Update November 14th, 2023: News Feeds has been published in Mythic Magazine Volume 35! You can find it on DriveThruRPG. Huge thanks to Tana Pigeon, working with her on getting the completed version of this system there. While the rules and inline examples remain the same, the article published in Mythic Magazine includes a big example showing how all these rules come together, as well as a beautiful worksheet for keeping your News Feeds organized.
In my solo roleplaying games I like the world to feel like it’s alive, like it will keep on existing and moving even if I decided to have my character sit down and just make a cottage out in the middle of the woods and grow mushrooms for thirty years.
There’s a lot of tools to this end, ranging from the simple, to the complex. In this article I present a middle-of-the-road approach in terms of complexity and bookkeeping, targeted more at simulationist players who like to keep a strong fog of war. It is built to be used with the Mythic GME 2e ruleset, but feel free to convert it to other oracles or rulesets and publish those conversions.
If you just want the tool and don’t care for the explanation, jump down to News Feeds.
Existing Approaches
In general I’ve seen two categories of approaches to the problem of a living world for solo roleplayers. The first is to use the facilities included within your system. The second is to construct a system of faction simulation, usually using a concept of faction turns, and using the goals and assets of a faction to drive events in the world.
Imagine the following scenario in a generic medieval fantasy setting. A monastery of some order of clerics has sway over an area of land, with some villages and serfs within it farming and providing for the clerics. A neighboring duchy has a castle in a thriving town with a significant garrison.
A particularly bad storm tears through the area, causing significant flooding, and ruining a large portion of the grain, likely causing a poor harvest and potentially a food shortage over the winter.
Your character has determined this by traveling through the area and noting the sights they have seen, and the storm blew through causing them some trouble, so none of this has been remote or off-screen for your character, they have lived it. As a player, you can make the inference about the potential for a poor harvest, and you want to see what happens.
Using the first approach, you would now make some record that this is an ongoing event that you want to keep track of. Over time, random events may take place which refer to it, and if you want to keep getting specific information about it, then your best bet is to use your oracle unprompted to learn how things progress.
Doing things in this manner will generally be very vague as you learn only basic information from your oracle, and it may be hard to interpret if you haven’t been in the area that the situation affects recently. Especially I find it difficult to account for many key players within a collection of related events over time.
Using the second approach, you would begin by statting out multiple factions, perhaps the monks, the serfs, the duke, and the city guard. Each faction will have some goals, some assets, or other stats your faction system requires, and when you have time pass you will take a faction turn, causing the factions to interact with each other and their assets.
Factions run in this manner also do not satisfy me because they require a significant amount of bookkeeping, they reveal large amounts of information about the factions as you stat them out regardless of if your player should know that information, and in my experience these systems usually put a large focus on the interplay between factions, while lacking much facility for factions interacting with the world. Representing a bad harvest because of a storm may be challenging. This does come with the benefit however that it is easy to keep track of many key players over a complex set of events.
These two approaches take something of opposite sides. One focuses entirely on the tangible outcomes that the character can see or experience, the other focuses on groups of people and their motivations and allows world events to flow from there.
Goals
With the groundwork of the existing categories of solutions and what I consider their flaws for my own usecases above, collected below are my goals for News Feeds.
- World events should be able to cross to the current context where appropriate
- Required bookkeeping should be minimal, but clearly defined; players should not have to invent a new format for bookkeeping after reading this
- Player knowledge should not expand significantly beyond character knowledge
- Collections of key players and events should be able to organically grow without significant risk of losing detail
- Events the player loses interest in should be able to easily fade into the background
- Both inter-faction and faction-world interactions should be easily representable
- Keep additional rules beyond the base Mythic GME 2e to a minimum
Non-Goals
In addition to trying the above, the following are explicit non-goals for the News Feeds system.
- Representing entire factions in the world
- Creating a detailed simulation
- To be portable to other oracles without modification
News Feeds
A News Feed is a way to keep track of an ongoing situation that your character may not be directly involved with, but that they may hear about. It has its own lists, as well as its own event log, similar to the adventure journal from Mythic.
Creating a News Feed
When a situation occurs in the world that you want to keep track of but that you don’t want to be a central part of your adventure, instead of creating it as a thread, make room in your notes for a News Feed, and write down a summary of the situation at the top, followed by the general scope of the news. Make sure this second part is editable (e.g. by using a pencil), as it may change over time.
