Campaign Mastery

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 […]

A guest article by G.F. Pace Additional contributions & Editing by Mike Bourke I recently moved to London from Italy. After a good beer (or several) in a London pub, I can easily imagine the environment in which Tolkien and Lewis (and so many of the other Gods of the fantasy genre) began to perceive […]

I didn’t want to split this article in two. You really need to have read part one before you can get full value from what’s below. So I’m going to assume that you’ve done just that, and don’t need a synopsis to refresh your memory, and just dive straight in… Transitions & Global Emotional Flow […]

Swing Swing Dodge Swing Scurry Duck Scurry Scurry Dodge Kick Swing Leap Swing Parry Swing Duck Swing Scurry Dodge Swing… …it gets a bit dull and repetitive after a while, doesn’t it? Every adventure, every combat, heck, every campaign needs to have its highs and its lows, its frantic periods and its lulls of inactivity. […]

There are things that we all take for granted. Any expectation of this sort can be a great basis for an adventure.

“Your shoelace is untied.” By the end of this article, you’ll understand the significance and meaning of that phrase. Mentioning Call Of Cthulhu in Monday’s article reminded me of a discussion that I once had with Dennis Ashelford, still probably the best CoC GM that I’ve ever seen in operation, about how best to convey […]

Verisimilitude is critical in a role playing game in order to facilitate the suspension of disbelief and players (and GMs) getting into character instead of viewing events from a meta-perspective. Believability is hard-won at the gaming table and subject to constant attack by game mechanics and real-world distractions like side-conversations. More difficult still is the […]

Something got me thinking the other day about the villains trilogy that I wrote last year – Part 1 – The Mastermind, Part 2 – The Combat Monster, and Part 3 – the Character Villain and about something that wasn’t included. What makes the scariest villain? Beginning at the Beginning: What is Fear? Wikipedia has […]

Introduction A week or two ago (as I write this) I was chatting with someone on twitter, and they wanted to show me a map they were working on – but couldn’t find where they had stored it on their computer. File organization is one of those areas that no-one ever really talks about, so […]

Exhaustion has gotten the better of me, I’m afraid, and has prevented me from making enough progress with the next part of the Orcs & Elves series. I always knew it was likely that sooner or later I would run into deadline trouble, and planned accordingly. So here’s an article that I prepared earlier and […]

There are three tricks that I use all the time when designing adventures, characters, races, campaigns, cultures, NPCs and Villainous Plans for RPGs, and for rebooting tired old characters. I call them the magic bullets of design, and I’ve written about most of them several times before – but there is always something new to […]