Transcript
Speaker: Good. Good. So good. Good. So very good. Good.
Speaker: Welcome to the Good GM's Podcast. I'm E.E. Morris, and today's episode is Lore of the Worlds. And now, here's James.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to another episode of Good GM's podcast. I'm James and I'm not joined by my co-host Chucky today. This is a special recording session that I'm doing. I have a guest here today who goes by the name of Cam Rogers. Cam Rogers has been building worlds for a living for over a decade. Novelist, director,
Speaker: lead writer for Warframe, which is one of the biggest game universes in the world. um You've written novels. You've written, you were an extra on and Queen of the Damned, if I'm not mistaken as well. That's pretty neat. If you look closely, you can see my hand somewhere, I'm sure.
Speaker: There you go. Very cool. Very cool. So you, you know, you've been around for, for a little while. um I'm here. I'm excited because I'm here with, with Cam and we're going to be doing some chin wagon, which is, I believe what the young kids are saying in Australia these days.
Speaker: So yeah, the young kids, my dad's generation. Yeah. So, um welcome. How are you doing? Good. Yeah, pretty good. How are you doing? I'm wonderful. Wonderful. Happy to be here. um So, we yeah we normally do... I should have asked you this before, but um I kind of know the answer to this question because you are working in our in our Patreon right now, working on our our in our Discord. and you're running one of our actual plays. So one of the questions we usually ask is what you've been playing lately. And as the time of recording and the time of this airing will be a little different, but you've you've been playing some Mothership.
Speaker: um I am prepping Mothership, which will be the first RPG that I've run in a while. because And of course, my neighbor just started grinding metal. Oh, perfect.
Speaker: That's very metal right now. That's awesome. You can hear it a little bit. Again, there's not much you can do about it other than yell at him. And then you got this guy yelling back at you like, hey, I'm working. Okay. um But yeah, Mothership. um So i'm I'm prepping that. ah Really, really loving it.
Speaker: And I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I think I've just poached one of your players as well, Claire. So she's going to- Yes, Claire from my Masked and I are Lithotep game, who nobody knows yet because your your your actual play is going to start before mine ever gets the first episode out there, which I'm working on. um but And then also you've been doing helping us out with the on the Discord. So for those of you who don't know, who are listening and and are wondering what the heck we're talking about here, if you join our Patreon at a free level or better, better, um you can you can become a member of our Discord. And in our Discord, we have a lot of cool people like Cam here, and we have cool things like a book club. And our first book club book that we've decided, and it's not just a book club, it's not like Angela's Ashes or No Country for Old Men. We're talking game books and the first book we've chosen is mothership. So cam's going going to help, uh, the group of people who want to be a participant in that, in that read through, I don't know if it started at the time of this episode airing or not, but that's an example of the kind of fun stuff we can do in our discord. So thanks for doing that.
Speaker: Yeah, no worries. It's, uh, it's going to be super fun. Yes, indeed. It's a great little game. That is amazing, actually. I'm really looking forward to it. I don't know much about it, so I'm actually looking forward to the book club because I think I'd like to learn ah vicariously through other people. I might grab a copy of it. um So we're we're here today to talk about the world, ah but not just...
Speaker: the world we live in, but but all of the other imaginable worlds that we can discuss. We're talking about lore building, world building, um and from a GM's perspective, how do we keep track of that stuff? So why don't we start with you. um tell us Tell us about yourself and why you're our qualified expert for world building and lore building.
Speaker: um I started running role-playing games like in the early 80s in my dad's shed, and that's basically where I learned how to write quickly and well for a very demanding audience who would give you feedback in real time. Yes. um And like everybody, basically just started you know doing what it said in the book and and being very kind of rigid about that, but quickly realizing that what made stories work and what gave them a life beyond the session was the characters.
Speaker: And, you know, the players make these characters because, and, you know, they mean something to them that, know, they're bonded very tightly to them. They, they have a life inside the player's head. And as I would later come to learn in writing novels,
Speaker: character is plot. Um, it's, it's not good point. Yeah. It's, it's, it's not about like, you know, we've got to go rescue the princess or whatever. It's about this person has conflicting internal motivations. They're in a group with other people who have conflicting internal motivations Many of those motivations are emotional and don't make any sense, but are incredibly relatable.
