Now, I know none of us here at the Stew would ever use a roleplaying game as an excuse for spending the evening blatantly flirting with our best friends. Nope. Never. Ever. (If we’re going to flirt with the homies, we’re gonna be up front and ethical about it.)

THAT SAID, this Valentine’s Day, if you want to add a little romance to your games, you should be armed with the knowledge of what goes into creating a satisfying romance arc. The ingredients and…techniques…required to bring two (or more) characters to their…narrative climax.

So sit down. It’s time we have The Talk.

Always Use Protection

Any sort of romance arc should be vetted by everyone at the table with active and enthusiastic consent. Theoretically, you’ll have covered the topic in session zero, but it never hurts to take the table’s temperature before you get hot and heavy with the RP.

If you’re looking to dip your toe into the waters of narrative smooching, you can steal a page out of BookTok’s book and talk to your group about potential romance arcs using a pepper scale.

0-1 peppers is mild spicy—some flirting, a kiss here or there, maybe some implied hanky panky behind closed doors—all the way up to 5 peppers.

NOTE: I do not advise jumping headfirst into a 5 pepper romance arc as your table’s first foray into romantic RP unless, to quote John Mulaney, “Everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly.”

The chance for emotional bleed at a romantic table is quite high, so make sure to deploy your safety mechanics and use them liberally.

The Arc of Cupid’s Arrow

Getting into the thick of it, what are the elements that create a good romance arc? In one of her Patreon classes, award-winning storyteller Mary Robinette Kowal explained it with an acronym: D.R.E.A.M.

• Denial — No! I could never love someone like that.
• Resistance — Damnit, we have chemistry, but I can’t let that spark become a flame.
• Exploration — Fine. One date won’t hurt…
• Acceptance — Okay. Yeah. I DO love them!
• Materialization — Hey, everyone! We’re getting married!

If you look at the majority of romance stories—from rom coms to gothics to the latest romantasy epic—you’ll find some version of this template applied to all of them. The trick as a GM is knowing which phase your characters are in and using the appropriate kinds of obstacles for those phases to create a good story.

PRO TIP: Give your players copies of this arc and ask them to track where they think their characters are on it as the story progresses. If your table is crunchy, gamify the progression through the arc with romance points (or some other form of tracking).

It Rains When We’re Sad

Feelings in general — and romantic feelings specifically — mostly happen inside people’s heads. They’re “navel-gazing” character arcs, unless we, as GMs, externalize some of the conflicts and obstacles involved in those arcs.

• Denial Phase: The characters have made assumptions about each other. What are those assumptions, and what situations can you concoct that will force the players to challenge them?
• Resistance Phase: At this point, the characters are still clinging to their definition of self and their assumptions about the love interest, but the walls are crumbling. What challenge will push them over the edge?
• Exploration Phase: When they’re exploring the potential for a relationship, both parties will be guarded, and trust will need to be earned. Challenge their trust in each other. Put them in situations that require them to step outside their comfort zones.
• Acceptance Phase: This phase usually comes after one or both parties have made an ass out of themselves and potentially harmed the relationship. It’s the “break-up” moment that happens in so many romances, when the bet that brought them together is revealed, or the secret that one person has been harboring comes out. It’s usually only after the love is taken away that they both realize they’re in love.
• Materialization Phase: This is the happily ever after. You don’t need to create any challenges in this phase. It’s their reward for all the work that went into the arc.

In standard romances, most of the obstacles the characters face are social and, honestly, have much lower stakes than your standard D&D party faces. So imagine how much fun you can have when the angry ex that comes to break up their date in the exploration phase turns out to be a necromancer or a dragon or the dragon necromancer king of a rival country!

What are some of your favorite examples of romance arcs at the table? Let us know below!

Everyone Loves A Giant

Giants come up a lot in RPGs. They are especially popular in fantasy RPGs, though there are some I would argue deserve a place in one or two other genres. What made me want to write about giants is that, cool as they are, giants are way more interesting in folklore than in most TTRPGs. In fact, to be honest, I think giants are often sadly undersold in TTRPGs, particularly in bestiaries.

Maybe it has something to do with familiarity. They’ve been there in tomes, the bestiaries and the manuals since… well since before a large proportion of the current community could probably read. And especially in those early entries, they were often not amongst the most exciting pictures available. I mean ugly, stupid looking… guys.

Not even cool armour, and unless it was an ettin, not particularly monstrous. Because the scale of a giant just doesn’t come across in a three-inch illustration.

Maybe that’s why, in many TTRPGs, giants have become a simple, escalating challenge. Bigger and bigger versions of essentially the same thing, encountered in tactical fights as your characters progress. A scalable threat, with a side serving of elemental power. Whether shaped by frost, fire, clouds, or the lumpy quality of a hill, they just get bigger, in a series of power showdowns.

All too often, they have little other presence in the world. They are not usually mysterious, and they certainly are not evocative springboards into otherworldly adventure.

Creatures Of Fairy Tale

It is true that, in many European fairy tales, especially in England, giants are often depicted as being unintelligent, or slow-witted. That is because their purpose in those stories is to give the hero an opportunity to be clever and quick, almost as if, to the original tellers of these tales, these qualities were what defined a hero (rather than any moral compass… ).

The hero doesn’t win by fighting. He wins by being clever. In this way, the stories reflect cultural values: the giant is the larger foe, the seemingly unconquerable enemy who is defeated by cunning alone.

But there are plenty of examples of giants in folklore and mythology that are far more interesting than that. And more three-dimensional than they are sometimes depicted in TTRPG bestiaries.

A Magical, Faraway Land

Are giants just big humans? Or something more monstrous?

How about the one with the beanstalk? Its a classic example: he isn’t just big. He lives in another world, possibly The Otherworld. Jack can only go there by magical means. Magical means, by the way, which seem to be intrinsically tied up with leaving his mother and might be seen as a rite of passage. But the journey also involves sowing beans – a clear reference to agriculture. Planting crops leads to all the treasures Jack brings back, which turn out to include music, livestock and commerce (in the form of gold). Late Stone Age, and the advent of farming, anyone? Or maybe the arrival of horse nomads and the cattle-raiding tradition?

When Jack does get to the other world, not only the giant is super-sized but so is everything else. It is a magical place, connected with the sky. And when Jack returns, he comes back with a magical harp that sings songs and tells poems. The harp is therefore symbolic of either wisdom and learning or the skill of the bard, or both. Jack also has a hen that lays golden eggs.

