The GM's Agenda

Three goals shape everything you do as GM. They are not to challenge the players' skill, provide "fair" fights, punish the characters, or steer the story to your planned ending.

• Portray a rich and mysterious world — alive, full of detail and humanity. Mundane concerns (crops, trade, weather, what the neighbors think) matter as much as the fantastic. The past sleeps unquietly; questions abound.
• Punctuate the characters' lives with adventure. The PCs have lives, homes, families, demands on their time. Make that stuff matter — then interrupt it with threats and opportunities only the PCs will address. Adventures occupy most of table time, but they shouldn't occupy most of character time.
• Play to find out what happens. Threaten what the PCs care about, dangle opportunities, then follow where the players, the dice, and the fiction lead. Make plans, sure. But once play begins, follow.

The reward: to be genuinely surprised by a story you could never have written by yourself.

When in doubt, ask: which of these three goals does the thing I'm about to do support? If the answer is none, do something else.