Speaker: um And that has to interface with the world and the the the myriad pressures that this world puts on them. right And when you get that friction and when those sparks starts flying, that's when the plot starts telling you what it is. Oh, wow. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah. So it's like, it's like ah when I think of, again, I've been watching a lot of walking dead. I think of zombies and a zombie horror genre. Zombies aren't the, they aren't the, aren't the backdrop. The zombies are the weather. They're the the disaster in the disaster movie.
Speaker: Yeah, they're they're no different they're no different than the outbreak or the or the or the train wreck. they Or the aliens and aliens. or the Yeah, exactly. So the the characters are the plot. I love that. I love that. um So how do you keep... So i guess I guess the big question too is when you have a world that you're building, you're not just building... like The player characters are participating maybe a little in... like what's the name of the guy that runs the convenience store, but more so the bigger story. And we're talking epic stories too, right? We're talking about some, some pretty major things, not just like, you know, my kids on bikes campaign, which is about a small town and a bunch of monsters. We're talking about, sometimes we're talking about like eons of lore, you know, countries at but at war with each other. How do we how do we, how do we build a world like that?
Speaker: Well, i mean, is is that That's in your in your in your wheelhouse, right? Because Warframe, I assume, is is a like one of the things you worked on. That's that's a bigger world than just... Oh, yeah, for sure. But I don't think you land going...
Speaker: you don't You don't just land and build Middle Earth first and the characters second. like you know Middle Earth starts with a simple guy. you know The Hobbit starts a simple guy living a simple life in a very simple place.
Speaker: And then in steps, it becomes more and more exponentially complicated. And those exponential layers of complication each contain elements like the elements that we started talking about. And when they rub against, you know, maybe it creates friction and sparks and those sparks are kind of the plot.
Speaker: And that's that's how you wind up getting the farm boy becoming, you know, the world saving hero if you want to take that route. um So i think it's a mistake in some ways to want to start out building this huge grandiose world.
Speaker: it's It's kind of like in that sense, you're wanting to have written rather than wanting to write. And I think it's important that you want to write more than you want to have written. So if you give it like, I'm way more interested in ah so in in the stories you know in a story about you know a group of flawed screw ups struggling to pay the rent you know in a disaster of their own making than I am about yet another story about a chosen one saving the universe. Because I can relate to the first one.
Speaker: You can't really relate to the second one. No. and And with the second, the second one really is just a kind of a dramatization of our love of celebrity. Right. You know what i mean? Yeah. You know, you want the cookie. You don't want to, you don't you know, you don't want the process of becoming a chef.
Speaker: Right. Yeah. sand you want you know And you want you want praise and blah, blah, blah. but it's a lot more it's a lot more interesting seeing people at their best while going through their worst than it is seeing people either at their best going through their best or at their worst going through their best.
Speaker: The last one would probably describe like the Sopranos or succession or something like that, which can be a good story. Yes. But anyway, my point is, I know what you're saying. i know what you're saying. Yeah. But my point is the, the, where the good stuff is, it's in the characters, right? It's, it's always, it's always in the characters. If you don't have good characters, you've got nothing. So, so if you do the characters, right, your reward is it generates this epic story.
Speaker: Now, uh, One of the best role-playing games I ever ran was ah Dark Heresy, which was a Warhammer 40,000 role-playing game. I'm not sure it's in print anymore.
Speaker: um but some But that was set against the backdrop of arguably the grandest, most detailed, lore-heavy universe, science fiction universe that's ever been created.
Speaker: h But obviously we didn't make that. But the focus of the game was four characters. And this huge, grinding, oppressive universe was just the background and the context in which these small stories had to had to survive and function.
Speaker: Okay. So did you keep track of that grandiose or you just knew it because you read it? Like, did you, did you, were you prepared? Like, i guess what I'm getting at is, so I'm running mass of my lithotep, which is one of the globe trotting world saving epic adventure of, of like ah monumental proportions. um So I kind of have to keep track of like, if the characters go zig instead of zag, o I need to know where they're going next. But, but Am I doing it all wrong? Like, are you are you like, ah is your suggestion to understand the world and then just react as the characters create the world around them?
