Campaign Mastery

What if you held a Blog Carnival and no-one came? Until quite late in the most recent carnival, that’s what I thought I might be faced with. In the wash-up, only one person besides me proved willing to take the challenge. To be fair, that’s not a total surprise; I knew it was a difficult […]

This article started with an invitation to write a review of RPGSmith. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is, all will be clear by article’s end. After an introduction, and a summary of what the product was, the co-founder who made the offer threw in a provocative statement: “I would like to note […]

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 February 2019 Blog Carnival is being hosted by Sea Of Stars, with the subject of Making Magic Wondrous. This wasn’t an easy subject, because I’ve already done so much in this area regarding magic items of various types. I suspect others may have found it so, too, because entries are thin on the ground […]

Over the Christmas break, and for some weeks prior, I read “First Contact” by Ben Bova and Byron Preiss, and three or four times in the course of doing so, I found myself mentally yelling at the page, “that makes no sense”. There are some logical errors in the assumptions upon which SETI is founded, […]

  There’s a long tradition of TV shows doing Christmas episodes. These are Christmas themed in some way, often by having the action occur over the holiday period, and if necessary are out-of-continuity or even non-canonical. This has led to an equivalent pattern occurring in some RPG Campaigns. Christmas adventures are often much harder to […]

701 492 537 313 432 835. 191 489 361 702 127 659. 723 296 032 553 407 934. Those all look like fairly random strings of digits to me. How about: 333 333 333 333 333 333? Or 022 022 022 022 022 022? Or 123 450 123 450 123 450? Or 000 000 000 […]

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, […]

The GM puts a problem in front of the PCs – a couple of thugs extorting the locals. The players come up with a plan to solve the problem which works perfectly. The public shower the PCs with rewards and gratification. Sounds pretty boring to me. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the adventure? Roadblocks, Tripwires, Deceptions, […]

Being invited recently to participate in play-testing for Pathfinder 2.0 (or whatever they are calling it) – an invitation that I had to, regretfully, decline – has, nevertheless, fired my imagination. I keep returning to the question, “If I were one of the authors tasked with updating the game system, what would I do?” Surprisingly, […]

There’s a TV Series that every GM, regardless of the genre of their games, should be watching. It’s a show that I’ve discussed before, in a completely different context – in The Expert In Everything, and it’s name is Scorpion. Why? Simply put, because it contains so many lessons for the GM. To be specific: […]

Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most influential games of all time. The stories generated by Dungeons & Dragons campaigns have inspired fantasy novels and movies. Not only has the game itself remained popular for a number of decades, it has spawned countless other tabletop RPGs and even full-blown computer games. Yet, despite its […]