# I Want to Be Surprised by My Own Campaign Again ![[Blades in the Dark (cover).jpg|300]] ![[Ironsworn (cover).jpg|300]] ![[Starforged (cover).jpg|300]] ![[Microscope (cover).jpg|300]] ![[Kingdom 2nd Ed (cover).jpg|300]] tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/ironsworn #game/rpg/blades-in-the-dark #game/rpg/kingdom #game/rpg/starforged Once again, we head into the wilds of Reddit for commentary. But this time, I literally have to put it here on the Digital Garden because it's too long for a Reddit reply. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I'm going to take the inspiration to reply to people in the positive stride it richly deserves. --- ## Don't Be a Human Computer > I’m sick of feeling like a computer. I get bored preparing a session and running it because I always do it the same way: I bring scenes that the players will move through. Obviously, I make changes between sessions and try to make the players’ decisions matter, but generally there’s already a preset ending (or endings) and I just guide the players to where I need them to go. A – B – C. > > I’m looking for another way to approach sessions where I feel like a participant instead of just reading paragraphs I prepared beforehand. I want to improvise together with the players, make decisions in the moment, and see where they lead us instead of having everything predetermined from the start. > > All the adventures I’ve read are A – B – C. Even open-ended ones like Dolmenwood boil down to reading or presenting whatever is in the hex the players are in. I almost feel like I could become another player and play without a game master. > > A system I’ve been looking at is Blades in the Dark, but honestly I’m completely lost—I don’t know how these games are actually run. People also say Vampire works this way, but I don’t know what I, as the GM, need to prepare and what the players need in order to move around this improvised world. > > How can I move from running pre-planned, linear adventures to a more improvisational style of GMing where the story emerges collaboratively with the players? > > -- https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1t8dery/i_want_to_be_surprised_by_my_own_campaign_again ## The Philosophy of Letting Go We have roughly 30 years of development of tabletop RPGs in the field of GM-less games. That is, games that don't have a GM, in which everybody at the table is a player, and which never require you to put together a checklist of places the players need to be and then herd them around from place to place like a tour guide rather than someone who's actually enjoying what's going on at the table. We'll get to talking about those in a minute, but first let's talk about one of the core philosophies, and that's that the players and the GM (we'll get to GMlessness in a minute) are *all playing the game*. They are all responsible for creating the experience. They are all responsible for creating the world at a certain level. Creating the world may be part of play. In fact, creating the world may be the entire point of play. In order to get there, you have to give up the idea that you need to be the one to bring the excitement to the table, that you solely are responsible for the world as a whole, that you direct what's going to happen, and that you kick back, put your feet up and think about just letting the players play. This often can just work with more traditional systems, but only insofar as you make it clear that the characters that the traditional players have in front of them need to have motivations. They need to have things that they want. They need to have things that they crave - and that they can't have. They need to have something they want to do about the fact that they can't have it, and that thing may or may not actually be able to get what they want. Once they have motivations, once they have things that they are pursuing, the next step is relatively straightforward. You let them do it. Now you don't have to prep things because you generally can't. You may need to know more about the world in specific as it regards to what they desire and what they seek, but you've already talked about that and you know where to focus your attention. You've just reduced your stress load by half, and this might be all you need to switch from the entertainer, the circus master, the director, down to being an old-school games referee, just providing the response engine for the players. Frankly, I wouldn't stop there. I like to go well beyond that. So let's talk about some of the other things you've brought up. ## [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel) *[[Blades in the Dark]]* is an excellent example of low prep/no prep, fiction forward, player driven gaming. It's a really nice intermediate step between classical GM authority and modern excision of the role, being a participant who engages by essentially playing the world as their character. To really understand why it works this way, you have to look at how character generation actually occurs. Characters are created together by players at the table. This is key. Putting together the game is a collaborative process, and the players have buy-in. They aren't responsible for creating the setting. That's part of the game (other games do that differently; we'll talk about that in a bit). But it's here that they start being responsible for fleshing out their character responsibilities. They do that by picking playbooks, which aren't character classes, though they do help communicate what things that they're good at, what special moves that they have, and what