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PUM Quick Rules: Plot Nodes

Plot Nodes are the building blocks of your story's universe. They represent key elements of your fiction and game, constrained to the Plot Scope you have defined.

The Six Types of Plot Nodes

In PUM, you can create and track six main types of Plot Nodes to flesh out your game:

  1. Game or world elements: Universal features that define your universe and shape its atmosphere (e.g., oppressive government, decaying ecosystem, sentient technology, crimson fog).
  2. Potential problems: Dangers, obstacles, or encounters that threaten the protagonists (e.g., malfunctioning AI assistant, spectral apparitions, territorial gang, perilous terrain).
  3. Useful findings: Discoveries or assets that can aid the protagonists in their quest (e.g., decrypted code, ancient artifact, map of an uncharted zone, prototype device).
  4. Pending questions: Mysteries or questions that you or your characters seek to answer (e.g., "Who betrayed the rebellion?", "What triggered the collapse of the old society?").
  5. Relevant Characters: Protagonists, allies, rivals, or villains.
  6. Interesting Locations: Taverns, dungeons, planets, or buildings.

Passive and Active Purposes

Plot Nodes have two main purposes in your solo session:

  1. Passive Guidance (Creative Context): They serve as a quick-reference list for you as the narrator, helping you build context, track active threads, and keep your creative juices flowing.
  2. Active Invocation (Random Twists): When you trigger a Random prompt during a Plot Beat, PUM will occasionally select one of your active Plot Nodes and insert it into the prompt. For example, if you have a rival named Marcus marked as a Plot Node, a Random Prompt might roll: "An NPC acts aggressively (Marcus)".

This ensures that your world elements, problems, findings, questions, characters, and locations don't just sit idle on your sheets—they actively reappear in your story, making your world feel alive, dynamic, and interconnected.

Tips for Managing Plot Nodes

  • Keep Them Alive: Remember to update, evolve, and adapt your Plot Nodes as your story progresses. Problems get resolved, questions get answered, and findings get used!
  • Enable/Disable Nodes: If a character is captured, or a location is destroyed, you can disable that node in the app so it is no longer invoked by Random Prompts.
  • Plot Focus: You can adjust your Plot Focus settings to determine how often your Plot Nodes are called by Random Prompts versus general random events.

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