Designing The Dungeon (RPG All)

NB: One week to go before the flight. 

This week's post is inspired by The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying (Jonah & Tristan Fishel) p137: 

Remember that the encounter, not the adventure, is the fundamental unit of play. If you design your whole dungeon expecting characters to follow a certain path or explore it in a certain way, you will always be let down. Consider your dungeon a collection of encounters, not a story in itself. The story will emerge organically, as characters pursue their goals and adapt to overcome the encounters you've designed.

You can tell the Fishels came from a Dungeons and Dragons background, and that's not just because they use the word dungeon. It's because they see encounters as things to be overcome. That follows the basic D&D principle that even live action play follows, to an extent: the things you find in front of you are obstacles, not parts of the narrative, and they are to be beaten, not navigated past, negotiated or otherwise engaged with. When you are in a 10 by 10 room, everything looks like an orc guarding a chest.  

However, the advice is sound. You can't expect players to navigate the space the way it's drawn. One of the reasons why I've never liked drawing maps isn't my lack of artistic ability - though that definitely helps - it's the realization that the map does the players no good. They don't want to tap-tap-tap their way down the corridor checking for traps with their 10ft pole. Or chickens.

Zee Bashew

But if you present the characters with an elaborate map, they explore the map. Or try to. Before they get bored and start to make their own fun. 

In my experience the best maps are the ones like the train in Orient Express: not a dungeon so much as a convenient way of illustrating the surroundings, so the characters can say 'while such-and-such is in the dining car, being distracted by Charlie's scintillating conversation, I shall be in the baggage car, going through their trunk and belongings.' 

Still! A series of encounters. OK. Let's game that out.

Assume this is a Facility. The characters have discovered it and want to investigate it. It doesn't really matter which setting this is, but for the purpose of example I'm going to assume it's Night's Black Agents. Modern day spycraft, in other words, and this is a Manufacturing Facility with Medium Security and Medium Monitoring. That means Difficulty 4 for most tests, and any investigative point spends to find out information start at 1 point for the basics. Medium Monitoring suggests that any enemy response will be relatively quick, something like 5-10 minutes armed response for any blatant oopsie, and Medium Security suggests that there are guards and cameras on-site as this is a reasonably important installation. 

OK, fine. There are locks on the doors and people paying attention to what's going on. It doesn't matter, in this example, what the Facility is manufacturing. Assume it's narrative-important. It makes MacGuffins.

So if this is a series of encounters, not a set of rooms to explore, what are those encounters?

Well, let's take a step back and talk a little bit about the Building. 

This is, after all, a mini-Building. It's the narrative space in which you expect players to meet people, creating plot. We already know it's a Manufacturing Facility. That suggests semi-industrial at least, possibly biological or chemical depending on the nature of the MacGuffin. A Supernatural setting might be different; a funeral home could be a Manufacturing Facility, if you assume they're making zombies or torturing souls. However, let's keep it simple and assume that it's semi-industrial. 

That implies there's not much in the way of residential or commercial nearby. There might be a caff for local trade, somewhere that sells fish and chips, say. There won't be a high street stuffed full of shoppers. The traffic on the roads is more likely to be trucks than Ferraris. Not many tourists, if any at all. The people here have a purpose for being here; they're transporting, lifting, carrying, on their way to A from B, not noodling around looking for entertainment. If there are thieves or neer-do-wells lurking about, they're not muggers or pickpockets. There's slim pickings for that type. Car thieves or burglars might do well here. 

Most important to note, unless the enemy have a good relationship with the local law, there probably aren't any police nearby. After all, what they're doing is illegal, or at best borderline-legal. They don't want straight law enforcement breathing down their necks. Thus, if there are coppers nearby, they're working hand-in-hand with the folks running the Facility. 

OK, that's a decent thumbnail. Encounters?

Well, there are several points to consider. Let's start outside and work our way in. 

Assume the characters are standing outside the Facility looking for a way in. They're looking at a semi-industrial area. If this is London, or most places in Europe that haven't been bombed flat in wartime, then the area is a mix of 1900s red brick, 1960s concrete and 2000s cheap industrial, all glass and metal. The first encounter area is external security. Locked doors and cameras. There might be a bloke on the main door, or if there is a loading dock area then there may be security there, and workers loading/unloading lorries as well. 

