Campaign Mastery

Welcome to the first part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – Portals and Gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix… Most […]

The Context Saxon, one of my players and a fellow GM who has contributed guidance through ATGMs on a number of occasions was telling an anecdote the other week about what transpired in the D&D 5e campaign that he plays in. It seems that one of the players was unable to attend. That happens in […]

A ‘Game Physics’ can shape plots, be revealed and extended by plots, but its greatest impact is usually more subtle and cumulative, and only experienced at a Campaign Level, where it can serve as a binding influence that ties disparate plots into a unified whole. Game Systems in service of plot This section was originally […]

Sorry for the delay in posting this – my ISP is conducting maintenance of some sort, and my connection kept dropping out, making it hard to upload and format the article in the usual manner. Combinations So far, I’ve been looking at the different elements of pauses-in-play in as much isolation as possible, going beyond […]

It happens in virtually every campaign. The longer the game runs, the more overprotective of their characters the players become. They become more and more attached to the characters and more adverse to exposing them to serious risk. The GM, on the other hand, wants to continually raise the stakes and up the ante, in […]

In part one of this series, I demonstrated that a pause or interruption in play can be enormously beneficial, if used correctly. Last week’s article examined before-pause and after-pause content and found that these had to match in order to extract that benefit, and that the type and length of pause was a critical variable […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series has examined the process of creating a new campaign in detail, and at last, the new campaign is ready for the curtain to lift and the show to begin – right? Right? This isn’t the first time it has seemed that way since this series […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail, a process that is approaching its conclusion. Campaign Structure There isn’t much of a structural nature left undone, or so it must seem – and, truthfully, the bulk of the work is done. But there […]

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 […]

I’m in the process of answering a question from GM Roy, who wrote: “I need some inspiration to create cool names for spell components. I have 5 [scales of rarity = Mike]: Common (flesh, breath, water, dust) Uncommon (earth from a cemetery, humanoid blood) Rare (head of a Medusa, Minotaur’s horn, black dragon blood) very […]

This question comes from GM Roy, who wrote: “I need some inspiration to create cool names for spell components. I have 5 [scales of rarity = Mike]: Common (flesh, breath, water, dust) Uncommon (earth from a cemetery, humanoid blood) Rare (head of a Medusa, Minotaur’s horn, black dragon blood) very Rare (Essence of the ghost […]

This question comes from GM Roy, who wrote: “I need some inspiration to create cool names for spell components. I have 5 [scales of rarity = Mike]: Common (flesh, breath, water, dust) Uncommon (earth from a cemetery, humanoid blood) Rare (head of a Medusa, Minotaur’s horn, black dragon blood) very Rare (Essence of the ghost […]