, if all goes according to plan), because this approach worked so well for me last week – I had time to get more than 16000 words of […]

WARNING: At around 35000 words, this is certainly one of the longest posts here at Campaign Mastery! Settle in for a long and sometimes-bumpy ride, folks… This is part two of my review / demonstration of the “Tangled Web” campaign sub-structure. I’m going to presume that you’ve already read part one, which you can find […]

Today I’m going to attempt to make the world’s most boring subject – How I Manage My Money – sexy. No, that’s going too far. I’ll settle for interesting. That might be asking too much, too – but there is RPG Relevance to the subject. The goal will be to not make it boring, and […]

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 […]

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 […]