Campaign Mastery

A Status Update It can be readily observed that this is not part 3 of the ongoing series on Economics in RPGs that I’ve been publishing for the last couple of weeks. Right up until the last moment, I was uncertain as to whether or not to continue with that series this week, but two […]

This post details two Empires contending with each other in the Warcry campaign at the moment. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. There’s also some discussion of when a Kingdom needs to become an Empire, and a mysterious religious body that seems entwined in events. The working title of the article was […]

A bit of a fill-in article this week (and maybe next week, too), so that I can put additional effort into a larger article on Economies in RPGs. In the original version of this article, it was illustrated with a composite image created from three DALL-E (Ai-generated) images. Part of the reason for doing so […]

This post features a composite of three AI-generated images. If you disapprove of AI-generated content, you may prefer to view a version without the AI-Content. If so, just click on This Link: https://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/the-land-of-green-no-dall-e-version Having searched for jungle images before, I knew that finding the right one would be problematic, so I turned to DALL-E. The […]

There are three facts about a character that can be considered definitive of what sort of person they are, diagnostic of what sort of mistakes they will make, and instrumental in defining what sorts of adventures will consume their attention. These are not the whole sum of the substance of the character or his personality, […]

I was thinking about the perception of time and how that doesn’t match up with the mechanism of time-keeping in the standard initiative systems in games. I mean, it’s certainly possible to design additional mechanics to take these variations into account, and reinvigorate a system that has become predictable. More interesting AND more realistic at […]

I’ve been fortunate enough to write a number of very well-regarded articles on how to run mysteries in RPGs. There was The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs (even WOTC linked to this one), The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, which builds on the earlier article, Delving Deeper Into […]

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact. Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I […]

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November. That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that […]

I was reading something on Quora the other day that offered a fairly convincing argument that most people wouldn’t recognize real randomness if it bit them on the toe (in less colorful language). Now, most GMs are not ‘most people’; we work with randomness all the time. But the more I thought about it, the […]

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, […]