Have them Act!

Remember that the purpose of your prep is to give you something interesting to say when the next session starts. Remember that your NPCs are just not that complicated. You’re not holding back for a big reveal. You’re not doling events out like you’re trying to make your Halloween candy last until New Years. All your threats have impulses they should act on and body parts leading them around, so for god sake, have them act! — Apocalypse World, pg 121, Vincent Baker

I am reading Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker, which seems appropriate given the current state of world affairs. Sometimes I find the way it is written annoying, while other times I appreciate its direct and casual manner. On the whole the book is great and the advice scattered throughout can and should be picked up whole hog and used in your most oldest of old school D&D games. Apocalypse World tells you how to run a sandbox game without ever calling it that. The book seems quite revelatory, while managing to not take itself so seriously.

When I was running my Carcosa game I had a lot threats in the wilderness so subtle and so slow moving my players would often not bother investigating to see what was going on, or would get bored of the investigation and move on with their lives. Their biggest enemies were the Jale Slavers, dirt bags who kept on showing up in random encounter rolls, and The Dominant Reflection, an insane Bone Man sorcerer who they had inadvertently set free in the first session, and his cult. These two groups were antagonistic. Trying to deal with them was a clear and obvious goal. After they displaced the The Dominant Reflection the sessions that followed were in an awkward place where they was really only one enemy in play: they were on good terms with most everyone else they interacted with.

In hindsight I should have been far more pushy and straight forward with all the groups I had in play during that game. My Snake-Men from the distant past never once showed up in the game directly because I thought of them as ‘boss monsters’ to be encountered later. The players would see the aftermath of their actions, or stumble upon their army of Carcosan Zombie Men wandering the wilderness, but I never really gave them enough clues to indicate what was going on. Similarly I had a cult North of where the party spent most of their time, but because the party never ventured North after the early sessions this other faction just sort of sat fallow “exploring” a megadungeon the party didn’t care about anyway.

The advice I’ve quoted above seems simple and good. There isn’t much point preparing stuff just to have it sit fallow. Your NPCs Machiavellian plots are probably quite lovely, but I suspect at the table simple and direct action is likely just as much fun to play.