responsibilities the character possesses. The Leech can be a medic and put together charms and potions that keep the crew intact, but they can also be an obsessive demolitionist with a pyromaniac flair and spend their time building explosive gear. Your Whisper can be a brilliant expert in dealing with the sorcery of Duskvol, or they can spend their time making contacts with the ghosts in the city and creating a network of informants who know everything supernatural that even gets near the streets. You'll notice that the characters have something in common: they're all criminals. Blades in the Dark takes as its central premise that the characters share this particular commonality, and it helps keep things on track. In part, it helps establish what we know that they want, because they are starting as a tiny little nobody gang in a city of movers and shakers where life is hard and it can be dangerous, and they've chosen to live a criminal lifestyle amidst all this. Every character has a vice, which is the thing that they do to deal with stress, because stress is a literal mechanical entity. You gain stress for getting advantages on die checks or for causing a flashback that makes you be perfectly prepared for the situation at hand. However, to get rid of that stress, you generally have to indulge in something a little bit dangerous. Maybe it's an obligation and you feel that you need to put in time serving them, whether it be the church or your family or another gang. Maybe it's gambling you can't resist and you're going to blow a bunch of money to relax. Or maybe it's straight up pleasure you want, and you can be found between scores in an opium den or in the company of scarlet women. We'll get to when you actually have time to do these things momentarily. (I know I'm saying that a lot.) Here's where things go interestingly sideways. You're not done when your character is made. Next up, you build your crew, which has its own mechanical framework. This is part of how we start getting to how the game is played, because your crew has a type, whether it be assassins or a cult, or smugglers or whatnot. Your crew has a headquarters, which starts pretty decrepit and is built up as you devote coin to advancing it. You have reputations with other gangs, and here again we are touching the engine that makes things go. The bits of the motor are all sitting here. You have characters who inherently want things because they are criminals living on the edge and have bigger wants and desires than just that. You have their gang, their crew, and their headquarters, which all need to be improved in order for them to take the long climb to the top. You have the city, which I haven't talked about, but which provides a setting full of opportunities to get themselves in trouble and either fight or talk their way out of that trouble. All the pieces are in place. They have motivations. They have things they want but can't have, and next we're going to talk about what they're going to do about that. What they're going to do about that is the score. *Blades in the Dark* is played as a series of scores, which are basically a mission-based structure around which action takes place. It is always decided on by the players. They have needs, after all. What is it that they do for a living? Are they assassins? Well, the score's probably to kill somebody. Are they thieves? There are plenty of houses to get involved in burglary. Are they a cult? They probably want to expand their territory so they can proselytize to more and bring them into the fold. When we talk about how does the game work, the score is the thing. Now, you might think that this is where you have to do your job as a GM, and that's only partially true. Your job is to have an idea of where things are going, and to be able to describe what the characters see along the way so that they can follow the game's directive as to how they should play their characters: **"Drive it like you stole it."** But this is really easy if you manage your situation right. After all, assume that you have session zero of character generation and putting the crew together and figuring out the relationship of the crew to the city and all the factions therein. At the end of that session zero, they should be able to tell you what the score they want to pull off to begin with is. They have some contacts, they have some ideas, they pick the score. At that point in the session next week, you come back with an idea about where they're going. Is it a burglary? Well, then you may have made some sketches of the house, thought about what kind of security the place has. Maybe even placed a few goodies here and there, just enough so that you can run a bunch of criminals through it in a way that is driven by the players, and this is key because of the way mechanics work in *Blades in the Dark*. You will not be rolling any dice as the GM. Not a one, not unless you want to for something like figuring out if something happens randomly. That's entirely up to you. Your job is to make GM moves, which is essentially purely reactive and narrative. Only the players roll dice. Your job mechanically, beyond the GM moves, which essentially are just you giving feedback to the players about what happens, is to help decide what the position the character is in when the player wants to do something, when the outcome is in question, and how effective what they're trying to do is. If you've been in a sniper overwatch position for an hour and have a bead drawn on exactly where you know the guy is going to step out of his front door, you are in a controlled position. The state of