“Okay, so you’re tied to a chair inside a run-down trailer,” the game master told me. “The woman standing in front of you punches you in the face. ‘Where is it?’ she screams. ‘You’re going to tell me, or I’m going to hack pieces off of you until you do!’”

I blinked. I’d been handed a character sheet just 20 minutes earlier. The only thing I knew was that I was the leader of a biker gang. There had been no lead-up, no introduction to the world of this tabletop RPG. I didn’t know who this screaming woman was, how I’d ended up trapped in her trailer, or even whether I had the information she was trying to beat out of me.

And I loved it. I wasn’t used to getting thrown straight into the deep end this way, not even at the kinds of indie-RPG one-shot showcases I’d been frequenting, where weird formats and radical narrative experiments were the norm. Being introduced to a story that was already well underway and facing a dangerous situation with a lot of unknowns was an exciting, startling challenge that I still remember more than a decade later, long after most of the other details of that one-shot have faded. That cold open pushed me out of my comfort zone, started the game with a bang, and instantly focused the attention of everyone at the table. Suddenly, we weren’t a bunch of strangers trying to figure out how we wanted to approach this game: We were a team dealing with an urgent, immediate, life-or-death problem.

Tabletop RPG narratives that start in the midst of the action are pretty atypical. The published D&D campaigns I’ve played or run tend to open with low-stakes scenarios that acclimate characters to a setting or situation. Most of the non-D&D campaigns I’ve played (or run) over the years start with some form of slow-burn relationship-building, akin to what Critical Role’s Campaign Four did at launch, with a lot of lore and characters figuring out their motivations and connections. I’m often drawn to collaborative storytelling games like Dialect or The Quiet Year, which focus as much on collective world construction as they do on actual playtime. My favorite horror game to run is Dread, which starts with players filling out questionnaires to define their characters — often a lengthy, thoughtful writing process before anything else........

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