The scope of the news should indicate how your character might hear about the goings on related to the situation. For the above example of a storm causing a poor harvest, it may be county-level news, which means any time you hear about goings on in the county, you might hear news about the harvest. For a small feud between family members, the scope would be the family, you’ll hear news from family and friends, but it is unlikely to be gossiped about at a bar the next town over. Sieges and wars may be scoped to the nation they are in.
Some scopes may be a bit more abstract, for example an active robbery in a city may have a scope of “police scanner”, meaning you may hear information about it when tuning into the police scanner, but you might not hear about it from anyone else in town.
Next, record the time increment of this news feed. The time increment is how long you expect between major developments in the situation. For the bad harvest example, this time increment may be several weeks, for a family feud it could be months or years, for a siege or war it may be days or weeks, for an active robbery it may be 10 minutes.
Keep in mind that this is not the minimum time between events happening, but is instead the average time between major events that may shape how the situation moves forward.
Also make room for a half-sized threads list and characters list, as well as event summaries.
Start by adding in the primary characters and threads that you can think of associated with the current situation.
For our bad harvest situation, we may add the following to our lists:
For threads we add “Damaged Crops”. For characters we add “serfs”, “monks”, and “duke”.
This is our groundwork for how the situation might play out. Now we have completed the initial bookkeeping for our News Feed, and we may resume normal play.
Using a News Feed
As you continue play, you will want to hear news about what is going on with the situation which has been created as a News Feed. In general, there are two ways for this to occur.
The first is by random events with the Remote Event focus. Whenever you roll this focus, you may choose to make the event about a News Feed. If you do, randomly select from among your active news feeds, and then generate a News Event as normal, and interpret this as a normal Remote Event, requiring you determine how your character gets the news.
The second way is by interacting with the scope of a News Feed. Any time your character interacts with the scope of a News Feed you have an opportunity to ask a Fate Question, “Do I hear any news?” If you get a Yes answer, you move on to generating a news event. On a No, you don’t hear any news. On an Exceptional No, you cannot make any more attempts to hear news this scene. On an Exceptional Yes, a major event is generated, regardless of how long it has been since the character last heard news.
Beyond just generating news events, a News Feed represents real actions which take place within the world, and which can help to shape it outside of where your character is actively participating. This is important to keep in mind as your character moves about the world. News events should always be kept in mind as a part of your adventure context as you interpret the results of Fate Questions, of Discovering Meaning, or resolving Random Events. If your character goes to where the news feed is taking place, the events migrate from being a news feed to being a part of your adventure.
When your character becomes relevant to how a news feed will continue, migrate any relevant threads and characters from the News Feed’s thread and character lists to your adventure lists, and avoid generating news events, instead playing out the events of the situation directly.
Conversely, when your character moves away from an ongoing situation, if you are interested in how it turns out consider creating a News Feed, or if the situation was already represented by a News Feed before your character arrived at the location, update the lists to match the present situation, and summarize how it changed in a new event in the News Feed’s event log.
As you play, also periodically consider if the labeled scope and time increment still make sense. Perhaps an active robbery with a scope of “police scanner” and a time increment of 10 minutes has evolved over time to a hostage situation and it’s important to change the scope to “local news” and the time increment to 1 hour.
Generating News Events
To generate a news event, start by considering when you last generated a news event, or when you created the news feed. If the amount of in-game time that has passed is more than the time increment, the news event generated will be a major event. Otherwise, it will be a minor event.
In either case, start by rolling on the relevant News Event Focus table. This gives you the event focus for your news event. Next, roll on an appropriate elements table. The actions elements table is a reasonable default for most results, as with Random Events.
| 1d100 | Minor News Event Focus | 1d100 | Major News Event Focus | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-15 | Rumored Event | 1-10 | New Character | |
| 16-30 | Character Action | 11-15 | Remove Character | |
| 31-35 | Character Positive | 16-30 | Character Action | |
| 36-40 | Character Negative | 31-35 | Character Positive | |
| 41-50 | Move Toward a Thread | 36-40 | Character Negative | |
| 51-60 | Move Away From a Thread | 41-55 | Move Toward a Thread | |
| 61-70 | Current Context | 56-70 | Move Away From a Thread | |
| 71-80 | Roll Two Minor Events | 71-75 | New Thread | |
| 81-100 | Roll One Major Event | 76-90 | Close a Thread | |
| 91-95 | Roll Two Major Events | |||
| 96-100 | Roll Three Minor Events |
Rumored Event
A rumored event is an event which has a dubious source or which has otherwise not been confirmed. These events may come to nothing, or they may be true. Either way they will change how their subject is perceived.
If after rolling on an elements table you are unsure of the interpretation, consider rolling on the News Feed’s characters list to determine who the rumor is about.