surprise is probably going to make you have a great impact. On the other hand, if you're hanging by your one good arm from an awning and trying to kick a guard in the head who's trying to pull you down, you are undoubtedly in a desperate position and you can most likely be looking at a limited effect. Roll the dice, see what shakes out, and let the fiction guide you. That's the scores. The other part of this that makes the engine really churn is downtime. As we were talking about before, downtime is when you pursue your vices, deal with some out-of-group roleplay, beat the streets, pursue long-term projects, or maybe deal with the results of the heat you've brought down on your heads by not being as circumspect as you might have been. You get your payoffs. You deal with some entanglements from time to time, but mostly the downtime is used for pursuing characters' individual issues, like regaining stress by indulging their vice, or doing a long-term project or training. It's at the end of downtime you should be looking to finish out a session and ask the players what their next score is going to be. Rinse and repeat. As the GM of *Blades*, you don't have to build out a whole world and make sure it's all moving pieces at the same time. You've got a very well-detailed city that the characters literally can't leave. You've got a whole bunch of factions which have mechanical methods for helping figure out what they are up to, or want, or are headed toward. You've got players who are motivated and active and deliberately seeking out the next thing to do. Then there's you, just doing the minimal amount of prep that you need, letting the players and the mechanics drag them through situation after situation, always generating more complications that you get to be responsible for putting in front of them with a smile. I guarantee you this is a lot simpler and less stressful than anything you've been doing to date. It's not running anything out of anybody else's scenario, so it's not an A, B, C, D sort of situation. The mechanics will make sure that it's not an A, B, C, D sort of situation because complications are going to come up all the time. I will tell you that you are going to spend a lot more time in the game being engaged, not reading paragraphs that you wrote, but actually trying to come up with exciting and interesting moments because the players are creating exciting and interesting moments and you need to match that energy. In fact, that's going to be critical. You are going to be playing the game as much as they are, being surprised by the game as much as they are, and all that's just been waiting for you this whole time. If you've never read *Blades in the Dark* all the way through, I encourage you to do so because it does have some of the best GMing advice I've had the pleasure of reading, and it has the right attitude. --- ## [Ironsworn](https://tomkinpress.com/pages/ironsworn) / [Starforged](https://tomkinpress.com/pages/ironsworn-starforged) That was a whole lot about *Blades in the Dark*. I really do love *Blades in the Dark*, but we have games which are very specifically absent a GM, and with good reason, because they don't need one. Let's talk about one of my favorite designs, which is *[[Ironsworn]]* (we'll talk about *[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]* in a minute because it uses the same mechanics, or rather an updated version of them, but has another significant distinction). In *Ironsworn*, there is no GM. The game is designed to be played solo or co-op with you and other players all working and playing together. If you must, it can be played in a traditionally guided way, but it's perhaps not the most fun that way. It works. It's probably superior to any other tabletop RPG that you've had the pleasure of, which focuses on the characters because it gives everyone the tools to be involved. But I definitely suggest co-op play, GM-less play as the primary mode. Solo is also beautiful. Don't get me wrong. What about *Ironsworn* makes it such a different way to play? Well, it's fairly simple. It comes with an outline of a setting, one which is akin to Viking era Northern Europe, perhaps even Iron Age. The default setting has weather that is harsh and cold, a relatively thinly settled population, most places, frontiers that still exist, and a rough-and-ready frontier attitude because your people have only been in the Ironlands for a couple of hundred years, having fled elsewhere. In session zero of *Ironsworn*, you'll be putting together the truths of your setting. That is, there are a list of questions which have some given answers which you can choose from or you can write your own. If you're going to be playing with other people, I suggest you do this together. Build the world you want to be in. Because you build it together, talk about it together, you'll all be invested. Part of building characters after the world is that you choose their vows, what they've promised to do, what quests they want to go on that shapes their world. Are they looking to kill the men who murdered their parents? Do they want to establish a city in the frontier? Do they hunger to fill coffers with gold and become the richest man on the continent? Do they seek hidden knowledge and artifacts which were lost from the prehistory of the region? That is their background vow. You'll also be creating their immediate vow, something that's going on right now. Are they in the midst of robbing a house in order to make some easy coin? Are they escorting a caravan to a small village in the Hinterlands? Did they find an abandoned temple and are