i think i have a handle on what to do in BW on how you have to push against beliefs until they break. I learned how to kick the PCs in MG but there is one thing i don’t get.
You need a good situation to create strong beliefs and a bit of worldburning to have extra investment in the situation.
When you have done that you have beliefs and the PCs.
What do i do then as a GM? What do you do before you sit down and play your first session?
There is really not a lot of advice in the books about this.
Can we talk about between session prep?
Generally, think about the kind of thing you want to see in the game and then propose it to the group to kick start things. Like “Hey guys, how about we play a game set in a barren wasteland. You can be one of the merchant companies that cross the waste carrying goods from exotic places. I see a robber baron who’s rumored to be a dark necromancer and some kind of giant sandworms…what do think?”
OH! Sorry.
Draw a big relationship map of the PCs Beliefs and the NPCs that came up in world burning and make sure that all the beliefs have interesting interactions. Give your NPCs very simple drives that will put them in the middle of the PC’s lives either for Better or for worse.
Roughly like this, except this is for a story and so some of the lines are annotated with events, while yours will be annotated with beliefs and relationships.
Very cool map. Seawyrm, relationship maps are a big part of Ron Edward’s Sorcerer (other games probably used it as well, but that’s where I learned about them). Anyway, in Sorcerer you draw maps showing the links between characters in terms of blood or sex (I think it’s only blood and sex). The idea’s been adapted for other games to show how characters are related in all sorts of ways. For BW, I would focus on beliefs instead of relationships. Draw a bunch of boxes with the PC and NPC names and then draw arrows to things their beliefs are about, characters, events, items. Look for places where characters care about the same things, or where the things they care about interact. The more arrows pointing to a thing indicates how much of a big deal it’s probably going to be. If a PC has a belief about something that isn’t interacting with anything else, it suggests a disconnect with the rest of the situation. Aim your NPC beliefs so that things have lots of arrows pointing to them. Voila.
