Make a world worth fifty evenings

Anyone can build a scenario pack: say session zero at your table, describe the world you're imagining - a few sentences is genuinely enough - and the GM authors the rest: the factions, the secrets (unseen, so you can play your own world and still be surprised by it), the characters, the labels. You never touch a file. This page isn't homework; it's the checklist the GM builds for you, so you know what to ask for when you want to steer. (Want to open the files and craft at the schema level? the Builder's Manual is your page.)

1. Build factions, not plot

Agendas generate content forever; plots run out. The single highest-leverage thing in your world is two or three factions who each want something specific and would keep pursuing it if the player never showed up. The engine advances every faction's agenda whenever game time passes - so a faction with a real agenda writes your world's story for you, forever. A villain with a plan beats a villain with a scene list, every time.

The test the GM will run: every named faction needs an agenda AND a clock it would pursue with the player absent. If you can't say what a faction does next Tuesday without the player, it isn't a faction yet. The great ones also carry a fracture - the heir who disagrees, the priest who read the runes right - because fractures are where alliances and betrayals live.

2. Bury secrets worth digging for

Your gm/secrets.md should hold at least one truth that recontextualizes the whole premise - the thing that makes a player put the phone down for a second when they finally learn it. Then seed it at three depths: a surface oddity anyone might notice, a middle clue that rewards a deliberate dig, and the truth itself, defended. Investigation pays in Adventure Mode because discovery is a tracked state - so give the trackers something worth finding. And two or three secrets that interlock beat one: when the mystery, the prize, and the trusted guide each hide a face of the same fact, every dig pays twice.

3. Boss games: hand them the whole outfit

If your premise puts the player in charge of something - a gang, a clan, a trading company, a settlement - build it on the engine's outfit layer from scene one: officers with their own agendas, crews tracked with loyalty (mutiny is a clock, not a surprise), an operations ledger in whatever period your world breathes (weeks, seasons), rivals run at the same scale, and succession in your death rule - the founder dies, the heir plays on, and the campaign becomes a saga. Session Zero handles all of it when you say "I want to run the whole outfit."

4. Family packs: write for the reader

Set audience: family and the whole engine plays at kid height - the store shows the badge, and the GM binds itself to the family rules: it asks the table's ages once (and remembers them for every session after), pitches every sentence so a young reader can read it aloud, and keeps peril real but bloodless. The craft that separates a great family pack from a padded one:

Kids deserve the real game. Keep the factions, the clocks, the three-depth secrets - all of it. Simplify the words, never the world.
Defeat costs, death doesn't happen. Write a death rule where losing stings and everything lost can be won back - captured friends, stolen songs, a rival gone cold. Rescue is a better quest than revenge anyway.
Make the stakes kid-sized and real: grades, friendships, a secret straining a family. A hero with a bedtime is a hero with something to lose.
The read-aloud test: read your blurb and your opening scene out loud. Anywhere a kid would stumble, use a simpler sentence. Names they can say, words they own.
Villains scary, never sadistic - and best of all, savable. The enemy a kid figures out how to rescue is the story they retell at breakfast.
Short seasons, high replay. A family Question should RESOLVE - a season of bedtimes, not a year - and the ending offers doors: play it again re-dealt, a sequel season, or a new world. Build your pack so the second run surprises a kid who already knows the twist.

5. Ask a Question with a campaign-sized clock

Every great pack asks one dramatic question: does the town live to see the thaw? How high does a nobody climb before the family notices? The Question's clock should be campaign-scale - seasons, not hours. Small clocks can and should be brutal (the hostage can die on day two; that's grief the story carries), but the central Question is never hanging on a 48-hour fuse. Give players room to live in your world; the long way round is where they fall in love with it.

6. Choose your campaign's shape

Every pack declares one of three shapes, and the store shows it up front so players know what they're picking up:

finite - a game with an ending. The Question resolves, credits roll (title card, epilogue, every loose thread repaid), the book closes. Best for tight premises: the heist season, the one terrible winter.
open - a world without an ending. No central fuse burning; the player lives there, and the world just keeps generating. Best for sandbox premises: the frontier town, the trading route.
saga (the default, and usually right) - the game ends; the world doesn't have to. The Question resolves with full credits, then the player chooses: keep living in the changed world, or close the book. Every bundled pack so far is a saga.

Session Zero asks you this and explains the trade-offs at the table - but knowing it going in makes your other choices sharper: a finite pack spends everything on its ending; an open pack spends everything on its generators.

7. Build for sprawl - your pack is a first act, not a runtime

The best campaigns outlive their packs, and the engine is built for it: when every authored arc has resolved, faction agendas, world turns, and the player's own ambitions keep generating story forever. Build for that:

Arcs are skeletons with multiple endings - hooks, escalation beats, and two or three ways each could land. Never a script: play fills them in, and an arc that can only end one way will fight the table.
Make the map bigger than the plot. Name a few places your arcs never visit and give each one line of what's true there. The engine generates at the edges wherever players wander - your names and one-liners become its raw material.
Build factions that survive the Question. If your central mystery resolves and every faction's reason to exist resolves with it, the world dies with the plot. The ones still standing - with agendas the resolution reshaped - are the sequel.
Leave load-bearing vacancies. An empty seat of power, an unclaimed territory, a trade nobody runs anymore: gaps are invitations, and the engine promotes player ambitions into full arcs ("build a bar empire" gets milestones, opposition, and a clock, exactly as if you'd written it).

8. Write pregens people want to BE

Two or three ready characters, each with a trade, a wound, and a hook wired into the opening situation - in your world's own idiom. A pregen is most players' first sixty seconds in your world; "jump in now as the ferry mechanic who owes the wrong people" beats a blank character sheet for almost everyone.

9. Declare your era, then let it bind

The era block - what exists, what's rare, what's absent - is your world's physics, and the GM enforces it in both directions: players can't summon what your world lacks, and the GM won't hand it out either. The absent list is where atmosphere lives. No cure. No cavalry. No cell service. What's missing is the pressure.

10. Label it so people can find it

The pack store and the in-game browser search your labels verbatim: a title, a genre, a few tags, a blurb that sells it in two sentences. Session Zero writes these with you, and --eject-pack checks them before you publish - a pack without them is findable by nobody. Building for kids? Say so and the store gives you the family-friendly badge and filter.

11. Publish it

--eject-pack {name} at your table: you get a share code (friends import it with one line) and a GitHub-ready zip.
No GitHub account? No problem: email your share link to support@adventure-mode.com with the pack's name - a human reviews it and shelves it for you. GitHub users can PR the zip's contents into the registry directly; either way your pack appears in the store.
Standout packs get pulled into the base game, with credit. That's the ladder: your Session Zero world, shipped to every table.

The short version: factions with agendas, secrets at three depths, a campaign-scale Question with a declared shape, a world built to outlive its plot, pregens with hooks, an era that binds, labels the store can search. The GM runs this exact checklist before your first scene - packs that pass play for months.

Want the whole workshop? The Builder's Manual is the complete reference for hand-crafters: the full pack schema, every dial (hidden dice, pacing, house rules, the era block), how the GM actually uses each file you write - character sheets, faction clocks, secret depths - and the eject-edit-import workflow, including building packs in a GitHub repo with version control. Session Zero to get a compliant world, then craft every file by hand.