When playing pretend with friends it helps to have some rules for when we inevitably disagree on what's happening in the fictional world. I first took that idea to heart as a nine year old who had recently been introduced to Shadowrun and 1st ed. AD&D, and who couldn't help but see how much more frustrating and prone-to-stalling-out the imaginary games on the playground were as opposed to the table top games. Or board games, which have rules to govern play and a (few) pre-decided end condition(s), which makes it even easier for everyone to agree on the shared make-believe of the game.
I prefer the middle ground of RPGs: there's some rules to guide conflicts and contextual considerations, but usually no end game condition (of course, some will: Polaris springs to mind), and I like the flexible, open-ended space encouraged by those factors. Some unshared assertion or general question about the shared fiction will come up, the rules are brought to bear to decide what's what, and then what happens next. That continual falling from concretized story to the wild boundless imagination to resolution by way of the rules being used to concretized story...
Thus the blog title 'and then what happens?' - because I enjoy continually venturing out into that shared space of imagination and questioning with other humans.
The rules you use, however (of course?), change some of the ways your story will progress, just like how the grammar and words of the language you speak circumscribe how you can sensibly communicate to others. To that end, I spent some time considering which of my various gaming resources I wanted to draw from for the Veins of the Earth campaign I'm setting up. These are what I've decided on for primary documents:
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