The thing your character wants and won’t say

Hey y’all,

Welcome to Volume 5, and welcome back to the workshop.

Before anything else: you’ll notice a slight delay in this week’s newsletter. That’s because I was holding off so I could share the big news. The website is LIVE!! Everything we produce now has one home at sleepersartifice.com. Our tools for GMs and players, both paid and free, our tables, ledgers, options, cards, and games, are all in one spot. Our worldbuilding content, creative writing, modules, and everything else will live there as well. The free tools are linked there, as are some quick, easy-to-use tables you can roll on for a wide variety of in-the-moment needs. It’s brand new, so if something’s broken or weird, hit reply and tell me. I’d rather hear it from you than find it myself at 1am.

Okay. On to the good stuff.

We all know the character. “Just here for the gold,” arms crossed, no attachments, in it for the payout and nothing else. Then, seemingly out of the blue, four sessions later, an NPC kid is about to get hurt, and that same player is halfway out of their chair before they know they’ve moved.

THAT’s the good stuff. Every table has it, and here’s the thing nobody tells you: nobody planned it. It came from a want the player was carrying the whole time, but never expressed. The cold merc wanted somebody to protect. He just never wrote it on the character sheet.

So stop waiting for it to happen by accident. Ask for it.

The letter · Free, on Substack Subscribe

THE QUESTION: what does your character want, and would never admit?

Before your next session, go to each player one at a time, away from the table, and ask them for one thing their character wants and would never say in front of the others. One sentence. Put it on an index card, or in your GM notes in Google Drive.

You’ll get gold. Not the coins, but the kind of currency a GM can’t get anywhere else: story drivers from your players’ inner thoughts. The paladin wants to be forgiven for the thing they did before the campaign started. The rogue wants a home they’re allowed to lose again. The loud player wants to be taken seriously for once. The quiet player wants their character to matter as much as the loud one’s, and this is the first time anyone has asked.

Then you do the only thing you have to do. You keep those cards, and you spend the campaign putting each want just out of reach, or setting it down right in front of the person at the worst possible moment. You don’t have to announce any of it. They’ll feel it.

Here’s what that looks like. The rogue’s card says she wants a home she’s allowed to lose. Three sessions later, the party shelters at a half-burned farmhouse, and the old woman living there offers the rogue the spare room if she’ll stay and help fix the roof. You don’t point at it. You don’t wink. You just set it down on the table and see what she does with it. Whatever she picks, stay or go, that’s the best scene of the night, and all you did was read a card.

That’s the whole thing. A want you know about is a powerful storytelling lever you didn’t have before, and now you’ve got one for every seat at the table.

THE FIND

This week’s is a post, not a game: “Backstories are earned, not written” by Kate Korsaro, over at her Substack, Kate Plays. She’s writing about old-school, high-lethality games, but it travels to any table. Her case: the five-page dossier you bring to session one is a cage, and the real character shows up in play, in the scars, the weird loot, and the grudges nobody planned. My favorite bit is Timmy, the two-silver-a-day torchbearer the goblins took in session four, and why avenging him beats any villain you wrote at home. That’s our cold merc all over. Give it a read, and if it lands, subscribe. It’s free: Kate Plays.

FROM THE WORKSHOP

Earned doesn’t mean empty, though. The Backstory Ledger gives a player a few good hooks to start with, so the story has something to grab onto once play begins: The Backstory Ledger.

The always free stuff: the Player Cheat Cards, and The Sundered Page, our whole one-page game you can run tonight. Grab them at Player Cheat Cards and The Sundered Page.

And if you haven’t wandered the new site yet, the whole shelf is waiting: sleepersartifice.com.

ALSO WORTH YOUR INBOX

Play.Fearless. Mad Jay writes every Monday for the whole table, players and GMs both. A recent Monday Musings is a thank-you letter to every group he’s ever run for. It covers a 50-session Twilight: 2000 campaign, crit charts read out loud at Rolemaster night, con tables full of strangers, and the one-on-one games he’s run with Maxwell since Maxwell was seven or eight. “The tables made the GM,” he writes. After an issue about what players carry to the table, it’s the right thing to read next. Read it, then go thank your own table.

Thanks for hanging with me. If this was useful, forward it to someone at your table. That’s how this thing grows. And if you write a newsletter too and this feels like a fit, hit reply. I’m always looking for good neighbors to recommend. We’ll pick up next week.

-J