Yep. It also worked to get both F and T types playing.

(I’m working on the MB type test. Can you tell?)

That, and two or three books full of ideas and NPC stats and such. Though, funny enough, I only ever really referenced the MRB and Vimary durring play. And even those more for inspiration and tone than anything else.

Which reminds me, Tribe 8 was a great game for starting characters out on an F basis (where most current Forge games are better about a T basis) — I got people playing Tribe 8 by reading the prophecy of Joshua and then having them read the splat for the Tribe they’d be exiled from. BOOM, they’d be playing and rebelling and looking for spirit quests left right and center.

The more I look at roleplaying, the less and less I see GMs and especially GM prep as being necessary. A lot of times all of that prepwork was just insurance that what you played wouldn’t suck; with adequate guidelines for the actual roleplay around the table, we need less and less of that insurance. We can create — as in Capes, as in Conquer the Horizon — an engaging story from the ground up without prepping it all out before we even start. So we can, as you point out, just have a general destination or even direction in mind and let the events of play develop the details as we go. You had like, one side of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper for Warrrior Unbound, right? And most of that was, I seem to recall, just a listing of (what we now call) player flags. What are games in two years going to look like when we don’t have GM Prep, all we have left is GM Reference Sheets? Exciting!

Remember Deborah in our Tribe 8 game?

Your epic idea is pretty much how that came about. I knew I wanted a Fatima to bite it and a new one to be born (as you guys had skipped Children of Lilith), and I knew I wanted you guys to do it. The rest I just made up in response to things you folks did in game.

Looking back on games like that its funny how hit and miss the techniques were, because I wasn’t actually aware of what I was doing. If’n you’d asked me at the time I probably would have said I was GMing like everyone else, and that game was the same as the one where I railroaded the whole party into joining the darkside.

But in a real way I think the reason that game went better than the previous one (the one based on Trial By Fire) is that in the prvious one I had a map of step by step, but in Warrior Unbound I just had a general outcome that all of you were expecting.

*If it is an epic, what’s a better term for each session?