DM Resources: Campaign Mastery

One of the things that take a lot of my time these days, besides preparing my campaign world and stuff for the PCs to do, is roaming the internet for good source material and advice on the various aspects of being a DM. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the internet, my main source for inspiration and knowledge were the few books on the subject I came across and bought (such as the excellent AD&D 2e supplements The Castle Guide, Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, and Creative Campaigning). These days there are countless websites and blogs with advice and background material of all kinds, from new monsters to how to populate your city, but not all of them are equally useful or well written (which was the case for many official supplements as well).

I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about some of the best of them in a small series of articles, to pass on my findings. While new discoveries to me, many of the sites I write about might be well known to many of you. For that reason I would be happy to receive suggestions on your favorites in the comments, so I can expand my own list of useful resources.

The first website I would like to mention is Campaign Mastery which is among the absolute best when it comes to advice on being a game master, both in terms of quality, as well as sheer volume of content. Since 2008 they have posted more than 500 articles, ranging across the spectrum of everything a DM might need to know to run good games. I have barely scratched the surface of their archives and have already found plenty of content, that has given me new ideas for campaign elements as well as interesting twists on old ones.

Campaign Mastery also has plenty of articles that I will probably never use or even read, for various reasons (some of them go into extreme detail on things I don't consider that important), but I can't imagine any DM out there, that wouldn't find at least a handful of articles that could be of use to them.