Campaign Mastery

  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 […]

One problem. Two characters with the same Skill. How do they combine abilities to make the problem easier to solve? Or are two heads no better than one? This is the Dual Competence rules problem. Another problem. One character has the Skill needed to solve it, another who doesn’t – but who has to actually […]

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 […]

Today I want to share a simple technique for elevating your narrative text. It requires you to follow just two rules: Ignore the sense of sight for as long as possible. Don’t use a noun or a verb unless you have already described the object using rule 1. Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? But let’s […]

…at least, I hope it’s new. As I wrote, a strong sense of deja vu crept over me, and it started to sound awfully familiar. But a careful search of past posts failed to turn up anything… I come up with more ideas than I can ever use. Until I co-founded Campaign Mastery, I simply […]

It’s a funny thing, but once you’ve thought of two or three tips on an important subject, other thoughts on the same subject start crowding in. This was going to be a quick article listing a handful of tips, things that I always keep in mind when creating an NPC, but then the ideas started […]

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, […]

There’s a show that I like to watch now and then on a local Free-To-Air lifestyle channel called “Rescue My Renovation”. It appeals because it not only explains what was done wrongly but the correct way that it should have been done, and why. This presents practical information that I’ve found useful from time to […]

Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is founded – having more fun at the gaming table. That make’s this post (again, technically*) the 1001st – a number that itself both the seeds […]

It’s not often that I start one of these article with no certainty about where it’s headed, and with no intention of even attempting to be comprehensive, but that’s the situation in which I find myself this week. Last week, I participated in an extended conversation through Twitter with Daniel Lonson and several other GMs […]

Anagathics (n) – drugs and treatments that halt and reverse the progress of aging. At least, that’s what they are called in Traveler – since we don’t exactly have any proven medications that achieve this yet, nor even research into the science on which such treatments could be based that’s advanced enough to make treatments […]

Or, “Dwarves are from Marz, Elves are from Venusia”, which was almost the title of this article! I was thinking about another post (that you will hopefully see in a week or so) when an idea for a completely original D&D/Pathfinder cosmology occurred to me. In a matter of minutes, it had become a fully-fledged […]