Dialogue: Essential Techniques There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue. 1. Canned Dialogue This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide. There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, […]

This is not the article that I intended to post today (that’s still somewhere in the pipeline). Real-world events have overtaken my planning and this post is in response to those events. Some of the language may be provocative or even incendiary; I make no apologies for that – this is a subject that has […]

Welcome to 2023: A status update So here we are in 2023! Funny, but it feels a lot like 2022 to me. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and are all revved up for the year to come. My holiday period was great, meeting new relatives and catching up with others […]

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms. In a nutshell, the dice represent all […]

The December Blog Carnival by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. This is the beginning of Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the subject. There are times when it can be useful to the GM and his simulation of reality not to require a roll for something. This article is going to explore […]

So November has come and gone, and with it, Campaign Mastery’s bonus hosting of the Blog Carnival. Those who got inspired by the topic did a stellar job with some very interesting contributions, which I’ll summarize later in this wrap-up post. Sadly, there weren’t really enough participants for that to fill this article. Possibly, misunderstanding […]

This article had the working title of “The Penumbra of Personality Traits”, but when it came to actually write it, I decided that readers might find the meaning a little opaque (and yes, that’s a pun, as some will immediately recognize). A penumbra is also a solid metaphor (another pun) for the personality construction technique […]

I steal inspiration and technique from anywhere that I can find it, but I’m always careful to credit my sources (especially when the application is a bit left-of-field). In the past that has given me articles such as Growing The Perfect Family Tree (Part 1, Part 2), The Ashes: Understanding Brit and Aussie Characters, and Lessons […]

I have said before that you can never have too many approaches to determining the characterization of an NPC up your sleeve. Today’s article offers a new one, and a systematic way of looking at simpler approaches that can also be useful. Let’s start by setting a baseline for comparison… 0. Going Nowhere: The Null […]

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way). This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and […]