Speaker: As they, so as they discover a new place, you're prepared to, to, to write it as you go. Okay, so there's that case so there's there's sort of two answers to that. one is One is the answer in the context of something like 40K, which is this you know huge already pre-made backdrop.
Speaker: and And the other answer is in something much smaller and homemade that you know the universe is sort of filling itself in as you play. And so with the first one, I was much more au fait with the 40K universe then than I am now.
Speaker: But even then it doesn't matter because if you're, if you're like a tiny little cog in a really huge machine, you don't, the the cogs don't, know the huge machine. They only need to know the other cogs around them, big or small.
Speaker: And as long as you're familiar with that frame, everything else works just fine. They're not going to know what you don't know. They're only going to know what is pressing on them and what those, what those pressure mechanics are connected to. Okay. And that's really all that matters.
Speaker: All they really care about is how does this affect me and why? Pressure mechanics. Explain that one to me because that's a great term and I want to, I'd love to ah like the concept of a ticking clock, like that's a pressure mechanic. Okay. um Two people sitting, sitting at a table. One of them knows there's a bomb under the table. The other one doesn't.
Speaker: And person A is trying to talk the person person B into getting out of the cubicle before it goes off, but he can't tell them about the bomb. Okay, so is the bomb the pressure mechanic or is the knowledge of the bomb the pressure mechanic? That's all pressure mechanics. Right? So so that's like an especially tense thing. But, you know paying the rent is pressure mechanic.
Speaker: um Not screwing up your relationship, ah you know, trying to win your girl back before she gets married to somebody else is a pressure mechanic. Okay, okay. The Death Star approaching Yavin 4 is a pressure mechanic. Right. And these, so these, these are terms that I hadn't, I hadn't heard before, but so now I know the term, the great, it's a great one. Pressure mechanics. I'm going to keep that in my, ah in my. Yeah. So the nice thing about pressure mechanics is that they generate tension and tension is narrative currency.
Speaker: Like, and narrative currency is something that you bank and then spend strategically in order to get an emotional, motivational,
Speaker: response that is memorable right so for example know i got every i hate the fact that i everybody always comes back to star wars going to do it anyway star wars is a great example yeah i know because everybody knows her and everybody knows yeah yeah like it all you know like a good story always always comes to a to a to a pinpoint head yes and you know you could argue with star wars it's you know the spirit of Obi-Wan telling Luke to trust himself and in doing so saves the universe.
Speaker: But all this kid has done is kind of not be good at the stuff this old guy has been trying to teach him to do And so now you're having to trust.
Speaker: It comes down to like a split second where you've got to trust this incompetent farm boy to not screw up at this thing that he's only ever screwed up at. yeah and And so then you get that kind of thing and you get that inhalation. Right. Which is basic, which is the cue for the audience. And that's the narrative currency that's been built up from all of the pressure mechanics. Exactly. get to pay off for the big explosion. And that wouldn't work if you hadn't set up the thing with the targeting bot on the Millennium Falcon, if you hadn't set up.
Speaker: You know, all all all of these things, right? And him constantly being upstaged by Han, all that stuff. um And so you do this long enough and you you begin to just sort of get and and a very instinctive ah grasp of how to build the bottom layer of that pyramid in order to support, in in order that the next layer of tension means something because those blocks are attached to the tension blocks below.
Speaker: okay and as you go up and as you go up that pyramid, it just becomes more and more tense until in the in the final moment of the third act, you get the actual cap of the pyramid where all of this pays off and it just, ble and you get that tension release. you know When Luke inhales and holds his breath, the audience inhales and holds their breath. Gotcha.
Speaker: And that's the pinpoint. And that's ideally kind of what you're you're building towards. So how do you, how do you track? We interrupt our program to bring you this important message.
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Speaker: right on friday nights good gms on twitch look for good gms podcast and be there and get some pizza what you're you're building towards so how do you how do you track all of these points though like and this is i guess what i'm getting back to and i mean we can talk about like oh there's kanka and world anvil and there's there's wiki and there's there's all kinds of different websites and stuff i'm not talking about that necessarily but mentally like so let's say you're running this Star Wars campaign and your main characters are your are your are your are your heroes, how do you track like what happens and what's planned what you plan to happen?
