Unwritten: System Reference Document/Running the Game

Fiction First

We’ll get to guidance for specific situations you may encounter below. But first, the guiding principle that you as a GM should always keep in mind can be boiled down to two words: Fiction First. As a GM you should always keep the narrative firmly in mind. Your rulings and decisions on when to apply rules should always be based on the needs of the story. From this we get the Golden and Silver Rules of Fate games (and thus Unwritten).

The Golden Rule is: Decide what you are trying to accomplish first, then consult the rules to help you do it.

This is more important than it seems at first glance, so we’ll go into it into more detail. You don’t pick up a hammer and decide you want to build something that involves nails. Instead you decide what you are making, then decide you need nails to keep it together. Similarly, the rules in this book do not always tell you how to do things or what you should do. Rather, they give you tools you can use for what you are trying to do.

Some decisions will be easy. If you are trying to jump a chasm, that’s an Overcome roll. If you are dodging out of the way as that charging animal comes at you, that’s an Oppose roll. But a lot of situations may not be so clear. Don’t let that stop you. Try to boil down the action to its most basic expression and you’ll find that one of the rules you have will probably fit.

And this leads to the next rule...

The Silver Rule: Never let the rules get in the way of what makes narrative sense.

The rules should not dictate how the narrative plays out. Once again, they don’t tell you what is possible; they just help you get to what you want to do. So, if the rules as stated don’t quite fit the situation at hand, make a ruling to modify how you apply the rules. Don’t change the story if it doesn’t neatly fit into the mechanics as they are presented here.

You can see this philosophy throughout this book. Several mechanics, such as the rules for Writing or exploring, deviate from the particulars of the Four Actions. You should feel free to do so as well. For example, if it doesn’t make sense on an Advantage roll to give the character a Boost on a tie, then don’t do it. Look back to the spirit of the rule as a guide - a tie on an Advantage roll should be not quite what the character wanted, whatever that may mean.

As always, applying these rules and any game mechanics are something that should be up for some discussion with the players if needed. Everyone should be on the same page.

Handling Aspects

Aspects are the pivot that the Fate system turns on. You have an important job in managing the flow of fate points to and from the players, giving them opportunities to spend freely in order to succeed and look awesome, and bringing in potential complications to help keep them stocked up on points. As a GM, understanding how aspects work is the most important skill you can develop.

A lot of people get confused about what qualifies as an aspect and what doesn’t. The only difference between a story detail and an aspect is that an aspect is important. Pre-determined aspects are inherently important: character aspects are those details that the players want to be important, while the aspects you place on a scene are what you think the scene will be about. They are meant to ‘stick out’ so that you remember them, and so you can use them for invocations and compels. Not everything in a scene or a location will be notable. You don’t need to give a forest an aspect of Lush Forest unless you plan to actually use it.

There is no way you can anticipate what players will find important, though. As soon as a detail becomes important to the story, it becomes an aspect.  You should allow it to be used as an aspect as long as it makes sense. If a player says in the middle of an action, says something like , “Hey, this forest is pretty dense right? Maybe it has the aspect Lush Forest that I can invoke with a fate point,” you should consider it. Players can force this to happen through successful Advantage actions, but there is no requirement that an aspect has to come from an action.

At the same time, if a detail just doesn’t come up, then it won’t become an aspect. If an aspect never gets used, then just drop it.

This may seem really vague, with aspects popping in and out of existence. This is a strength of aspects - what is important narratively becomes mechanically important when it needs to.

Justification is Power

Justification might seem like the least interesting of the roles that aspects play. However, using an aspect to justify an action or a situation gets the most mileage out of anything you can use it for.

Aspects are true. Because they are, they shape the game. Whether an action makes sense or not depends on the aspects that affect it. Dissecting a mysteriously dead animal makes perfect sense if you are a Former Medical Examiner or a Biology Major. Without that, it won’t fly.

Situation aspects offer the same guidance. For example, if a character is trying to sprint quickly across a room with Cluttered Floors, it makes sense to ask for a roll before they can move. If there is no such aspect, just let them make the move and get on to something more interesting.