There is the Direct and the Indirect approach. 

The Direct approach is obvious, and it's the one a lot of players opt for: smash your way in. Tackle the bloke on the main door, or the ones at the loading dock. That means you need combat stats for them and anyone else in the immediate area. You also need response times for backup, since unless the characters are very quick and clever someone's going to ring the alarm right about now. 

The Indirect approach involves going round the back, looking for covert ways in. Or going over the roof of a nearby building to see if you can sneak in. If you have a hacker on the payroll, they might be using this time to take over the enemy's cameras. If you know there's an underground passage or sewer, now's the time to crawl up from below, that sort of thing. This part might not involve a physical challenge but it will want a technical one. Disguises or covert identities may come into play at this point. Remember, you already know that the base Difficulty for most tests is 4. That should help you decide how difficult any particular encounter is. 

OK, now they're in. The question now becomes, what Encounters do they find inside?

Well, let's stick with the Rule of 4. This is a relatively simple Facility, after all. It's not one you designed specifically for this campaign. It's one you had to come up with on the fly.  That means you have four potential encounters in this Facility, one of which must be Rome. That translates to three ordinary encounter types and one special. The Boss.

Thus:

• Flunkies. Low level civilian types, admin, people doing data entry or monitoring cameras. Unarmed, with no combat rating. If the entry was Indirect and no alarm has been triggered then they go about their jobs assuming all is as it should be. Any who encounter the characters assume they have a right to be there, unless they obviously pose a threat. After all, if they didn't have a right to be there, why would they be there? Possible clue to the nature of the Facility found by interrogating the flunky or looking at whatever it is the flunky is doing.     
• Self-Aware Flunky. Civilian types, but with seniority. They may have combat skills. More importantly, they know the characters aren't supposed to be there and will raise the alarm if given the chance. They definitely possess clues to the nature of the Facility and might have a MacGuffin on them, assuming the MacGuffin is transportable and not unique. There is a chance that one of the self-aware flunkies is actually someone important to the Conspiracy as a whole, eg. a top scientist, necromancer or named NPC of some kind. 
• Security. These may or may not be armed. If armed, they will use lethal force. If unarmed, they use nonlethal (tasers, pepper spray) and attempt to capture.  If armed, well ... If the alarm has not been raised then security does not automatically assume everyone they encounter is a threat. If the alarm has been raised, then security treats everyone they meet as a threat, unless there's reason to behave otherwise. So, eg, if the characters disguise themselves as flunkies, they might not automatically trigger an armed response. 
• Rome. This might be a thing, rather than a person. In Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, for instance, the strange canister at the heart of the church crypt is Rome. I'm not going to go into great detail here since your Rome may be very different, but the point is, this is the heart of the Facility. Whether it's a vampire on the prowl, a portal to another dimension, a smelting pot for souls or something else altogether, is up to you. The broader point is this: whatever Rome is, it is dangerous, and it is the reason why the Facility exists/functions. 

Those are the basic encounters. Do you need more?

Sure, you can have more. Whether you need them or not is up to you. However, for the sake of this example let's assume that there are other factions out there interested in what the enemy is up to. Let's assume the Mysterious Monseigneur and his Vatican friends take an interest in the Facility. They may be watching it from afar. They haven't decided to take action against it, not yet. They want to know more about where the Facility fits into the overall network, so they're just monitoring it for now. 

However, now the players decide to move in, and the MM needs to decide what to do about that. 

The MM isn't necessarily opposed to the characters. The Vatican's involvement might be simply to watch what happens when the characters poke the hornet's nest. Or it might be to swoop in like the cavalry should the characters want a rescue. Or the characters might notice the MM's people hanging around the Facility and decide to strike up a short-term alliance. Any of these options are on the table, which means the Director needs a rough idea what the MM has to play with. Are his people armed special ops types? Researchers? Occultists? Something else? 

Let's further assume that the local authorities are not in the enemy's pocket. That means if the police, firefighters, emergency response or what-have-you show up, their arrival might stop whatever armed response the enemy had in mind. Time for a chase scene, perhaps?

