Sometimes you make a bet on what your players will do next. And you lose that bet, often. In our tenth session, day fifteen after the fall of Kalisz I bet that the players would return to a site to see if those inhabitants were friendlies or hostiles. I went through Twilight: 2000’s site generator and prepped that site. Put some love into it as all GMs do. That generator was simple enough and evoked enough imagination that you could just roll the tables and improv the results. I love this about sandbox games! When the generation tools, charts, dice, entrails are simple to use but read like tarot cards, or horoscopes. Anyways, I lost that bet, My players went south to a new, unprepped town to recon it.

Twilight: 2000 RPG has a generator for daily encounters. Once per shift, four shifts a day, you may pull a card from a deck of 52 cards. Free League out did themselves with this deck! It is themed across suits and values! Every session I draw five to six cards, and review them. These six events will be put in play, in any order, before I draw again. That’s my rule, my GM fiat. As we play I’m looking for the most dramatic event that fits to drop into the shift. Sometimes I won’t add a new event and I double down onthe current situation, where adding something new might not add fun.

SO, south, to the unprepped lands. From an earlier Google maps review, we knew to the south was a small town with a big church. As my players are filling in a spreadsheet to organize the day’s tasks by shift (LMAO!) I’m looking over my cards. Ten of Spades is speaking to me. Its name is “That’s an Order”. This encounter is a group of stragglers from US Forces. They outrank the PCs and want the PCs and their stuff in the unit. This card came up once before and the players avoided that incarnation on the road. What if this unit is larger, had a little time, and a whole town? I scaled this card up to fit the town that Janusz, our Polish doctor, and Tracey, our US Mechanic went to recon. This one encounter exploded into a session’s main thing and a cliffhanger. I kept returning to the focus of the card, its main thing, whenever I needed guidance to drive the encounter.

I love sandbox games that have oracle-like generators like this. Not only does a card here have reuse value, but they are also inspirational —and that’s the point right?! I’m also biased, I like to play to find out. Player authority and setting generators make for wonderful GM surprises. I remember saying to the players:

Playing the Ten of Spades encounter straight means Tracey very well could be pressed into service. In fact, she was given an offer, new unit patches and everyone is acting as if she said yes. The polish doctor might catch the bad end of this deal. The other two players are fretting about how to proceed as they watch this unfold at a distance. All the players are bought in and I love it. I don’t know how it resolves and losing two characters is very real on the table. We are all on board with this. I feel like this moment is why we play these games and the foundation of the stories we tell of past games.

In the week that followed, I took that random encounter and made it a site using the same rules in Twilight: 2000 I used to prep the eastern town. However, I picked from the list where it made sense based on how things already played out and rolled on tables where it was still unknown. Random Ten of Spades is now “Barnes America” a real thing in our setting now. I didn’t know about it beforehand. It wasn’t boxed text. Just a prompt on a random card that I drove like a nail. Yeah…I could have just moved the prepped town, but I’m glad I didn’t.