Campaign Mastery

There are two different visions of a typical winter’s day. If altitude and latitude permit, you have your snowy day with bitter winds and flurries and whiteouts and snow getting down your back; if not, then cold and wet with howling winds and driving rain that sheets horizontally and in which the only cover is […]

This is a somewhat unusual article for Campaign Mastery in that it is pitched as much, or even more strongly, at players than at GMs… While planning the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign yesterday with my co-GM, I made an observation regarding the changing style of roleplaying. Both my co-GM, Blair, and I, […]

These two poker terms should have special relevance to RPGs. I’ll explain why in a moment – first, let’s make sure that everyone is on the same page as to meaning. Bluffing Bluffs are a rather broad subject. The traditional bluff in poker and other types of gambling is an attempt to make a weak […]

The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor that I have created to represent Plot Holes. These are matters of huge significance or importance that everyone is overlooking because they are not immediately obvious, but that once you see one, you can never forget that it’s there. This is a series about methods of […]

There are a couple of expressions that I frequently use as metaphors, simply because they express a concept in a really compact space and in a way that everyone can understand. One is ‘The Iceberg’ to indicate something that is a lot bigger or more important than it seems on the surface. Another is ‘The […]

This is being written a little under the deadline pump; I’m still playing catch-up from my week away at the Family Reunion / 40th Birthday party for my nephew. So it may not quite live up to my usual standards, but I’ll do my best. Actually, I’m cheating for a lot of this article, which […]

The Story Of Prohibition When Prohibition became law in the US in 1920, it was expected that, albeit reluctantly, the citizenry would simply obey. This was no mere law, after all; it was an Amendment to the Constitution, the very document that defined the United States as a nation, and hence an attempt to willfully […]

Have you ever tried to run a prison-break scenario? Was it as successful as you would have hoped? I’m betting that most readers will have answered “no” to the first question and that virtually everyone else will have answered “no” to the second. There’s good reason for this state of pessimism: no matter how essential […]

There’s an old saying: “you can choose your friends, but you cant’ choose your family.” I was thinking about that this morning and it suddenly struck me that there was an interesting RPG-related question that could be founded on that premise – the very question that forms the title of this article. The Arguments for […]

How do you take three plot ideas and interlink them to make one grand adventure? I’ve often skimmed over this point because it’s usually arisen in the context of campaign planning, so I thought it was high time that I went into it in greater detail. Another reason why I’ve been dodging this discussion for […]

I always get far more invitations to support and review projects that I can possibly manage to satisfy. Every now and then, I bundle as many of them as I can into a goody roundup to inform those who might be interested in backing them of what’s going on. Today, I have 10 items to […]

I’ve been re-watching Season 2 of The West Wing over the weekend. I only meant to watch a couple of episodes, but as usually happens when I put it in the DVD-player, I started to binge. It’s a show that never fails to tickle my sense of optimism, my hope for the future, my love […]