When we were wrapping up our original campaign, we did a series of flash-forwards, a sort of where-are-they-now? kind of thing, in the final episode. From those, we knew that JT, one of the original PCs, was going to be going down a dark path for a while but that eventually her girlfriend Renci would arrange an intervention to get JT the help she needed. We also knew that Renn, who had had an interest in big game hunting ever since his first appearance in our original campaign, was going to end up becoming essentially a wildlife veterinarian. The Resh Hour stories became our chance to see how these things came about. In addition, it was an opportunity to learn more about Renci and her background, since she had not driven the campaign plot as much as Renn’s personal story had.
My spouse, who had played JT in the original campaign, played Renci in the Resh Hour series, and I played Renn. The Mythic GM Emulator was a great tool for letting both of us be surprised by how those things played out, even though we knew where the story would ultimately end. One thing about the GME, though, is that it does take a lot more energy to play with it than to just be a PC. This is because essentially everyone is bearing some of the burden of the GM. In the Resh Hour stories, one of the places we struggled with this was handling NPCs. We found it worked more smoothly to have one PC take the lead on interacting with NPCs in a given scene, which freed up the other person to devote more attention to fleshing out the NPC. So when Renci was talking with Pile-of-Leaves at the end of Resh Hour, I spoke for the former Jedi, and when Renn did, my spouse controlled the Mirialan. This was less of an issue in Resh Hour 2: Boots on the Ground, since we decided this would be a wilderness exploration mission. Still, some new NPCs do join the roster, as you will learn if you read on….