Invocations

We recommend that you don’t apply extremely exacting standards when the PC wants to invoke an aspect—you want them to spend in order to keep the flow going. If you’re too stringent on your requirements, it’s going to discourage them from that free spending.

On the other hand, ask for more clarification if you don’t get what a player is implying, in terms of how the aspect relates to what’s happening in play. Sometimes, what seems obvious to one person isn’t to another, and you shouldn’t let the desire to toss fate points lead to overlooking the narration. If a player is having a hard time justifying the invocation, ask them to elaborate on their action more or unpack their thoughts.

You might also have the problem of players who get lost in the open-ended nature of aspects—they don’t invoke because they aren’t sure if it’s too much of a stretch to apply an aspect in a certain way. The more work you do beforehand making sure that everyone’s clear on what an aspect means, the less you’ll run into this. To get the player talking about invoking aspects, always ask them whether or not they’re satisfied with a roll result (“So, you succeed with a result of 1 shift. You want to leave it at that? Or do you want to be even more awesome?”). Make it clear that invoking an aspect is almost always an option on any roll, in order to try and get them talking about the possibilities. Eventually, once you get a consistent dialogue going, things should smooth out.

Compels

During the game, you should look for opportunities to compel the PCs’ aspects at the following times:

• Whenever simply succeeding at a skill roll would be bland
• Whenever any player has one or no fate points
• Whenever someone tries to do something, and you immediately think of some aspect-related way it could go wrong

Remember that there are essentially two types of compels in the game: decision-based, where something complicated occurs as a result of something a character does, and event-based, where something complicated occurs simply as a result of the character being in the wrong situation at the wrong time.

Of the two, you’re going to get the most mileage out of event-based compels—it’s already your job to decide how the world responds to the PCs, so you have a lot of leeway to bring unfortunate coincidence into their lives. Most of the time, players are just going to accept you doing this with minimal negotiation.

Decision-based compels are a little trickier. Try to refrain from suggesting decisions to the players, and focus on responding to their decisions with potential complications. It’s important that the players retain their sense of autonomy over what their PCs say and do, so you don’t want to dictate that to them. If the players are roleplaying their characters according to their aspects, it shouldn’t be hard to connect the complications you propose to one of them.

During play, you’ll also need to make clear when a particular compel is “set”, meaning that there’s no backing out without paying a fate point. When players propose their own compels, this won’t come up, because they’re fishing for the point to begin with. When you propose them, you need to give the players room to negotiate with you over what the complication is, before you make a final decision. Be transparent about this—let them know when the negotiation phase has ended.

Weak Compels

In order for the compel mechanic to be effective, you have to take care that you’re proposing complications of sufficient dramatic weight. Stay away from superficial consequences that don’t really affect the character except to provide color for the scene. If you can’t think of an immediate, tangible way that the complication changes what’s going on in the game, you probably need to turn up the heat. If it doesn’t give someone a sinking feeling, you probably need to turn up the heat. It’s not good enough for someone to be angry at the PC—they get angry and they’re willing to do something about it in front of everyone. It’s not good enough for a business partner to cut them off—he cuts them off and tells the rest of his associates to blacklist them.

Also, keep in mind that some players may tend to offer weak compels when they’re fishing for fate points, because they don’t really want to hose their character that badly. Feel free to push for something harder if their initial proposal doesn’t actually make the situation that much more dramatic.

Encouraging Players to Compel

With five aspects per PC, it’s prohibitively difficult for you to take the sole responsibility for compels at the table, because that’s a lot of stuff to remember and keep track of. You need the players to be invested in looking for moments to compel their own characters.

Open-ended prompting can go a long way to this habit in your players. If you see an opportunity for a potential compel, instead of proposing it directly, ask a leading question instead. Let the player do the work of coming up with the complication and then pass the fate point along.

Also remind the players that they can compel your NPCs, if they happen to know one of that NPC’s aspects. Do the same open-ended prompting when you’re about to have an NPC make a decision, and ask the players to fill in the blanks.

Your main goal should be to enlist the players as partners in bringing the drama, rather than being the sole provider.

