Master Your RPG Campaigns
Mike Bourke, from Campaignmastery.com, agreed to share a bit about his role-playing game story. It's quite a journey.
Campaign Mastery Logo
How were you introduced to role-playing games?
I was a big science-fiction fan when I went to uni. That led me to hook up with the University Of New South Wales Science Fiction Society. From time to time after the weekly meetings, some of the members would engage in other social activities - watching videos, bull sessions, convention planning. On one occasion, they broke out D&D. I took a first level thief, who was the first player killed - by a stirge, as I recall - but the experience lasted long enough for me to be hooked.
A couple of my fellow students who also attended that session were more experienced gamers. They told me about a group that gathered in one of the social areas maintained by the campus, the "blue room". While some of the members of the UNSWSFS were depreciating about that group for reasons that I never understood, I dropped in on them that weekend, and they became my regular gaming group - initially, playing D&D and Space Opera, and then AD&D and original Traveller.
What are some of your favorite RPGs?
I've had the most fun as a player with AD&D, original Traveller, and 7th Sea, but that's because after the first couple of years I GM'd a lot more than I played. As a GM, there are three game systems that excite my imagination - D&D (either AD&D or 3.x), the original TORG system, and a set of homebrew rules based on the Hero System that I have been tweaking and developing since the early 80s (and GMing for most of that time). The Hero System gets a double-tick, really, because my co-GM and I are also using the 5th Edition as the basis of our Pulp Campaign. Lastly, there's a set of universal rules that I've been tinkering with over the last 10 years or so, the third generation of which are being used for my Dr Who campaign at the moment.
Do you still GM or play regularly?
I currently GM two campaigns, co-GM a third, and have three more on hiatus. I also play in a Star Wars: Edge Of The Empire campaign. All on a monthly basis.
Assassin's Amulet - Everything you need to know about assassins
Why did you create Campaignmastery.com?
That's a long and complicated story, but ultimately - from a business perspective - it came down to generating articles by Johnn [Four] and myself that would then be collated and updated into themed e-books. This was part of a master plan to create a publishing empire with Roleplaying Tips as one cornerstone and Campaign Mastery as another. The idea was that this would enable us to hire professionals to edit and contribute to both, freeing us both up for more content generation, which would lead to more ebooks from all of us, and letting both Johnn and I go full-time on RPG-related activities. But it didn't work out that way, in part because of Assassin's Amulet, and in part because of my health problems, and Johnn eventually gave up Campaign Mastery to pursue other avenues of achieving independence from his 9-to-5 job. We're still friends and back each other up from time to time.
From a creative viewpoint, there were two points. First, neither of us had ever done a blog before, but thought that it would be an excellent avenue for creativity, and for exploring topics that didn't fit under the Roleplaying Tips banner, and that the difference in focus would mean that we had something to contribute to the hobby. Once again, however, Campaign Mastery quickly grew into a most atypical blog - these days I think of it more as an online magazine that presents two feature articles a week. If you look back at our first half-dozen articles, they were a lot more typical of a blog than just about anything that's been published since.
Finally, from a gaming point of view, there were a lot of blogs out there at the time catering to different segments within the marketplace, but not a lot that week-in and week-out were dedicated to suggesting ways that *experienced* GMs could improve their craft. There was plenty for the absolute beginner and for the somewhat experienced GM, but not much for those who were looking for the next step. Our theory was always that even if an article was pitched above the expertise level of a GM *now*, by making the content as evergreen as possible, it would always be there, waiting for that GM to catch up to the point where it became useful.
From Assassin's Amulet
Tell us about Assassin's Amulet.
It started with the map created by Michael K. Tumey as the winning entry in a monthly contest at the Cartographer's Guild website in 2009. When he was done he thought "this is too good to throw away" and started thinking about what to do with it. Eventually, he contacted Johnn and myself to write a map key and build an adventure around it or an Assassin's Guild to inhabit it. Even though it meant putting our business plans on hold (and eventually abandoning them completely in Johnn's case), that map was too inspiring and intriguing to refuse.
