Campaign Mastery

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 […]

(As any viewer of Babylon-5 knows, a Zocolo is a marketplace or gathering place). The unusually observant may have noticed a new link in our right-hand Navigation. AetherCon is an idea that has arrived at exactly the right time – just as the required technologies and their distribution intersect with the realm of possibility that […]

Slow combats kill games. This hard truth frustrates you and I because, as GMs, we feel it’s our responsibility to facilitate fast, sleek and exciting sessions. When combat grinds, you end up with fewer encounters in a session. Fewer encounters means less story told, less adventure and less fun. Combat grind also saps your players’ […]

AutoREALM is open-source mapping software for RPGs. It operates as a vector-art program that operates on various layers, similar to the commercial software Campaign Cartographer. In 2005, development ceased on the software as the people working on it found the need to prioritize activities that actually put bread on the table. As a result, the […]

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane. GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments […]

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane. GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments […]

WordPress has a lot going for it – that’s why we use it for Campaign Mastery! For a long time now, I’ve been thinking that it has many of the advantages of a campaign Wiki, and a few more on the side, that would make it an ideal platform for game documentation – with the […]

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane and Johnn Four. GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to […]

First Impressions The Hero Labs Character Generator for Pathfinder is an easy to use piece of software both to install and use. Creating a character with it is as simple as selecting the appropriate action on a series of tabs. Each item has a window that can be brought up to describe the mechanics of […]