Campaign Mastery

How to describe wonders and monuments.

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question. Today, the […]

How do you choose a location? Where do events transpire? What considerations should you take into account, and what is the process and the chain of logic that gives the best answers most rapidly? These are questions that Blair and I will have to tackle repeatedly tomorrow, as I write this, because our next pulp […]

We all suffer from the occasional bout of writer’s block. This series started with the premise that different types of content meant different kinds of writer’s block, and needed different solutions to the problem. The immediate success of listing so many different solutions while outlining the article showed the validity of the approach; so far, […]

Everything has to happen somewhere, and that means that locations are an essential element of RPGs and RPG settings. And that makes locations a worthy subject for this month’s Blog Carnival. Posts I would like to see as part of this month’s carnival are:- How do you choose a location? How do you represent a […]

Translation blocks are a type of writer’s block which occurs when moving from one level or layer of the story that you’re telling to the next.

In part one of this series, I identified several primary types of writer’s block. All but two have been dealt with; this article examines solutions to those remaining primary types: Dialogue Blocks, when you have a conversation to write but have no idea what the participants will say, or what they are saying seems wrong, […]

A real-life example of solving a plot problem for an RPG.

There are four more primary types of Writer’s Block that I identified in part one of this series, and this article is going to tackle two more of them, and offer 17 solutions to those specific varieties of problem. The types of Writer’s Block to be dealt with in this article are:- Action Block, when […]

Novels and RPGs have one thing in common – you have to describe a whole boatload of locations every time you play. As a result, every GM learns the basics of doing so very quickly. Unfortunately, once they achieve a level of minimal proficiency, most GMs never give this aspect of their craft a second […]

This article is going to provide solutions to three of the specific types of writer’s block identified in the first part of this series: Conceptual Writer’s Block, when you trouble breaking an overall story idea down into a detailed plot outline, Specific-Scene Writer’s Block, which is a difficulty in taking that detailed plot and putting […]

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. Mysteries are hard to write. Ones for Roleplaying are even harder – or maybe that should be the other way around. There are a lot of unique challenges that have to […]