Sagas
You can play through a tale in a single game session, but a saga tells the story of a community over many tales. Sagas can go on indefinitely, for as long as people want to continue getting together and playing.
Just like a tale, you can apply stages to a saga. Since these won’t advance with the “So the story goes” ritual phrase, you should tie this progression to some other marker. For example, you might come up with a looming question for the introduction stage of your saga, agreeing that you’ll move on to the development stage with the next tale after you answer that question, whether you answer it in one tale or ten. Then, you may come up with another looming question to use for the development stage.
When you apply stages to a saga, you’ll frequently have two cyclic principles in play at once. Consider the example before; when we get to the development stage of our first tale, we’ll have a tale in the development stage and a saga in the introduction stage. That will mean that we’ll both “Defer answers” in play as normal because of the tale’s stage, but we’ll also have “Draw lines” still in play because of the saga’s stage. This creates a pattern of wheels within wheels, each tale telling a complete story, while each one still adds up to a larger narrative in the saga.