Hello,
Recently on the Harn forum, I men­tioned these prod­ucts.
I use these prod­ucts as part of my GM bag of tricks.
Dirt cheap, from Dri­veThru.

CRGE; Con­jec­tural role­play­ing GM Emu­la­tor, by Con­jec­ture Games.
UNE; the uni­ver­sal NPC Emu­la­tor
Arc Threads, by Thun­deregg Pro­duc­tions.
BOLD; Uni­ver­sal PC Sto­ries and Deeds Gen­er­a­tor.
Char­ac­ter Webs.

I used to use the Mythic FATE chart before I found CRGE. The for­mer really only works in a game of the same, the lat­ter can be used at any point with any game.
CRGE has you ask­ing sim­ple Yes/​No ques­tions. Fol­low the process in a log­i­cal man­ner.
For exam­ple; in a recent game of Blade, with my char­ac­ter in hid­ing in a city, I had a cou­ple plot events worked out, but I wanted to see if I could add to it.
So I asked, if the player was going to have some other threat = Yes.
Will it be Mag­i­cal = Yes, I think there was ‘but’ or ‘and’, part to the response, which if you inves­ti­gate the sys­tem, adds a qual­i­fier.
From there, it was mostly me. What magical/​mage threat could I intro­duce. OK ‘grey mat­ter’ clicks on.

Early in the game the player had a run in with a cou­ple of mages which resulted in the lab­o­ra­tory blow­ing up. The PC’s (I had two at that point in the game) observed this from a safe dis­tance and assumes the vil­lains died.
But in great comic book style, I could bring the more pow­er­ful back into the story. When the PC was leav­ing, the player who was only at the gam­ing table for a cou­ple of games, did a quick snatch and grab of valu­ables. The mage is being hunted by his rival Mages and needs one of the stolen items back, as it is cru­cial to his power. This was the ‘But’ part of the ques­tion.
So I asked a few more ques­tions about what had hap­pened to the PC. We had estab­lished when he joined the game, that his char­ac­ter came from this city. So it made sense that he had returned.
The ques­tions gen­er­ated some inter­est­ing results, I then used UNE to flesh out the gang the now ex-​PC, now NPC was a mem­ber of.
What had he done with the stolen gem ‘of power’.
I wont go into all the details, but from this I got an evenings play fleshed out. A poten­tial rival group of NPC’s to dog the Play­ers heels.

BOLD will also help fill the ‘what hap­pened’ etc.
UNE is great for stir­ring the grey mat­ter.

Not sure if other GM’s use these prod­ucts but I find them great in the design process, espe­cially as it can take my think­ing in unex­pected direc­tions. GM dis­cre­tion to dis­re­gard any rolled result of course applies.
I am not asso­ci­ated with the above, just great tools.

Allan

Allan wrote:
I wouldn’t have men­tioned comic books myself, but in spite of that this is the style, the proper kind of model for Blade. The game is designed for plot­lines with break­neck speed, for ses­sions where a the plot actu­ally pro­gresses far every sin­gle time, where sin­gle Checks can and should be used to adju­cate lenghty tasks. The proper mod­els to think of are thus indeed comic books or movies and not TV series and nov­els — or at least not the kind of (fan­tasy ) that have been writ­ten in recent decades, nov­els of many hun­dred pages each, and pos­si­ble part of a cycle at that. If nov­els are to be the model, it should be those nov­els of at the most 300 pages, which seemed to pre­dom­i­nate in (not only fan­tasy) lit­er­a­ture until quite recently.

Allan wrote:
I myself don’t use them and only have expe­ri­ence with an AD&D gamemaster’s prod­uct of more than twenty years ago, that (poorly) gen­er­ated plot ele­ments from a suc­ces­sion of ran­daom tables, but I think you have hit upon a very good point here. In my opin­ion the value of these prod­ucts lie only in tak­ing the think­ing into unex­pected direc­tions. It’s not that what they come up with is so won­der­ful or novel, it’s just that we, with our noses deep in the cur­rent plot­lines, are too close to them to see the obvi­ous. Being too deeply involved often makes us blind to what any­body else would see. With­out being some kind of plot wiz­ard I have often founf that I could help ref­er­ees at a loss where to take their plot to next with inter­est­ing ides with­out hav­ing to think at — just because my gaze was fresh.

I guess that those prod­ucts you men­tioned can serve exactly this func­tion, break­ing a ref­eree out of his well-​worn and staid way of look­ing at the cur­rent plot.

I was inter­ested to see what the UNE authors next prod­uct called COPE was going to be like.

con​jec​turegames​.com/

Allan

I use UNE occa­sion­aly, when i really need some­one on the fly and want to pour some­thing spon­ta­neous (so i dont repeat myself). Will have a look at those other ones thanks for sharing!

I picked up UNE years ago, the cur­rent ver­sion on Dri­veThru is changed slightly, for the bet­ter.

Allan

Hello,
Any­one famil­iar with this prod­uct, looks inter­est­ing?

www​.lamemage​.com/​m​i​c​r​o​s​c​o​p​e​/

Allan