Campaign Mastery

This is an article about a technique for repairing continuity and plot problems that is especially suited to long-running campaigns and to campaigns deriving from published sources. I’m not going to leave anyone who hasn’t mastered telepathy in suspense: the technique is Patching one plot hole with another. For some that will be enough of […]

This article started with an invitation to write a review of RPGSmith. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is, all will be clear by article’s end. After an introduction, and a summary of what the product was, the co-founder who made the offer threw in a provocative statement: “I would like to note […]

Over the Christmas break, and for some weeks prior, I read “First Contact” by Ben Bova and Byron Preiss, and three or four times in the course of doing so, I found myself mentally yelling at the page, “that makes no sense”. There are some logical errors in the assumptions upon which SETI is founded, […]

Progress reports are located at the bottom of the article. When the Blogdex was first published, it was brilliant. It made it easy to find the exact article I wanted to refer to, enabling rich cross-linking that would lead the reader to other relevant content and began creating a broader overview from the individual articles. […]

There’s a TV Series that every GM, regardless of the genre of their games, should be watching. It’s a show that I’ve discussed before, in a completely different context – in The Expert In Everything, and it’s name is Scorpion. Why? Simply put, because it contains so many lessons for the GM. To be specific: […]

In the first half of this two-part article I described a game-show format designed for my use in an RPG. A quick reminder: The License The game-show format and key elements thereof, as described in this blog post and its predecessor, are © 2018 Mike Bourke. Licensing is free for any RPG-related purpose. Licensing for […]

A month or two back, I perceived the plot need in my superhero campaign to have one of the PCs appear on the celebrity edition of a game show. The complication: Licensing of formats The problem was that Game Shows are licensed for big money and the owners are very protective of their rights. While […]

I’ve read a lot of RPG content and advice over the years, much of it D&D related. I’ve contributed my fair share to that total, it must be admitted. Every D&D supplement (that’s not explicitly a collection of monsters) contains new magic items. Websites and magazines abound in them. AD&D creatures, at least came with […]

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 asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. This offering completes the second-last batch of three in the series. It has been suggested […]

The Fourteenth Shelf: Odds & Sods II – Practicalities – Introduction by Mike Practicality can mean many things when it comes to RPGs, and the contents of this shelf touch on many of them. Practicality can be utilizing things that have already been done for game content. There are many intriguing stories of lost treasures, […]

The Thirteenth Shelf: Odds & Sods I – GMing, Tools, and Fiction – Introduction by Mike Being the GM can be isolating at the Game table, especially when a problem strikes. It’s usually too late when you’re in the hot seat to do much research into solutions (unless the problem is so grave that you […]