2

Unframed: The Art of

Improvisation for Game
Masters is copyright
2014 by Engine Publishing,
LLC, all rights reserved.
Jason Morningstars essay,
Agreement, Endowment, and
Knowing When to Shut Up,
is copyright 2013 by Jason
Morningstar, all rights reserved,
and is published by Engine
Publishing, LLC with permission.
Ken St. Andres essay, Why
Trollworld Has Two Moons . . . and
Other Tales, is copyright 2013
by Ken St. Andre, all rights reserved,
and is published by Engine
Publishing, LLC with permission.
Engine Publishing, the Engine
Publishing logo, and the truncated
gear device are trademarks
of Engine Publishing, LLC.
Gnome Stew, The Game Mastering
Blog, and the Gnome Stew logo
are trademarks of Martin Ralya.
Mention of , , or TM products
and services is not intended as
a challenge to those rights or
marks, or to their holders. All such
products and services are the
property of their respective owners.
The Engine Publishing logo was
designed by Darren Hardy.
Published by Engine Publishing,
LLC in July 2014.
Authors: John Arcadian, D. Vincent Baker,
Meguey Baker, Wolfgang Baur,
Emily Care Boss, Walt Ciechanowski,
Stacy Dellorfano, Jess Hartley, Kenneth Hite,
Jennell Jaquays, Eloy Lasanta, Robin D. Laws,
Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Don Mappin,
Scott Martin, Alex Mayo, Jason Morningstar,
Martin Ralya, Kurt Schneider, Ken St. Andre,
Monica Valentinelli, Phil Vecchione,
Filamena Young
Publisher: Martin Ralya
Editor: Martin Ralya
Art Director: Martin Ralya
Graphic Designer: Darren Hardy
Layout: Darren Hardy
Cover Artist: Christopher Reach
Cover Designer: Darren Hardy
Interior Artist: Christopher Reach
Indexer: Martin Ralya
Proofreaders: Robert M. Everson, Daniel Milne
Capitalist Tool: Kurt Schneider
In memory of Aaron Allston, David A. Trampier,
and Lynn Willis
With special thanks to John Arcadian, who was
right about Unframed needing interior artwork
enginepublishing.com
PO Box 571992
Murray, UT 84157
Dedication
This ones for Jonathan Jacobs and Fred Hicks,
without whose inspiration there probably wouldnt
be an Engine Publishing. Slinte! Martin Ralya
Credits
3
Improvisation is at the heart of roleplaying. No matter what roleplaying game
(RPG) youre playing, and no matter whether youre the game master (GM) or
a player, youre improvising constantly during the game. Even if you plan out all
of your adventures in advance, down to the last detail . . . youll still nd yourself
improvising, in little ways and big ways, all the time.
Tere are a few good gaming books out there that address improvisation; my fa-
vorite, other than this one, is Graham Walmsleys Play Unsafe, which changed the
way I look at gaming. (Its seriously good; you should buy it.) But none approach
improvisation from many dierent angles, and I wanted there to be a book that did;
UNFRAMED: Te Art of Improvisation for Game Masters is the result.
Te title refers to two things about improvisation that I love. First, that ideas you
come up with on the spur of the moment are sometimes rough and unnished, but
brimming with potential and wonderful in their own rightlike an unframed can-
vas. And second, that what you improvise during play is often less constrained
less polished, less framedthan what you prepare in advance, and like a painting
coming to life and bursting free of its frame those ideas tend to be surprising.
In Unframed, Engine Publishings fth system-neutral book for GMs, you get the
collected wisdom of 23 GMs on improvisationa core skill for every gamer. And
not just any 23 GMs, but a diverse group of people with unique GMing styles,
varied gaming backgrounds, and a wealth of knowledge and hard-won experience
to share.
Teres no One True Way to play RPGs, and theres no one way to improvise; by
presenting dierent perspectives on the many aspects of improvisation for GMs,
Unframed aims to be a toolkit you can draw from for the rest of your GMing career.
Each essay packs a hell of a wallop into just a few pages. Teres a ow to the book
(a lot of thought went into Unframeds topics and reading order), but every essay
stands on its own and you can read them in any order.
Unframed is also a tool for players: Its full of tips you can use to better portray
player characters (PCs) as well as non-player characters (NPCs), advice on putting
forth ideas that are easy for other players to embrace, and tricks for quickly embrac-
ingand running withthe improvisation your fellow players are doing at the
table. If you play more often than you GM, or love GM-less games
or live-action games (LARPs), youll nd plenty in this book to
make your gaming more enjoyable.
Selecting just 23 authors for Unframed was insanely dicult.
Working with them was notit was a pleasure and a privi-
lege. Tanks for buying Unframed, and happy improv!
