This post is intended for games where the players operate as a cohesive team or unit with access to some kind of home base or support team and a means to contact them regularly and easily. FIST is the cleanest example that comes to mind but it could work pretty easily in Blades in the Dark, LANCER, Troika, or what have you.

The goal is to both distribute responsibility for worldbuilding among players and also intentionally break up consensus on how the world works in a satisfying way. This is accomplished by giving each player a Support Character, remote from the action, who needs to be contacted by a main character to answer questions.

Your Support Character has the following attributes:

Real Name: Kept secret.

Department: The part of your home organization to which your support character belongs. Examples might include personnel, R&D, SIGINT, material & logistics, or security.

Callsign & Frequency: How the Main Characters address and contact your support character.

Expertise: A narrow-but-deep well of knowledge on a subject relevant to the team’s work. Examples might include medicine, zoology, criminal organizations, or giant robot manufacturing.

Fixation: A similarly deep well of knowledge on a subject that is, at best, esoteric. Examples might include cooking hamburgers, the Godzilla film franchise, romance novels, or cryptozoology.

Contrivance: Because one player is responsible for two characters, a contrivance should be in place to explain why they aren’t likely to talk to each other. While Rowlf and Kermit certainly HAVE sung a duet together, it certainly puts a lot of stress on Jim Henson to pull it off. Examples might include they simply don’t like each other, they like each other too much and are trying to be cool about it, or just a quirk of luck that they don’t seem to run into each other.

Scratchpad: Space to pre-write bits of compelling jargon, turns of phrase, important sounding names, and other details to pepper in with a given answer to make sure it sounds right.

Calling a Support Character

As long as their communication equipment is in good working order and the greater context allows for it, a Main Character can call any Support Character not forbidden by contrivance at any time. This is understood to take valuable time and make at least a small amount of noise. In situations where time is not critical and silence is not golden, calling a support character is essentially free (if a poor use of their time).

The Support Character then answers, and the Main Character asks a question. When answering, it is important to note that the Player does not actually need to know much of anything, and should feel empowered to simply make things up. 

Example: I, the author of this post, do not know with absolute confidence whether or not the mongoose is nocturnal or diurnal. If my support character is a zoology expert this does not matter one bit. If a Main Character calls and wants to know about the mongoose I am going to declare them nocturnal mammals that are famous for killing snakes, are capable of squeezing into surprisingly tight spaces, and are immune to rabies. Certainly a fair bit of this is not true in the real world but in the world of this game we’re accepting this as bog-standard mongoose behavior.

But if everything you say is true, then why do I disagree?

Inevitably, an expert will say something outrageous that either cuts against the grain of how the GM (or published adventure, or group consensus, whatever) had imagined things were going to work. This is a feature, not a bug, and we are trying to get to this tension as quickly as we can.

When possible, simply let the weird thing happen. A mongoose is spotted during the day, rabid. How can this be? Call the zoologist again, though she might spend the whole time talking about her fixation with Shaw Brothers martial arts movies and describe the plot of Five Deadly Venoms as an answer. 

The goal here is to let strageness beget more strangeness, allowing the Support Characters to be a lifeline back to the normal world and creating a sense that the one the Main Characters currently occupy is decidedly odd, even in innocuous ways. Moss growing on the wrong sides of trees, bricks weathering the wrong color, maybe its nothing and maybe the answer is crucial to your survival.

Obviously, but perhaps not as obviously as one might hope, the table is entirely within rights to shut down an expert espousing a sufficiently off-tone or hurtful opinion as fact. If your friends call you on your bullshit, know that you are receiving the most generous of gifts and receive it with dignity.

Intended impacts on distribution of worldbuilding.

The intent is to give the GM a list of topics about which they simply do not have to come up with anything, but can defer to the experts already available to the player. The GM goes wide, the support staff goes deep.

The procedure of calling in the expert is in place because it gives the players an in-universe way of initiating the request for information, and ensuring that the player responsible for delivering a TED talk on a given topic has a prompt to work with.

Arguably, if the GM were responsible for the entire support staff then no Contrivance would be necessary, but I’d argue that it is a small price to pay for achieving that most noble of goals: breaking consensus. Not only does the distribution of responsibility keep any one player from burning too bright, but also it ensures that no one at the table (especially the GM) is really on sure footing with regards to small details about the world and how it works.

Written by Dan Phipps
Cover image from death generator
Inspirations:
Sam Dunnewold asking good questions on Bluesky.
The Metal Gear Solid games. 
FIST by CLAYMORE.
Playtesting worldbuilding games designed by Rob Hebert.