Campaign Mastery

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines in detail the process of creating a new campaign. What more do you need? You’ve got the basic plot, you’ve got the basic world, you have these organized so as to spread the developmental workload over the life of the campaign, you’re ready to […]

A Message from the Writer/Publisher: As I write, a hostage situation continues to unfold in Sydney, as it has for almost 15 hours, capturing world attention for all the worst reasons. For those who may be concerned, I am completely fine. But I must share my contempt for those who have attempted to politicize events […]

I was watching a documentary the other week. (I know, it seems like I watch a lot of TV. I actually watch less than it might seem, but I’ve gotten a number of articles out of what TV I do watch.) Anyway, the subject in this case was the investigation of the crash of a […]

A review of One Spot No. 3 from Moebius Adventures and some musings on a consequence of the rise of crowdfunding.

This is not the post that I expected to write today (an ATGMs article), nor is it the backup idea (about getting into character) that I expected to use next week but was ready to bring forward – look for those next week. A confluence of completely independent events has sent my thoughts surging down […]

There’s a debate that has been fought ever since man invented games that have an element of chance has been, “Is it better to be lucky or skilled?” It’s a debate that has a number of unique resonances within the sphere of an RPG. How should a player or GM simulate a character who relies […]

This article is the result of a confluence of many different vectors, from reading a review in the current issue of KODT of the original “Paranoia” RPG to reading an article at E Pluribus Unum about Twitter mistakenly suspending an account as a purveyor of spam. Setting aside the questions of anti-spam techniques and technologies […]

About the “Epigrams Of Mike” series: An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. Usually under the hashtag #Musing, I have the habit of occasionally tweeting notions and thoughts and philosophizing; the 140-character limit of twitter (and yes, I know there are ways around that) by definition makes those tweets […]

How does Magic (in general) work? I’m not talking about how the rules work, but how Magic works within the game world. Why raise the question now? I should probably pause for a moment to explain why I’m writing about this now – in the middle of a major series about Modern Priests. There are […]

I was watching a documentary on the roles of Women as portrayed on Television the other day, and it yielded a couple of unexpected insights – one into modern society, and the other into the edition wars that have plagued D&D over the last few years, and the divide between “new school” and “old school” […]

This irregular column resurrects lost blog posts about RPGs from Mike’s 2006-7 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. One of the decisions every referee has to make is how much NOT to tell the players. To be blunt, the referee has to decide when to lie to his […]

An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. I’ve been tweeting these for some time now. This article collects and discusses some of my best and most enlightening.