Campaign Mastery

The real difference between game prep and a lack of game prep, in a lot of ways, can be summarized as felicity of style: better-presented maps and illustrations, better thought-out plans, better characterization of NPCs, better depiction of that characterization, and more stylish Narrative. This article is part 2 of a masterclass in the last […]

What’s the real difference between game prep and a lack of game prep? I think the most overt differences can all be summarized as felicity of style: better-presented maps and illustrations, better thought-out plans, better characterization of NPCs, better depiction of that characterization, and more stylish Narrative. Better-presented maps & illustrations Although this article is […]

For those who came in late: Cliffhangers are a wonderful way to end a gaming session. Ending play at a moment of high drama leaves players anxious to get back to the gaming table, and makes a gaming session memorable. They serve as milestones within the adventure. In Part 1, I listed eight general tips […]

Cliffhangers are a wonderful way to end a gaming session because they end play at a moment of high drama that leaves the players anxious to get back to the gaming table, and that tend to be fairly memorable because of the drama. You can think of them as milestones within the adventure. The primary […]

Pulp Rules for Healing, and how & why Pathfinder & 3.x GMs should consider adapting them to their games.

Following the publication last week of the rules on Windchill and other weather-based environmental effects, I was asked a very profound question by Rob, one of several GMs that I associate with on Twitter: Any tips on the drama side, Mike? My players have always felt a bit meh about weather – deadly but dull […]

A few weeks ago, I described my processes for creating Partial NPCs, a methodology that determined how much NPC definition was needed for that NPCs role in an adventure, in Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep. This was described as essential know-how for the article that I was originally going to write and publish […]

How much character do you need? Or, to phrase it another way, how much character construction do you have to undertake in advance when creating an NPC? You could simply have a random character generator throw up something to avoid any character construction, but the results never seem to mesh properly with the situation in […]

How do you GM when you have more players than you can handle?

The dream sequence can be a powerful weapon for a GM, presenting information the players can’t get, illuminating subtleties of personality, and more.

You can never have too many quick NPC generators. Choice means that you can pull out the weapon most suited to the needs of the moment, achieving better solutions in less time and with less wasted effort. This article describes one that I often use when I need the NPC to have one specific character […]

The sheer scale of a modern urban environment is something that we all tend to take for granted. It’s so hard to grasp it, because we only ever see the very tip of a very large iceberg – with far more than nine-tenths of it removed from our sight. In any city there are the […]