But when we started looking into the subject, we found that Assassins, as a class, were woefully neglected. Part of that was that 3.x had rolled them back into the Rogue class, but mostly it was because there were several quite tricky aspects to having assassins running around in a game. We started generating ideas for additional content alongside developing the background for the "adventure". We listed everything that we could think of that anyone might want to have in a game supplement about Assassins, threw in as many twists and turns as possible, then categorized them as "must have", "nice to have", and "well, maybe", split up the tasks between us, and went to work ticking items off the list one after another.
Keeping everything organized was a nightmare. We started off doing it by email, then moved to a Wiki that looked promising and worked wonderfully - when it worked at all. But it was beset by reliability issues. Eventually, I took a week and migrated the whole project to Google+. Initially, Johnn was going to serve as our chief editor, but couldn't keep up with it all, so I took that over and did the final edit and all the formatting - and discovered that we needed a whole lot more illustrations to break up the blocks of text. So, for the next month, I generated three illustrations a night. Some of them I'm very proud of, some were just barely adequate. At the same time, we started planning the marketing campaign and trying to build up a buzz around the product.
At the time, it was intended to be the first in a series, enabling us to take maximum benefit out of the background, but by the time we finished, Johnn was pretty much burned out. I got about 1/3 of the way through the sequel, "The Order Of Light", which was to do for Paladins what AA had done for Assassins before a combination of worsening health and Johnn pulling out of Campaign Mastery put the project on hold. I still have all my notes, but never found the time to finish them.
Still, I'm proud of what we put together, and it continues to sell modestly.
Mike Bourke
Are you working on any new RPG projects?
I'm always working on something, even if it's only for my own campaigns or for Campaign Mastery. Copyrights mean that the 1000-page-plus Hero System variant that I wrote for the Zenith-3 campaign can never be published except in the occasional dribs and drabs, but the Imperium rules that I'm using for Dr Who are incredibly compact and incredibly flexible. I could publish them at some point as a single article in Campaign Mastery, that's how tightly-packed they are, but if I can ever sort out an account with DriveThruRPG - their terminology confuses the heck out of me - I might publish them.
Nor have I completely given up on the original Campaign Mastery business plan. At one point I generated a list of 20 themed game supplements built around CM content, each containing ten articles from the site that had a common subject matter, updated and expanded, plus two new articles on the subject that had never been published before, plus a third new article that would also be published at Campaign Mastery to promote the collection. These would be relatively cheap and would be somewhere around 100 pages each. I think that would be a fair price.
Then there's the Personality Engine that I created for my TORG campaign, which simply wouldn't work as a blog post for layout reasons, but which would be functional for any game system as a short e-book.
Unfortunately, all of these rest on that DriveThruRPG account, and I simply don't have one as a creator. Until I have something to actually release, there's no urgency to the problem, anyway.
If people want to learn more about you and your work, where should they go?
There are five articles, and one page, at Campaign Mastery. You should start with the "About" page.
After that, I did a two-part bio of myself as part of the 5th anniversary celebrations a couple of years back - Part 1:
http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/dice-and-life-1/ and Part 2: http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/dice-and-life-2/
I talked about my early gaming experiences in another pair of articles, Bringing On The Next Generation. Part 1, Player Peers talks about my early experiences as a player, and Part 2, Gamemaster Mentors continues the story as I learned how to be a GM. Finally, Gaming With The Family – Lessons from yesteryear talks about my early experiences GMing for my two brothers.
In terms of my work, there are hundreds of articles about it at Campaign Mastery. If you look at the right-hand side of the page, under the category "Mike" (which connects all the articles I've written for the site), you will find subcategories for each of my current campaigns. Some of those campaigns are now shut down, some are on hiatus, and some are still very active.
Finally, I'm active on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gamewriterMike. Stop by and say hi sometime. I'm happy to talk about music, or motorsports, or gaming, or philosophy, or science, or science fiction. In fact, there are probably more subjects that I *will* talk about than subjects that I *won't*. 🙂