The First Frontier: Appearance Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those […]

The post The Four Frontiers Of 'Alien' first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

Whew! Finished at last!! This is a long one, folks – more than 16 thousand words, or about four normal Campaign Mastery articles. Heck, that’s approaching game supplement levels… Needless to say, I had no idea it would be anything like that long when I started. I Hope it’s worth the wait! Awakened Trees Most […]

The post The Miracle Of Wood first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

“Game Physics*” have been on my mind lately, no doubt because of my recently published article on the underpinning theory of how Magic works in my superhero campaign. This article is primarily aimed at D&D / Pathfinder / Fantasy GMs, but it may also serve in other genres in which the underlying “science” doesn’t match […]

The post Creating a Campaign Physics first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

There have been three shows that seriously went into oil painting on Australian TV. The first was the Rolf Harris Show, in which Rolf used house-paints on a large board, paining in just two or three pigments; his art was often comprised of abstract shapes until the whole image came together in a fairly impressionistic […]

The post Pigment On Canvas - Six GMing Lessons from Oil Painting first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

(originally titled ‘Flowing Mana and other arcane concepts’) Today, I thought I would share with you a few concepts from my superhero campaign that relate to the “science” of how magic works. I’ve addressed the circumstances under which these were presented in-play in an earlier post; this is more about delivering the high-concept ideas themselves […]

The post The Meta-Physics Of Magic first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

It has always been my opinion that of all the pantheons, the Norse are the most suited to application within a superhero campaign. The Greek deities are too whimsical, the Romans too arrogant; the Norse are the most level-headed in many respects. What’s more, the Vikings had a sense of the rule of law that […]

The post Norsing Around With Jordenheim first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

Campaign Mastery’s turn as host of the Blog Carnival has now passed into the dusty pages of history, and the baton has passed to Gonz at Codex Anathema, whose topic is “Whose Relic Is It Anyway?” That means that it’s time for a roundup of the submissions in response to our round of hosting – […]

The post Carnival Roundup plus Henchmen! Henchmen! Henchmen! first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

Yesterday, I took the day off (actually, this was back in April 2018 – this post has sat around unfinished for quite a while, I’;m probably due to do it again!) This morning (April 2018 again), I was reflecting on how much I enjoyed setting aside the stresses and strains of daily life and just […]

The post A Character's Day Off first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

I Spent much of the weekend a few weeks ago performing my regular data backup. Everyone in IT has horror stories resulting from inadequacy of backups. Even IT professionals and past professionals like myself – who know how essential backups are – have lost irreplaceable material to inadequacy of backups. That’s because there are two […]

The post The Great Reset Button In The Sky first appeared on Campaign Mastery.

I originally started writing this as a contribution to the May 2020 Blog Carnival, hosted by Moebius Adventures, but when I wasn’t able to finish it in time, I set it aside for later completion. It is now “later”… Travel The theme of the May carnival was “Are we there yet”, and the subject matter […]

The post Interesting Journeys: You Can Get There From Here first appeared on Campaign Mastery.