Listing the best posts offered at Campaign Mastery in the first third of 2016.

It was my intention to offer up the next post in Topologia but it’s not quite going to be ready in time. I’ve already written about 2/3 as much as was in the most recent post in that series and I’m only about half-way through. To say that my creativity has been in overdrive on the Ironbarb Flats would be a massive understatement! But that’s for next week, all going well. In the meantime, here’s a hit parade from 2016!

The Very Best Of 2016 Pt 1: Jan-Apr

There’s some good stuff here, if I do say so myself. But, as usual, some of it hasn’t all aged as well as the rest, and there were some quite dated reviews that contributed nothing, and even one or two posts that I consider comparative duds. What there isn’t is a lot of middle ground – things are either really good or not.

Some of these received accolades at the time, while others have flown underneath the radar – I’ll signal those as I go.

As usual, production of this post has rubbed some broken s in my face, the consequence of the update to https a while back. While s on their own and images on their own survived the process, what wasn’t initially obvious was that images with s failed in conversion and were stripped away, leaving only the naked captions. I’ve been fixing these as I found them, so the site has been steadily improving – a side benefit, but extra work.

The 10/10 list

• Creating A Building: A Metaphor and Illustration – a 6-step process for conceptualizing buildings for an RPG, simple enough that it can be done on the fly if you have to.
• Pieces of Creation: Énorme Force – a villain from the Zenith-3 superhero campaign. Should be readily adaptable to everything from D&D to Cyberpunk to Horror. Some obvious questions have been deliberately left unanswered so that each GM can integrate the concepts into their campaigns.
• The Rolling Retcon: how much campaign history is fixed? – When a retcon is appropriate, how to do it, and how it integrates with the broader concepts of continuity in RPGs, with a fourth option to consider somewhere in between episodic and strict continuity and the campaign arcs that are my primary approach.
• Ask The GMs: Building on opportunity – Resource management in RPGs. One of the PCs has come into possession of a small base and wants to expand it. What are the best ways of integrating this into a campaign and using it as an opportunity / springboard?
• Pieces of Creation: Mictlan-tecuhtli – Another villain from the Zenith-3 campaign, with a supporting cult. Easily adaptable to Sci-Fi or Cyberpunk, doing so for D&D / Pathfinder would be more difficult but potentially more rewarding. With their own cult for added menace.
• Ask The GMs: Iceberg Plotlines: Massive Plot Arcs in RPGs – Slow-building storylines that develop over time and how to make them successful in an RPG is something that I’ve discussed in many posts at Campaign Mastery, but this explores some variations and pitfalls not covered elsewhere. With a comprehensive example from the Zenith-3 campaign.
• TCCT and N: Excessive Wealth in D&D – PCs having too much money is a perennial problem in RPGs. TCCT&N is my checklist of solutions. This article explores the consequences and ramifications of each.
• A Hole In Your Past: Character Connections With Yesterday – Having a minor figure from a PCs past encountered in-game by chance can be a trigger for all sorts of things beyond simply exploring the background of the character. This post offers a technique and a 9 different ways to use the encounter as more than a casual contact – some of them significantly transformative. Also useful for inserting a characterization twist into a significant NPC.
• Support Your Local Hero – Breaks “Heroism” into five tiers and examines each for the impact on plots and tone. Includes the concept of characters who do the ‘right thing’ for personal gain – read this if your PCs are murder hobos.
• Character Capabilities: An often-forgotten source of plots – How to generate adventures and encounters from what PCs can do. A simple 6-step process, most of the article is taken up by creating an example.
• Character Incapability: The distant side of the coin – The other side of the coin, basing an adventure or encounter on a having to do something he doesn’t know how to do has some pitfalls to trap the unwary. This article navigates through the problems and offers solutions to them. Along the way, there’s good material on the distribution of the spotlight and scene length. Readers might want to actually start by scrolling to the end of the article and reading the Wrap-up first to get an idea of what the article doesn’t include and why – it frames the rest of it rather well.
• Boogie to the tune of the hidden Mastermind in your ranks – I’ve never been a huge fan of the title I came up with for this article, but the advice it contains on how to create a Mastermind’s Grand Plan is rock-solid.
• Pickin’ and Choosin’: Cherry-picking RPG Elements – Cherry-picking game mechanics from other sources for house rules is a time-honored tradition, but how many have applied the technique to adventure structures? It’s a surprisingly powerful and useful approach. With a substantial example from the Adventurer’s Club campaign.
• Choosing A Name: A “Good Names” Extra (Revised & Extended) – describes the process that my co-GM and I have developed for the naming of NPCs in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, and how we use the name to tell the players something about the character, often without them even noticing.
• The Perils Of Players Knowing Too Much – When a PC is an expert in a field that the player knows well, several traps and pitfalls come out of the woodwork that few GMs expect. This not only explores these and solutions to them, it looks at the benefits that can result and how the GM can harness them.
• Small Motives and Personal Activities – Methods for bringing minor NPCs to life (with minimal effort) and how to keep their personalities consistent over multiple appearances.
• The Beginnings Of Plot – When translating a plot idea or seed into a playable adventure, a critical decision is how the adventure will start. This article offers 7 alternatives and considers the strengths and weaknesses of each.
• Who Owns Your Campaign? – The more input into the evolution of a game setting PCs have, the greater the investment in the campaign the players will have. The more input into the evolution of PCs a GM has, the greater the investment they will have in the success and prosperity of those PCs. Looking closely at the consequences results in some advice that runs strongly counter to “normal practices” in most campaigns.
• An Amazing Ancestry – I analyze 3 repeating / persistent patterns in ancestry discovered through “Who Do You Think You Are” and applies these to the concept of a character’s ancestry.

The 9/10 List

• Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima – Villains from the Zenith-3 campaign, designed as an expression of the concept of a “Force Multiplier”. Only a 9 out 10 because they are not as readily adaptable to other genres, but the principles on which they are built definitely do travel well.
• Bidding For Characters (and related metagame alternatives) – I look at the process and alternatives for constructing a coherent adventuring party, adding the titular method as a new option for GMs to consider. I’ve never seen this actually tried, and that lack of real-world proof-of-concept is the handicap that relegates this article.
• Definitions and the Quest For Meaning in Structure – I often use multiple different terms for the same concept in different articles, for a number of different reasons. This confused one reader enough that she compiled a glossary. This article expands and annotates that glossary to get everyone on the same page. Understanding these concepts is critical to going from an experienced (or inexperienced) GM to being an expert. A little self-referential to be a 10/10 article.
• Use The Force, Fluke: Who’s On First This Time? – Takes an accidental house rule from Star Wars: Edge Of The Empire and discovers that it offers a way to make an adventuring party a small tactical unit instead of a collection of disparate individuals in almost any RPG. Largely overlooked by readers at the time, this is one that deserves more attention. The fact that it derives from a more obscure game system is what holds this article back a bit.
• Finding Your Way: Unlocking the secrets of Google Image Search – Google have changed their interface and some of the options, and don’t have a way to filter out AI results, but most of this article is still relevant, all these years after it was written. But the changes are enough to cost it a mark out of 10.
• The Incremental Art Of Escalation – A plotting technique / tool for planning escalation in an adventure or encounter. But these days I think it’s a little too much effort for casual use. Great if you’ve got some planning time to spare or struggle with this aspect of your planning.
• The Gilligan Tools for better characterization – Uses a fan theory about Gilligan’s Island to explore the creation of Flawed Heroes – a tool equally useful for players and GMs, PCs and NPCs. Not as fully fleshed out in process as most of my articles, but still useful.

The next post in this series will cover the middle of 2016.