Speaker: Like you you have to have already figured that like Grand Moff Tarkin is an NPC you've you've you've created and and you've you've got a voice in mind. You're like, I'm going to use my Peter Cushing voice, right? Like you've got all of those yeah those things. how How are you keeping track of that as a writer, as ah as ah as a GM, like both both sides of that story? Well, I mean, running a game is different to writing a book. Obviously, yes. so If you're just writing a book, then write a book because the players have to write too. So when when it comes to – one of the things that i really like writing about about running a role-playing game, whether it's a scenario that I've written myself or if it's something canned, is is never is never really knowing what's going to happen and being surprised by it and then rolling with it. Like for from where I'm sitting, being a good GM and having the most fun being a GM –
Speaker: And for players to have the most fun being GMed by me is having a good grasp of improvisation, having ah a good grasp of being able to think laterally in the moment, being able to yes. And what the player is doing, like never, never really having like a concrete idea of they have to go down this corridor and they have to open this door. And when they're in this door, this has to happen. And in respect, like none of that, like if they want to if they just want to go, if they want to go sideways,
Speaker: I want to let them go sideways because as far as I can tell, my job really is to just facilitate the world. And as long as they feel that the world is living, breathing and reactive and that there there are no invisible walls and you whatever they want to do, they can do my job.
Speaker: is to keep the high level structure of the story in my head and ah and to always keep my antenna extended for ways to reintroduce narrative threads to the new context or setting that the player's joy and delight has shepherded them towards. Right. And if I do that, then they're doing me a favor in the sense that they are creating a world and a setting and an experience that is the most fun for them.
Speaker: Right. And I am, and I'm doing my job by making that narratively relevant by having a sort of a knife fighter's grip on the structure of the plot that I can, when the moment presents itself, maybe reintroduce or even re-skin the context of the next narrative piece to fit the context that they've introduced.
Speaker: Okay. So they're still, they're still sort of, you know, headed towards, you know, the outcome. But on top of that, because i understand their characters and I know enough about their characters' backstory, what's important to them, you know, though the the emotional wounds they have, you know, the the the the personal beefs or goals that are emotionally important to the players that they would like to resolve, the wishlist of like cool stuff they would like this character to be involved in, right down to even just a fantasy of ah doing a particular thing in a particular kind of scene, like, you know hanging one arm off the back of a spaceship while, you know firing at a bunch of bandits down below or something like that. Right, right, right. You know, if I can facilitate that, then it's a lot more fun for them.
Speaker: It gives me sort of work orders and it provides, it's one of the things that provides what I think of as liberating constraints in the sense that anything that tells me what this story isn't makes my job easier. Okay.
Speaker: so So what it means is that like I'm not burning a whole – I don't have a whole bunch of cognitive load spent trying to cover all my bases. I can instead use instead use that mental and creative energy to just make everything we're doing doubly fun, doubly immersive, doubly meaningful. Right.
Speaker: And in doing that, the story is going to survive beyond the table and they're going to want to come back. And so in terms of like ah you know tracking stuff, the only thing I'm really interested in tracking is the stuff that is emotionally and personally meaningful to the players and by extension ah to the characters and by extension the players. So you do you have a ah notebook beside you and you write these things down as you go? do you ah back Back in the day, we were playing every weekend. so ah In some cases, in occasionally I would do that, but generally the the bullet points per character per player was so obvious that I didn't need to. Right. Yeah. Because it was crafted in such a way, right? There was this detonation that you just didn't you know you didn't really forget.
Speaker: um but i'm But I'm also looking for, you know ah as a result as a result of these things, like you know NPCs that could be really cool or you know a kind of a story angle that could be real... or what i Actually, what um'm but primarily, what um'm all of these things really are just another name for setups.
Speaker: Okay, yes. Like yeah a really cool setup, because I can think of ah of a doubly cool payoff. Right. And you know maybe it's you know maybe it's ah it's a story permutation that's you know really fascinating that'll let me plug into a piece of law world lore that I think is really, really interesting that I'd love to bring the characters into. Right. um Because that makes a richer that makes a richer story. It's not just, again, the farm boys. Yeah.
