Held Narrative Momentum, Structured Play, and the Game of Bedtime Dominoes

25 Nov, 2025

Bedtime Blues

I can have a hard time sleeping. It turns out, shockingly, that a thirty minute stretch of lying motionless in the silent and unwavering darkness is actually prime breeding conditions for obsessive thinking. I'll lie there, curled up safe in the gentle arms of a lover, and flood my body repeatedly with adrenaline over horrors imaginary all night unless I put my restless grey matter to work on some other project.

Narrative is a beautiful sword that, always unsheathed in the mind, will poke you something terrible when you try to sleep with it in the bed. But luckily - if I may overextended a metaphor until it's long enough to form a sort of pretzel shape - it can also be used to cut the Gordian knot. I turn my mind from stories to stories. But, like, nice ones.

I'm a long-time lover of roleplaying games and a live-in lifetime partner to that silver fox we call storytelling. One feeds into the other and, lying in bed trying desperately not to listen for a burglar, I've got a pretty good system worked out for producing them in a way indicative to sleep.¹

Principles

First: a principle. Narratives hold momentum like a spring does. A good story is set up first and foremost by held potential. The first act, in particular, should squash (or stretch if that's more fun to imagine) this spring down further and further until the reader can bear it no more and the whole thing flies out from under the hand of the author to careen across the room and catch a nearby monomyth in the eye.

Second: another principle. This held momentum is what index-card-loving, pdf-hoarding, indie RPG designers are talking about when they say Prep is Play. There used to be this idea in the RPG scene that any part of the game where you weren't "playing" was some kind of bullshit fun-accounting you had to slog through to get to the good bit. While this might be true of some parts of roleplaying², it absolutely doesn't need to extend to character and world generation which can be an absolute pleasure when done properly.

The Game

The game is this prep. It's directionless enough to make sure you can still drift off but focused enough to keep your mind busy. It's basically a bunch of tips from different roleplaying games taped onto Fate's session 0 format but damn if it doesn't get you drifting off.

Come up with a premise.

You'll want it to be fun but it doesn't have to be in-depth. Something like "A DS9-style space station" or "a goblin detective agency in noir-20s New York". That second idea is sick, actually, that's what we'll use for our examples from now on.

Create Issues

This shit is ripped directly from Fate and is absolutely wonderful. Come up with a Current Issue (what's the problem that's currently going on in this setting?) then an Impending Issue (what's on the horizon that could become an issue if unaddressed?) and - if that's not juicy enough - throw in a Legacy Issue for good measure (a previously solved problem that's got some lingering aftereffects).

In our goblin world, maybe the current issue is a crime gang that's taken hold of the goblins' neighborhood. The gang are called The Weasels and get up to all kinds of dastardly behaviour. The impending issue is a nearby banking conglomerate that's trying to take control of the properties in the neighborhood so the whole block can get leveled and turned into some boring bullshit. The legacy issue is centered on The Treasure of Skuds Ramone which is a supply of buried gold the goblins previously found and used to buy themselves out of a tricky situation. This situation is mostly stable but, unfortunately, Skuds' old crew might come snooping around and asking questions any day.

Create Faces

You wanna come up with two characters to represent the current issue and at least one for the impending and legacy issues. The characters for the current issue should be invested in opposite directions. Feel free to let this step balloon a little. If additional characters, places, or stories bubble up you can follow where they lead.

The Weasels are easy. We'll have Sticky Jones, a summer-toothed nogoodnik who's supposed to be low in the pecking order but has gotten a bit big for his boots while the boss is outta town and started pushing the gang to do more dangerous burglaries. On the counterpoint, we'll add in Patsy Scrip the local papergirl who - furious after The Weasels stole her bike last year - has been writing articles about them and slipping them inside the papers she delivers to shine a light on their misdeeds. Patsy is the only person in the neighborhood who knows the goblins got Skuds' gold but she's a good girl and kept it to herself. For the Bank we'll have Herbert Inforp, a sniveling accountant with a mean streak who is often slinking around in the bars fishing for new leads on how to apply pressure to the locals to get them to sell. And Skuds' Gold can have Elphie Ramone, the rich girl uptown whose money has started to run dry and who may soon turn an eye to hunting for her late uncle's missing stash.

As you can see, many of these characters suggest places - a bar, a hideout, a bank, a corner store that's being used to print Patsy's independent articles. And those places all come with at least two obvious characters who frequent them: the old married couple who run the corner store and are down on their luck, the booming-voiced barkeep of the local dive bar and a host of patrons who are always looking for help with this and that. I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic has some great frameworks for approaching this part of the game.

Some tips on making good characters

• Give them something to care about
• Take an obvious idea and change something. Then change something else. In This World by Ben Robbins has some fantastic ways for you to approach this.
• Ask obvious questions in a leading way. Don't say "what is Patsy's living situation?" say "how does Patsy cope with living with her older brother, a man who has just taken a job at Horrible Bank?" Those questions tend to have more obvious answers and build the story out far better.

Create Main Characters

Now I'm usually asleep by this point but if, somehow, you're still going, come up with some main characters. Give them a main Thing, something that gets them in trouble, and then tie in extra character traits with short stories that connect to already-established characters and issues. Then, go back and tie their traits in to the world by making even more supporting characters.

Grelp is the ever-grumpy leader of the goblin detective agency. She gets herself into scrapes because she's an absolute sucker for a sob story and will work for free if a client turns on the waterworks. She's got a trusty gun - pinched off Sticky Jones during a firefight turned fistfight when Grelp was investigating a diamond heist the Weasels had pulled off last year and Sticky was trying to get away with the goods. She's technically the landlord for her building but the paperwork was forged when the previous landlord (Enid Burke) went missing five years ago during The Month of Blackouts and if Horrible Bank find out about it they'll try and leverage this against her. Her one true love is this hideous, expensive toad named Briam who lives in a tank in the office decorated with the remaining gold from Skuds' stash.

Next steps

And now (good gracious, tired one, how are you still awake after imagining all that?) you go back again. Make more characters and locations. Give them more problems. Don't try and write any events into the world, just keep fleshing out the backstory of everything. Zoom in on items and street corners, creaky floorboards and forgotten schemes.

If you want, you can daydream about possible episodes of this beautiful show you've imagined. What if Sticky meets Elphie and falls in love? He might go on a string of jewellery heists to try and win her heard with diamonds! What if Patsy's operation gets threatened the bank trying to bribe her to print false news? She might hire the goblins to tail Herbert and try to dig up some dirt on him! These are fun ideas to bounce around a little bit I wouldn't plot too much, there'll be time for telling stories in this world when the morning comes but at night the best you can do is set up the dominoes until you drift off.

A final thought

This kind of play is often my favourite. There is so much promise in these worlds and, after you've had a few goes at it, you get really good at working out exactly how to put out ideas that will create more of that held narrative energy. The beauty of the game is that, if a detail doesn't sparkle, you can just keep tweaking it and turning it until it clicks and becomes ready to spring out into a story. It's like molding blu tac into little figurines in your mind. No stakes, just finding out the best way to make the legs so the figure doesn't fall over.

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