Running Game Creation

As outlined in Starting a Game section, establishing setting details is often a collaborative effort between you and your players. In that sense, the best thing you can do as GM during the process is to be open to new ideas and be generous with your own, just like everyone else. Play off of and expand upon the suggestions that the others offer up. Your players will be more invested in the game if they feel like they’ve had a hand in building it.

Of course, if everyone’s amenable, there’s nothing stopping you from showing up with a clear vision of exactly what you want to run. Just make sure everyone’s on board if you go that route. Even one player who isn’t into it, and doesn’t really feel inclined to get into it, can really affect the game.

Top Down vs. Bottom Up

Some like to start with the big picture first and drill down to the details, while others prefer to start with the here and now and develop the big picture as they go. These are often called “top down” and “bottom up,” respectively. Neither one’s better than the other, but each has its pros and cons.

With the top-down approach, you’ll determine most of the setting in advance—stuff like who the movers and shakers are, the locations of important cities, the nature of important organizations, and so on. This has the advantage of providing a clear sense of how the world fits together.

The downside, of course, is that unless you’re working from the default setting, it’s usually a lot of work on the front end. It also requires the players to show up with a pretty thorough understanding of it all, which can be daunting. But if everyone’s up to speed, it can make for an enjoyable and rewarding game.

If you’re going bottom-up, though, you’ll start with whatever’s immediately important to the PCs. That might be anything from a few notable NPCs in their neighborhood to the name of someone the characters ran into in Ae’gura. Then the group figures out the details as the story goes along. There’s no need to have an idea of how things fit into the world, because everyone will make that up as you go. The world just spirals out from whatever you start with.

The potential downside here is that it requires quite a bit of improvisation and thinking on your feet. That goes for everyone at the table, GM and players alike. For you, the GM, that might not be such a big deal—running a game almost always involves a degree of flying by the seat of one’s pants—but not all players are going to be ready for that sort of responsibility. In addition, if your players like to immerse themselves in their characters and see the game world through their eyes, they may find it jarring to occasionally break from that perspective to, say, invent a name on the spot for the Age they just found or tell you the history a cult of neo-D’ni fanatics that have been hiding out in an obscure cavern.

Mixing Epic and Personal

Small-scale stories concern events closely connected to the PCs, and probably within a very limited area: just D’ni and a few Ages. Large-scale games are the opposite: epic tales spanning dozens of Ages with world(s)-shaking consequences. Both types of stories can be a lot of fun. However, don’t be fooled into thinking the two are mutually exclusive. Here are a couple ways to combine them.

• Start Small and Grow: This is the classic zero-to-hero story in which an unassuming individual with no pretensions to glory is suddenly swept up in events beyond the scope of his experience.
• Peaks and Valleys: Here, you’re alternating the large-scale with the small, using the latter almost as something of a breather. Typically, the large-scale storylines will deal with epic threats, while the small-scale storylines will be of a more personal nature, with few if any connections to the earth-shaking events transpiring in the characters’ lives. The small-scale sessions serve as something of a breather between all that epic action, and give the players a chance to delve into some unexplored corners of their characters. Plus, if you want to connect the small- and large-scale stories down the line, you can—and the payoff will be all the more satisfying for the players.

Actions

Roll the dice when succeeding or failing at the action could each contribute something interesting to the game. If you can’t imagine an interesting outcome from both results, then don’t call for that roll. If failure is the uninteresting option, just give the PCs what they want and call for a roll later, when you can think of an interesting failure. If success is the boring option, then see if you can turn your idea for failure into a compel instead, using that moment as an opportunity to funnel fate points to the players.

GMs, when considering a roll, you should consider the following questions:

Is the action is a reasonable action for the character to perform?

If the action is impossible, or just too improbable, then it doesn’t happen.

Is this an action that deserves dramatic attention?

Some things the characters want to do may be difficult. However, they may not be interesting. Stopping to roll the dice may interrupt the flow of gameplay unnecessarily. Or maybe failure or the cost of success will just have little effect on the flow of the story. If it doesn’t really matter, then let the player have the action and move on.

Is failure an interesting option?

Sometimes failure is just boring. Maybe failing here just stops gameplay completely to no effect. There’s no need to have the characters standing around and the players stumped. If you are in a situation where a character fails and a player would just decline to pay a price for success and ask to roll again, then it may not be worth making the player roll in the first place. However, if failure might lead to the characters making different choices or open up other avenues for drama, a roll could be a good idea.

