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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9845330" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'll accept that the games I mentioned - In A Wicked Age, Wuthering Heights, and Cthulhu Dark - are pretty niche.But I've never read Wuthering Heights (or any Bronte novel - I'm better read in non-fiction than fiction! And thus am one of those who reads the reviews rather than the works). To run Wuthering Heights, I think it helps to have a general sense of nineteenth or early twentieth century English social norms - otherwise the Problems Table won't quite make sense - but beyond that, a general feel for soap operatic and/or romantic drama will get you through.In the Cthulhu Dark sessions I've run, the Mythos didn't play much role: I did once use a shoggoth, but mostly the label; I can't recall if my shoggoth behaved much like a HPL shoggoth. Mostly I've relied on a general sense of how horror-oriented mystery/thriller stories work: in particular, that a mundane problem (eg someone or something is missing, or is being unexpectedly concealed) turns out to have a non-mundane explanation (eg the missing person has been turned into a were-hyena and their treating physician is cooperating with their corporate partner or family member to cover this up). This is (I think ) the most basic situation structure for sucking ordinary people (which is how I see Cthulhu Dark characters) into a story of non-mundane horror.When GMing In A Wicked Age, I've relied on my general sense of fantasy, and especially swords and sorcery/swords and sandals fantasy. That helps make sense of generals and armies and enchanters and desert tribes and the like. But I don't need to have read any particular REH or Roy Thomas Conan story to make the game go.I wouldn't really consider any of this sort of genre familiarity to be prep. I see it more as going to understanding how the fiction is meant to make sense to all the participants. This has been driven home to me <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/traveller-actual-play-an-ambiguous-success.698317/" target="_blank">running Classic Traveller for one of my daughters</a>. It was another zero-prep session - she rolled her PC, I rolled a starting world and a patron encounter, and we went from there. I relied on my familiarity with the conspiracy/thriller genre, which was what her PC (a 1977 Other character with streetwise-y/rogue-y skills) and the patron suggested. But her relative lack of familiarity with that genre meant it was hard for her to understand the situation and declare effective actions for her PC.It seems to me that this genre familiarity that all participants need is different from distinctive GM-side prep.</blockquote>

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