Speaker: It's now the farm boys in the world where the evil wizard a hundred years ago created a curse that you couldn't use the word blue. Yeah. So like when I made settings for Warframe, what was really important to me was like, when Warframe started. Sorry, like Warframe is, again, i'm not i'm not i'm ah I'm a table gamer, not ah not a a PC gamer.
Speaker: Warframe is sci-fi? Warframe is battle? Warframe is sci-fi. So ah the high-level story is that it's ah it's a third-person team-based science fiction shooter. Okay. yeah um in a in a In a big open universe,
Speaker: Dozens of worlds, dozens of planets, dozens of factions, hundreds of characters, highly like, you know, a hundred thousand pages of dialogue and script. Um, and, uh, I got brought on in 2017. I think the game had been live for about three years at that point, but it, to hear the creative director at the time,
Speaker: describe it, they brought me on to lift their narrative game because back then it really, it was just a corridor shooter, really. It was just a little like a procedurally based sort of corridor shooter. And they brought me on to um start doing their open world stuff.
Speaker: So I created three or four open worlds for them. or And each of these open worlds has ah a history a context in this solar system spanning conflict.
Speaker: um There is a society, the society has a very distinctive culture and um the culture is typically based in what we call a hub, you know, a city or a a place where players can run around and interact with merchants and characters.
Speaker: And then there's like a cast of characters. And what was really important to me was that these settings, not not even just the characters in the settings, but the settings themselves, ah were aware of each other and cross-referenced with each other, spoke about each other, talked about each other. So that the the setting itself, the larger setting, became self-aware.
Speaker: wow and it felt alive. like Yeah, all all of the different parts created a self-informing system. h And so what that did was it gave it gave it the system a life of its own.
Speaker: It gave it an internal and an external life that the players could trust because all of these components were bouncing and sparking off of each other and being influenced by each other. But, um,
Speaker: ah But it also, again, eliminated choice paralysis in terms of ah character design, scenario design, future setting design, because it was telling us what it was not.
Speaker: These settings were telling us what they weren't. So we could just play with what they we knew they were. um And so I guess because because they were cross-referential, it would give the players an excuse to see the other ones.
Speaker: So not just live in one and not have any reason to even care that there's three others or whatever, right? Yeah. And players had you know favorite you know favorite ah you know hubs and settings that they liked and favorite characters that they liked.
Speaker: And you know they got ah they got a big kick. And it's the thing too is- This is just like this is just like an RPG, like just to be fair, like a table a table RPG. It's that you're going to have your settings, you're going to have your places you go back to, and you're going to have your NPCs that you like talking to. And that's great. Yeah. no yeah and And what it does is it um it never lets you get bored because- and this is something Star Wars does well and it's something 40K does well, is there's a lot of color on the plate and there's a lot of color movement and variety in the settings. So, you know, yeah, there's the Imperials. Yes, there's the Rebels. There's also like the scum and villainy aspect. There's also like, you know, the monastic Jedi aspect. And then there's all of the other, you can tell any story in the Star Wars universe. You can tell any story in the 40K universe.
Speaker: You know, if you if you get tired of the grimdark stuff, go play an orc who's just a football hooligan with a gun. Like, yeah. You know, or play, you know in you know, a very austere, you know, elder with a very high and mighty sensibility, you know, who exists to or remove, you know, much bigger wheels within wheels kind of thing.
Speaker: Right, right, right. um There's always, you know, there's there's something for everybody, right? That's awesome. And so when it comes to the RPG stuff, that's kind of what I like to do as well is and it's one of the things Mothership does as well as ah in in reading the material they've got is,
Speaker: One of the things Jim Henson tried to never do was repeat himself. Something I try to never do is repeat myself, not to compare myself to Jim Henson. But one of the things that Mothership leans on and they make a point of is try not to repeat yourself in the sense that, okay, if if this if you tell a story about ah you know what is it to be human, then...
