Campaign Mastery

Welcome to 2023: A status update So here we are in 2023! Funny, but it feels a lot like 2022 to me. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and are all revved up for the year to come. My holiday period was great, meeting new relatives and catching up with others […]

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms. In a nutshell, the dice represent all […]

The December Blog Carnival by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. This is the beginning of Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the subject. There are times when it can be useful to the GM and his simulation of reality not to require a roll for something. This article is going to explore […]

So November has come and gone, and with it, Campaign Mastery’s bonus hosting of the Blog Carnival. Those who got inspired by the topic did a stellar job with some very interesting contributions, which I’ll summarize later in this wrap-up post. Sadly, there weren’t really enough participants for that to fill this article. Possibly, misunderstanding […]

This article had the working title of “The Penumbra of Personality Traits”, but when it came to actually write it, I decided that readers might find the meaning a little opaque (and yes, that’s a pun, as some will immediately recognize). A penumbra is also a solid metaphor (another pun) for the personality construction technique […]

I have said before that you can never have too many approaches to determining the characterization of an NPC up your sleeve. Today’s article offers a new one, and a systematic way of looking at simpler approaches that can also be useful. Let’s start by setting a baseline for comparison… 0. Going Nowhere: The Null […]

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way). This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and […]

Campaign Mastery has already hosted the Blog Carnival once this year, but when Scot (who runs the Carnival for us) asked me to fill an empty slot, how could I say no? Especially when I already had a list of carnival subjects to draw on? So, this is Art-spiration. Pick a painting or drawing and […]

With the conclusion of the Zener Gate campaign, I’ve been thinking about what comes next. In fact, it’s fair to say that it’s been somewhere on my mind for most of 2022, if not always front-and-center. About six months ago, I decided that I would resurrect the Warcry campaign, even though it would need some […]

This is being written more in hope than expectation. Last week (Wednesday night, to be exact), my internet connection became suddenly unreliable. Because it happened late at night, I had the not unreasonable theory that this was because of network upgrades; not only does my ISP not notify customers of such outages in advance, but […]

The Glass Spider – metagame It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game. So […]

Lately, a lot of the spam that CM has been receiving has proposed the use of AI-generated content to make the life of the writer/publisher easier, as though content creation was nothing more than the means to an end. The Flaw In The Argument Mankind has yet to build an artificial system that can pass […]