Martin Ralya Salt Lake City, UT April 2014
Introduction
4
Table of Contents
Contents
An Ear in the Grass:
What David Lynch Can
Teach You about GMing
Alex Mayo 56
Coherence and
Contradictions
D. Vincent Baker 16
Introduction 3
Youre in a Bar
Eloy Lasanta 52
Yes, and: A Recipe for
Collaborative Gaming
Emily Care Boss 12
Gaming Like an Actor
Filamena Young 25
Improvising
Dialogue Sequences
Robin D. Laws 6
Just in Time
Improvisation: The
Procrastinators Tale
Jennell Jaquays 34
Getting Off the Railroad
and Onto the Island
John Arcadian 21
Agreement, Endowment,
and Knowing When
to Shut Up
Jason Morningstar 43
Improvisation in
Horror Games
Kenneth Hite 39
Why Improv
Meguey Baker 48
Scaffolding to
Support Improv
Scott Martin 29
5
Table of Contents
Additional
Contributor Bios 111
On the Herding of Cats
Kurt Schneider 60
I Say, Then You Say:
Improvisational
Roleplaying as Conversation
Michelle
Lyons-McFarland 64
Selling the Experience
Don Mappin 73
Building Worlds by the
Seat of Your Pants
Monica Valentinelli 77
Hitting Rock Bottom
Phil Vecchione 82
The Unspoken Request
and the Power of Yes
Jess Hartley 99
The Social Sandbox
Walt Ciechanowski 91
Off the Rails: When the
Party Jumps the Track
Stacy Dellorfano 86
Names, Voices,
and Stereotypes
Wolfgang Baur 68
Why Trollworld Has Two
Moons . . . and Other Tales
Ken St. Andre 95
Its Okay to Be Weird
Martin Ralya 103
Index 108
6
Robin D. Laws
Improvising
Dialogue Sequences
Robin D. Laws
Robin D. Laws newest roleplaying game is Hillfolk, in which you weave an epic of dramatic
interaction in an age of hungry empires. Previous RPG designs include The Esoterrorists, Ashen
Stars, Feng Shui, and HeroQuest. His ction projects include eight novels and the short story
collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign. He comprises one-half of the Golden Geek Award-
winning podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, and can be found online at robindlaws.com.
As a GM your most extended exercises in o-the-cu invention occur during dia-
logue sequences. Internalizing the simple structure behind character interaction in
ction, scripted and improvised, allows you to sharpen these scenes, making them
fun, memorable, and rich in story opportunity.
Petitioner and Granter: Understanding the Scene
A simple structure powers scenes of any character interaction in drama, ction, cin-
ema, or TV. One character wants something from another character.
n Wash wants Zo to show that she cares more about him than she does
about Mal.
n Cersei wants to reestablish her position of superiority over Tyrion.
n Loki wants Tor to let him out of his cell.
Te rst character makes a petition of the second character, hoping to get that thing.
Tat makes the rst character the petitioner. Te character hearing the petitioner
has the power to grant this request. Tat makes the character the granteralthough
granters refuse requests as often as they grant them. In the above examples, Wash,
Cersei, and Loki take the roles of petitioner, while Zo, Tyrion, and
Tor are the granters.
(If this all sounds familiar to you, you perhaps recognize it as
the heart of my game Hillfolk and its DramaSystem rules en-
gine. Te terms petitioner and granter come from Te
Conversations, a book-length interview of the legend-
ary lm editor Walter Murch by novelist Michael
Ondaatje.)
7
Improvising Dialogue Sequences
Roleplaying dialogue scenes work the same way. Te only dierence is standard to
RPGs, in that they frequently feature an ensemble of protagonists. Often theyll
make joint petitions of a single character, speaking en masse. Slightly more rarely,
theyll be petitioned as a group, acting as a granter together. Often, you as GM will
make a petition in a two-hander scene (one featuring two characters), your NPC and
one PC. Te PC may then take the petition back to the rest of the group and theyll
debate what to do about it.
Te rst step, then, in sharpening your improvised dialogue scenes is to identify the
petitioner and granter. Tankfully this is a simple callif an NPC proposes some-
thing to the PCs, the NPC is the petitioner and one or more PCs acts as the granter.
n Te March Warden (an NPC) asks the PCs to clear the great swamp of
encroaching orcs.
n Euston Chau (an NPC) asks Dominic (a PC and his wannabe son-in-law)
to have Mr. Bright (another PC) committed to a mental institution.
n Te Mugwump (an NPC supervillain) tells Redblade (a PC vigilante) to
lay o, or hell reveal Redblades secret identity.