These are magical items. And by the way, Jack doesn’t go there to slay a monster, protect the community, or rescue a hapless gender-stereotyped aristocrat. He goes there to explore. And then he steals loads of stuff. Sound like any player characters you know?

So am I saying you have to have beanstalks in your game? Definitely not. But if you do want a spookily enchanted means of reaching a special place, what about a magical forest that borders the plane that is the land of giants? Or a haunted marshland? Or even a coast?

Creatures Of Legend

We also see wits and cunning in Irish mythology, with Finn McCool defeating the Scottish giant Benandonner. When Benandonner comes to Ulster from Scotland to basically beat up Finn McCool, Finn outwits him by climbing into a crib and pretending to be his own baby.

Many giants in folklore were more hideous than your average frost giant.

These giants, may not have even been giants in the stories’ original forms, but instead ‘heroes’ of an older time (see here for a further explanation…). By ‘Heroes’, of course, I mean heroes in the traditional sense: that of killing loads of your people’s enemies.

Some of these are also berserkers, by the way, who are clearly only giants when they adopt the riastrad. That’s a kind of celtic battle frenzy (that you see Slaine go into in the old 2000AD comics). It’s something like becoming the Hulk, but messier, with blood spouting out of the top of your head and your body all bloating up and getting twisted-Arnie.

Which is something we don’t see in TTRPGs very often. I’m NOT suggesting a were-giant by the way. No, I’m NOT. I’m talking about trained, professional warriors who seem absolutely normal until certain conditions are met (such as being pissed off), when they metamorphose into a nine-foot tall… man? Like a were-man? No, I don’t mean that, I don’t…

It would be cool though. A great recurring foe for your party.

Another Irish giant is Dryantore, who is a sorcerer. He conjures mist and puts the heroes to sleep. And why shouldn’t giants cast spells?

Then there’s Jack of Irons, from Yorkshire in the north of England. An undead giant with blackened skin and the decapitated heads of his enemies tied to his belt and, in some versions, I think, his own head strapped to his own huge club (or did I imagine that…?). This guy’s a ghost, essentially, though whether a ghost of a giant or just a big spook, is unclear. I think both are allowed.

Yeah, About Jotuns…

Giants should be wierd, otherworldy creatures, possibly supernatural, and always terrifying.[/caption]
No article on giants would be complete without mentioning the ‘Frost Giants’ of Norse mythology, or Jotnar (Jotunn, singular) as they are properly called. So basically… these are not really ‘giants’ at all. That’s a sort of mistranslation, as being a jotunn did not necessarily denote great size and the root of the word seems to denote eating or gluttony.

The Jotnar are, if anything ‘anti-gods’. Not quite demons, they are in opposition to the Norse gods, perhaps chaotic, in opposition to the ‘order’ the gods bring, but that’s a little over simplistic. The Norse gods don’t seem that ordered or lawful to me, but then I’m not an early medieval Scandinavian. Jotnar are more similar to the Titans of Greek mythology and there’s a good reason for it, but that’s for another post…

Jotnar do all kinds of crazy things, like have stone heads, turn into horses, give birth to monsters. Pretty out there stuff and a license if i ever saw one, to get super creative with giants.

Creatures Of The Supernatural

Last, but certainly not least, we cannot forget the Nephilim.

The cut-to-the-chase version of the Nephilim story is this: Angels saw how hot mortal women were and decided to come down to earth to get some. They seduced the women and ‘begat’ children. Who were giants. Nephilim.

There is some debate about the meaning of that word. I’ve seen it translated as meaning ‘fallen’, from the Greek. That doesn’t especially make sense to me but apparently it could also mean ‘giant’ in Aramaic, so I’m guessing that’s probably on the money. Anyway, what works for me here is the connection between giants and the mystical. They are not just a random, mortal breed of human-like thing, they are the offspring of a forbidden supernatural relationship.

How cool is that for world building!

Demonic Offspring

It gets better (at least, in terms of an engaging story, not in terms of the humanitarian treatment of ‘other’…).

Giants should be wierd, otherworldy creatures, possibly supernatural, and always terrifying.

God was so annoyed by the whole situation, not to mention that the Nephilim had started eating people and stealing food and acting like all carry on, that he had a flood to get rid of them. And that is why there was a flood. Only the Nephilim don’t die. They drown, yes, and they die physically, but their spirits linger. Nowhere to go, you see. So they hang around on post-diluvial earth, causing trouble, and because they have no proper place and they don’t know what to do with themselves, one of the things they do is put themselves inside other people…

In other words, they become demons.

When a person in the biblical world (according to this version of the story), gets possessed by a demon, that’s the displaced spirit of a dead giant-offspring of a rebellious angel. Which explains why demons might be in your world, without being summoned. It connects lore and current world issues, and it makes demons, giants and angels ALL more interesting, in my opinion.

I mean, you know, it’s your game. Do what you like…

I’m not saying you have to accept this as ‘gospel’ (no pun intended), and I’m genuinely not trying to sway anyone’s religious beliefs here. I’m saying this is what happens in one of the versions of this story. And I think it’s cool because it means things can be tied together by players or by you.

When player characters meet a giant, that’s a little piece of world lore, stomping around. And when they meet someone who has been possessed, likewise. It’s probably been done in fiction somewhere. Some of these themes definitely appear in John Gwynne’s Of Blood And Bone trilogy (which is awesome, by the way, and you should read it).

Magic Skulls

I love me a magic skull. And another way of making giants more intrinsic to your world is to tie them to more magical ingredients. Giants need to be more mystical. And what better way to make stuff mystical than to make it about… skulls!

What if giant skulls are magical and can empower magical spells? In whatever genre. Or can be used to animate the undead, because they bridge the gap between the natural and supernatural worlds? Or if giant-size femurs just make better magic staffs because they channel arcane power more readily? Maybe giant bone dust, not chalk, is what needs to be used to draw a pentagon. Or if the teeth, when sown, and the correct incantation uttered, become animated skeletons?

There is a ton of material on the internet about giant-related folklore and a lot of different directions you can take it in. Ultimately, it’s your game and it’s your world (I may have mentioned that…). But we all shouldn’t miss out on the possibilities for making giants much cooler than they sometimes are, by being trapped in ideas presented in published material when there are so many cool stories that were once told by our ancestors.

And if you’ve done anything cool with giants in your campaign, I would genuinely love to know. Because new ideas are always priceless. How do giants work in your world? How do your players interact with them? How often do they come up?

