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Beyond the Railroad: Embracing Emergent Narrative in Tabletop Gaming
Imagine this: you’ve spent two weeks crafting the perfect session. You have dungeon maps, NPC motivations, even some subtle foreshadowing and some dramatic lines for the big boss. Now, on game day, your players roll up to the door of the dungeon, take one look at your ominous stone doorway, and decide, “let’s go talk to that farmer we met three sessions ago instead”. We’ve all been there. You spent so much time and energy, and now your carefully orchestrated plans are closely resembling a collapsing house of cards. Your first instinct is probably to nudge (or violently shove) your players back towards your prepared content. And you can do…
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Session Zero: The Ties That Bind
You’ve built your world. Picked your genre. Set the tone. Agreed not to roll dice in the guacamole. Now it’s time to ask the question that turns individual characters into a story worth telling: Why are these people together? Not just “because the plot says so,” but truly—what binds them? What history do they share? What promises have been made, debts owed, pranks un-avenged? While a group of strangers meeting in a tavern can get the job done, a party with shared pasts and tangled loyalties is storytelling gold. Why Bonds Matter Character bonds are the narrative thread that ties a party together. They give players a reason to care…