Could paying a price for success be interesting?

Some things the characters are just going to succeed at eventually. The master cat burglar will eventually figure out how to get past the ancient D’ni security system - it’s what they do. However, what it takes to do that and what effects it has is ripe for drama. A roll can take advantage of that.

Is the action being actively opposed?

Any time two (or more) people are working against each other, we have drama. Both failure and the price of success have ramifications, so rolling the dice makes sense.

Deciding on Difficulties

Like most of Unwritten, choosing the level of opposition is driven by narrative factors, rather than any attempt to represent a reality. Base difficulties off of both the nature of the situation and its importance to the story. It’s more an art than a science, but we have some guidelines to help you.

When deciding on passive opposition, look at how the PC’s skill level compares with the opposition.

• Anything that’s two or more steps higher than the PC’s skill level—Fair (+2) skill and Great (+4) opposition, for example— means that the player will probably fail or need to invoke aspects to succeed.
• Anything that’s two or more steps lower than the PC’s skill level—Fair (+2) skill and Mediocre (+0) opposition, for example—means that the player will probably not need to invoke aspects and have a good chance of succeeding with style.
• Between that range, there’s a roughly equal chance that they’ll tie or succeed, and a roughly equal chance that they will or won’t need to invoke aspects to do so.

Therefore, low difficulties are best when you want to give the PCs a chance to show off and be awesome, difficulties near their skill levels are best when you want to provide tension but not overwhelm them, and high difficulties are best when you want to emphasize how dire or unusual the circumstances are and make them pull out all the stops.

Of course, there needs to be a good reason that backs up your choice in the story. It’s totally okay if that justification is something you’re about to make up, rather than something you know beforehand. Aspects are a great tool for this, especially situation aspects. It makes sense that a character with Just Not a People Person would have more trouble trying to communicate with natives who don’t speak their language. This is a situation ripe for compels, but if you aren’t specifically looking to throw a complication into the mix, adjusting the strength of the opposition makes sense.

In fact, the need for more challenge for a particularly skilled player or set of players is a great chance to be creative and bring new details into play. Let’s say you want to make bypassing an old D’ni security system more of a challenge, and you have an NPC you have been wanting to bring in. You could decide that the NPC has upgraded the system, or is somehow interfering. By doing so, you’ve brought in a narrative hook and made things more interesting.

You might also try using “out of place” difficulties to indicate the presence of unanswered questions during the game—for some odd reason, the store room you’re trying to break into has a +5 lock on the door. What could be so important in there that you don’t know about?

Either way, don’t skip the justification part—either let the players know what it is immediately when you tell them the difficulty, or shrug mysteriously and then let them find out soon thereafter (as in, the time it takes to think it up).

Great Success!

Sometimes, a PC is going to roll far in excess of the difficulty, getting a lot of shifts on the roll. Some of the basic actions already have a built-in effect for rolling really well, like getting free invokes on an Advantage action.

For others, it’s not so clear. What’s happens when you get a lot of shifts on a roll? You want to make sure those results have some kind of meaning and reflect how competent the PC’s are.

Here are a few choice options.

• Go Gonzo with the Narration: It’s important to celebrate a great roll with a suitable narration of over the top success. Let the success affect something else, in addition to what the PC was going for, and bring the player into the process of selling it by prompting them to make up cool details. “Three extra shifts on that attempt to get past the lock — tell me, is anyone ever going to be able to lock that crypt again?”
• Add an Aspect: You can express additional effects of a good roll by placing an aspect on the PC or on the scene, essentially letting them an advantage for free. “So your action to chat up the ResEng succeeded with four shifts. She’ll let you into the DRC library, and she’ll also act as Available Backup if you should need some help later.”
• Reducing Time: If it’s important to get something done fast, then you can use extra shifts to decrease the time that it takes to do an action.

Awesome Failure

Failure is a hard thing to make awesome, but it pays off in making interesting games. Fumbles are only dead ends if there isn’t anything interesting to be found by following up on it.