A few weeks ago, I was running my Blades in the Dark campaign, in the Free Play stage, waiting for the players to finish gathering information to kick off their score. I figured they needed to get a few details uncovered to be ready. I had even given them a few hints in the narrative prelude, which I released the day before the session. Roll after roll, and question after question followed, and I started to realize that the players were not even close to what I had prepped for the evening, and had chosen an unexpected chain of actions. The interesting part was that through these actions, they were going to reach the same end scene that I had prepped for in the score, that is, to encounter a powerful Faction that could help them, if they were willing to make a deal. I decided then that we did not have to keep with the prep or even the normal structure that Blades recommends, and rather, just let the session, in its organic way, play out. 

Sometimes, play deviates pretty far from prep. 

And that is ok. 

All Play Deviates From Prep

On some level, all play deviates from prep. No GM can ever prep for everything players could do and for every outcome of the randomizer of the game. When we prep our own material, what we tend to prep is the most probable actions and outcomes. We put a room of Orcs in the dungeon, we prep it for a combat scene, but the players might use stealth or negotiation. When play deviates from prep, the GM needs to improvise what happens, often engaging the rules of the game and their own story skills to come up with how that scene is handled and how it flows into the rest of the story. 

Today, I am much more into the philosophy of prepping situations but not solutions. The players will come up with a solution, and the rules of the game will determine the outcome of their solution. As long as I understand the general story, the setting, and its characters, I can determine how the story incorporates the outcome. Today, I consider a good session one where the players surprise me with their choice of solution or how the outcome of their choices plays out. 

This is not to say that “play to discover” is the one true way. I don’t believe in one true way to GM. I am saying that it’s the way that creates my current enjoyment of the game. Before this, when I ran games prepped tight to the expected actions of the players, I enjoyed plenty of those games, and so did my players. Find your enjoyment in this hobby however you like (within the limits of Safety). 

Small Deviations vs. Large Ones

All that said, there are small deviations from prep, and there are large ones. Small deviations typically resolve themselves within the same scene or in a scene or two. You might have to move a few things around in your prep to make that happen. For example, the detectives (characters) decide not to interview the bartender, and miss the opportunity for a specific clue, and you decide to move that clue to another NPC, later in the session. 

Large deviations in prep are the kinds of things that take a sharp turn from what you expected to happen in the story or session. They may not resolve themselves within the session or story, or open up an entirely other storyline that was not expected. For example, your prep for the night includes the detectives (characters) working the murder at the nightclub, but after getting started on that case, they put it on hold to reopen a case they recently closed, to chase a clue they had left unresolved. 

This is A Feature, Not a Bug

While RPGs have similarities to other media (i.e., movies, streaming, or books), they are by their very nature an improvisational form of entertainment. In other media, you may not know what is going on while you are observing it, but the writers locked in the events of the story through the creation of the media. RPGs are not like that; we are both the writers and consumers of the media at the same time. 

Play in RPGs is erratic and sometimes downright strange. Players come up with all sorts of ideas, sometimes based in the game world and sometimes in the real world. They bleed their own emotions into the game, making sometimes irrational decisions for their characters. Dice do not follow “the script,” and key rolls are blown. But it’s supposed to be this way. It is what makes this hobby so much fun. 

Dealing with Deviations

As a GM, the sooner you get comfortable with handling small and large deviations, the better your games will be. You will never prep the deviations away, so lean into them and get good at handling them. 

Here are a few simple tips on handling deviations, but this list can’t do this skill justice. If you are new to GMing, use this as a starting place; if you are a more experienced GM, you likely have done most of these things.

Don’t Prep Solutions

Going back to Dogs in the Vineyard, prep situations and not solutions. Learn to let go of what the “correct” or “optimal” solution is for a given situation, and just create the situation. You can’t deviate from the prep if there is no prep. You may want to, for the sake of efficiency, cover a few bases, but don’t lock anything in as being the only way to conclude the scene. For example, prep some stat blocks for the Orcs, since combat is a possibility, and you don’t want to break out your Monster Manual should the players draw swords.

Move Elements Around

For smaller deviations, you can always move some elements around. If the key was supposed to be found in room three after the combat, and the players stealthed through room three and never searched it, move that key to another room. Or do away with the lock the key was intended for. As mentioned earlier, this is good for small deviations. 

Soft Corrections

Sometimes you can nudge the players with a hint, a comment from an NPC, or a skill check that gives the characters some information. For instance, the players start to theorize that the blue plasma could be the cause of the ship explosion, which would take them completely off the mystery, so you call for a science check, and when successful, you tell the players that their character knows that blue plasma is ionizing and could not cause an explosion. I like this technique when the characters may know something that the players don’t, and giving them that info helps the game progress more smoothly. 

Hard Correction

Other times, you have to take more of a direct intervention and speak to the table, GM to players. I reserve this for larger deviations, where the players are going to do something that is going to take us right out of the story that was planned for and into something new. At this point, I will pause play and tell the players what is going on, and offer the choice to continue their new course of action or help to work the game back to the prepped story. 

As a caveat, I am comfortable enough as a GM to allow for either of those situations to occur, but you might not be, or you might be playing something published and don’t have anything else to work from, so you may only want to offer how to get back onto the prepped material. That choice is up to you based on your comfort with your game and your table. 

Toss The Notes

Lastly, you can just let the deviation happen. You don’t have to correct it; you can just play the ball where it lies. See what happens and play from there. This is going to require that you be comfortable improvising the game from this point on. If you are, and you are curious about how this deviation could play out, then put your prep away and keep playing. 

Hold Your Prep Securely, But With A Loose Hand

Prep is a great tool to help you organize your game and minimize the “dead air” of having to look things up or try to think of what to do next. Prep is what we think could happen in the game. Players are a wily lot, and sometimes they don’t do what we think they will. At that moment, we have a choice to make. Do we try to fix the deviation, or do we let the deviation drive the game? There is no right answer. It is a decision that you make as the GM, based on your expectations and comfort levels. In the tenure of my decades of GMing, I have done both and have had both work and fail at different times. 

In the case of my recent Blades game, the players were quite satisfied with the outcome of the session, although we never ran the score, but rather Free Played into a solution. When I commented to them about the deviation after the session, they didn’t care. They thought the session was just fine. Next session, I suspect we will go back to a good old score again, but we all had fun playing. The players got the outcome they wanted, and I was entertained by how it came about. 

