Scribbles and Horrors

Like wads of cotton dipped in kerosene for firestarters, my written and unwritten prep-work jottings are consumed entirely in the heat of roleplay. No little secret is safe, it all gets exposed, burnt-up.

I used to think my job as referee was to be a coy asshole, sitting behind my Dungeon Masters Screen armed with a book of secrets, secrets which could be meted out carefully and objectively as the players uncovered how to make characters live in my world. My DM notes were instructions for dripping and drabbing the PCs through the slog of well-balanced progression, agentic storytelling, meaningful simulation, and so on.

I find now though that as soon as I write down some fact about the world it pops up immediately into in in play. Whenever the PCs see some thing I can’t help but tell the players all of it, the whole caboodle, it just spills out of me in the flurry of description, and suddenly for me, the Referee, the answer to the next question isn’t in my notes and its not in the rulebook and it has to be real and now and when I finally speak it has become real, going somewhere I do not know where.

And that’s when the game really starts, when we’ve taken the leap of trust into the unknown. There is no safety net, and so anything can happen.