Finally, let's assume some non-aligned media types are lurking nearby. It might be actual media from an honest-to-God news outlet, or it might be random bloggers with drones and cameras. They're here for other reasons, but they might be attracted to the Facility if something eye-catching happens. Like an explosion. Or the beginnings of a chase scene. Again, not a combat encounter, but it is something which complicates the narrative. Sometimes the narrative needs a good complication now and again. 

The great thing about encounters like these is that you don't need them for just this moment. You need yes-and contingencies for all kinds of moments. That means you can re-use, say, the police encounter you designed, or the media encounter, in other scenes. 

So there you have it. A series of encounters, rather than a set of dungeon tiles. A Facility with a little flesh on its bones.

Enjoy!

The Bull (We All Met At An Inn)

It's the perennial bugbear. The cliche to end all RPG cliches. The adventuring party has to meet somewhere. Why not an inn?

What would make it more interesting? 

It's your local. Nameless tavern number 368 in a life full of nameless taverns is not a good start. What if you and your mates have been coming here all your lives? What if you have history with this place?

The Bar, dir Álex de la Iglesia

So how does this work in practice?

Assumptions: Night's Black Agents, starting locale London, small Edom (as per Field Manual p58), Supernatural variant, and whether it's Thriller, Mirror or something else isn't relevant to this discussion. 

I posted the clip for two reasons: first, it's a brilliant film, go see. But second, just look at that bar. All those little details. I don't doubt for a minute I could walk into any one of a dozen different places in Madrid and find a bar exactly the same as that bar. It's the local spot on the corner. It's the place you walk by every day. If you didn't cross the threshold, you'd still know what you'd find if you went in there because it's no different than a dozen others. It's a bar.

And yet ...

The Bull

East End boozer near Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park and on the edge of Limehouse, West India Docks, narrowly missed by Nazi bombs during the war and now a hangout for peculiar characters of all kinds.

Owned by: Ex-IRA (silent partner).

Publican of record: Charlie Brown (not the Charlie Brown), someone who everybody knows. The police may or may not realize he's a front for the Ex-IRA. Edom certainly knows.

The Brewer: Bowman Brewery, vans coming and going at odd hours.

Watched by EDOM via Maggie Canter, Church Scavenger (p96 Field Manual).

Four Things:

• The telly’s constantly on the go, showing football at all hours of the day and night. There’s usually half a dozen faces paying it attention. Sometimes the same half a dozen, day in, day out.
• The upper level ballroom used to be a second bar but that’s been closed for donkey’s years, used for storage and the like. The Ex-IRA’s pals sometimes meet up here.
• There’s a back way out not many people know about. It leads into a smelly little alley that runs along the cemetery wall; someone athletic could scale over the wall and get into the cemetery.
• FOURTH THING

The Fourth Thing will depend on what variant you shoot for. In this example I'm shooting for Supernatural: vampires are the result of magical or other supernatural activities on Earth; spirits, ghosts, witchcraft and the like. This can be a broad canvas, but I shall shoot for:

• Some say the old black and white photos framed on the wall have peculiar properties. You think it's all a load of crap, but there's no denying some of those photies are creepy as hell. Why does it always feel like the people in those pictures are looking right at you?

OK, so that's the bare bones. This is the adventure hub. It's where the characters initially gather. I see this as a kind of Kingsman variant, where the characters start off as dumb kids messing about. Of course, they don't know what's hanging around in Tower Hamlets Cemetery which, conveniently for plot, is right next door.

So what will this hub have?

Well, it will have surroundings. There will be neighbors. There's that convenient cemetery, and Limehouse not far off. It will have history. It will have rival groups seeking to extend their influence over it, and those rival groups don't necessarily have anything to do with the Conspiracy.

Finally, it will have Plot Function. There's something about it that is necessary, perhaps vital, for ongoing plot. 

This week let's talk about the neighbors.

I've mentioned the Building before: that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. 

