Paul Taliesin​​​ sure, no problem. It’s really just the scope and style of the questions for playbooks. They’re relatable and adult and not crazy. There is a good mix of mundane (this character is my elder) and juicy (I’ve shared a bed with this one, I covet this one’s property). So there’s a good bit of range, I think.

I usually see the maps start with the factual relationships, like who is whose relative, in the first round, and with that context folks then start grabbing for the telenovela ones right away: I’m sleeping with Sigrid, who might be my niece but I’m not sure, but I really want to marry Osk the witch, whose brother is the huscarl to the goði, etc etc.

I guess I look at, say, the Urban Shadows r-map questions and it’s just not as claustrophobic or juicy. US starts out by relying on “what do you care about?” to get things started, while SotI expects the GM to look for the juicy bits on the map and ask leading questions.

Not to pick on US, I really love that game, it just provides different tools that aren’t so preloaded with fraught situations. Cities are big, farmsteads are small.

Night Witches comes as close to SotI as I’ve ever seen, but it also needs to serve the “strangers thrown together by circumstance” thing, so it’s juicy but less tangled.