Character Action
Roll on the News Feed’s characters list to determine the character who is taking the action, then the elements table you feel is most appropriate.
This is an action that a character takes, it may be related to an ongoing thread, or connected to another character, but it should represent at least an active choice, or perhaps a physical action on the part of the character.
When this event is minor, the action should not have any immediate impact on the outcome of a thread. Major character actions may permanently change the outcome of the situation that gave rise to the News Feed.
These sorts of permanent changes, if you feel guided by the prompt, may in some cases overlap with some other options on the table. If you feel a character action would close a thread, initiate a new one, or add or remove a character, then the action should have those effects. The existence of the other table entries should not hold you back, as they guarantee that those changes occur, while Character Action does not.
Character Positive / Negative
Roll on the News Feed’s characters list to determine which character will be affected most by the event, and then on the elements table you feel is most appropriate.
The event need not require any activity on the part of the rolled character, and may involve other characters as well, but the interpretation should result in a net benefit or penalty for that character in the scope of this News Feed.
As a minor event this should not be an unrecoverable loss or an inordinate gain, but should reflect the natural ebb and flow of events.
As a major event, this should permanently change the character’s relationship with the other characters or the threads.
New Character
Introduce a new character to the situation. You may make whatever elements rolls you wish for inspiration, but I recommend making a roll on the Characters elements table followed by a roll on the Actions elements table.
As this is can only appear as a major event, the new character should be a major player in the situation, and should immediately have some impact on the outcome of it either simply through their presence, or by taking some notable action.
Keep in mind that characters may be literal characters, they may represent factions or other groups, or they may represent other aspects of the situation or world which may appear to act on their own. Perhaps a season could be embodied as a character, or a mountain or forest, or a force of nature like particularly active freak weather, or a group of animals. Anything which will act as a repeated element of actions taken within the context of the News Feed.
Remove Character
Roll on the characters table and an appropriate elements table to determine the method by which they are removed from the situation. This does not need to mean a character dies or is incapacitated, it simply means that they will no longer contribute meaningfully to a situation. Perhaps they have settled on a course of action and will not be swayed by further events, maybe they move to a new location no longer impacted by the situation. Maybe they withdraw and choose to act as a passive party.
All this requires is that in some way the character is no longer a significant player in the situation which prompted the creation of the News Feed.
Move Toward/Away From a Thread
Roll on the News F eed’s threads list to determine which thread is affected, and then roll on the elements table you feel is most appropriate.
The event should bring the thread closer to a conclusion, or introduce a snag in it which will keep it relevant for longer.
As a minor event these should be smaller amounts of progress that could be reversed by character actions or similar.
As a major event these should be irreversible progress or significant snags which can only be resolved by additional major events.
In some cases it may be appropriate for moving towards a thread to close it, or moving away from a thread to introduce another, although both should only occur with major events. The existence of the new thread and close a thread entries on the table should not discourage you from doing this, they are a guarantee, while movement of a thread is only an opportunity.
New Thread
Introduce a new thread to the situation, using a roll from an appropriate elements table as inspiration.
This can only appear as a major event, and represents a new emerging aspect of the situation which most or all of the characters will care about, and which will take significant time to resolve.
Close a Thread
Roll a thread from the News Feed’s thread list. Using a roll from an appropriate elements table as inspiration, find a way to bring the thread to a conclusion, so that it is no longer a major concern for the characters.
This can only appear as a major event, but is more common than introducing a New Thread. This allows News Feeds to naturally tend towards a resolution over time.
Current Context
A Current Context event acts as an extension of the most recent events which have taken place. Roll on an appropriate elements table, then look at your event log and choose the most recent major event or any subsequent minor events which you can see a way to extend with the result.
This extension should act as a continuation of that event, and it may be appropriate to record that continuation with the original event in the News Feed’s event log.
Roll X Minor Events
As the entry says, this requires a number minor events be rolled. If you roll this result as a secondary roll, ignore it and reroll.
This means if you are rolling three minor events as a result of a roll on the Major News Event Focus table, you should ignore results requiring you to roll two additional minor events, and that a roll requesting three minor events after rolling a major event from the Minor News Event Focus table should also be ignored.
Roll X Major Events
Roll a number of major events. If you roll this as a result of a secondary roll, ignore it and reroll, as with the Roll X Minor Events results.
Interpreting News Events
Something that has been mentioned in a few specific table entries’ descriptions, but which I wish to call special attention to, is that the table entries are not the only way for new characters to appear, for characters to be removed, or for new threads to be introduced or old ones to be closed.