Blame the Circumstances

The PCs are competent people. They aren’t supposed to look like fools on a regular or even semi-regular basis. Sometimes, all it takes is the right description to make failure into something dynamic—instead of narrating that the PC just made a stupid mistake, blame the failure on something that the PC couldn’t have prevented. There’s a secondary mechanism on that lock that initially looked simple, or the contact broke his promise to show up on time, or the ancient tome is too withered to read, or a sudden seismic shift throws off your run.

That way, the PCs still look competent, even though they don’t get what they want. More importantly, shifting the blame to the circumstances gives you an opportunity to suggest a new course of action, which allows the failure to forward momentum in your story. The contact didn’t make his appointment? Where is he? Who was following him to the rendezvous? The ancient tome is withered? Maybe someone can restore it. That way, you don’t spend time dwelling on the failure and can move on to something new.

Let the Player Do the Work

You can also kick the question back to the players, and let them decide what the context of their own failure is. This is a great move to foster a collaborative spirit, and some players will be surprisingly eager to hose their own characters in order to further the story, especially if it means they can keep control of their own portrayal.

It’s also a great thing to do if you just plain can’t think of anything. “Okay, so, you fumbled that action by 2. So you’re working the lock, and something goes wrong. What is it?” “You missed that roll to keep your eyes peeled. What don’t you notice as you’re sneaking up to the queen’s chambers?” It’s better if the question is specific, like those examples—just saying, “Okay, tell me how you fail!” can easily stall things by putting a player on the spot unnecessarily. You want to let the player do the work, not make them.

Antagonists

One of your most important jobs as a GM is creating the NPCs who will oppose the PCs and try to keep them from their goals during your chapters. The real story comes from what the PCs do when worthy adversaries stand between them and their objectives—how far they’re willing to go, what price they’re willing to pay, and how they change as a result of the experience.

Take Only What You Need to Survive

First of all, keep in mind that you’re never obligated to give any NPC a full sheet like the ones the PCs have. Most of the time, you’re not going to need to know that much information, because the NPCs aren’t going to be the center of attention like the PCs are. It’s better to focus on writing down exactly what you need for that NPC’s encounter with the PCs, and then fill in the blanks on the fly (just like PCs can) if that NPC ends up becoming more important in the campaign.

The NPC Types

NPCs come in three different flavors: nameless NPCs, supporting NPCs, and main NPCs.

Nameless NPCs

The majority of the NPCs in your campaign world are nameless—people who are so insignificant to the story that the PC’s interactions with them don’t even require them to learn a name. The random explorer they pass in the Cavern, the archivist at the library, the DRC minions running around. Their role in the story is temporary and fleeting—the PCs will probably encounter them once and never see them again. In fact, most of the time, you’ll them simply out of reflex when you describe an environment.

On their own, nameless NPCs usually aren’t meant to provide much of a challenge to the PCs. You use them like you use a low-difficulty skill roll, mainly as an opportunity to showcase the PCs’ competence. In conflicts, they serve as a distraction or a delay, forcing the PCs to work a little harder to get what they want.

For a nameless NPC, all you really need is two or three skills based on their role in the scene. Your average security guard might have Athletics and Notice, while your average clerk might only have Research. They never get more than one or two aspects, because they just aren’t important enough.

Nameless NPCs as Obstacles

The easiest way to handle nameless NPCs is simply to treat them as obstacles: Give a difficulty for the PC to overcome whatever threat the NPC presents, and just do it in one roll. You don’t even have to write anything down, just set a difficulty according to the guidelines in this chapter, and assume that the PC gets past on a successful roll.

If the situation is more complicated than that, make it a challenge instead. This trick is useful when you want a group of nameless NPCs more as a feature of the scene than as individuals.

NPC First, Name Later

Nameless NPCs don’t have to remain nameless. If the players decide to get to know that explorer or Restoration Engineer or whatever, go ahead and make a real person out of them—but that doesn’t mean that you need to make them any more mechanically complex. If you want to, of course, go ahead and promote them to a supporting NPC. But otherwise, simply giving that courtier a name and a motivation doesn’t mean he can’t go down in one punch.

