Campaign Mastery

In part one of this 5-part examination, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. In Part two, “A Neccessary Evil?”, I discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the historical precedent for oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse […]

Garry’s Article, The Conundrum Of Alignment, which appears as part one of this series, raised some excellent points. I agree with many of them, and felt that further discussion – and an alternative point of view – was merited, since I had reached radically different conclusions from much the same foundations. In parts 2 & […]

Johnn received this article submission for Roleplaying Tips, but it’s not a fit for the e-zine, which tries to be systemless as much as possible. He “didn’t read much of it because 30 years of alignment discussions puts this on my topics blacklist, even for personal reading (smiley).” So he asked me to take a […]

How can you make the players feel like their actions have an impact on the world? Sometimes, the simplest questions have the most complicated or profound answers. So it was with some trepidation that we’ve approached this question, which was asked virtually exactly as it’s quoted at the head of this article. The short answer […]

It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices […]

Many monsters come with treasure in D&D. Taken at face value, these can quickly overwhelm a campaign. I thought I would run through a few measures that the GM can use to control how much hard currency the party gets their hands on. First they have to find it Most treasure will be found in […]

The Roleplay of Prestige Classes My games normally enforce the roleplay (non-game-mechanics) requirements for Prestige Classes (and, where relevant, feats and level progressions). It’s not enough for the character (PC or NPC) to simply meet the prerequisites, they usually have to DO something. Pages 204-205 of DMG II, in discussing the design of new prestige […]

Let’s talk for a minute about the law. Most legal systems are based on two things: the protection of certain general principles that are considered fundamental truths by the society in question, and a long history of precedents matching punishments with violations. Criminal law, for the most part, is fairly straightforward. Not much has changed […]

How do you give your campaign realistic weather without overloading the GM with Admin tasks? Hi, both of you, First I would like to praise you for a wonderfully done job! My question is about weather in role-playing games. Let me expain: I’ve been running a campaing for a while now where the PCs evolve […]

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these […]

This is the third part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined the first two, Expression […]

This is the second part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; this part and the next (which were originally intended to be the whole article) gives some techniques for conveying the uniqueness of the resulting culture to the players, selling them on its credibility, […]