itch.io

Thanks for reaching out! Adding more GM support is definitely a goal of mine going forward, as when I wrote this game originally it was very much geared for my personal playstyle as a GM-- that is to say, heavily improvisational and imagery-focused. Most of my planning comes down to coming up with cool concepts and then figuring out ways to throw them in front of my players to see what they do. But hey, that's pretty broad, so let's get into some specific advice!

One, lean on Rituals! The Ritual of Beginning is written to give a broad trajectory for a game that's just getting started, as well as to quickly tangle up the PCs' lives. Playing that out, letting the players explore the Named City for a bit, and then hopping into the Ritual of Sleep will probably eat up a good amount of your first session and give yourself and your players a nice taste of what the game has to offer. Other rituals, like Storytelling or Bloodshed, help to frame significant moments in a way that's not unlike GM moves in a PbtA game. 

Two, pick one or two layers you really like and focus in on them. Pick out a few locations that speak to you, write some NPCs who hang out there, give one of them a knotty problem, and set your players loose. There's a lot of disparate (ha) ideas in this book, you don't have to worry about juggling all of them at once. If you take the advice from point one, just play around in the City and Dreaming for a while, and only expand out once you're comfortable! 

Three, check out small business in the zine titled Seven Plays. It's a little adventure module, just a couple NPCs and story beats, but enough to get a story going if the above isn't cutting it. There's also Apoptosis but it's considerably less new-GM friendly, as instead of a clear goal and some stops along the way it gives you pregen PCs with an insurmountable problem and asks you to play out a bleak tone piece. 

Lastly, remember the game's mantra: If it's interesting, you can do it / If you forget about it, ignore it / The City is wide enough for all of us. Don't sweat the details too much! The GM is a player too, and that means you should have fun with it! Get a bit silly with your friends, bite off more than you can chew, and when you inevitably make mistakes take them in stride and grow from the experience.

Hope you have a lovely time!

Update: We just finished our Session Zero. We were just going to go over the rules together and create characters. We planned to spend maybe two hours, but we sat there for three and still didn't finish, and we had loads of fun just imagining possible character arcs and themes for our story! It was great, and I think everyone's excited for the first proper session (I certainly am).

I came up with a little something to introduce the concept of layers, as well as the basics of the token engine, to my players:


(We were playing on an online whiteboard thingy) - alongside this layer I had three character sheets with a Rank 1 role on each, and an "Unfinished" trait that had some tokens already on it that the players could use to "buy" traits and rank-ups according to the rules. That way we got to practice the flow of tokens and the way you combine a character trait and a layer trait to make something happen.

I had a whole bunch of example traits ready that I either copied from the Act 1 book and the Seven Plays NPCs, or wrote myself. The players could pick from among those traits or write their own. We realized pretty quickly that the traits we'd pick would significantly shape the story we'd tell together, and the ideas got flowing! We had a blast just coming up with weird character concepts and arcs.

We know each other pretty well in the group, and when we got to picking roles, it was immediately obvious to everyone who would choose which role. The three roles were pretty natural matches to everyone's personality and general disposition. But at some point one of the players went "hey, wouldn't it be interesting if we shuffled the roles around, so everyone gets to come out of their comfort zone a little?" - and so they did! Now we got this really whacky cast where the seer became the knight, the thief became the seer, and the knight became the thief. I think it kind of shows in the characters they're building (and yeah, we're not done with the characters yet, the players asked for more time to sleep on it and finalize their trait selection and ranks at a later point)




And yeah, we have a "Corruption Arc" trait. I wrote that one mostly for fun, because one of the players really likes corruption arcs in media, but I didn't expect them to actually go for it. But at some point our thief was like "Hey, what if the Seer had the corruption arc, wouldn't that be interesting? What would that even mean?" - and, well, now we're going to find out.

All in all, we had a very dynamic session that went to lots of interesting places, and we've not even finished the characters! I already have no clue what kind of story hook to present to this cast ^^' but I have some time to think about that. Unfortunately, the first session isn't gonna happen for a while yet due to pesky Real Life Things.
I can just say I am very excited. If the vibe keeps up like this, we're going to come up with the wildest stories. :D