Campaign Mastery

Today’s article was originally going to be just an example of using logical structures to construct an adventure from the middle out, but that should be fairly standard (and possibly dull) fare for anyone with a reasonable amount of experience – so I was looking for a way to dress it up and add to […]

A necessary preamble For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a […]

This continues the article that I started last week, offering a simple technique for the quick and easy generation of families for RPGs. Most of the time, this would be used for the families of PCs, occasionally it might be used for the family of an important NPC. I should also note that most of […]

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles. Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article. That article changed and morphed several […]

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 […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]

Yesterday, on Quora, I answered a question about beginning as a GM.. The question originally posed was “How can I play NPCs in DND and how can I get started DMing? This is my first time and I’m so lost.” There was already an excellent answer to the question, so I took a more general […]

Integration. What does that mean, exactly? Well, in mathematical terms, it means – essentially – accumulation of results from designated start point to designated end-point. In social terms, it roughly translates to incorporating or mixing one thing with another so well that the results appear completely uniform and consistent. Both are on speaking terms with […]

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.” That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article. First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation: Four […]

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”. After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’. Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s […]

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that. A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their […]

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer. Despite the official discontinuation, every release of […]