Speaker: if the next story is a story about what it is to be human, the players are going to feel like, oh, okay, Mothership is ah a game in which you constantly question what it is to be human. But no, the next one's body horror. And the next one is that is is like um you know gynecological horror, like in the vein of Alien. And you know maybe the next one is is something more you know k Cronenbergian or John Carpenter-ish or it's Event Horizon or it's Aliens. or its yeah know you know So you just you're constantly sort of mixing it up.
Speaker: Oh, that's great. And that's, I think, and and if you also find if you do that, Not only does it stop you getting into a rut as a game master, what it means is the players are always shifting their footing as well, which means they're taking different actions, which means the machine is always sparking.
Speaker: Right. Because you're not wearing a groove. Right. And that's it. And that's it. And that's that's exactly what i was going to say is that's key for like, if you want to do horror, you can't let the players think they know exactly what's going to happen next.
Speaker: The scariest horror is the ones that, you know, like to me, like Lost Highway is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. And the number one reason is that there's no rules. Anything can happen at any point in that movie. And it's terrifying.
Speaker: And I'm not saying that that's a smart method for GMing, but if you can shift like today's today, like this session or this, this storyline is, is ah like you said, is, is, is, uh,
Speaker: investigative survival horror. And the next one is like corporate, ah you know, espionage. And you know you never, you never know what you're going to get. Right. Yeah. It's of the reasons I liked running cyberpunk 2020 back in the day as well, was there was just so much scope for all sorts of stories, high, high status, low status, all that stuff. I mean, the other thing, just getting back to what you said before is like, you know, you said the reason lost highway scared you is because anything could happen because there's no rules that,
Speaker: makes me anxious because lost highway does have rules. You just have to work to like, if you were speak to David Lynch, he would absolutely tell you exactly like if he wanted to, he would, he would break down exactly what it is. And if you look at it, then people have broken it down.
Speaker: There are I swear he said it was a dream. Like it was, it was based around the idea of a dream where in a dream you could like Mitch Hedberg says one minute you're sleeping. The next minute you're building a go-kart with your former landlord.
Speaker: Like, you know, yeah and that's what I, that's why I found it. Like, I'm not saying there's no rules. I'm saying that at what at different points in the movie, actors play different characters. but yeah So this is the, let's see, this is something I try to keep in mind. Right. um I've worked with a lot of people who ah decide they just want stuff to happen. And,
Speaker: You have to have rules. if you If you don't, if you just do that, you're going to, you do eventually wind up losing the audience's trust. hundred percent. If it, if it becomes so messy that you just sound like, you know, Charles Manson creating your own language and thinking you're super special. Right. you're just talking gibberish. No, you're you're right. i I didn't mean to imp imply that no rules was the way to scare people. but No, no, no. Um, but, um, Oh God, I was going somewhere with that. Sorry. Sorry. No, it's okay. Uh,
Speaker: I think youre you were you're probably you were talking about the idea that you can't just keep making stuff up on the spot because your audience is going to stop caring. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it there needs to – oh, yeah. So so the word – you can't just dismiss dismiss that as mystery because mystery only works if the withholding of information isn't frustrating. Right.
Speaker: Yes. Otherwise, you're you're just you're just an annoying dilettante, really. um but But if they are confident that you've just raised a question that at some point you will reward their investment with some kind of an answer...
Speaker: Great. Fine. but But if the withholding of – my litmus test is always if the withholding of information is just annoying, then don't do it. Right. But if it's intriguing and it makes them sit forward, then yes, absolutely. But remember, you almost always have to pay it off. That's a skill. That's hell a skill. It can be. It can be. I mean, like David Lynch – and I agree with this. One of the things David Lynch hated about – Modern filmmaking is this corporate compulsion to just tie everything up with a nice, neat bow and give all of the answers. Because then when you leave the theater, you're not asking any questions. The story doesn't exist in your mind and it's just dead.
Speaker: So David Lynch is, in my opinion, like masterful at knowing what to answer and what to leave unresolved. Yes. Yeah. you in that And that's the thing. And you're right. To to to use the Lost Highway examples to continue with that one. the the What made it scary is not that there wasn't rules, is that we didn't fully understand them.