That's all the neighbors are. They're part of the Building. These are locations where you, the GM, expect plot to happen. That doesn't mean they're all mandatory, that the characters absolutely have to interact with each and every one of them. What it means is, you, the GM, have options. Plot can happen in any of these places and, if you give yourself enough options, you'll never be flailing around wondering what the hell to do next because there will always be somewhere to go, something to do.

I'm just going to discuss a few options this week but always remember, the more options you give yourself the less likely you'll find yourself down a plotless blind alley.

Cowden Wing Tzun (Martial Arts Academy on Cowden Lane)

Popular among women and a slightly older crowd, this academy is open all day and night. The owner, Stanley Ho, is a friend of the Ex-IRA and occasionally does small jobs for Maggie Canter.

Four Things:

• The building was a funeral parlor in the 1900s-1930s and still has a large yard with what would have been a carriage stable back in the day and is now a tumbledown garage.
• Stanley Ho lives in rooms above the academy but his lifestyle is very Spartan; he seems to think that owning things is bad.
• Gym Rats know it as a prime place for finding students out on the prowl, wandering out of their comfort zone.
• FOURTH THING: Some say the carriage stable is haunted by a black carriage that wanders the streets at the dead of night. If you see it, pray it doesn't stop; it might be stopping to collect you.

Michael Townshend Memorial Statue

Made in 1954 by Avant-garde sculptor Townshend in memorial of an ARP warden who died trying to save children from a burning building. This is an abstract work that, to look at, resembles a pipe cleaner gone wrong. It stands close to one of the entrances of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.

Four Things:

• There’s a persistent story that the statue or the immediate area of the statue is haunted by the ghosts of the children who died.
• The Feral Child Vampire (p191 main book) likes to hang out here and can often be found nearby.
• The street immediately in front of the statue is an accident black spot; rare is the month when someone isn’t sprawled bloodily in front of it. Bike accidents are particularly common.
• FOURTH THING: never, ever touch the black bike. If you see it chained up to the Memorial Statue railing, run.

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park

Also known as Bow Cemetery, Tower Hamlets opened in 1841 and closed for burials in 1966. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park today encompasses the original historic cemetery, bounded by historic walls, and additional pockets of land including "Scrapyard Meadow" and the Ackroyd Drive Greenlink. The overall site is today celebrated as Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature and Conservation.

Four Things:

• The Feral Child Vampire lives here and hunts here; the police know that assault victims turn up in the cemetery from time to time but haven’t made the connection.
• Victims of the Bethnal Green wartime disaster (173 dead) are buried here and the Feral Child Vampire sometimes uses their graves as a resting place.
• Scrapyard Meadow used to be housing until it was bombed flat and some say the house returns every so often; there’s a ghost hunting society spreading that rumor and investigating the site.
• FOURTH THING: The Man In Uniform is sometimes seen near Scrapyard Meadow. He looks official but a little old-fashioned, and whenever he's seen there's the persistent smell of burning, and scorched flesh.

Let's talk about this a little more. 

It should be obvious that I'm borrowing from reality to make this work. There really is a Tower Hamlets Cemetery, and it does have a Scrapyard Meadow. That much is true. Michael Townshend and the ARP warden story is completely invented. I ran a quick Google to see if there really is a Cowden Lane in that part of London and to my knowledge there isn't, so pop, there you go. The Feral Child Vampire officially hangs around in Kingstead, but ... well, Tower Hamlets is more plot-convenient.

Point being, you don't have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of London to invent a London that suits your purposes. You need to know just enough to invent a Building, and from that Building plot flows.

Think about it for a moment. Never mind what's in the actual London. What might you expect to find in any city, whether London or somewhere else?

• Public telephones. Bust, yes. But most places still have the spots where they've been. They just haven't bothered to remove them. The UK famously had its red box, and of course there is the Tardis box.
• Blind Alleys. Or narrow alleys, or closed-off-by-construction alleys, or any variant inbetween.
• Peculiar public monuments. That's how I got to Townshend but really, every city or town of size has some odd little statue or stone up remembering [insert peculiar historical fact here].
• Places that were used for something else once but have since been converted to new uses or left to rot. London's best example of this is probably Canary Wharf, which used to be shipping and docks and is now money and banks. You can still find bits of the old Canary Wharf, if you look hard enough. 
• Parks. Not just the big or famous ones, but lots of little parks with iron bars and sturdy gates. Perhaps this one is owned by the city. Perhaps it's owned by the neighbors. Perhaps nobody knows who owns it ... or who plays there after dark.
• Markets. London has more markets than you think. New York has markets. Washington DC has markets. Paris, Lille, Brussels, Berlin - markets, markets, markets.  