Petitioning is active; it seeks to overcome the granters resistance to put a new story
point in motion. Assuming youre letting the PCs drive the story, theyll be making
more petitions of your NPCs than vice versa.
n Te PCs ask the old hermit they encounter out in the great swamp if hes
seen any orc activity.
n Dominic asks Eustons chief security ocer why he cares so much about
Mr. Bright being sent to an institution.
n Redblade pressures the gatekeeper of a criminal dark data network for ac-
cess to the Mugwumps le cache.
Identifying the petitioner helps by requiring you to pin down what the scene is about.
When youre playing the petitioner, you usually know that from the outset. (Some-
times youll shift your NPCs goal in response to what the player says, which is good.
But you still know in the rst place what the character seeks, and you still know even
if that changes in mid-scene.)
When youre playing the granter, you nd out what the scene is about partway
through, when the players make clear their requests. You know your NPC is being
petitioned, and immediately or gradually come to understand what the petition is
about. When you gure it out partway through, its often because the players are also
trying to work out what they want from the character. Expect this to happen when
you introduce a new NPC without establishing right away what her role in the sto-
ryline might be.
When a roleplaying scene seems shapeless, its usually because neither you nor the
players know what its purpose is, and are muddling around trying to nd it. With the
petitioners goal identied, you see how it can proceed to a resolution.
16
D. Vincent Baker
Coherence and
Contradictions
D. Vincent Baker
D. Vincent Baker is the creator and publisher of several critically acclaimed, award-winning, and
controversial RPGs, including kill puppies for satan, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Apocalypse
World. He lives in a little town in New England with his wife and co-designer Meguey Baker and
their three sons.
Prepare a list of images that are purely fantastic, deliberate paradoxes say,
that t within the sort of thing youre writing. Te City of Screaming Statues,
things like that. You just write a list of them so youve got them there when
you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with
the other. Michael Moorcock, How to Write a Book in Tree Days
(http://www.ghostwoods.com/2010/05/how-to-write-a-book-in-three-days-1210)
Improvisational GMing is, in its way, like trying to write a novel in three days. In-
stead of the blank page, you have the eager and expectant players, hoping that youll
say something delightful, startling, provocative, and fun, with no editing and no
do-overs. Go!
Eective preparation is crucial. Moorcock gives us an easy and powerful way to go
about it, a minimum of prep for a maximum of fun.
The GMs Raw Materials
For our purposes, the raw materials an improvisational GM has to work with are the
games setting and scenerythat is, its places and thingsand its cast of NPCs. Te
players characters are their own to play, of course, and their belongings are theirs too.
Te games eventual storyline is strictly hands-o: Te storyline emerges, develops in
play, live at the table, as a result of the players characters interacting with the GMs
setting, scenery, and NPCs.
Because the future storyline is unknown, its impossible to give the NPCs their nar-
rative roles in advance. Te GM cant know which NPCs will turn out to be antago-
nists, sidekicks, trusted friends, hidden inuences, love interests, or even just forgot-
ten, until the moment that it comes true in play. Before then, its just guessing, and
the best policy is to give every NPC, even the most casually-invented, the potential
to step into a major role.
Te right resonances and deliberate contradictions can do it.
17
Coherence and Contradictions
The Right Resonances
By coherence and the right resonances, well take Moorcock to mean the principles
that underlie the game world youre creating.
Take a few minutes to think about how the world is, how things work, and what people
are like, in principle, in the abstract. Youve probably been doing this already, by gut,
as youve been imagining the game and getting excited to play. It wont hurt to make
it explicit. Tree or four principles should be plenty for a start, and you can always add
more as they occur to you. Principles like:
n Nobody really likes their job.
n Every computer has a human face.
n Te city is full of people of every culture.
n Religious devotion is usually hypocrisy.
n A person with a sword is dangerous to everyone.
n Te sun is scorching, blinding, and unforgiving.
n Spaceships are noisy, close, and smell weird.
When you create a setting element, a piece of scenery, or an NPC, you make it cohere
with the rest simply by remembering and following the principles youve established.
Your principles help you improvise things that t into the imaginary world as though
they have always been there.
Deliberate Paradoxes
Its the cracks, the seams, the tensions between things that make them interesting.
When the players rely on you to improvise things for them to be curious about, to
explore and seize upon, you can use inbuilt contradictions, Moorcocks deliberate
paradoxes, to provide the appealing texture.
Moorcocks example, the City of Screaming Statues, is fun and over the top (Scream-
ing statues? How would a statue scream?), but more modest paradoxes will do just
as well. Even utterly down-to-earth features of a place, a thing, or a character can
contradict one another.
I like to say it, simply, as give everything a but.
Te spaceship is hard-worn but lovingly main-
tained. Te island sky is blindingly blue but today
the clouds race in. Te hocus of the desert cult
loves his family with all his heart, but he knows
that in the desert you have to choose who will
have water and who will not.