Supporting NPCs

Supporting NPCs have proper names and are a little more detailed than nameless NPCs, playing a supporting role in your scenarios (hence the name). They often display some kind of strong distinguishing trait that sets them apart from the crowd: their relationship to a PC or NPC, a particular competence or unique ability, or simply the fact that they tend to appear in the game a great deal. Any faces that you assign to the locations or factions you make during game creation are supporting NPCs, as are any characters who are named in one of the PCs’ aspects.

Supporting NPCs are a great source of interpersonal drama, because they’re usually the people that the PCs have a relationship with, such as friends, sidekicks, family, contacts, and noteworthy opponents. While they may never be central to resolving the main dilemma of a scenario, they’re a significant part of the journey, either because they provide aid, present a problem, or figure into a subplot.

Supporting NPCs are made much like nameless NPCs, except they get to have a few more of the standard character elements. These include a high concept, one or more additional aspects, one stunt, and a handful of skills (say four or five). They have one mild consequence and, if you want them to be especially tough, one moderate consequence.

Skills for a supporting NPC should follow a column distribution. Because you’re only going to define four or five skills, just treat it as one column. If your NPC has a skill at Great, fill in one skill at each positive step below it—so one Good, one Fair, and one Adequate skill.

• Skill Levels: A supporting NPC’s top skill can exceed your best PC’s by one or two levels, but only if their role in the game is to provide serious opposition—supporting NPCs who are allied with the PCs should be their rough peers in skill level.
• Concessions: Supporting NPCs should not fight to the bitter end, given the option. Instead, have them concede conflicts often, especially early in a story, and especially if the concession is something like “They get away.” Conceding like this serves a few purposes. For one, it foreshadows a future, more significant encounter with the NPC. Because conceding comes with a reward of one or more fate points, it also makes them more of a threat the next time they show up. What’s more, it’s virtually guaranteed to pay off for the players in a satisfying way the next time the NPC makes an appearance.

Finally, it implicitly demonstrates to the players that, when things are desperate, conceding a conflict is a viable course of action. A PC concession here and there can raise the stakes and introduce new complications organically, both of which make for a more dramatic, engaging story.

Main NPCs

Main NPCs are the closest you’re ever going to get to playing a PC yourself. They have full character sheets just like a PC does, with five aspects, a full distribution of skills, and a selection of stunts. They are the most significant characters in your PCs’ lives, because they represent pivotal forces of opposition or allies of crucial importance. Because they have a full spread of aspects, they also offer the most nuanced options for interaction, and they have the most options to invoke and be compelled. Your primary antagonists in a scenario or arc should always be main NPCs, as should any NPCs who are the most vital pieces of your stories.

Because they have all the same things on their sheet as PCs do, main NPCs will require a lot more of your time and attention than other characters. How you one really depends on how much time you have—if you want, you can go through the whole character creation process and work out their whole backstory through phases, leaving only those slots for “Crossing Paths” open.

Of course, if you want, you can also upgrade one of your current supporting NPCs to a main using this method. This is great for when a supporting NPC has suddenly or gradually become a major fixture in the story. Players may fixate on a specific NPC, regardless of your original plans for them.

You could also do things more on the fly if you need to, creating a partial sheet of the aspects you know for sure, those skills you definitely need them to have, and any stunts you want. Then fill in the rest as you go. This is almost like making a supporting NPC, except you can add to the sheet during play.

Main NPCs will resist to the bitter end if need be, making the PCs work for every step.

Regarding skill levels, your main NPCs will come in one of two flavors—exact peers of the PCs who grow with them as the campaign progresses, or superiors to the PCs who remain static while the PCs grow to sufficient strength to oppose them. If it’s the former, just give them the exact same skill distribution the PCs currently have. If it’s the latter, give them enough skills to go at least two higher than whatever the current skill cap is for the game.

Playing the Opposition

Remember, you want a balancing act between stonewalling the PCs and letting them walk all over your opposition (unless they are nameless NPCs, in which case that’s pretty much what they’re there for). It’s important to keep in mind not just the skill levels of the NPCs in your scenes, but their number and importance.

Right-sizing the opposition is more of an art than a science, but here are some strategies to help.

