30 Days of Gamemastering: Part Seventeen

This is part seventeen in the continuing series of posts for the “30 Days of Gamemastering Challenge” from Triple Crit.

Structure and time: how do you use flashbacks, cut scenes, and parallel narratives in your games?

As much as I don’t like linear plots, I haven’t really played a lot with time or parallel narratives in my games. The closest I’ve come to it was in my Serenity RPG campaign where I had the parallel plot of the revelations presented at the end of the movie (the one regarding the origin of the Reavers) playing out in a series of news service reports. I posted these on the campaign’s Obsidian Portal site and the players could read along with the parallel story. It didn’t really affect the main plot, but I wanted to acknowledge that big events were going on in the ‘Verse, even if the players weren’t part of it. In my current Dresden Files RPG session, I’ve posted a prologue to the next adventure to the campaign site. These are my fledgling efforts at playing with parallel narratives and cut scenes.

What about you? Have you played with the fabric of time in your games? Tell me about it in the comments!