Sometimes a part of the interpretation of an event will imply one of those things, and you should feel free to record them on your News Feed’s lists. Something important to consider when an event implies one of these things is whether the event is major or minor. In general, large-scale changes like this should only occur during major events, but if you cannot find a minor interpretation of your prompt when rolling a minor event, prefer using your first instinct even if it is major to invoking the I Dunno rule.
When to Create a News Feed
News Feeds have a specific and narrow focus in the manner I have envisioned them, so when to use them and what you should represent with them becomes an important question. You may of course adapt these mechanics to suit whatever situation you feel is appropriate, but in this section I describe in more detail the sorts of things I expect these rules to be useful for.
In general, I would categorize events which may turn up in your game into three categories. World events, adventure events, and news events. These correspond roughly with how I would recommend resolving each of them.
World events are things which happen in the world but which are not required to have any connection to any existing aspect of your game. The first time you arrive in a town, you may wish to ask what has been happening in the town lately. This would be a world event, as it has no established connection to your game, but the interpretation of the answer may establish one.
World events can generally be resolved with fate questions or discovering meaning. If a sheriff in the wild west is chasing down an outlaw, they might ask a fate question when walking into a new town about whether their mark is there already, and if not they might ask about the recent happenings. The first is a fate question, the second a chance to discover meaning (although after this first encounter may be a good time to establish a Place Feed).
Adventure events are the events of your game. They have a direct impact to the direction your game takes, and are centered around your characters. These are events which take place either as you play, or as a part of the threads you have established within your adventure lists.
Adventure events are resolved through conventional play, and are prompted either by your expectations or by random events which are triggered by Mythic.
News events are events which surround a specific and well-defined situation which your character is already familiar with through other means, and which you as a player or your character wish to keep updated on, but which do not have an immediate and direct impact on your adventure.
These events could have any scale associated with them, affecting anything from just a few people up to the entire universe, but they still have a limited and specific set of threads and characters which are relevant to them. In this way it might be relevant to have a News Feed about a new guard captain’s attempts to crack down on the local thieves guild, but it would not be relevant to have a news feed for “everything that happens in the city”.
In this way you may have several distinct News Feeds which talk about some or all of the same characters, but which have a different set of related goals, connections, scope, and time. For a mafia family’s drama you may have a News Feed connected to the son of the don being under investigation from the FBI, a News Feed about the second cousin who is up and coming and looks to be the better choice for a successor to the don than his own son, and a News Feed about a gang encroaching on the don’s territory and affecting his business. Each of these news feeds will have a number of overlapping characters, but each one progresses at a different rate of time, and each one will have scopes for news about them which are distinct.
In this example you might see the second cousin looking to become the next don have a time increment of one month and a scope of “crime families”, allowing you to hear about it from contacts in the organized crime division of the police, from members of the family itself, or from other notable criminal figures in the area. The investigation by the FBI might have a time increment of 2 weeks and a scope of “FBI investigation” meaning you can only gain news about it by directly interacting with the investigation, perhaps by hacking into the FBI records, by having an insider contact you, or by being a member of the FBI assigned to another job. For the gang war between the don and the encroaching gang it might have a time increment of one week, and a scope of “local news” because big activities they take will start to appear directly from news outlets, and as rumors from people living in the affected areas.
The End of a Feed
Over time, the primary situation that a news feed is built around will come to a natural end. Maybe the active robbery turned hostage situation has been resolved, the perpetrators are in custody, and the hostages made it out alive. Maybe winter has come and gone and while there was some trouble with a food shortage, the monastery and nearby town managed to pull through and this year’s crop is looking good. Maybe the don was taken down by the FBI and the second cousin has stepped up to take his place, ousting the son from the family and bringing the usefulness of the FBI investigation to an end, leaving them with nothing to worry about but the turf war.
This will happen either as all active threads in a news feed come to a close, which the event tables are naturally tuned to do this over time, or as a central aspect of the situation resolves on its own, regardless of the state of the threads. This may be a season or event passing, or some large outside event changing the priorities of the participants in the feed, or other things that fit with the context of your adventure.
Another way a news feed may end is by the player losing interest or the character losing contact with the scope. In these cases the news feed doesn’t come to some conclusion, but rather fades out with time before being dropped entirely. In this case you may not realize that a news feed has truly ended until it comes up again in your adventure context, and you must deal with the aftermath.
These are all valid ways for a news feed to end. When you have realized that your news feed has ended, you should go through a few steps.
