
We could add periods, events, or a new thing called "scenes", which are exactly what they sound like and are were the actual roleplaying takes place, as long as they dealt with the focus. Therefore all of the stuff that the rest of us added had to deal with that subject either directly or tangentially. John was the first active player so he chose to focus on First Contact initially.

For instance in ours we had a period where Mankind meets alien-kind. The focus will define and shape the current go around the table and all the stuff that gets added. One person starts as the active player and chooses a focus. There was some sort of system for how many of these you do before you dive in to the play portion, but I can not remember what it was.Īt this point you have a bit of a framework put together and you dive into the action. The final part of the "setup" portion of the game has everyone going around the table adding in new "periods" (defining large periods of time) and "events" (specific events within a given period).

Then you define a "palette" for the game, which is a list of stuff that definitely will be allowed in and stuff that will definitely NOT be allowed (I won't list all the stuff we came up with here, but we did stuff like Yes to Orcs and Gods, and No to Elves and Steampunk). The next step is to decide on the beginning and ending of the timeline you are going to explore with the game (We started with Magic reappears as the Mayan calendar ends, and the end was Mankind joins the Galactic Republic). You start off by deciding on a theme for the game (We decided to do: Magic re-enters the world as mankind leaves it).

As you play the game you are building a world and a timeline and telling stories all along it.