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure you can think of more. Point being, all these are, or can be, part of the Building. 

It's up to you. It's your Building.

Next week: the History.

The Neighbors (RPG All)

I expect you noticed the many articles about Russia’s cyberwarfare section, Vulkan Files, this week.  

This isn’t going to be a cyberwarfare post, though. The post is inspired by a throwaway line in the Guardian’s article. It goes like this:

The inconspicuous office is in Moscow’s north-eastern suburbs. A sign reads: “Business centre”. Nearby are modern residential blocks and a rambling old cemetery, home to ivy-covered war memorials. The area is where Peter the Great once trained his mighty army.

Which made me think: how often, in any RPG setting, does the Keeper think about the neighbors?

A lot of settings go into some detail about, say, city blocks, or neighborhoods. Fantasy used to be particularly bad at this. I remember one of White Dwarf’s prize-winning series of articles detailed a city block by block, practically house by house, and while it’s an incredible achievement I could only think, as I read it, ‘there’s absolutely no way I could use this.’

I mean, what would be the point? As DM, you’d never remember half of it. The bits you did remember, you’d never get right. You’d forget stats, or get lost in the maze of text, and be forced to make things up on the fly. 

Swords of the Serpentine and Bookhounds of London are better at this, as is Night’s Black Agents or even D&D 5E. There’s enough detail to get you going, not so much that you get bogged down in minutiae, and you convey the flavor of the setting which is much more important than knowing Boggs the Butcher lives in a tumbledown shack in the middle of Spogger Street and owes money to the wizard Fibble who’s in a sadomasochistic relationship with Dodo the gnome who lives in Quaggoth Street at the bottom of the hill and who experiments in alchemy, supplies for which she gets from Ruin the golem on Dundle Lane. Ruin has a quest for you, by the way. They have a rat problem in their cellar. If you bring him six rat tails … and so on.

But there is some advantage to knowing who the neighbors are. It sets the mood, gives you backdrops for scenes, and sometimes allows for important plot twists. It might be nice to know if, say, there was a rambling old cemetery nearby your Bookhounds’ shop. Or just where they go for breakfast.

Not every setting has an established base of operations for the characters, nor does every genre encourage it. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser never had a home for longer than a few minutes. The only time that duo established a nest it got burnt down a few paragraphs later; after that, they were wandering adventurers – at least until they retired. Your Nights Black Agents flit from city to city in a never-ending quest to rid the planet of bloodsuckers. Dungeons and Dragons invented the murderhobo, point being that they are actual hobos – Kings of the Road. 

Some settings do, though. Some are deliberately located in particular places – Bookhounds of London, Dreamhounds of Paris. Some are a little more broad-canvas but still rely on central locations; most World of Darkness games center the action on one or two particular places. Wraith depends on its Haunts. Vampires don’t like to travel, and even if they do the intricacies of the setting demand that they pay close attention to the territory they currently occupy.

So what does that look like?

First, a couple ground rules.

It’s not all Plot Relevant. The coffee shop on the corner doesn’t have to have Quests. The shopkeeper’s apprentice doesn’t have a Destiny, or at least not one that requires five fantasy archetypes to go on an epic journey in search of the golden sphincter of the arctic wyrm Quixotus.

It’s not all Supernatural. Yes, settings like Vampire assume all sorts of peculiar entities operate in the shadows. It doesn’t follow that every Starbucks is a front for the Camarilla/Sabbat/Mummies/Wraiths/Santa. Sometimes a Starbucks is just a Starbucks. 

It’s not Exhaustive. Don’t name every least business or NPC. Concentrate on the ones you intend to use, even if it’s just as set dressing.

It has a Past. Sometimes that can be fun to play with. 

Finally, Randomize. