Campaign Mastery

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, […]

This is something of an unusual article. As many of you know, I got my start submitting guest articles for Roleplaying Tips, and eventually co-founded Campaign Mastery with the writer/editor/publisher of that email newsletter, Johnn Four. A recent article was about “How To Think Like An Alien” – Johnn no longer numbers the issues in […]

Although I’ve lived in the state capital for more than half my life, and am a creature of thoroughly urbanized habits and propensities, at my core, I come from a small town almost 600km away named Nyngan, as explained in Location, Location, Location: Nyngan, in which I describe the township and how to adapt it […]

At the end of the last Pulp session, one of our players informed my co-GM and I that they might not be able to attend the next session. Because sessions of this campaign are a month apart, this constituted ample notice, and we’re going to be able to carry on without him. We’re sure that […]

How do you design your dungeons? For me, the only technique worth contemplating is the Narrative Approach, in which the dungeon’s location and structure derive from the adventure in which they are to be found, and the encounter content and similar details derive from the location, structure, and adventure. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But, as […]

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: […]

I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D. This relatively hard-to-find book from Oxford University Press deals with the biological processes by which humans react to various conditions, and hence the hazards posed by those conditions, in a way that is both technically accurate and yet […]

We all roleplay our character’s professions or character classes, right? Actually, we don’t. What we usually roleplay is someone pretending to belong to a profession, because that’s a lot faster and easier. The difference between the two might seem small, but the impact when you compare the two is like night and day. Awareness of […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that I love concepts that re-imagine standard game elements like races and classes through the prism of a completely new context. During a conversation at the game table a month or two back, I found just such a new context for a staple D&D/Pathfinder race, Dwarves. Traditionally, D&D […]

One of the banes of RPGs since time immemorial has been been the seemingly inevitable drift toward out-of-control character capabilities at high levels. It’s something that afflicts almost every campaign that persists for any length of time, regardless of genre, but most notably, the various incarnations of D&D. This problem is so ubiquitous that there […]

I’m posting this early to beat the kickstarter deadline. If you want to back the project, which has now reached its funding target, you will need to act quickly – you have less than 52 hours! Background A week or so ago, relative to the publication date of this article, Campaign Mastery received an invitation […]