Your agenda

These are your goals when running Stonetop:

• Portray a rich and mysterious world
• Punctuate the characters' lives with adventure
• Play to find out what happens

Everything you say and do as the GM is meant to support these three goals, and no others. It's not your agenda (for example) to challenge the players' skill, or to provide "fair" fights, or to punish the characters. It's absolutely not your agenda to control the players or force "your" story to go the way you think it should. When in doubt, ask yourself: this thing you're considering doing, which of these three goals does it support? If the answer is "none of them," then don't do it. Do something else.

Your first goal is to portray a rich and mysterious world: alive and breathing, filled with detail and humanity and depth. Mundane concerns—crops, trade, weather, the opinions of your neighbors—are important. Fantastic elements are important, too, but they are strange and scary and poorly understood. The past sleeps unquietly. Questions abound.

Your second goal is to punctuate the characters' lives with adventure. The PCs have lives to live, homes to take care of, families to feed. They have demands on their time. Your job is to make that stuff matter, but also to interrupt it with threats and opportunities that only the PCs can (or will) address. Adventures will occupy the bulk of the players' time, but they shouldn't occupy the bulk of the characters' time.

Finally, most importantly, play to find out what happens. It's your job to portray a rich and mysterious world, to threaten that which the PCs care about or dangle opportunities, and then to see where things go from there. You'll make plans, yes. You'll make preparations. But once play begins, it's your job to follow where the players lead, where the dice lead, and where the fiction leads.

And the reward is this: to be genuinely surprised by the story that—naturally, organically, magically—unfolds. A tale you could never weave by yourself.