Deviations from prep are an integral part of the game, and the sooner you are comfortable with that, the more relaxed you will be running your games. There are techniques to minimize deviations, correct them, and embrace them. Like all things, these techniques are tools in a toolbox; you use the right one at the right time. That is the real skill, to know which one to employ when. 

How do you handle deviations from prep during your sessions? Are you a play-to-discover kind of GM, or are you more ‘stick to the script’? What are your favorite techniques for dealing with deviations? 

There’s an idea that adventures are like trains. Each train car is a scene that has an obstacle. You need to overcome the obstacle in the train car before you move onto the next train car. When you get to the last train car the adventure is over. You get off the train at the station and then get on another train to have another adventure. Doing this repeatedly gives you a campaign. All the GM needs to do is keep providing trains and all the players need to do is keep getting on them. Classic. Simple. Easy. Nothing wrong with it. 

But what if we don’t just look at creating trains with a series of train cars for PCs to overcome? What if we provide something that is happening? Something that will have a distinct end if the PCs don’t get involved. What if that something has a variety of potential endings depending on: how the PCs get involved, the choices they make, and how those choices have an impact on the something that’s going on? That’s designing a situation.

The “Situation” in RPGs

I like to think of the situation as a moment of instability in the ongoing narrative where multiple forces want incompatible outcomes and time or pressure will push events forward whether the PCs act or not. I don’t think of a situation as a scene, or an encounter, or a plot point. I see it as an evolving problem. By reframing adventure design to fit this idea we can craft and facilitate games where there is a lot of choice, unexpected outcomes, and tension beyond someone living or dying.

The Five Essential pieces of a Situation

One. Something Is Already Wrong

A situation begins in motion. The problem exists before the PCs get involved and it doesn’t wait for them to get involved. If nothing is currently happening, you do not have a situation yet.

• The thieves guild has stolen the art pieces from the gallery and two of the pieces are magical artifacts that are wards against demonic entities, but they can be corrupted to help summon a powerful demon. 
• A necromancer has built up their undead forces and is sending them into the town to steal resources and assassinate people. 
• A CEO of a company has been murdered and it looks like a retired serial killer is back at killing.

Practice this by coming up with problems in your own games that exist without having the PCs involved.

Two. There Are Competing Interests

At least two entities want different things, and those desires cannot all be satisfied at once. These entities may be people, factions, creatures, institutions, environments, or abstract forces like law or tradition. One of these competing interests should be the PCs and a GM should make it personal to one or more PCs if possible… and it’s almost always possible.

• The thieves want money for the pieces they stole. The gallery wants their items returned. The PCs would like to get paid for recovering the items and keep them from being used for evil purposes. A group of evil cultists wants two of the stolen items because they hold significant spiritual and magical significance to their cult and their goals of summoning their demonic patron. A group of protectors want the two specific items returned because they understand the power they hold and don’t want the demonic patron summoned.
• The necromancer wants revenge on the town since he believes he was wronged in being removed from the magic guild for lack of skill and then being kicked out of his home by his parents for his failure. The town wants to exist in peace. The necromancer’s parents want to live. The PCs live in the town and would like their homes to not be destroyed by undead.
• A secret society group organized the murder because they want a CEO in their organization to gain a lucrative contract. A husband wants out of the marriage and to gain the money from the deceased’s will. The serial killer is upset someone is using their MO. The PCs are friends of the deceased CEO and want justice and the previous victim of the serial killer before they stopped killing, was the brother of one of the PCs.

Practice this by taking the problem you came up with and figuring out who the competing interests are and what they want. Make one of them the PCs and decide how you can make it personal for them. 

Three. Pressure Exists Independent of the Players

Time, danger, scarcity, or attention applies pressure that escalates the situation. If the players do nothing, the situation changes on its own. This creates tension and a sense of urgency. While things escalate it’s worth asking yourself and maybe even jotting down a note or two about how far an interest will go to achieve their desire and when they’ll back off. What’s too much? When is desperate action their only recourse? That way you can understand how the pressure will push these interests when deciding how things progress and have a better idea of what to do when the PCs apply their own pressure.

• The thieves will hold a black market auction to sell off the goods, making it potentially harder for the PCs to recover the items. The GM knows the auction will happen in three days and the evil cult will purchase the two items of power. This would make it difficult if not impossible for the items to be recovered.
• The necromancer is gathering power and once he locates and then retrieves enough resources, he’ll raise the skeletal dragon and attack. This would put the town and its people at great risk.
• If the PCs do nothing then their friend’s murder will go unsolved and the company will eventually be sold off and dismantled. The serial killer will track down the actual killer and deal with them, putting the spotlight on a prominent society family. Now let’s take a slightly different road and ask what happens if the PCs try to solve the murder since it’s very personal to them. The secret society will try to dissuade the PCs with money, influence, and violence, to get them to back off. Even if the PCs don’t back off the secret society is working to tie up loose ends, and if the PCs take too long the clues and proof of wrongdoing dry up and the murder becomes unsolvable. 

Practice this by deciding how the situation ends if the PCs do not get involved. How will the different competing interests fare when the situation resolves itself? Many games have mechanics, formats, or frameworks for how things can escalate. If the game you’re running doesn’t have methods for escalation, just write down a couple of ways you think the situation escalates and what drives those escalations. You should give yourself at least two escalations that can be felt in the setting so the PCs have a way to know what’s going on.

Four. The Outcome Is Not Predetermined

A situation does not assume its ending. Throwing down, talking, switching sides, letting go, success, and failure are all possible outcomes. The GM can think about consequences but their time is better spent understanding how the competing interests think and react when pressured, so when the PCs act the competing interests act in a manner that suits the narrative in the game. People only do something to their ultimate doom or demise when they’re desperate and have no other recourse. It’s worth giving it some thought to when an interest has had enough and will decide to take a different path. Last thing on this: while it’s ok to telegraph potential danger and pay it off when appropriate, this kind of play isn’t about set piece scenes you’re driving the game towards. It’s about making choices matter on a larger narrative scale.

