Reading Club: Stonetop
Ending our GMing season by going home.
Listen to the latest episode in your podcast player of choice!
This week, in the last episode of our first season, we're discussing recently released fantasy game, Stonetop. We're discussing how it works as a kind of textbook for running games and using it to to launch into big questions about the variosu ways games support GMs.
Excerpt:
After the very brief introduction to the game, brief for a big game like this, the first section that you get in Stonetop directly is called Getting Started. And it is sort of an overview of the session zero process. This is something that's becoming more common now in games because there is this understanding that one of the big tasks as a GM is — there's various different constituent activities, but you can sort of club them together into the grander task of — "getting things started".
Starting play is one of the big goals of the role of the GM because there's so much inertia to getting started. This is everything from, actually getting people scheduled and to a place and figuring out the time and figuring out what game and learning the rules and even after you sort all of that out, just going from we're sitting down at a table to, "Okay, we are playing a game." That step in a kind of Neil Armstrong on the moon kind of way, that's a big step. It's only one step. It's such a small thing, but it is still a big step, and somebody has to do it. And that person is the GM.
With awareness of that task, this idea of we can hold the GM's hand and we can lay out everything to run that first session, we can lay it out explicitly, and we can try to give as much support as possible. If you think of going from not playing to playing as one step that's hard, getting a GM to go from "I'm not sure what I'm running next" to "I'm running this next." Like, that's also a big step...
As always, you can participate in the discussion! Please respond by June 30th or July 1st, either by sending in an audio recording, posting in the official discord, or writing to thomas@rascal.news and we'll include your responses in the talkback episode.
Participation is open to everyone, including non-subscribers!
Discussion Questions
- What do you think about Stonetop? What do you think about it as "a textbook for running games"?
- As a GM, do you find yourselves having a preference for pre-existing settings, setting created at the table, an original setting created by the GM alone, or something else? Do you find yourself moving between these modes? Or just sticking to one? Do you have a particularly memorable experience with one of these modes?
- Do you have a favorite question that you've asked as a GM or that you've been asked?
- What's the best pitch you've ever seen from a game (that wasn't an IP or a sequel)? What about it got you excited enough to run it? Was it very different from your usual thing or in the same wheelhouse?
- What game has made you feel most supported when it comes to improvising? How did it do that?
