diff --git a/skills/rpg/references/lessons.md b/skills/rpg/references/lessons.md index d79488a..c8fee02 100644 --- a/skills/rpg/references/lessons.md +++ b/skills/rpg/references/lessons.md @@ -213,3 +213,36 @@ pass. new case so that pairing is its best scene costs nothing and is the whole payoff for returning players. Keep the house rule intact — every seam still needs a written alternate route so new players lose nothing but the echo. + +## 2026-08 — OPEN DAY (The Custodians prologue, house system) + +- **Write the recruitment prologue out of the pregens' own biography lines.** The + ten "(before)" sheets each ended with a *How they found her/him* line. Two of + them — a building that "stopped being on the street it was on" and a caller + talked down "for eleven minutes" — were already the same incident, and the + other eight fitted over it without a single edit to the plot. Build the + prologue at the intersection of the existing seams and the scenario cannot + contradict a sheet, because the sheets came first. **Read the whole roster's + private lines before inventing an inciting incident.** +- **Reconcile the seams in both directions, and prefer changing the sheet.** One + line said *night* and the scenario is an afternoon: one word on the pregen was + the cheap fix, and both became true. Where a seam needed an event the scenario + did not have (a casualty for the one who carries people out, an injury for the + doctor), the honest move is to add the event, not to bend the seam. +- **A scenario where nothing is hostile needs that stated as a GM instruction, in + the first page, three times.** The default GM reflex under pressure is to make + something menacing. "Every figure is busy, polite or preoccupied" is a rule, + not flavour. +- **Let them succeed and let the outcome not change.** For a fixed-timetable act, + write explicitly that every intervention *works* mechanically and alters + nothing — and that the GM must not have them fail instead. Failing is + comforting, because failing implies succeeding would have helped. +- **Three unresolved things is the right number.** One is a loose end, two is a + mystery the table will try to solve, four is untidy. Name them in the GM notes + as *do not resolve* so a helpful GM does not answer them. +- **Midjourney will not stop putting lettering on a building.** "no text / no + signage / no lettering" failed twice on a shopfront-shaped prompt. What worked: + describe it as a *two-ink screen print*, name the two inks, say "flat pale + yellow background instead of sky", and add "no shops". Palette drift and + hallucinated signage are the same failure — the prompt was letting the model + reach for a naturalistic reference photo.