Campaign Mastery

A necessary preamble For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a […]

This continues the article that I started last week, offering a simple technique for the quick and easy generation of families for RPGs. Most of the time, this would be used for the families of PCs, occasionally it might be used for the family of an important NPC. I should also note that most of […]

I’m a fan of the history/biography show, Who Do You Think You Are?, as I have explained a time or two in past articles. Watching some episodes of the show recently, a recurring thought concerning the abbreviated family trees they show finally coalesced into the concept for an article. That article changed and morphed several […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.” That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article. First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation: Four […]

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that. A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their […]

Some article ideas are simply not big enough to sustain an entire post on their own. From time to time, I gather these mini-posts together to form one more substantial post. The last time I did this was in Eight Little Tips: A Confection Of Miniature Posts, 6 months ago. It’s time I did it […]

I’ve been an active Quora user for the last few years, as long-time readers would know. Since August 2017, more than 1200 answers have been viewed almost 250,000 times. My content there averages more than 2000 readers a month (my content here averages more than three times that number). I’ve even built whole articles here […]

This article started in my mind when I was thinking about the Covid-19 situation here in Australia (and elsewhere where the virus has been close to eliminated) but I’ve since broadened and generalized it to some extent. It began with my imagining a set of random tables to describe someone’s interaction with Covid-19. Such-and-such a […]

This article is likely to ramble a bit. There will be times when I have to talk around the subject so as not to give away any surprises to my players, or to provide a proper foundation for the point of discussion. That’s an unfortunate reality for life as an RPG Blogger; the only alternative […]

I generated two images to accompany this article (actually, I generated 10, but these were the two that made the cut) – and could not pick between them; they both reflected the content and title in equally-compelling but distinctly-different ways. So I’m using both of them. The second image will appear a bit later. While […]

I try very hard to provide balance in my coverage of different genres here at Campaign Mastery, guided by the relative popularity. Out of every 15 posts, 6 should be Fantasy oriented, 4 should be sci-fi oriented, 2 should be ‘realistic’ (Modern-day or Pulp, hence the inverted commas), 2 should be Superhero/Secret Agent oriented, and […]