clearing it out of nightmarish undead horrors so it can be consecrated again? All of these things could be what's going on right now, the immediate vow, and kicks you off headfirst into play with characters who all have motivations and goals and are ready to rock and roll. The reason you don't need a GM is because Ironsworn is built in an oracular way. There are plenty of random generation tables to give you inspiration and guidance, whether it be for creating points of interest along the way, journeying back to the village where you've been sleeping to trade away some of the goods you found in the dungeon and heal up or thematic inspiration for figuring out what those goblins in the valley below might be up to. Luckily, there are some really good examples of co-op play on YouTube for *Ironsworn* and I heartily and affirmatively suggest that you should watch them, not just because they can show you how GM-less play can proceed, but because they are almost relentlessly entertaining. You probably wondered why I suggested *Starforged* up there. Well, *Ironsworn* has the advantage of being free. You can just go to the website and download it. It's a fantastic game, it's complete. You'll probably want the *Delve* supplement as well for more detail about dungeon diving, but across the board it's an amazing piece of work. Starforged is sort of a half edition forward of *Ironsworn*. It adds a little more complexity and nuance, giving you more legacy tracks than just your quest completions. You can gain legacy based on the bonds you have with other characters. You can gain legacy based on the exploration that you've done of the cosmos. It's also science fiction rather than fantasy, which speaks to me a little bit louder. If you would prefer something a little more 18th century age of sail, there's a supplement for *Starforged* called *Sundered Isles*, which leans very heavily into a variably fantastic take on piracy and fleets, all of which is completely compatible, of course, so you can have your piratical fleets plying the space lanes just as easily as they can the oceans or the skies above. It's beautiful, but it's not free. On the positive side, there's a deal going on the **[Everything Ironsworn Digital Bundle](https://tomkinpress.com/products/everything-ironsworn-digital-bundle)**, which includes everything from *Ironsworn* to *Starforged* to *Sundered Isles* for $40, which is about two-thirds of the price you'll be paying for just one game, depending on how mainstream that game might be. You'll get more setting information than you'll ever need. It's a good deal. --- ## [Microscrope](https://www.lamemage.com/microscope/) We've talked about methods that you can use in the game that you're currently running to make things more surprising, to take the reins a little bit out of your hands and put them in the players so that you can feel like you're part of the game again. We've talked about games which prioritize that mode of play, whether it be by changing things to focus on player-driven choices within the context of a tighter experience or fully GM-less, oracularly driven fiction-forward games. I want to finish off by talking about something that is really far outside of traditional game design, and it's something that Ben Robbins does extremely well. *[[Microscope]]* is almost a one of a kind game. I say that because I can only think of one game in the history of tabletop RPGs which is remotely structured like it, and that's *[[Universalis]]*, something so obscure I'm probably one of the few people that remembers it exists. In *Microscope*, you don't have a character. You don't even have a world. You don't even have a fixed timeline. Instead, you have a bunch of players and rules for how to manage responsibility and challenge. The goal state is not to win the game or to beat the challenge, but instead to play together, making something that's interesting, compelling, and exciting to everyone at the table. You do this by essentially creating periods in a timeline and zooming in further to find out the answer to a specific question or zooming out again to introduce a new period. You start play by defining the start and the end of the game. The start may be, *"a handful of ragged refugees, land on a planet and deconstruct their ships in order to build a barely surviving village."* The end may be, *"the great stellar civilization of Amaran finally collapses under its own weight of corruption, leaving fragmentary warring hegemons sprawled across the galaxy."* Play then focuses on filling in the time between those things. How did we get to the great stellar civilization? Where did the corruption set in? What was the early years of the village like? How did they spread? Was it by conquest or simple hard work? Along the way, as you insert things into the timeline, zooming in from periods to events and events to actual scenes, you learn about characters who are important, movements and societies. Players will pick up temporary foci, which they will be responsible for as long as they want to be, and make their turns about that thing and how it interacts with everything else. This sounds like it would be a complete and utter mess, but it's surprising how anyone I've ever sat down to play Microscope with ended up loving it and feeling really bound to the timeline that we'd created because they'd created it. They had a hand in it. Cities, civilizations, worlds, empires, and individuals had risen and fallen at their word, and they wanted to know more. Always wanted to know more. *Microscope* is not a traditional role-playing game. You do not play a role in