Proposal: A Narrative Production Workflow for Player Exchanges

Preserve the causal spine

Narrative work may select, stage, and express an approved outcome. It may not improve the outcome, invent a prerequisite, reveal protected information, resolve an approved uncertainty, or create new canon by implication.

Make knowledge diegetic

Every player-facing fact should have a credible source. The leader may know it because of their office, personal observation, communal memory, a named informant, a public record, a physical object, or an explicitly uncertain inference. The text should not confer clean knowledge merely because the GM has recorded it.

Reward attention without requiring divination

Every essential pressure must be clear enough to support meaningful action. Deeper opportunities, motives, and risks may be carried through corroborating clues that reward careful reading. The game should distinguish attentive interpretation from guessing what the GM secretly wants.

Show that the player's particular choices mattered

Each result should contain at least one development that could not have occurred in the same way without the player's chosen people, precautions, priorities, or leadership method. This communicates submission quality through consequences rather than grades.

Let NPCs act

Named people should not function primarily as labels for information. When they appear, they should decide, refuse, interpret, interrupt, improvise, conceal, concede, or demand something according to established motive and capacity.

Keep the document playable

Atmosphere cannot come at the expense of comprehension. The player should finish a packet knowing what seems urgent, what remains uncertain, who matters, and what kinds of action appear possible. A concise reference ending may summarize knowledge already earned through the narrative.

1. Truth envelope

Produced from approved adjudication or approved campaign initialization:

• facts and outcomes that are fixed;
• costs, failures, and foregone opportunities;
• NPC decisions, motives, knowledge, and limits;
• player-visible discoveries;
• uncertainties that must remain unresolved;
• facts that must be communicated;
• protected facts that must not be disclosed;
• proposed details that would require GM approval before becoming canon.

The truth envelope is the contract every later role must obey.

2. Knowledge-provenance ledger

For each intended player-facing fact:

This ledger is the primary defense against unexplained or “magical” player knowledge.

3. Clue map

Important pressures, opportunities, dangers, and concealed causes receive intentional signals:

• a primary clue that is difficult to miss but not necessarily interpreted;
• an optional corroborating clue for attentive readers;
• an interested NPC interpretation;
• a competing interpretation or complicating fact where appropriate;
• at least one plausible avenue for investigation or response;
• the conclusion the clues must not yet prove.

Not every fact needs mystery treatment. The clue map is for situations in which discovery and interpretation are part of play.

4. Narrative brief

The brief identifies the story the document is trying to tell:

• the player's dramatic question;
• the dominant throughline;
• the intended emotional movement;
• two or three recognition beats tied to specific player choices;
• the NPCs who exercise agency;
• the turning point;
• the visible price;
• a memorable physical image;
• the changed situation or unanswered question at the end;
• required facts and protected facts.

5. Editorial response log

Substantive editorial notes are classified as:

• Required: factual, privacy, continuity, causal, or epistemic defect;
• Strong recommendation: pacing, characterization, engagement, or clarity;
• Optional: taste-level language or structural alternative.

The author accepts or rejects each substantive note. A rejection receives a short reason. Disagreement about a required note goes to the human GM.

Stage 1: Construct the private scenario model

Establish the village's material position, authority structure, immediate pressure, advantage, constraint, unusual opportunity, concealed danger, active NPC agendas, customs, and genuine possible directions. This remains explicit and mechanically useful behind the screen.

Stage 2: Choose the story engine

Define the recurring tensions capable of generating play beyond the first decision:

• What form of authority does the leader hold?
• Who wants incompatible things from that authority?
• What material problem resists a proclamation?
• What opportunity carries a meaningful cost?
• What anomaly invites investigation?
• What relationship can change over several turns?

For an important opening, the story team may propose two or three treatments with different lenses before the GM selects one.

Stage 3: Design the leader's first-hour experience

Choose a bounded event—a morning inspection, emergency gathering, journey, hearing, failed ritual, accident, or return from danger. The opening should include:

• a physical event already underway;
• two or three people with incompatible aims;
• a consequential object or environment;
• a decision people expect from the leader;
• an unanswered question;
• a tonal promise for this clan's story.

Not every named contact should appear. Those who do appear should contribute action rather than biography.

Stage 4: Build knowledge provenance and clue chains

Decide how every necessary fact becomes available during or around that experience. Remove information the player does not yet need. Convert appropriate facts into inspectable uncertainty.

