Campaign Mastery

For the Oct 2026 Blog Carnival, hosted by Vulcan Stev, I offer the Klein Wand, drawing inspiration from… non-traditional sources. I took this month’s subject to be a challenge, one to which I wasn’t initially going to respond – while magic items tend to be around in many of my campaigns, they tend to be […]

It’s my contention that with every encounter, the canny GM will expand on the lore surrounding the creatures encountered. I’ve been plugging away steadily at the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series, in which a lot of the elements discussed start to come together into a coherent picture of the processes, but it’s […]

It’s been quite a while since I sat down at the keyboard to write one of these articles without a clear idea in mind of what the subject matter would be – usually from weeks in advance of publication date. When a deadline is looming, that experience can be extremely stressful and unwelcome, but when […]

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article. In this case, though, that “previous part” is actually the […]

Welcome & General Introduction Readers may have noticed that the previous part of the series promised the Renaissance and then barely mentioned the subject. That happened because, at least at first, there wasn’t a lot of economic difference, and what trends later started to manifest themselves were essentially the same trends that drove industrialization in […]