the sense of a class or even an individual, though you can take on the role of an individual for scenes and in fact must. Instead, it's about building something and sometimes tearing stuff down, finding out what's going on because you decided what's going on. You will always and endlessly be surprised when you're playing *Microscope*, whether you're the facilitator or somebody else is taking care of worrying about that stuff, or everybody at the table has played enough to know how it works. Every moment is surprising and every moment is worth paying attention to. I can't really recommend it enough. --- ## [Kingdom](https://www.lamemage.com/kingdom/) While I'm out here in the weeds, and I've talked about Ben Robbins' work, we might as well talk about the other major game that he has released, which is *[[Kingdom]]*. It's a game in which there is no GM, and the players represent important people within an organization, a location, or a literal kingdom whose decisions make a difference in the crossroads of decisions that have to be made. *Ironsworn* and *Starforged* are about being characters, and although those characters can be very powerful, *Kingdom* is about powerful characters in that their roles are literally, definitionally, and mechanically important to the world. If you are playing a character who is the power, you literally have the ability to make decisions about what the kingdom does at the crossroads you find yourself at. No one really has the power to say no unless they depose you from the power position and take it for themselves. If you are playing the touchstone, then whatever your character reacts with is how the rest of the people in the kingdom feel. You literally state it by your actions. No one can gainsay you. That is strict truth, unless they want to take the position of touchstone for themselves and have to give up whatever it was they were before. If you're the perspective, you can literally tell the power and everyone else what will happen as a result of picking one choice or another at the crossroads. What you say is the truth. That is what will happen. No one can gainsay you unless they want to take your position, in which case they have to give up their own. While this sounds really constrained, in practice it's shockingly good. I've had some of the best roleplay in my life playing a *Kingdom* game. You'll notice there is no GM. There's no real need for one. The world is put together by the players at the table and you are a member of the players. If you want to be surprised at the table, it's harder to be more surprised than the things that fall out of *Kingdom*. --- ## Exunt This has gone on a lot longer than I really intended it to, but I hope it gives you enough of a shakedown that you get curious about methods of play which don't require you to follow someone else's scenario or any scenario at all, that allow you to play either in an authoritative role as the GM or in a GM-less manner with everybody at the table contributing and have that electric jolt of your opinions and decisions and experiences being surprising and meaningful. Whether it be from switching to some sort of oracular play and letting a bit of randomness fall in your life so that you have to interpret it. Or whether it be because you and everyone else at the table share power of creation. That feeling of being a player, of being involved, of being surprised, is something that we have a lot of games that can provide and have provided. Yes, changing the way that you approach the games you're already playing can go a long way. But switching games to ones which go out of their way to provide you the tools to do that—that's a bigger step forward and it has bigger payoffs. Hopefully some of this is helpful. ## Postscript 2026-05-10 14:20 > Thank you for taking the time to write all of this, it’s very instructive. I think I did understand how these games worked, but I just needed the courage to start running them. Like you, in this thread I’ve also been recommended to try solo games—I’ve never tried it, and maybe that’s exactly what I need to learn how to convey all of this to a table with my players. > > https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1t8dery/comment/ol1072o/ Honestly, solo gaming has been one of the greatest innovations that has really gotten polished over the last several years, and I strongly advise you to try it. You can be a lot more experimental at your own table alone if that's the sort of thing that you're sensitive to. I've never minded breaking out completely bizarre things at a table in front of people who've never seen anything like it myself. But I've been doing that for decades at this point. It's part of the fun. The great thing is most of the solo games out there are also very co-op play compatible. So if you get started playing solo and you want somebody to come and play with you, maybe just a one-off session because you've got a friend over or family is visiting. It's easy to throw together a character for them and just get right in using the processes that you've already been doing. It's extremely freeing. You just have to try it. Now, it's not for everybody, and that's okay. It doesn't have to be. But if nothing else, it gives you new ways to think about the games that you're already playing with people and maybe new things to introduce them to. To break them out of habits that they've gotten into along the way, like being passive recipients of the entertainment that you're bringing to the table rather than active drivers. Traditional gamers get into bad habits. Sometimes you just have to shake them out.