This week, we’ll take a look at some stuff you might actually be able to use while gaming. This subject, however, will require that I open up with a little confession:

I am a lazy Game Master.

Oddly enough, though, despite my lack of interest in massive amounts of preparatory work, I have the good fortune to have been considered, by the several dozen people who have played in my personal campaigns over the past 20 years, to be a pretty good GM.

This is largely because I have figured out one very important skill, and have worked hard to master it. That skill is improvisation.

I learned very early on in my gaming career an important lesson: Nothing is established until you commit to it. Until you divulge the information to the players, it is mutable…ever-changing. If this is done correctly, your players won’t know the difference. It will all seem as if it had been planned by you from the beginning, part of a grand tapestry that you wove for their entertainment…when in reality, they did most of the work, and you merely reacted to them.

In this installment, I will be giving you one of the improvisational techniques that I have used in my campaigns.

“Let’s start at the very beginning…a very good place to start.”
                    -The Sound of Music

If you’ll forgive the show-tunes reference, the beginning actually is a good place to start…the beginning of a campaign, I mean.

Here is the first of my improvisational methods: I don’t come up with ideas for campaigns. I come up with ideas for the beginning of a campaign. That’s it. After that, I let the direction of the campaign be created by the characters. Let’s face it–the average playing group has something like four players and a GM. It is simple numerical fact that the players have, in the average case, four times the imaginative power of the game master. There are simply more of them than there are of you…why should you do all the work?

They come up with character concepts…why not sit back and have them create the direction of the campaign as well?

What I have done in past campaigns is to create the opening, and then sit back and observe what the players do with it. I then react to what they’ve done, and we’re off and running.

Some examples:

“The King is dead”
I tend to use this opening in games where the player characters are fairly high-powered, both in ability and influence. I’ve used it in MARVEL SUPERHEROES, as well as VAMPIRE.

The set up is this: The players are subordinate to a leader of some kind. You give them an overview of the situation to start play. Then, on the first night, you kill off the leader. You then sit back and watch the fallout. The players will react to the event. Their reactions will give you a direction in which to take the campaign. One player might try to assert him or herself as the new leader…other players might try as well, leading to intra-party conflict. More astute players might start worrying about what the power vacuum will mean to the group’s enemies…giving you an opening to throw those very enemies right at them.

The first VAMPIRE campaign that I ever ran, back in 91, used this opening, and managed to run for over a year and half just on the seeds of stories planted by the actions of the players on that first night of play.

“Why are they after US?”
This is a fun one. I’ve tended to use it in games where the starting player-characters aren’t supposed to know much about what’s going on…it lends a bit of tension and action to the discovery that they undertake. I’ve used it in IMMORTAL, JUSTICE, INC., and 7TH SEA.

Here’s the deal. You just come up with a group of bad guys, and have them attack the players. Have them make comments like “at last!” or “Turn it over, scum!”…something that indicates that they have a clear reason for the assault. Do you need to have a reason? Well, no, actually…just be vague. You’ll come up with a reason later, and it will seem like you had it all planned from the beginning.

Remember: Raymond Chandler once said that if a story was getting boring, you should just have two guys with guns kick down the door and come in shooting. It becomes ten times more interesting if it seems like there is a reason for them to be there.

“The Blake’s 7 Gambit”
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Blake’s 7 was a really kick-ass British sci-fi series in the early 80s. I blatantly lifted the set-up of the show for not one, not two, but three different SF campaigns: STAR WARS, PERIPHERY(a small press game that I wrote in 1993), and TRAVELLER.

The campaign starts as follows: The players are prisoners, aboard a vessel of whatever wicked-and-nasty government has locked them up. The ship comes upon a derelict vessel, which the nasty government jailers want to salvage (salvage has historically been a great way for naval personnel to get rich/buy their way out of the service). The vessels link up, but the crews sent over by the prison vessel are never heard from again. The captain of the prison vessel, unwilling to let the salvage go, decides to send over a group of expendable prisoners to secure the vessel and find out what happened to the other crews…with no weapons, and wearing “dead-man collars” which will kill them if they attempt escape.

The players have to overcome whatever has been killing off the other salvage crews, figure out a way to take control of the vessel, and evade their captors. Of course, when they discover that the vessel is massively more advanced than anything they’ve ever seen…then the fun begins. What will they do with such a resource? Fight for the rights of their fellow oppressed citizens? Become the biggest, bad-ass space pirates the galaxy has ever seen? Don’t worry…they’ll show you.

The point here is that your players are more than capable of dragging any carefully prepared story that you have off to hell and gone. Almost every “how to GM” article or section in a rulebook that I’ve read has contained the “be prepared to have your adventure completely screwed up” admonition.

So, if they’re going to do it anyway, why not roll with it? It only takes a couple of things on your part: the ability to think on your feet, and the ability to keep a straight face when they assume that you’d planned it that way all along.

This week’s recommendations: I’m reading The Arthurian Companion, 2nd Edition by Phyllis Ann Karr. I’m listening to DELTRON 3030 (a hip-hop sci-fi concept album).

See ya in 7.