No ash? That’s smoking butane.

They want private progress. They want to be the industry leader in whatever it is. They’re not progressing humanity, they’re making a great fiscal quarter.

I really enjoy and am deeply terrified of building GURPS characters.

Thanks! This is great!

I bought the GURPS core books like a decade ago and never got a group together to play. I’m still interested in doing it one day, but my list of games to run/play is so long already.

I’ve recently been prepping to run Blades in the Dark as a few-shot. I know the McElroys have an Actual Play in it, but do you know any other good resources to see a game running in action?

Combined with that, I’m in the “same” communities on my local instance as I am on instances with a bigger community for the same thing. Reddit doesn’t have a “home” like instances naturally have.

If I had to name to my process, I’d separate my process into, Forks, Stories, and Meanwhile. I run a very freeform sandbox game, so depending on what kind of game you’re running, this may be more lor less useful for you.

Stories are what call the collective series of hooks, adventures, and NPCs. All of the things that go into an individual story or quest. I break this down into information like, who has a problem? What is the problem? What does a good result look like to them? (players tend to find their own solutions to your NPCs problems anyway, so I don’t think too hard about this.) With these and similar leading questions to ask yourself you can start to outline what the story will be, roughly. I usually have a race and job picked out for NPCs. Sometimes a job is also a class, but a lot of NPCs in towns have noncombat, non adventuring jobs. I improv from there, but prep to your comfort.

Forks are what I use to stop and think about other outcomes. Often, I don’t prepare too much for a fork and instead mentally and emotionally prepare for a lot of things at this spot to change when it hits players. Forks can be a moral choice in the middle of a quest ala Bioware quest design, but also combat can be a fork. Stories can get derailed by a PC death, Gandalf the White showing up to Helms Deep at sunrise kind of moment, or a literal fork in the road. Forks are another thing I don’t actively prepare too much, I just note that here, the exact next step will depend on what the Players want to do. This NPC will present their information, and it’s up to the Players to trust or not trust them. Again, prep to your comfort.

Meanwhile is my system for tying up Stories into a larger Arc. While the party killed the Yuan-Ti cult moving to establish a foothold in a nearby city (Snakes on a Train), what was the crime boss they left for dead going to do? Break out of jail? Probably that for sure. Hire assassins to find and eliminate the party? Sounds like his whole thing. Cross the Lonely Sea to meet M’Neth the Elder Demon of Pyrrhic Vengeance? I guess we’ll wait and see.

The point of Meanwhile is not for your players to see, but for you to keep tabs on recurring villains and how much they are growing and changing before we see them again. Introduce villains and let them sit off screen growing in power. Introduce multiple and let each one be distinct and grow at different paces.

To summarize, write a Story that stands alone, but think about where your Players are going to Fork off their own stories within it. When a Story is wrapping up, Meanwhile, your villains have been working, too. The players can, but don’t have to, see the results of a Meanwhile immediately. Maybe we don’t see Glarius the King of Knaves again until he’s finished achieving lichdom.