Sorry for the late response on this, but I didn’t see it before now for some reason.

The system is very open-ended, but there are some good guidelines for moving on. Once you have used around half of your nodes (18 connected nodes or so), and you either connect them to a new transmission via a node, or you can wrap up all together. Usually once you have 10ish nodes down, the connections give a clear picture of what is going on. For example, in my own game I just ran a session of last night, the Diamond Fist threat was connected to the disappearance of Harayah al-Mabhum. The PCs are investigating this disappearance, and were summarily attacked by an assassin from the Diamond Fist. The emerging narrative here is the Diamond Fist has a vested interest in stopping this investigation from occurring, and it is all tied to something called the Hand of Frost. The first conclusion, based on the emerging narrative, should be a confrontation over the Hand of Frost with the various factions involved.

This might not yet reach the 18 node mark, so the rest of the adventure would be the repercussions from these actions. It’s a progressive approach rather than a firm conclusion being stated when the adventures are starting. By that point, you’ve connected so much you should have a great idea of how to build a climactic finish.

Yeah, I was actually referring to keeping track of the framework, more importantly mid-game. I understand now that you do it in Roll20 so basically thanks, you’ve answered my question.

I have traditionally just used a text document with created tables. You can certainly use a spread sheet and just have larger text blocks, if you’d prefer. The nice thing is the framework is exceptionally lightweight, so you don’t need to do much in the way of data entry. The more important part is keeping track of the connections map once you have it up and going. In the example above, I just shared a Roll20 page, since it’s versatile enough to handle it. It’s not as pretty as something you could make by hand or in Visio, but it’s good enough.

Having a rough outline of the setting you’re in I’ve come to understand that is the way to go in homebrewed settings, because the players will always think of something that the GM hadn’t. Well, I’ve come to realize that when this happens it is a hell of a game and you’re doing a good job as a GM because you have players active in the setting, not just go-alongs.

Today I also read in Shawn’s interview of the Adventure Shed people pretty much the same thing.

Technical question: do you use MS Excel or a similar spreadsheet software in keeping track of your transmission frameworks or some other software?