The Emergent Game

Here is a process for running and playing adventure games in a Free Kriegsspiel manner that borrows from collaborative storytelling games and aims to minimize prep work. We start with nothing. It's a back-and-forth between Referee and Players.

1. Elevator Pitch
The Referee gives some broad strokes ideas about what the setting could be.
So this is a Desert Punk Fantasy world with gunslingers and ritual magic.
You could be wandering lawmakers from some ancient order.

Players pitch in with their takes on these ideas or specific details they want to add.
We'd rather be desperadoes, also guns & rituals sound fun, but could there also be pulp science stuff?

2. Characters
If that wasn't made clear before, establish what the group is, and who the characters are. Put a limit like 30 words or even 3-ish words (background, talent, weakness? two good things and a bad thing?) to set up characters quickly. What are their relationships, what makes them interesting, and names. We do this before the setting of play so that the players have time to get an idea of who these characters are and that'll also give them a frame of mind through which they'll think about the rest.

3. Local History/Geography
Again, the Referee starts with a pitch, this time for the setting of play - where and when is the game actually happening within that world?
You all have drifted into the frontier town of Rozvood, on the border of the blasted wastes known as the Badlands.
Then you ask them to add their own details to the place, pointed questions can help.

And again, players pitch in with stuff they're interested. We're doing two things here: 1-creating a shared understanding of what the world is like, 2-curating the prep for the players' interests.
This method still assumes the Referee runs the world while Players run their characters, you can detail things more and you probably should be taking notes as ideas hopefully come rushing from these exchanges.

Set up not only a place in space but in time, what's happened recently that upset the status quo or what is threatening to do so?
About a month ago a rich water tycoon called William Van Lordes settled near Rozvood and has been agressively buying land from farmers. Yesterday he came in town with his posse of armed thugs and threatened to take the land by force from anyone who wouldn't run off with their "compensation" of $30.

There's been sightings of the outlaw Kriss Krimson and his boys, the Howlers, in the hills north-east of town. They're probably hiding in the old silver mines. I bet the ghost of old Tom Backany will keep them company. They've got nice bounties on their heads too, would be a shame if their corpses were lost to the mine.

Maintenance on the old railway in the region has been bringing a lot of new blood in the area, there's even a small workers' shantytown with a name now, Rattlesnake, was it? Anyways, rumour is, train's crossing all the way from Leng to the Green Land to the west. Train-robberies are old-fashioned I know but if the money's good...

See what the players seem to take an interest in, and ask them questions as if their characters had already done some legwork. They might set up some obstacles themselves or give you ideas about them. Don't forget to also write down surprises without prompting them. The idea is only to help prepare the opening session, too. The rest of your prep should then naturally emerge from the events of that charged first session (don't be afraid to set up hooks for later adventures during that first session, too).

4. The Game Proper
So far, I haven't mentioned rules. That's because I want you to "make it up" but in a smart way. Start with nothing or some intentionally bland and basic notion like "we roll d6, high is good". Don't worry about how the characters tie into the mechanics. You can do it diceless for the beginning too, in practice it'll probably be so for most of the session.

Then, when a situation comes up and you realize that referee adjudication and table consensus truly aren't enough, OR you get a fun idea about how to resolve it WITH a mechanic, use that mechanic. Don't write it down, just make use of it now and either forget about it, or realize later on that it sticks and works well with the setting of play and style of your table. Or change it if it doesn't. After the first session you may want to commit it to paper, or not.

Throughout multiple sessions of play, you'll naturally tinker with the mechanical framework, add things, remove things, change stuff etc. Try to avoid doing so without direct input from something that happened in the game as playtesting material. That is, don't go "I'm going to add a rule for shooting off hats" unless you've 1) been in a situation where it warranted dice rolling and 2) you actually tried making it work with what you already had at your disposal and it wasn't enough fun. And even then, you probably should do that kind of tinkering during the session. Consider using a Referee Screen so you don't have to worry the players with whatever you're rolling. This means you can keep a solid pacing in running the game, while also doing various playtesting experiments during the adventure.

Eventually you will reach a point where either the game lost steam, or you wrapped it up neatly, or maybe it's still an ongoing thing after months or even years. Regardless, you now have a living document that includes a custom made setting and rules that go with it. Congratulations, you've run a campaign and became a game designer while doing so.


For today's one-shot, I'm going to use the examples I pitched above, plus maybe, just maybe, a 2d6 vs 2d6 roll mechanic because Perfected is very fun.