• The thieves want to sell the goods at auction, make their cash, and then disappear. The cult wants the special items. We know these things will happen if the PCs do nothing. But when the PCs grab one of the thieves off the street and bring them back to their base of operations to get information out of them, things start changing. The other thieves want their friend back. They attack the PCs base to get their friend. The PCs have already moved their friend to a safe house, though. The Thieves bail, understanding that they can’t recover their friend so they have no reason to fight further. With their friend missing they decide to disappear with the items and sell them later. The PCs get the location of the thieves base. Unfortunately they fail the roll to get to the base before the thieves go to ground. The evil cult doesn’t get the items but the PCs don’t recover them so they don’t get paid and the thieves get away. 
• The PCs only have so much time before the necromancer is ready to attack and they have to decide if they’re going to defend the town from these assassinations or look for the necromancer in his lair within the complex beneath the town. How they interfere with the necromancer’s preparations can alter the necromancer’s plans, maybe even causing the necromancer to take their leave and look to seek revenge another day. Maybe they encounter the necromancer and taunt them enough to infuriate them to the point of attacking early without the skeletal dragon. If the PCs inform the town of what kinds of forces the necromancer has and where they’ll come from, then the town will be better prepared to weather the attack. 
• There are plenty of things happening here. Will the PCs discover who killed their friend and bring them to justice? Will they root out the secret society and bring them to light? Will they find out who the serial killer is and what will they do, especially if the serial killer has been helping them to find the actual killer? Will the secret society tie up all their loose ends and get away with it all? Will the secret society of the rich and powerful sacrifice a few members to keep their secrets? Any of these things can lead to the end of the scenario.

Practice this by asking yourself what the potential outcomes you can see are. If you can’t see more than two then you don’t have enough competing interests with differing desires, ways for the situation to escalate, or moments when a competing interest decides their current desire can’t be satisfied by the way they’re doing things and either need to escalate or deescalate their influence on the situation.

Five. The PCs Actions Change the Setting and Ongoing Situation

Even when the players “solve” the current situation it should change the setting in some meaningful ways. Their choices shift alliances, have costs, create future problems, and can impact how the setting views the PCs. They can even create the next situation from the complications and costs of the PCs previous choices. Even if the next situation doesn’t have a direct relationship to the previous situation, those events should have had a lasting impact on the setting.

• The PCs fail to recover the items but their actions cause the thieves to delay selling the items. The thieves go into hiding. The evil cult can’t use the items to their advantage. The people who run the art gallery are disappointed and do not see the PCs as competent allies, this hurts the PCs reputation among the upper class.
• The PCs find the necromancer deep in his lair as he’s just finished raising his skeletal dragon, and they manage to defeat the dragon and the necromancer. The undead attacks stop on the town but the town never knows about the PCs heroics. Conversely the town never learns about the underground complex beneath the town and the PCs have a new base of operations they can finish exploring and then use going forward.
• The PCs learn who the actual serial killer is, but work with the serial killer who’s in a position of authority and catch the real killer of their friend. The real killer is jailed as are some of their conspirators, but this provides the actual serial killer a promotion to a higher position of authority. The company that was going to get the large contract is implicated in the conspiracy of murder and their CEO is arrested and their company takes a huge hit financially. It’s not a complete win but it’s better than nothing.

Practice this by answering some of the questions that arise from step four, kind of like a game of make believe in your head. Once you do, ask yourself how the setting would change if those questions you just answered happened. 

Not Much Different, Just Different Choices

Situations aren’t much different from other kinds of adventures. There’s just more narrative choices to be made instead of mechanical choices. Instead of which spell to use we ask “What do these interests do?” Instead of spell lists we have desires and how far these interests are willing to go. As the situation evolves you just do the thing that feels like the most reasonable and enjoyable action that interest would take. When the dust settles, make sure things have been affected. The fact that ttrpgs have these features is a strength and we shouldn’t be afraid to utilize that strength.

If you do decide to practice these ideas, I’d love to see what you come up with in the comments. Each of the examples I’ve provided is a very cribbed notes version of games I’ve run. The third example is from the AP on the polygamero.us site called Skritches. All episodes are out right now for you to listen to. Now I’m off to find some stew from the stew pot. I heard we just threw in some JT and Vecchione in there and that makes for some savory stew. Later.

It’s a new year! Time for resolutions (I don’t do those, BTW). Time for fresh outlooks on life. Time to plan some goals (I do make goals for the year, BTW). Time for some fresh starts. These fresh starts can come in many forms. New characters. New campaigns. New games. New Systems. New gaming groups. New you! Let’s talk about that for a bit.

Characters

If you feel “stuck” in your current game, maybe it’s time for a new character to come into play. This can be a replacement character for your current campaign if you’re a player. This can be a new, very important NPC for the group to interact with if you’re the GM. Changing things up can really introduce new energy and vitality to your ongoing campaign.

However, don’t rattle the cage too hard. The overseers will hear you and come down with their stun batons. Make the change smoothly and in flow with what’s going on in the campaign.

As a player, if you feel you need a new character to introduce new passion into your gaming, talk about it with the table. Not just the GM. The entire table. See what everyone has to say about your new character concept and how well it’ll mesh with the current party of characters. You definitely need the GM’s permission to swap out characters. You don’t need permission from your fellow players, but you should at least get their buy in. Get them all on board with the chemistry change to their adventuring party.

As the GM, throwing in a new, important NPC can be jarring unless that NPC is somehow related to something else that already exists in the material you’ve presented to the players. Make it a relative of an existing NPC, even if it’s a minor one. Introduce another NPC’s boss and/or subordinate. Show how the new NPC is related (not necessarily by blood) to an existing frame of the campaign. The NPC can be there to help or hinder the PCs. Heck, the new NPC can be there to grant a new mission/job/quest/goal to the PCs, but make sure the NPC is presented as a trustworthy fellow to avoid the PCs from doubting the new job’s sincerity or validity. You can do this by tying the new NPC to ongoing events or other NPCs.

Campaigns

Sometimes (especially after the rough scheduling of holiday break), it’s time for a new campaign. If you can, plan for this. No one likes a surprise “new campaign” at the new year because it was hard to get the group together for the last two months. Yeah. I know this advice is coming a bit late since the holiday season just passed. Keep this in mind for the end of this year. If you can wrap up the current campaign around mid-November in plans for a long hiatus as the multitude of holidays hammers into your family life, you can return after the new year refreshed and ready for a good start on a new campaign.

This isn’t necessary, but it might be easier to launch into something new instead of asking, “Where were we two months ago?” Of course, if you have a good scribe in your group that tracks events, dates, characters, and game status at the end of each session, you should be able to pick up where you left off with relative ease.

