Campaign Mastery

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 […]

I get asked questions all the time. Those coming at me through twitter I usually answer extremely briefly; if the 280-character limit (was 140) is not enough, I will either add more replies or set the question aside for answering here, if there is likely to be sufficient interest in the question. Those I get […]

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 […]

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 […]

Why should the GM care about Marching Order? After all, it’s purely in the hands of the players what order their characters are in. Well, as usual, it’s not quite that simple. First, if you can anticipate the marching order, you can plan encounters either to take advantage of it, or to share the spotlight […]

Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles. The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link […]

This article won’t be very helpful to readers who are visually-impaired. I apologize for that, I know I have at least one reader who falls into that category. Maybe if you could get someone to describe the diagrams to you…? I tried including such descriptions, but found that the meaning of the article became buried. […]

While this article builds on some others that I’ve done here at Campaign Mastery, I didn’t feel it was enough of a sequel to any of them to qualify for the Blog Carnival. But I wanted to remind readers that if you’re thinking of doing so, there’s still time to submit a late entry! I’ll […]