Maybe an example for some of us?
I’ll share an example of how a Blades in the Dark game I ran began. This may help with some general ideas.
During the first session, you create the player-characters and the Crew. As part of that process, the players will need to make decisions for their characters and for the crew; these decisions are to reflect that they’re denizens of the city of Doskvol (the setting for the game) and have a history and connections there.
The choices the players make will help determine some of the starting situation, and the GM should keep them in mind. The best thing a GM can do during the crew creation phase is ask questions. For instance, part of crew creation is the selection of a location that serves as a lair for the crew. The lair begins play with some upgrades, and you have to decide which of the city’s existing factions helped with the upgrades, and which suffered do to the upgrades. Ask why this was the case and then use that information to inform play. Alternatively, you can leave the question unanswered as something to be revealed during play.
All the decisions the players make during this phase should give the GM fodder to draw upon as needed. By the time crew creation is done, there should be a dynamic situation between the crew, some of the city’s factions, and other individual NPCs. Many games embed this kind of process into character creation, but it’s something that can be used to enhance many games.
So, for my group’s game, the players decided to be a crew of Hawkers, which are purveyors of illicit goods. They chose the Crew Ability “The Good Stuff” as their starting ability, which means that their product is of exceptional quality. So this prompted me to ask about the product; what is it? How did you come to have it?
They decided that it was a potent drug that interacts with the ghost field (a kind of ethereal plane that exists alongside the real world, the realm of ghosts and other supernatural entities and phenomena). They decided to call it Third Eye. One player suggested that they’d come into an initial supply of it unexpectedly, so we went with that general idea, with the expectation that we’d fill in more details later.
One player had chosen the Leech playbook for his character. This is a kind of alchemist/saboteur/mad scientist type of character. He suggested that he’d like to learn how to create more. So as a means to do so, the players decided to select the Lair Upgrade “Workshop” which gives the Leech the means to craft or engineer items… in this case, how to learn enough about Third Eye to be able to replicate it.
The selection of the workshop involved choosing a faction that assisted and a faction that was harmed. The crew would take a positive rep with the helpful faction and a negative one with the harmed faction. We decided that the Greycloaks (former police who’d turned to crime after supposedly being framed) had obtained equipment from the Sparkwrights (the city’s guild of engineers) and they provided it to the crew. So the Sparkwrights are angry with the crew for the theft of their equipment. Not a great enemy to have.
Part of the rest of the crew creation involved selecting another faction with a negative status, and a turf boss. The turf boss is the faction that runs the district in which the crew operates, and who must be paid tribute or else the crew risks angering them. We decided that what made sense was to have the Crows as the turf boss because the Crows are the current top gang in Doskvol. They took some turf from another gang, the Red Sashes, and offered it to the new crew. So our Crew has to pay tribute to the Crows and has angered the Red Sashes by taking their turf. It’s a small vendor stand in the district called Nightmarket, a district that’s seeing some form of gentrification from new money folks moving to the area.
The book suggests for the first Score to just jump in and start. What we decided was that the crew needed to get their initial shipment of product from their lair in Six Towers to the vendor stand in the neighboring district of Nightmarket. So that was the score… a Transport Score to get the product from lair to turf. They had to deal with some Bluecoats (the police) and also some angry Red Sashes. Finally, a ghost was attracted by the Third Eye… we’d established that it was supernatural in nature, and so I figured it made sense to introduce that element right away.
That first score was shaped entirely by the choices they made in character/crew generation. And the outcome… suspicious Bluecoats, angry Red Sashes, and possible ghostly attention… all mattered in subsequent scores. I’ve only touched on a few things from crew creation that were involved in the initial score, but there was a lot more to it, and it all informed later play.
All those starting details combined with the fact that once you do a couple of scores, some outcomes and follow up activities suggest themselves means that the game starts chugging along on its own. The players start suggesting scores… we need to grab some more turf, we need to hire some muscle to defend against the Red Sashes, we need to crack the recipe to make Third Eye, we need the raw materials to make it… and so on, all of this just starts to snowball from play.
I hope that gives a good idea about how this works.