Genre/Systems

If you’re going to change up campaigns, maybe it’s time for a new genre and/or system! Maybe. It depends on your group. Most gaming groups encounter the dreaded monster known as the “Long Hiatus” between November and December, and it’s finally releasing its grip on the group in early January. Of course, for those of us in the northern hemisphere of Earth, January and February (and sometimes March) can bring some pretty miserable winter weather, so that Long Hiatus might increase its grip on the group at random times.

If you are prepared and thoughtful enough for the Long Hiatus, you might have a chance to start an online conversation (email, Slack, Discord, etc.) along the lines of, “What genre or system do we want to tackle next?” Obviously, if everyone is happy with what you currently have, this conversation isn’t necessary. If you need a change of scenery from epic fantasy to something else, then mid-December through early February is a great time to bring up this topic.

Conclusion

Regardless of what you might need or want to change at the new year, make sure you communicate your desires with the rest of your group in an open and honest manner. Don’t surprise folks with a new genre or system or campaign at the start of the new year. Don’t ambush anyone (especially the GM) with a fresh character to integrate into the group just because the Gregorian calendar ticked up a number in years. I guess the point I’m trying to make is collaborate and communicate with everyone at the table on any “fresh start” you want to bring to the table.

Happy New Year!

May your 2026 be wonderful!

For the most part, I pick the games I am going to run by, as the kids today say, vibes. It has always been instinctual. I hear about a game, the right ones set off my Spidey Sense, and I am hooked. That has been my method for the last 43 years. At different points during those years, I have thought to myself, “perhaps there are no more interesting games to play”, only to find time and time again something that I was excited to bring to the table.  

Last week, I thought I had hit rock bottom. For the first time in 43 years, I struggled to find a game to bring to the table. One of my game groups reorganized, and I lost a few players, so I was looking for a game to offer up, and my list was empty; the well was dry. I spent several nights wandering my PDF collection and scrolling through DriveThruRPG looking for something that would vibe, that would create that spark. Nothing. I started to worry that perhaps this was the end, no more games to interest me. 

I then did what I often do when I get stuck on a problem, and started to break the problem down into parts I could name, so that I could try to get some kind of control over what was going on. I learned some things about that “vibe”.. Oh, and I found a game too. 

What was I vibing on? 

My attraction to certain games had to be a combination of different factors. When it comes to understanding the larger parts of what makes up a game, I think that Jason Pitre did best with their Four Structures. Read the article for details, but in a nutshell, the four structures are: 

• Setting – the world that the characters inhabit.
• System – the rules of the game.
• Situation – the things the characters do when you play. 
• Subtext – the hidden message or theme of the game. 

When I looked back at past games I have been excited about, I can identify which structures excited me the most. Some games may be just one thing, and others may be multiples, with the best fits being all four structures. When I think about Forbidden Lands, my initial attraction was through the System, because of its rules for travel. For Night’s Black Agents, it was a combination of System (Gumshoe) and Setting (Jason Bourne vs Vampires). For Blades in the Dark, it was the Situation (doing jobs), more than the setting or system. While initially, I liked Underground’s Setting, what really got me was the Subtext of when all you have been trained for is war, how else can you solve any problems? 

Those are broad categories. It is entirely possible to like things in a more granular way. My interest in Forbidden Lands was for just one subsystem, not the entire mechanics of the game. There is a point of diminishing returns in granularity; it would be hard for me to be excited to get a game to the table just because I think one character class is interesting. For me, there needs to be a preponderance of interest in one of the Structures for me to connect. 

Another thing I observed upon reflection was that the more I connected with one Structure, the less I needed to for the others. I really don’t love the setting of Blades in the Dark, it’s ok. But I really like the Situation of a gang doing jobs to raise their status in the underworld. 

Also, if one structure supports another, that is a multiplier for me. In the case of Night’s Black Agents, the Setting and Situation are superbly supported by the System. That is to say, there are rules for all the parts of the Setting and Situation (investigations, combat, chases, vampires, etc). Specifically, I want the System to reinforce the Setting, Situation, Subtext, or all of them. I find that when the System is not tightly coupled to the other structures, it makes it less appealing to me. 

Novelty and Predictability 

Thinking about the four structures and games I enjoyed in the past gave me a framework for looking at games and trying to understand why I was not finding anything I vibed with. While scrolling through lists of games, I now found myself saying things like, “I have played that system before”, “I don’t like to run fantasy”, “What do the characters do in this game?” It made looking at games more ordered, less vibes, and now more formulaic. 

During this exploration, I began to uncover two other factors in play. I love to run things I have not run before. I love the novelty of things. I rarely play the same game twice; I would rather play something totally new than run something I have played before. At the same time, I do have favorite game systems, because they are predictable. I like the feel of a PbtA system, and I have recently grown more comfortable with Forged in the Dark games. 

As I thought about these two factors in conjunction with the four structures, I realized that there was some nuance. Not every structure had to be novel, but they could not all be predictable. At least one structure had to be novel. Also, I found I get hesitant if everything is novel, meaning I like something to be predictable. For instance, a system could be totally novel if the setting (or genre – a component of setting) were predictable. 

Just what was I looking for? 

This added information about novelty and predictability provided some nuance to my searches, but more importantly, I was finally able to articulate what I was looking for, for this group for this game.

I wanted a predictable system. Where I am right now, I did not want to take on learning a new system. But I need some novelty, which eliminates replaying any past games. The game I was looking for was going to be a system I am comfortable with, but a setting and/or situation that was novel. 

This made searching much more efficient. I was now able to eliminate systems I was not comfortable with and games I had played in the systems with which I was familiar. Quickly, a short list of candidates popped up, and within a day, I settled on the game I wanted to try: 

Transit by Fiddleback Productions.

Transit is a PbtA game. Very predictable for me. I knew I would have no problem learning the System and being comfortable running it. The general Setting is SciFi, which is also familiar to me, but the characters take the form of AIs embedded into spaceships; a novel Situation! This was a solid combination for me. A System that I was comfortable running, in a general Setting that I am comfortable running and am well versed in its tropes, but a very novel kind of story to tell. I have not, in my 43 years, run a game where the characters were spaceships. 

Just like that, I was excited to get this game to the table. The drought was ended, and the age-old question of “are there no more games I am interested in?” was staved off for another day. 

Use the Force, Luke

The alchemy of why we like games is complex and contains many factors. By giving some of those factors names, we are able to create language for why we are intrigued by and turned off by games. In that naming, we give ourselves the power to move from instinct to rationalization. We no longer have to wander, hoping something will fall in our laps, but rather we can create a set of search parameters and hone in on candidates.