Dreams, memory fragments, ritual reflection, or culturally grounded altered states may communicate subjective experience where appropriate. They must not operate as supernatural truth engines in a mundane setting.

Stage 5: Draft the packet

A flexible default structure is:

1. cold open;
2. immediate confrontation or problem;
3. movement through a meaningful part of the settlement;
4. encounters that reveal resources and constraints;
5. a remembered or witnessed event establishing authority and custom;
6. a quieter clue, opportunity, or warning;
7. return to the decision now demanded of the leader;
8. compact orientation or reference material, if still needed.

The packet should invite action without naming preferred options or exposing the hidden scenario outline.

Stage 6: Run a naïve-reader test

A reviewer who sees only prior player-visible context answers:

• What is happening now?
• What appears urgent?
• What resources and constraints are visible?
• Who matters, and what do they want?
• What opportunities or anomalies did you notice?
• What remains uncertain?
• What actions seem possible?
• What tone and kind of story does this promise?

The answers are compared with the intended player experience. Missed essentials require stronger carriers or corroboration. Excessively confident reconstruction of hidden truth requires greater ambiguity.

Stage 1: Complete simultaneous adjudication

Analyze locked submissions together, resolve intersections, obtain explicit GM adjudication approval, and create the truth envelope. Narrative drafting must not begin from provisional individual outcomes.

Stage 2: Design observable embodiment

For each material outcome, decide how it manifests in the world:

• who acts;
• what they want and know at that moment;
• what triggers the action;
• what physical or social resistance appears;
• what the leader witnesses directly;
• what arrives later as report, rumor, or record;
• what visible consequence remains afterward.

Material embodiments that add new actions, incidents, or character commitments should be approved by the GM as part of adjudication or as a clearly recorded supplemental decision.

Stage 3: Build the recognition map

Map significant player choices to observable consequences. This is not a requirement that every instruction succeed or receive equal space. It ensures the result recognizes the player's actual authorship of the month.

Useful recognition beats include:

• a precaution preventing a worse outcome;
• a delegated person making the kind of decision they were prepared to make;
• a neglected dependency becoming costly;
• a leadership approach producing trust, fear, resentment, initiative, or compliance;
• a contingency preserving part of a plan after an assumption fails;
• an explicit refusal protecting resources or legitimacy.

Stage 4: Select one dominant story

Do not narrate every initiative with equal weight. Choose a dominant lens such as:

• a named person's decision;
• a project under stress;
• a contested public choice;
• an inspection or journey;
• an unexpected arrival;
• the aftermath of a failure;
• an institution facing its first real test.

Supporting work may be compressed. Across turns and clans, rotate lenses to avoid a repeated “departmental report” rhythm.

Stage 5: Draft with a story spine

A useful default sequence is:

1. enter at a consequential moment;
2. establish pressure and competing interpretations;
3. let the player's arrangements and named people operate;
4. reach a success, failure, revelation, or reversal;
5. show the cost and changed relationships;
6. end on the most charged new situation.

A short closing ledger may state what is now reliably known and available for the next submission. It should summarize the experienced story rather than replace it.

Stage 6: Test, edit, and audit

Run the naïve-reader test, then developmental editing, author response, and factual audit. Present the human GM with the final draft and a compact narrative-review card before requesting delivery approval.

Pilot A: Opening packet

Create one future-campaign opening using the full process. Before approval, show the human GMs:

• the private scenario model;
• the knowledge ledger and clue map;
• the narrative brief;
• the draft;
• the naïve-reader report;
• the editorial response log;
• the final audit.

Evaluate whether the added machinery improves the packet enough to justify its review cost.

Pilot B: Turn result

During the first live turn, use the full workflow for one result and a lean version for the others. The lean version retains the truth envelope, narrative brief, developmental edit, and factual audit but omits formal clue mapping unless discovery is central.

Compare:

• GM review time;
• number of factual corrections;
• perceived narrative quality;
• player comprehension;
• player anticipation for the next turn;
• whether different agents or passes produced genuinely different value.

Pilot C: Opening word and media allowance

Separately test the proposed ceiling of 3,000 words and up to two visual artifacts. Treat these as allowances, not targets. More space should support lived scenes and useful evidence, not longer inventories. The visual-production standard should be decided during the later presentation phase.