Speaker: o And they weren't spelled out for us. Like when we watch a movie... a war movie, right? We watch, we watch a a movie about world war one, right? We, we, we know what happened. We know that suddenly the bad guy's not going to be able to fly.
Speaker: You know, they they don't suddenly have lasers. There's not going to be, you know, um it can still be scary. It can still be terrifying in the understanding that what, what, what can happen is, is, is vast and, and, and and like huge.
Speaker: Hmm. But it's still scary. um I guess it's. Yeah. So, you know, it's funny because i I had an idea for what this episode was going to be about. And I realized this episode is about story.
Speaker: This episode isn't about creating worlds and stuff. We've got some good information in that. But really, I'm talking to a writer about how to tell a good story. And I'm getting a lot of benefit from this and so are our listeners. So thank you very much. I love them this. This is way better.
Speaker: That's cool. But I mean, but but this stuff, this stuff is foundational to creating worlds. Like, like you don't, like I said, like having, having created like, you know, a deep rich world that people love is a by-product of having done the work with characters. Right.
Speaker: Right. Yes. You know, it it comes from that. So, and and to go back to Jim Henson, a good example of a bad example is to me, and again, I'm going to get a lot of flack. I know I'm going to get a lot of flack here for saying this, but I remember loving The Dark Crystal when I saw it as a child and watching it again as an adult and thinking,
Speaker: the character of The main character in this story sucks. the the The depth of this character is is is is paper thin. And so it it lost me as an adult watching this movie. What got me as a child was the wonder of the world and the puppets and the beauty of it. But what lost me as an adult is you have a ah a place run by the mystics who taught this kid nothing and then sent him on an epic quest.
Speaker: ye He literally steps outside and steps on a stick and goes, what's this master? What's this? I don't know anything. like yeah and look And quite often those simpler stories you know will appeal more to kids than to adults, for real.
Speaker: um you know ah um But character is everything. You can't just create this beautiful, vast world with an epic storyline that's the 10,000 years ago there was a shard that was the blah, blah, blah. It's a great lore. It's an amazing world.
Speaker: But the story itself wasn't entertaining as an adult to me, watching again. Yeah, I mean, the sequel I did, I don't think that's the interaction. Yeah. I don't think the sequel they did got the same traction as the original did, but also like, I'll be the first to admit that there's an exception to every rule.
Speaker: Right. You know, absolutely there's an exception to every rule. I think the mistake is going in on day one, thinking you're the exception, you know? So I would, I would much rather have a bit of humility about that in the face of like 2000 years of storytelling tradition. And then if I realize, you know, if we're lucky enough to realize partway through that,
Speaker: something about what we're doing is the exception, great. you know Identify it and went and work with it. That's fantastic. But I would much rather i would i would ah would much rather gamble my time and the time of everybody else involved, including the players who are trusting me with it, with something I can trust.
Speaker: Yeah. Something that I know will work, something that I know will be emotionally satisfying um without without being predictable or formulaic even. Because the more you do this, the better you out it. you want to be surprised too.
Speaker: Yeah. exactly Well, that's the thing. And this is why I like the the the improv, quasi-improv aspect, not only of running role-playing the games, but even building a world like you know what you see in Warframe or in one of my books or something like that, is that it always comes from first principles.
Speaker: but you know You have this cast of characters. They're different in these ways. They spark in these ways. They spark because they're reacting these ways. And part of that is grounded in their immediate world. Their immediate world is connected to a larger world, which is connected to a larger world, which is connected to a larger world.
Speaker: And all of these things inform and form and form and then cross and form back down as well. So you're not writing an atlas. You're not writing a history book. You're writing a story. You're a cartographer.
Speaker: Right. You are- The world is a blank map and you're moving forward and and you're dispelling that fog of war as you move as you move through and and map and chart the areas that you So you're not a navigator. You're the guy of drawing the map.
Speaker: Yeah, and you can and you can sort of infer that, like, you know, here's a river and it looks like it's branching out. So that's probably going to be a bay, which probably means we're near the coast. And if there's a coast, it means that there'll probably be people living there and there'll probably be fisher people. And if they're fisher people, because this is a volcanic area, then they probably have this sort of... blood and So you can sort ah of kind of logically... Create world outside of what the players are discovering as you go.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. and And it's funny because, again, this kind of brings us around back to the beginning, which is that ah like when I came into this conversation, my brain said, okay, we're going to talk about world building. And we did talk about world building by starting with character.
