Most new gamemasters are equally new to using description, and fall back on stats as the written fodder for game preparation. Often, they will work hard to come up with interesting situations, and rely on easy descriptions or the use of improvisation (just throwing out whatever they think it is important for the players to hear at any given time). Other gamemasters may have plenty of experience in running games, but still feel there is a void in their interaction with the player; a great deal of the time, that void is description. It can be frustrating to run a game and not really feel like you've taken the players on a true adventure... It is on these assumptions that I will start the example off with the game stats of a planet. We'll take the raw stats and build from the ground up to create not just words and numbers, but a world. Let's say you sit down and do some brainstorming. You need a planet for the players to meet with a rather sinister black market contact. Their objective is to purchase mining equipment for the Alliance. You'd like the planet to be pretty interesting, but you have no idea where to start. It seems reasonable to keep it straightforward and have them go to a mining colony, where they can get the proper equipment without being noticed by the authorities or anyone of importance. You decide you'll run with the mining colony concept, and you produce the following from some further brainstorming....
You've filled in what you can so far, and you're still unsure about which species are on the planet, and what form of government (if any) is being used. You decide you want to move to adding a small capsule based on the above information, but you realize you need to come up with some additional detail that is not covered in the stats; after all, what good is a capsule if it tells you the same thing as what is in the stats, and no more? Thinking of what the stats don't cover, you come up with things like weather and what the local town/starport might look like. A wise decision at this point would be to try and make the planet go along with the psychological environment you are placing your characters in. Right off the bat, you know you want the black market contact to come off as sinister. It seems a logical idea not to make Veina a happy place to be, since the black market contact would have to compensate to come off as truly sinister. So, you figure it would be helpful if Veina itself was at least an uncomfortable place to be, and perhaps even a little intimidating in some ways. Well, you haven't covered weather and what the population area looks like, and you need to throw those in the capsule - those two items are a good place to start on the road to creating an interesting scene...you jot some ideas down in the capsule section...
You look at what you've just written. You made the weather a little overbearing and indicated the town is rather lackluster - two decent ways to use the background that the black market contact will be in to seem more sinister. But it's still not enough - you don't have anything but a few sentences and some stats, hardly enough to throw at a group of players...you continue to think...
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This is an original work by Tim "Nealos" Salam. Note that descriptive text included are exerpts from a work in progress. |
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