8.3 Seeds

When you kick off your game, you have a whole sheet full of story seeds: several character seeds, a group seed, and one or more setting seeds. These provide you with fodder to play out during the game and with a framework to which you can tie everything that happens in your story.

At some point, one or more of your seeds will have played out to a conclusion. There is no formula about how quickly this happens or what the conclusion looks like. It’s something that you’ll know when it happens.

In some cases, it’s pretty obvious: Zadie’s character seed about the necklace she had given to her old partner and current nemesis will eventually lead her to him, and they’re going to find a way to settle the score. Once that’s taken care of, the seed is fully developed and doesn’t provide any more room for growth. Once that happens, you can consider that plot closed and start a new one.

Creating new seeds is as easy as coming up with ones in the first place. You make up an event, issue, or insight that will drive the character toward a new series of interesting events, decisions, and conflicts. This doesn’t have to be something that comes up in play; you can just tell your fellow players that you’ve decided that something new happens to the character, and this is it.

If you tie seeds to the development of your abilities (see below), you have additional motivation to keep developing and wrapping up new seeds. But even without that, you’ll find that fresh seeds are always a good way to breathe some new life into your story.

Sometimes you might think about abandoning a seed. If you really can’t figure out a good way to tie it into the story, or it just somehow makes the game less fun for you, it’s perfectly alright to abandon a seed. Just let your other players know so they won’t play to it anymore and make up something new.