To begin, mark the news feed as concluded. If aspects of the feed get taken up again at a later date, start it as a new feed. Next, review the whole sequence of events associated with the news feed. Any permanent changes which occurred as a part of the news feed you should try to keep fresh in your mind as you interact with the scope it was associated with. A well-executed news feed will have lasting impacts on the world even once they are concluded. This would be a good time to record any permanent changes to the world, characters, or relationships in your associated notes if you keep them.
If the news feed you are concluding did not resolve its primary situation, make a special note that you must resolve the situation’s aftermath when you come back to the feed’s scope.
Aftermath of News Feeds
When your characters enter the scope of a news feed long after news was last heard about it, either because the player lost interest in it, the character lost access to news about the feed, or any other reason, the effects of the outcome of the news feed should be visible, but generating events until every thread closes would be a long and cumbersome process.
In this situation, a minimal set of events should be generated that will provide a conclusion to each part of the feed you feel is relevant to the world. This can be as few as one, or as many as one per thread.
When you first interact with the scope of a news feed which has not been active for a long enough time that you feel the situation should be resolved, look over your notes. Select from the threads list the threads you think would have the most impact on the world after the resolution of the feed.
Next, for each selected thread, roll a single event on the Major News Event Focus table, ignoring results that ask you to make additional rolls. Regardless of the event focus rolled, add to the context for this event that the interpretation must result in the thread being resolved, and keep in mind that the event may take place over a long period of time.
Once this is complete, you will have a number of additional events for your news feed which collectively conclude the feed. Integrate these new events into your world’s context, and then continue play.
It is possible that during the resolution of the news feed additional questions about the world come up or situations emerge which are not immediately resolved by the events which resolve the initial news feed. This is alright, and may prompt you to create new news feeds to track them. These feeds should also be relatively easy to populate because they can draw on character lists from the feed being concluded, and the central premise for them is set up by the event you wish to track.
Specialized Feeds
These rules are fairly general, and may be applied in use cases beyond the primary one outlined in the above text. Here are some ideas for other types of news feeds which you might want to use.
Place Feeds
Place feeds act as a way to track the happenings in an important location that your characters repeatedly visit. These feeds are unique in that they don’t ever conclude except for in extraordinary circumstances, or by your characters leaving and never coming back.
In this type of feed, if all the active threads conclude the feed is not completed, it is simply an uneventful time at the location. When events are generated and no threads exist, you should bias your interpretations towards creating new threads when possible, to keep activity going.
When creating these news feeds, consider adding characters who you have not met but who you know are active in the location. Perhaps the local government, an influential guild or three, a local hero, a subsection of the populace like miners in a mining town, and similar.
As a general rule, I’d recommend setting a time increment for these feeds that is a bit more abstract. Also create a secondary, shorter time increment. When the characters are within the bounds of the scope of the place feed, roll up one minor event for each of these shorter time increments during standard play, or during downtime instead roll a major event at each of the larger time increment.
In addition, you may wish to use the Aftermath rules whenever the party is gone from the location for a while or spend very significant amounts of downtime within it, but slightly adapted.
After you have rolled the completing events of the aftermath, remove any threads you did not roll completing events for. Next, look over the characters list and remove any which you feel only have relevance to the place feed in the context of the threads which are now complete. Alternatively you may leave them on the list, and only remove them if you need to invoke the I Dunno rule when they come up in future events.
If you take particular interest in some thread active in the feed, consider generating a news feed for it. When you do, remove the thread from the place feed, and add any characters from the list which feel relevant. Any characters who have no involvement in other threads in the place feed and who were migrated to the new feed should be removed from the place feed. Finally, continue with the normal process for creating a news feed, setting its own scope and time increment, and adding any new threads or characters which feel appropriate.
If you have a news feed which grew out of a thread for the place feed and you need to run an aftermath for the place feed, consider treating the news feed as the original thread that it grew out of and generating only a single event for the whole feed. This may help keep the amount of work required to resume play after entering the place again to a minimum. Keep time increments in mind as you do this, however. If the time that has passed since the players last interacted with the feed is appropriate to simply generate a major event rather than running an aftermath, prefer that and keep the news feed going while the rest of the town’s threads are resolved as an aftermath.
Character Feeds
Character feeds are very much like place feeds, but instead of following what happens in a location over time, it follows the life of a single character. This is an opportunity to make a more detailed life story for a character as you repeatedly interact with them, as an alternative to other detailed options like The Adventure Crafter or BOLD.
Adapt all of the suggestions for place feeds, but instead of centering the feed around a location, center it around the character.