• Don’t outnumber the PCs unless your NPCs have comparatively lower skills.
• If they’re going to team up against one big opponent, make sure that opponent has a peak skill two levels higher than whatever the best PC can bring in that conflict.
• Limit yourself to one main NPC per scene, unless it’s a big climactic conflict at the end of an arc. Remember, supporting NPCs can have skills as high as you want.
• Most of the opposition the PCs encounter in a session should be nameless NPCs, with one or two supporting NPCs and main NPCs along the way.
• Nameless and supporting NPCs means shorter conflicts because they give up or lose sooner; main NPCs mean longer conflicts.

It’s easy to fall into the default mode of using the opposition as a direct means to get in the PCs’ way, drawing them into a series of conflict scenes until someone is defeated.

However, keep in mind that the NPCs can advantages just like the PCs can. Feel free to use opposition characters to scenes that aren’t necessarily about stopping the PCs from achieving a goal, but scouting out information about them and stacking up free invocations. Let your antagonists and the PCs have tea together and then bring out the Empathy rolls. Or instead of having that fight scene take place in the dark alley, let your NPCs show up, gauge the PCs’ abilities, and then flee.

Likewise, keep in mind that your NPCs have a home turf advantage in conflicts if the PCs go to them in order to resolve something. So, when you’re setting up situation aspects, you can pre-load the NPC with some free invocations if it’s reasonable that they’ve had time to place those aspects. Use this trick in good faith, though—two or three such aspects is probably pushing the limit.

Your opposition will be way more interesting if they try to get at the PCs in multiple venues of conflict, rather than just going for the most direct route. Remember that there are a lot of ways to get at someone, and that mental conflict is just as valid as physical conflict as a means of doing so. If the opposition has a vastly different skill set than one or more of your PCs, leverage their strengths and choose a conflict strategy that gives them the best advantage.

Obstacles

Drama suggests that the explorers encounter a series of obstacles that they have to overcome in order to see what is over the next hill. As always, what is interesting should guide you on what to throw in the explorer’s path and how much focus it deserves. Slogging through the swamps of Negilahn is difficult, but we only need to spend any time on it if the trek is interesting.

Simple Overcome and Advantage actions will usually suffice. Failure should rarely simply cut off access to an area. Rather, it should be the chance for creative problem solving or diverting into interesting subplots. Success at a cost can leave the explorers hurt or resources depleted, for example.

When it is time to zoom in on the drama of exploration, it becomes an exercise in problem solving for the characters. Rather than just simple obstacles, characters should face problems that they have to solve that require more than a roll of the dice to bypass. Teamwork, planning, and thought should be required. Dipping into action sequences like challenges and contests as a structure allow you to turn it into an adventure scene on all its own. Getting past a particular obstacle can even be the basis of a sub-plot or story arc, with gathering the information or resources needed.

GMs, one thing to remember: once a problem has been solved, it is solved. Don’t make your players run through the sequence again when they head back or come that way again; that’s just boring. Unless the situation has changed significantly or there is a chance for additional new drama (such as an interesting compel), just let them walk by without further problem.

Hazards

Environmental hazards are a common hurdle for explorers to face. A simple passive opposition will often be enough. Situation aspects can be used for invocations and compels. A forest age may have aspects like Dangerous Predators or Poisonous Mushrooms Everywhere, for instance.

However, hazards can be viewed as ‘characters’ with aspects and even skills. Playing a hazard like this makes it an active participant in the scene—the environment (or elements in the environment) can actively do things to characters. They become participants in scenes like contests.

The environment may have an attribute that will affect the characters the longer they are exposed to it. A contest that is run through the scene can model this. The environment uses its skill against the characters and each characters resists with appropriate skills in return. If the hazard gets a three-victory lead over a character, then the character takes an appropriate consequence. If the character takes the same lead, they have bypassed the hazard and no longer have to deal with it. Remember that this is a contest between the hazard and each character. One character overcoming the hazard may not mean the others have as well.

A scene that is just a contest versus a hazard has some possibilities, but combining the contest with other actions will be more fun. Interspersing contest exchanges with other activities (even other contests, such as running from an angry mob) adds another level of worry to the situation. A contest could be run across several scenes to reflect a pervasive threat that affects the characters the whole time they are in the area.