When you're planning to run an RPG beyond a one-shot, conventional GM advice says to write out plots and secrets to reveal over play. But there's a perniciously popular idea that players can't know secrets "too soon," or you won't have a game left. Let's discuss why that's wrong:

There's two Big Ideas to break down in this thread: (over)prepping your game + pacing the game WRT secrets/lore. These two things are fundamentally linked. When you start a longform RPG you need to plan less than you think; what you DO plan, you can reveal sooner than you think.

Let's start with overprepping your game. When starting a new game, some GMs think of a big picture, final encounter, or core mystery they want to address. But when you do this, it's easy to lose sight of where the players fit into it! What about what they're interested in?

You can't prep an RPG in a vacuum. If you have a whole story arc planned out that doesn't involve anyone's character concepts or what they're interested in, getting people to stay invested is going to be hard. At that point, you're reading a novel to the people playing the game.

My advice about prepping a game is to have a clear idea of what sort of story you want to tell, write some ideas in broad strokes, and let your Session 0 fill in the rest. Want to run a courtly intrigue game? Let the characters inspire which political interests are involved.

If you do all your GM prep without any player input, you'll end up with either too much or not enough info about the game. You can also fall into the trap of expecting things to fit a set order of events; the PCs didn't fight the monster you wanted them to? Don't force them to!

Some modern investigative games have pushed their GMs to write "keys" when prepping - pieces of info that move the story forward. It doesn't matter in which order you get these keys because they're things you learn whenever it's appropriate to "unlock" a new part of the mystery.

Here's where prep and secrets meet: if you have secrets and don't reveal them to players, they'll feel like they're not making progress at best and decide they're wasting their time at worst. You have to reveal some kind of secret each session to keep the story moving forward.

A major failing of older investigative RPGs was that if you failed certain dice rolls, you'd never get critical info to finish the scenario. This has made its way into many RPG groups and it kills games. A failure should create complications, not stalemate your entire game.

As an aside, the idea that whiffing a die roll results in a problem rather than a punishment is what people mean when they say "fail forward." Many RPGs say failing a roll means you don't do a thing; what if instead, you pick the lock just as a guard comes around the corner?

Back to secrets: many GMs think that if players figure out all the big reveals in the game that there won't be any plot. This is objectively untrue; you just need to make new secrets. The things you had planned are probably great STARTS to a mystery! How will you expand on them?

Let's put on our Teacher Hats for a second: there's a thing in education where you plan a lesson around an objective I call a SWBAT: "By the end of this lesson, Students Will Be Able To..." This is part of "Backwards Design." This can easily be applied to your GM prep!

Let's say the PCs are about to break into a smuggler's warehouse; they don't know he's spying on them for a rival NPC. So, "by the end of the session, players will learn...":
- The smuggler knows where their secret HQ is
- The smuggler's been paid off by their rival

HOW you reveal that information is sometimes as interesting as what that info actually is. Do they find a sack of coins in the smuggler's desk with a note that says "For services rendered, signed (Rival NPC)"? Do they interrogate the smuggler himself? Drop the info where it fits.

When you think about the Big Picture secrets of your game, drop them like breadcrumbs and push players towards them. When you run out, refill the bag of breadcrumbs with new secrets. Newer RPGs encourage this with End of Session XP: "Did we learn something new about the world?"

The thing about revealing secrets is that just because you KNOW something doesn't mean you can DO anything about it. When Luke learns Darth Vader is his dad, all he can do is reject it. It takes him a whole movie to get right with it and resolve it. It works the same way in RPGs!

Some GMs think that prepping a ton of secrets at the top of a game and slow-burning them makes you a mastermind GM, but that power fantasy erases player agency in the conversation that is the game. In almost every game I've run, the best twists have come from player suggestions.

Because the game is a conversation, a great GM should always try to bounce story beats back and forth with players. You tell me something about your character, I pitch you a complication based on it, you respond, etc. It's like tennis - player and GM should alternate who serves.

I'm not here to tell you that you're running RPGs wrong, but writing binders full of secret lore and then smiling behind your GM screen as players try to solve your metaplot is just mental masturbation.

You won't run out of ideas if you reveal secrets; you'll write better ones.