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It’s not always necessary to roll dice. Only ask players to make a Save when the outcome is uncertain, the stakes are interesting, and there are consequences for failure.
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Don't prepare plotted stories, as they presume the reactions of your players. Instead prepare interesting situations and problems for your players to solve, subvert, or avoid as they see fit.
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The core of the game is players making informed choices, following by the GM reporting the impact of those choices. Don’t hide information from the players without good reason; you are their eyes and ears in the fictional world. Describe the situation as fully as you can, and ask ‘What do you do?’
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Allow the narrative of your campaign to emerge from choices your players make, and the reaction of the game world to those choices.
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Don’t create problems that have an ‘answer’. Allow your players to surprise you. If they come up with a creative solution, give it a chance to work
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Build responsive situations - add interactivity, dynamic threats, and potential energy. Give players ropes to swing from, mysterious buttons to press, and villains who stand next to explosive red barrels.
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Embrace random chance and the intervention of the dice. Use the dice tables provided in this book to inject events, locations and NPCs into the game world, so that Vaarn will surprise you as well as your players.
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NPCs should have vivid, memorable personalities and easily understood goals (even if they conceal their true aims at first). Once the players know what an NPC wants, they understand how to interact with and manipulate that character.
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Make Vaarn feel alive. NPCs are not static quest givers: they have their own agendas, quarrels, and misfortunes. If the players leave a settlement and return later, something should have changed.
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Make Vaarn feel dangerous. Combat can be deadly and won’t always be fair. Remember that monsters and NPCs want to stay alive too - make use of reaction rolls, morale saves, and negotiations, so that every conflict isn’t a battle to the death.
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Make Vaarn feel strange and beautiful. Describe the red sun casting purple shadows over blue sand dunes, the wild animals with parasitic chrome limbs, and the showers of falling orbital debris that light up the night sky.
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Make the Exotica powerful and interesting. They’re the big prizes everyone is searching for, so they will open up new ways of solving problems for the players. Conversely, make sure the Exotica come with downsides, so there’s a trade-off for using them. Vaarn becomes dull when one tool is the right answer to every question.
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The rules don’t cover everything that will come up in play, so you’ll sometimes have to make a quick ruling that feels right and move on with the game. If the same situation keeps coming up, talk with your players and agree on a new permanent rule to cover it.