Campaign Mastery

I didn’t expect to be writing about this right now. I knew that I would need this sometime towards the end of the year for my Dr Who campaign, but I had months in hand. What has brought this forward is the February 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by the Sea Of Stars RPG Design Journal, which […]

This article started in my mind when I was thinking about the Covid-19 situation here in Australia (and elsewhere where the virus has been close to eliminated) but I’ve since broadened and generalized it to some extent. It began with my imagining a set of random tables to describe someone’s interaction with Covid-19. Such-and-such a […]

This article is likely to ramble a bit. There will be times when I have to talk around the subject so as not to give away any surprises to my players, or to provide a proper foundation for the point of discussion. That’s an unfortunate reality for life as an RPG Blogger; the only alternative […]

I generated two images to accompany this article (actually, I generated 10, but these were the two that made the cut) – and could not pick between them; they both reflected the content and title in equally-compelling but distinctly-different ways. So I’m using both of them. The second image will appear a bit later. While […]

Just to prove that the recent two-and-a-half-part article RPGs In Technicolor (part 1,part 2, part 2a) weren’t the last word on the subject, I thought of this topic of discussion. Picture a room in which your character is located. A partially-closed door leads to a corridor beyond. Somewhere down that corridor, something is glowing in […]

I try very hard to provide balance in my coverage of different genres here at Campaign Mastery, guided by the relative popularity. Out of every 15 posts, 6 should be Fantasy oriented, 4 should be sci-fi oriented, 2 should be ‘realistic’ (Modern-day or Pulp, hence the inverted commas), 2 should be Superhero/Secret Agent oriented, and […]

This post is a musing on the reaction to the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic here in Australia. It will have some relevance to citizens of other countries (and definite relevance to writers and GMs) but that wasn’t the primary goal when I was writing it – though that relevance did manifest along the way. I’m also […]

Something of a bare-bones post this time around, necessitated by the fact that I’m away from home and all its resources. I haven’t been idle while away; I had prepared more than enough RPG work in advance to see me through. Part of that work involves… well, that’s a little more complicated. You see, the […]

“A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet” – or so wrote Shakespeare. This afternoon, I watched (not for the first time), the Star Trek (original series) episode of (almost) the same name, and spent a few seconds ruminating on the expression. This essay will expand and expound on the passing thoughts that […]

This post has been badly delayed by a drunk driver who connected with a power pole this afternoon. To work on the damaged utility, the power supply had to be disconnected for several hours – and when the lights came back on, they didn’t bring my internet connection with them. At this point, I can’t […]

When I first started playing & running RPGs, prep was simply for “the game”. Then, with a little more experience, and in particular when I spread my wings from D&D to running a superhero campaign at the same time, it became prep for “the x campaign”. As the number of campaigns under my belt (and […]

I was really pressed for time when I wrote Part 2 of this 1-2 treatment of the subject, and as a result a couple of things that I wanted to write about got kind of lost in the shuffle. They aren’t enough to really stand as a full post on their own, so I’m sneaking […]