It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.
Today's prompt is Enter.
Both as a GM and a player, I always love that moment before you commit to a course of action, especially when it potentially puts the characters at risk.
The doorway at the entrance to Moria in Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" was the element that immediately sprang to mind when I thought about this prompt, but these little moments repeat throughout fiction and throughout roleplaying sessions.
When playing Eternal Lies I can remember every time we chose to enter deeper into the mystery, there was a moment of fear. Our characters felt so small against the threat. But once we were committed, it was all about doing and responding. You push off the edge and the energy takes you forward. Kind of how I found abseiling when I tried it.
Of course, it can go wrong; when we played Worldbreaker for Pelgrane Press' The EsoTerrorist, we had a moment when we had to enter a town with a major Ebola outbreak. The level of procrastination and hesitation from the players was amazing. None of us wanted to risk exposing our characters, with whom we'd developed a great attachment, to the possibility of such a horrific ending. Fighting the supernatural and its minions was fine, but risking being eaten alive by a superbug just caused us to flat out stall, causing the GM a lot of frustration until we finally talked ourselves into the whole thing!
There's definitely something to be said for making sure your adventures have plenty of chances for the players to choose whether they want to go deeper. This week's Jägermeister session had such a moment. The Bounty Hunters could have chosen to have taken a smaller bounty which would meant that they turned a small profit but avoided the potential of landing on a world that had been destroyed with weapons of mass destruction and becoming involved in solving a terrorist plot. They had a serious discussion about it and I was prepared for the campaign to end there, but fortunately, they wanted to go further. I think it was mostly wrapped in the meta decision of wanting to know how the plot plays out and knowing that they'd effectively wrap the planned campaign if they didn't enter into the next part.
The decision to enter, is a moment of choice. Make it meaningful where you can. A threshold to be crossed.
6 September 2025 (although posted on for the correct RPGaDay date)
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