What structures attract you to games? What roles do novelty and predictability play for you? Do you like them in certain structures or not in others? 

One of the things I love about Blades in the Dark is that it has a mechanism for creating background events for your campaign. During Downtime (though I do this after a session), you roll to see how various factions make progress (or not) on their goals. Mechanically, this is a series of Fortune rolls that advance various project clocks for each faction. The result of this is that while the characters are off doing their own things, the factions in the city also progress with their agendas and goals. Mechanisms like this give a campaign a life of its own. So let’s talk about it. 

Background Events

Let’s start with a definition: a background event is a narrative element that occurs without the direct intervention of the PCs. It can take many forms, such as actions of individual NPCs, groups, or even natural events. Background events can take place in one-shots and campaigns, and they can take place during stories or between stories. 

Background Events have a few effects in the game: 

• They create a sense of a dynamic background to the game. Having NPCs, groups, and natural events occur gives players the feeling that the campaign world is alive and breathing around them, and not just a static background that freezes when the characters change locations. 
• They create potential stories. The players may take an interest in the background events and may want to intervene, giving you and your table a new story to play. 
• They can create tension and drama. Having a main story and several concurrent background stories will create decision points in the game. Do the characters stay on the main story, or should they take a session and help the baker who is about to lose their bakery because of the lost shipment of flour? Which decision will they make, and what consequence will come of it? 

Several games have this built into their mechanics. Dungeon World uses Signs & Portents, and the Forged in the Dark games have the Faction Downtime actions. Even if a game does not have specific mechanics for it, they can be done narratively in any game, by just making up some news and events and conveying them to the players. 

A Framework for Good Background Events

Here is a model for a mechanized version of background events, if your game does not have a mechanism for this. This draws heavily upon both Dungeon World and Forged in the Dark: 

First, come up with some groups or individuals that are up to something. 

Second, for each group or individual, give them a goal and some arbitrary steps they would take to accomplish that goal. Here we are building a clock.

Third, decide what interval you want to update these clocks. A good starting interval is between stories. 

Fourth, at the specified interval, decide if the clock advances and how much. You can just decide this for yourself, or you can assign some dice to determine this effect. Perhaps roll a d6 and advance the clock that many ticks. 

Fifth, convey the outcomes of some or all of the clocks to the characters during the session. 

Conveying The Information

Regardless of whether you arbitrarily create background events or use a mechanism for creating them, the most important part is that you convey their progress to the characters. Like character backgrounds that are written down and not discussed at the table, creating background events and keeping them to yourself does nothing to enhance your game. The events you create have to reach the characters to create the effects above. 

For your game, you need to think of how news and information are conveyed. If you are playing a modern supers game, information and news are nearly instantaneous. It will be livestreamed or posted to social media before traditional news can report it. If you are playing a SciFi game where news has to travel great distances but is limited to the speed of light, then perhaps couriers jump from system to system in their FTL ships with news. News is dependent on the arrival of couriers. This will change how the news reaches the players; there could be delays or bundles of news. 

Give thought to how news travels in your setting and what constraints or features will be created in your game. The most important consideration is timing. If you want the characters to potentially act on some background events, then the information needs to arrive at them with time to react; otherwise, they will receive the news of the event and write it off because it will take too long to intervene. 

How To Present The Information

Once you work out how the information of the background events reaches the characters, take a moment and think of how narratively you can present the information. The least interesting way to do this is a GM to player data dump, where the GM just tells the players several events going on, “From around town you hear the following… blah, blah, blah”. 

The more interesting approach is to present the information in the context of how the characters would receive it. This can be solely narrative (the GM just saying things) or it could be a post or handout (for the more creative types). In a modern game, you might put the information in the form of social media posts. In a Roaring 20s game, this could be done as a radio broadcast or a newspaper front page. If you have an NPC that could present the events, they could come in and do it in character. 

In my Blades in the Dark game, the crew has an information network of newsies who gather rumors and events while selling newspapers throughout the city. The head of the newsies, Red, comes to the crew’s HQ and presents a briefing to the players. For this, I write out the events in Red’s voice, and during the Free Play phase of the game, we do a scene where Red is reporting to the crew.

Did You Hear? 

Background events are a great way to make a campaign feel more alive and can foreshadow events or create dramatic decisions for the characters. You can create these arbitrarily or using a mechanical approach. If you do use background events, give thought to how the information reaches your players, and when you do present it, think of a creative way to deliver the news. 

Do you use background events in your games? How do you create and track them? What’s the most challenging way information has had to reach your players? What is your favorite method to present the information? 

Session zero is packed. Like, really packed, with so many things to do and consider and take care of. There’s establishing the style/theme/tone of the game. Discussing safety tools. Establishing a genre to experience. Determining which system to use. Figuring out what setting to romp around in. Collaborating on character creation. Maybe even some shared world building between the players and the GM. Actually making characters. Perhaps an intro scene where the story is set and getting ready to roll before the campaign launches into orbit.

Yeah. It’s lots. Maybe too much.

However, I’m going to pile onto the stack a few more items that I think could be handled offline after session zero to help the GM really hone the campaign’s blade to razor sharpness. This can be handled via Google Forms, emails, Discord, Slack, or whatever communications methods your group uses between sessions.

Here we go!

Player Goals

Break the fourth wall here. Don’t think about character concerns, but what do you as a player want out of the campaign? Do you want to skulk around alleys? Maybe save a nation? Maybe be the big damn hero to rescue people of lesser abilities? Do you want to shoot between the stars, or delve deep underground? Do you want to level fast to see how the higher tiers of play run? Do you want to roll in the gold and spend as you please? What do you want out of the game? There is no wrong answer here.

Player Motivations

Why do you want what you want? This question is more important than actually stating goals for game play. Letting the GM peek into your brain to see why you want to accomplish certain goals will help the GM facilitate those goals more easily… and probably with a great deal more fun.

Character Goals

Now it’s time to delve into your character’s inner self and figure out what you want your character to accomplish as you roll through the campaign. Riches? Fame? Infamy? Revenge? Redemption? Do you want to find your long lost father and reunite with him? Do you want your hard-working mother to never have to punch the clock again? Cure a disease that plagues your hometown?

When developing goals for your character, try to come up with a short-term and a long-term goal. Make them achievable within the framework of the game/setting/group. Most of all make them matter to your character (and maybe the world at large), and have fun with them!

