Campaign Mastery

Welcome to the second part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – Portals and Gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix… To […]

Welcome to the first part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – Portals and Gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix… Most […]

Welcome to the Blog Carnival Host Page for November 2015! In the coming month it is once again Campaign Mastery’s turn to host the Blog Carnival (if you’re quick, you can still catch the tail end of the October Blog Carnival about creepy things coming to town over at Of Dice And Dragons). This time […]

I’ve worked on it up to the last minute and beyond, but the final installment of the Tavern Generator still isn’t ready. I’ve solved the problems that confronted me last week, though, so it’s now full speed ahead on wrapping it up, hopefully this time next week! In the meantime, here’s another quick little fill-in […]

Some background Before I can get to the main subject of today’s article, I need to tell a few short real-life stories to set the scene, putting the article into context. The Story Of Canterbury Road When I look out my front window, I am confronted by the somewhat depressing site of one of Sydney’s […]

To really get to grips with your RPG world, you have to understand how the invented environment affects the everyday life of the inhabitants. That’s more easily said than done. One technique is to answer a long series of questions, progressing from the simple to the profound, as shown in my first series here at […]

Hungry, over at Ravenous Roleplaying, is a long-time supporter of Campaign Mastery through his regular “Friday Faves” column, in which he collects links to the articles that have most inspired or interested him from the past week. When he has time, he accompanies those links with some comments; these are always interesting, and sometimes genuinely […]

A ‘Game Physics’ can shape plots, be revealed and extended by plots, but its greatest impact is usually more subtle and cumulative, and only experienced at a Campaign Level, where it can serve as a binding influence that ties disparate plots into a unified whole. Game Systems in service of plot This section was originally […]

In this series, I’ve been looking into the subject of Game Physics. Part one examined what a ‘game physics’ is, and what one can be used for. Part two focused in on one particular application, the generation and validation of House Rules. In this third part, the subject is the relationship between Game Physics and […]

As you can see from the title, this is part 2 of a series looking at the underlying principles and applications of Game Physics. The first part looked at exactly what the term meant, and found that it needed quite a lot of definition because it could be used to mean any of several different […]

“Game Physics” is a term that not enough GMs take the time to think about in depth. Physics is about isolating a single variable and measurable quantity, then altering that variable while observing the measurable quantity to shed light on the relationship between the two – then trying to explain the results in such a […]

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail. So far, we have a campaign plan and a development plan for the game world along with a schedule for that development. We’re now dotting i’s and crossing t’s and building up the foundations of […]