Speaker: And that's exactly the moral of this story is character is the plot. Yeah. Character's plot. Character's plot. So, so Cam, I think that's, it feels to me like we're going to have to have you back on the show for sure. um But before we conclude, why don't you do me a favor and tell us about your, your podcast that that's starting. It's going to be starting sometime near the end of September. I've heard dates, but I don't know the exact one. So we're just, we'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker: ah Yeah, it's called um I Love This and I'll Tell You Why. And I talk to interesting people about their niche interests. so ah the first episode is talking to Miko Rautalati, who's one of the writers at Remedy. He was a senior writer um above me when I was working on Quantum Break at Remedy.
Speaker: He's one of the writers on Control, Control Resonant, which is coming out in September. Miki's great. He talks about his love of tabletop role-playing games. Perfect. um How it changed his life, broke him out of his shell, gave him a career. um and um And it gets into the Nordic LARP scene and what he gets out of the the Nordic type of live action role playing the sort of experiences it's given him, the emotional awareness it's given him, um how... It's just made him a better person. So that's a really great one.
Speaker: And our listeners are going to get a lot out of that episode. So make sure you check it It's a lot of fun. You'll really it. love this and I'll tell you why. part of We talked to an actor and director about his love of volcanoes and how that basically informed his relationship with his father.
Speaker: uh we talked to our producer about an obscure seven episode sci-fi series from the early 70s that basically made her the person that she is today so it's a great bunch of things i love this and i'll tell you why is is the topic and that's the that's the name that's awesome and again that's part of the red juice uh you know our our our our loving producers uh reggie studio um so again cam thanks for joining us today any anybody One thing I always ask my guests when we when we when we do this is what's one what's your best GM tip? It doesn't even have to do with what we've been talking about, although I think you've probably given us a good some good ones today. But if if you had to leave us with one good GM tip for our good GMs who are listening, what would you what would you drop on us?
Speaker: Don't have a death grip on a concrete floor. Like be okay. Understand that the players are at least the missing third and let them have fun with it.
Speaker: and just be flexible and have a good enough understanding of how the plot works that they can they can run off into the hills if they want, but you'll still find a way to to make the make the plot work for them.
Speaker: Got it. um Don't be afraid to, I think the the kill your darlings is ah is the expression, I think, is don't be afraid to let go of something that you spend hours writing, even if, even yeah, no, I love it. I love it.
Speaker: And maybe that maybe that brings to the point where maybe we shouldn't spend hours writing things just in case. Oh, I'm i'm somebody i'm somebody who does. Like Mothership is, for example, like it's ah it's a pamphlet really. Right. But because I want to make something cinematic, I'm doing sort of high signal, low noise, sort of punchy, sort of read aloud material to just concisely set the scene.
Speaker: Got it. And and just littered with little bolded notes to myself about you're probably going to need this rule. It's on this page, blah, blah, blah, just so I can i'll see that sort of flow through it seamlessly. There you go. but So I think there's a – I think that it's all – it's It's a ratio issue. It's it's all and it's all in the ratio.
Speaker: Perfect. Perfect. Let let the players tell you tell you where the story goes to. All right. Thanks for joining us and you be good. Yeah, you too. Thanks, man. Have a good one. You too. Bye-bye.
Speaker: Thank you for watching. If you like or dislike what you heard, let us know. If you want to suggest an idea for an episode, ask the host a question, or just tell Chuck and James what you really think of them, join our communities at patreon.com forward slash good GM's podcast, or find us on the usual social media platforms.
Speaker: For now, I'm E.E. Morris, and you're all good GMs.
Speaker: We are so grateful to all of our Patreon supporters. At the gooder level, Weird Candy. At the good level, Carl Kiesler, Preston DuBose, Francis.
Speaker: Grouchy Lenny. And me. Yes, E.E. Morris. I put my own money to back our projects because we're all good GMs.
