Campaign Mastery

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 […]

On Quora recently, I (and others) were asked for GMing techniques to help shy players come out of their shells. As it happens, I already had this article underway, in one of those serendipitous coincidences that stretch credibility to the point of near-fracture. As it happens, I have 17 techniques to offer by which the […]

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 interrupting my planned schedule of posts to talk about what happened this weekend past in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, because it will be relevant to all campaigns regardless of genre. I was notified on Friday Afternoon that one of the regular players could not make it that weekend. My first thought was to whether […]

Every time there’s a fifth Saturday in the month (with the occasional exception), I run my Dr Who campaign. This uses a simple home-brew game system that I’ve been tinkering with for more than a decade. As the game proceeded (a good time was had by both GM and Player), I noticed the way that […]

Looking at the photographs of the “March For Our Lives”/”Never Again” rallies, you can’t help but feel that an entire generation, who have grown up under the shadow of gun violence in schools since Colombine (April 20, 1999), have run out of patience and been energized. Calls for compromise, like those of Mark Rubio, who […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame. The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters. While it contained a lot […]

Obscure Knowledge can be a great source of uniqueness in an RPG Campaign, but it needs to be handled with care. No-one enjoys being lectured to, and the more obscure the subject, the less likely it is to be of obvious interest to those receiving it. There are ways around the difficulties and problems, and […]

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the […]

This weekend’s session of the Zenith-3 campaign was a great success, and one of the big reasons for that was the real sense that the PCs were fully integrated elements within the game world. This article is going to look at some of the major reasons for that so that you can do it in […]