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Holy Crap! We Have a Game This Weekend! - The Baggage Cup and Supernatural

So you don’t have an awesome game lined up for the weekend, but your players expect you to run a game? Never fear. In this variant, you’re going to let them run the game and drive the plot. The trick is that they won’t even know they’re doing it.

The Baggage Cup is a method of mixing up the order of things. In my experience, it works better with newer games, long-standing characters aren’t too good for this. At the beginning of your session, you hand everyone two slips of paper, all these slips of equal size. You tell everyone to write down a piece of baggage.

The baggage must be gender neutral, and general enough that character stories can be modified easily to accommodate. Good examples would be things such as, “I accidentally killed someone when I was a teenager,” “I was the bastard child of a very important person. I don’t tell anyone because I don’t want them to treat me differently,” and “I have a gambling problem, I do what I do now to keep my mind off it.” Also, the baggage shouldn’t be so bad as to ruin a character’s life or render them unplayable, that defeats the purpose.

Then, you have everyone fold their pieces, and put them in a cup. Shake it around, have everyone draw a slip and read it. If they got their own, they have to put the slip back and draw another. Their goal that session is to exhibit at least two instances where that baggage, that secret could be discovered.

If your system uses advancement points (experience points and the like,) tell your players that their experience earning rests on their exhibitions. If their baggage comes out in a dramatic fashion, they get full experience. If they tried to bring it out but it couldn’t, they get half. If they don’t even try, they get nothing (or the obligatory base participation points.) Done correctly, characters will develop, their histories will come to life and the players will eat it up. Give them the loosest story seed to get started, and the moment one of those pieces comes to light, they’ll be all over it.