Running the Game
GM Goals
The goal of the GM in Stones, Scrolls, Swords & Sorcery is not to tell a story alone — it is to build one collaboratively with the players. This game is designed to thrive on improvisation, player-driven action, and shared creativity. You are encouraged to prepare situations, locations, factions, problems, and opportunities, rather than fixed plots or predetermined outcomes.
Stones, Scrolls, Swords & Sorcery tends to work best as a series of self-contained adventures tied together by an overarching narrative. A good way to think about a campaign is like a television season, where each session acts as its own episode. Most great adventure stories introduce a problem, explore the consequences and complications around it, and resolve it — or twist it — by the end of the episode.
While your sessions will likely run longer than an episode of television, usually somewhere between 3–6 hours, the same general structure works incredibly well:
- A clear hook
- Player engagement and problem solving
- A meaningful resolution or escalation
The players should feel free to pursue whatever interests them, whether that means hunting monsters, robbing nobles, exploring ruins, starting wars, building businesses, or chasing rumours that were never meant to matter. Your role is to respond to those choices honestly and help shape the world around them in return.
One of the most important responsibilities of the GM is to guide the players toward clear, understandable, and obtainable objectives. Players should almost always know what they are working toward, even if they do not yet know how they will achieve it. If a goal is large or long-term, break it into smaller achievable steps that naturally create future sessions and complications.
As the GM, think of yourself less as the author of the story and more as the force that gives the world shape, consequence, and forward motion. Every session should feel like movement.
Ideally, players should leave a session feeling one of two things:
- Accomplished, because they achieved something meaningful.
- Pressured, because events have escalated and the walls are closing in around them.
Even failure should create momentum. A failed plan should open new problems, reveal new information, create danger, or force difficult choices — not simply stop the game in its tracks.
When preparing a session, it is often enough to know three things:
The middle should largely belong to the players.
Avoid planning exact scenes, solutions, or outcomes. Instead, prepare situations, characters, locations, and pressures, then allow the players to push the story forward through their decisions. Often the most memorable moments will come from things nobody at the table planned for.
A session about robbing a merchant caravan may become a political conspiracy. A simple tavern fight may spiral into a city-wide manhunt. A failed ritual may accidentally become the entire campaign. Let these things happen naturally.
A manrta I help tell myself is to “Build the world, not the Story.”