Character Motivations

Here we go again. I’m beating the “motivation drum.” If your character doesn’t have a reason to accomplish the goal, they’ll give up on it at the first sign of trouble or when the smallest challenge presents itself. If your character has a core reason to get out there and do the thing, they’ll go do the thing!

Events to Experience

This (and the next few areas) come from a combined player/character perspective. Think of yourself and your character as a melded entity when venturing through these next few areas.

What events or scenarios do you want to encounter? Why? Do you want high seas danger? Maybe you’ve never swung from a chandelier while rescuing a princess during a ball and that’s on your bucket list. Maybe you’ve never actually gotten to level 23 of Undermountain beneath Waterdeep, and you really want to get there (once properly leveled up and equipped). Never owned a starship? Cool. Let’s do that! Want to command an army on the field of battle? Sure. Let’s go for it!

Location Types to Explore

Are there locations in your setting that you’ve never gone to? Maybe you’re playing in Forgotten Realms, but you’ve never been to the ruined nation of Netheril. Time to head north and go explore. Want to fly a spaceship through a black hole and see what the GM imagines is on the other side? Yeah. Set course for the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and see what’s there.

Caveat: Newer players may not know what they don’t know, so they may need some guidance on this front. On the other side, veteran players may think they’ve seen it all, but there’s no way they have. They may need some nudges to get them going on the creative side of this question.

NPC Types to Meet

Like with locales in your setting, there are innumerable NPCs to meet and greet and debate and fall in love with and hate with a passion. Give your GM some ideas on who (or what) you might like to encounter in the setting in a non-combat situation. This can greatly assist the GM in world building. You don’t have to go super detailed into this. Something as simple as, “I want to haggle with a spaceport junk seller who has a gambling problem,” will work beautifully. There are numerous hooks just in that one quote that any skilled GM can hang onto and run with.

Monsters to Defeat

Never fought a dragon? (WHAT?!?! You need to fight at least one dragon in your career as a gamer!) How about a mind-flayer or a beholder? Those are great challenges even for a higher-powered set of characters. Want to kill a lich and successfully destroy its phylactery? Yeah. Send that to the GM as something you’d like to experience. Have you ever had to cleanse a small village of a doppelganger infestation? What? No? Propose that to the GM as an idea, and let them run with it! You never know what cool stuff your idea will implant into the GM’s brain.

Conclusion

As I said at the start, this is not session zero material, but something to take offline. If your GM puts time and effort into posing these questions, answer them. Don’t forget to answer or fully ignore the questions. If the GM is asking about this kind of material, then they truly do care what you have to say. Don’t consider it a waste of time. Consider it your contribution to the story arcs, campaign setting, and general campaign material the GM will pluck from to formulate future sessions.

In my current Blades in the Dark game, I started to post preludes in our Slack channel a few days before the game. These preludes are short narrative pieces, centered on one of the characters, and convey some information to the players about the upcoming session. It is not the first time I have employed this technique, but I have not done it in a while. So I thought I would talk about it today.

The Prelude

By definition, a prelude is: an action or event that serves as an introduction to something more significant. In RPG terms, it is a small scene that acts as the introduction to the session. Typically, the scene is a short narrative piece that the players read; however, there may be cases where this is an actual playable scene between the GM and one or two players. For simplicity, let’s stick to a short narrative piece. 

What Does a Prelude Do? 

There are a few things that a prelude will do in your game. The first, and most obvious, is that it introduces the coming session. The second is that it can convey information. Third, it is a form of metagame (the game outside of the game), which is a tool for creating emotional investment. Fourth, it helps to get the game started. 

Let’s talk about each of these in more detail:  

Introduction of the Coming Session

The prelude introduces the coming session. It is a free scene to frame out the coming adventure. It helps set the tone, set up the first scenes at the table, and foreshadow things to come in the game. 

Conveying Information

The prelude is a place where you can infodump useful information for the session. You can name NPCs, provide facts that might be commonly known, etc. By including information here, the players arrive at the game with that information, without you having to do it at the table.

The Metagame

Preludes are playing the game outside of the session, which is a great way to build engagement in the game between sessions. If you release your prelude days before your session, then your players are engaging with it and thinking about the game before the game starts. It can often be a struggle to get players to think about the game outside of the session; the prelude is a way to jump-start that process.

Getting the Game Started

You can use the prelude to get out of the way of slower narrative parts, and let you start the game closer to the action. You can have a prelude that describes the characters facing down their enemy as the enemy monologues (infodump), and then when you start your session, you can go in media res, and jump right into an initiative roll for combat, which will make the start of your game far more exciting. This also works great for things like missions and heists, where the prelude can infodump some of the more common facts, allowing the game to start closer to beginning the mission or heist. This is how I use it for Blades.

Creating A Prelude

Now that we have discussed what goes into a prelude, we can look at how to create one. My personal favorite for this is a small piece of flash fiction, just a few paragraphs long. I like this form for a few reasons. One, it’s not too much work to prep, and you can make them entertaining. I will always work as much information as I can into the prelude so that I don’t have to find ways to inject that information into the session. 

Once you have your prelude set, you need to get it to your players. In this day and age, you most likely have an electronic forum where you can share this — Discord, Slack, Group Chat, etc. Drop it into that. The more important consideration is when.

You want to do it a few days before your session, so that people who do not check the Discord all the time will have time to check it before the game. At the same time, you do not want to do it so early that everyone sees it, and then enough time passes to forget what was written…that will undo all the benefits of the prelude. 

I find two days before the session is nice. It is within the window where people start checking the group chat heading into the game, far enough out from the game that if someone were to post a question about the prelude, I would have time to answer it, and close enough to the session that people will remember it. 

Prelude vs. Recap

These two things are different. The prelude is the introduction to the coming session, while the recap is an infodump about what happened last time. It is possible to do both of these online, but it’s more work for you. If you want to use both a recap and a prelude, I would do your prelude online, because it builds engagement, and do your recap while people are setting up for the session and getting settled in.

Recaps are good to do in person because if there are questions or discrepancies, the group can address them in real time. 

The Man Stepped out of the Shadows…

The prelude is a simple tool that can help start your sessions. It is a bit of extra work to create, but it has a number of benefits for your session and your campaign. It is not something you need to use every game, but like any good spice, its occasional use spices up your upcoming session. 

Do you employ a prelude for your game? What form does it take? How often do you use them?