Campaign Mastery

Welcome & General Introduction With each passing entry in this series, we get to ground that is more familiar to all of us – either part of, or directly related to, our everyday lives, or part of the collective zeitgeist concerning the forces that influence those lives. This makes analysis easier (I know more of […]

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there are some creature types that automatically get tagged as the villains as soon as they appear. This is true in D&D, in Pathfinder, in a superhero game, a pulp / horror game – you name it. These are ‘the obvious villains’ and today’s article is all […]

Dialogue: Essential Techniques There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue. 1. Canned Dialogue This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide. There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, […]

Today I want to share a simple technique for elevating your narrative text. It requires you to follow just two rules: Ignore the sense of sight for as long as possible. Don’t use a noun or a verb unless you have already described the object using rule 1. Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? But let’s […]

I’ve been thinking about Influences, Styles, Trends and Oscillations. It started when I was thinking about Nostalgia and the “death” of Disco and its subsequent morphing into “Electronic Dance Music” in the very early 80s. All fads and styles have a natural lifetime; the length varies, but at the conclusion, they are clearly recognized as […]

The Eleventh Shelf: Beliefs II – Ghosts, Poltergeists, and Apparitions – Introduction by Mike Wouldn’t the world be dull if everything was predictable? That’s as true of the world in a pulp game as it is of the so-called objective reality that surrounds us. And from the cracks and crannies of what is usually a […]

The Tenth Shelf: Beliefs I (Religions, Nazi Occultism, & Cthulhu) – Introduction by Mike It’s always difficult when you need to take something that was supposed to be whole and split it in two, usually for reasons of practicality. Take this shelf and the next as a case in point: No-one can argue that Religion, […]

The Ninth Shelf: Life In The Pulp Era II – Non-Civilian Life [Crime, Policing, and Militaria] – Introduction by Mike It sometimes seems that the term “delicate balancing act’ is over-used, but when it comes to Pulp it is a true description of some aspect of reality for the GM in at least some respects. […]

The Eighth Shelf – Life In The Pulp Era I: Civilian Life – Introduction by Mike This month’s blog carnival is about “Ordinary Life” and is being hosted by Campaign Mastery, so its’ fitting that the vagaries of chance and publication schedules has this shelf of the reference library appearing in the course of it. […]

Another monster post (18,400 words), another late posting. I once swore that I would never be involved in anything this large and complicated on a weekly deadline again; but every two or three years, it seems, overconfidence or hubris combine with a really good idea, and before you know it… Three things in particular caused […]

The Sixth Shelf: Hardware I: Weapons, Things, and Science – Introduction by Mike Pulp technology and science is a very strange animal. It can encompass everything from steampunk to space opera, Monoplanes to UFOs, and yet it remains grounded in the very real technology available in the 1920s and 1930s. The difficulty is always not […]

Finally, it’s done! This has turned into the largest single post ever published by Campaign Mastery, and by a huge margin. So, what happened? Well, when the initial blowout took place I calculated, based on the Europe results, that I could expect to have to add another 216 entries or so, at an average of […]