“I Read The News Today, Oh Boy!”

 (This Article was originally published on The Atomic Think Tank on March 10, 2025)

Dispensing plot seeds is an important part of GMing. They allow you to foreshadow future adventures, provide leading clues for PCs to investigate, give interesting and useful setting information and GMs can use them to gauge player interest in upcoming plots.
 In addition to that, it helps to sell the idea that there's a big, wide world out there that's happening all around the heroes. The only downside is, if you're a busy GM, you might not have time to write and present a full dozen or so newspaper articles, magazine articles, newsfeeds or TV and radio news reports or Youtube clips. Especially if large sections of them are only going to end up as background noise or flavour.

Several years ago, I was planning an upcoming session and decided to try and simplify the process for myself. I grabbed a handful of Index Cards and put a headline, a bit of clickbait or an enticing phrase or sentence on each. Some of these would be attached to more immediate, upcoming plotlines, others to long-term plot-seeds and still others were there for general setting ambience and flavour.

On the day of the game, I ran a brief downtime montage to get an idea of how each character was spending a few hours, and after this, I got the PCs to make Perception rolls. I then placed the cards onto the table, and using the results of the Perception rolls as Initiative Order, got each player to pick a card in turn. 
On a failure, the player gets to pick one card. A success, they pick two, and anything with more than one degree of success, they pick three.
 
Once everyone has their card(s) in front of them, they make a second roll. This can be any skill, as long as they can justify it. It might be Perception of the character's just keeping their eyes and ears open, Investigation of the character's actively seeking out more, it could be Intimidation if it's the Shadowy vigilante shaking down a stool-pigeon, or an Expertise if that's relevant. 
 On a failure, the player is able to ask two questions. A success, three, and anything with more than one degree of success, they can ask four questions based on the card topics. These can all be for one card, or can be spread out over a number of different topics.

The players then noted down the answers to their questions on the back of their card. The final result might look something like this:

During the session, the PCs could use these notes in the same way as they would a Hero Point, but only inasfar as it relates to the answer. After the point is spent, the box is ticked and cannot be used again.
 
For instance, the PCs are examining the charred ruins of the warehouse. The team's super-scientist Doc Rocket has rigged up a scanning device and, knowing that he's dealing with focused ionic fields and possible Martian Tech, has calibrated his scanner accordingly.
 As a result, when he makes his investigation roll, and rolls a 2 for a total of 12. He decides to spend that point for a re-roll and this time, rolls a 6, which becomes 16. Added to his Investigation, that becomes 26. 
 "Sweet Jumpin' Quasars!" says Doc, "The Ion-Scanner's going crazy over here! Whatever blew this place up, it was certainly no explosive manufactured on Earth..."

This is not the sort of strategy you want to do every session (or if you did, you'd REALLY want to cut down on the number of facts/answers), but at the beginning of a story arc or when your players have earned a chunk of down-time, it can be a great way to give players do a BIG info dump without it feeling like a big info dump. At the same time, you can also gauge player interest in possible future storylines, and plant seeds for later adventures with relatively minimal effort.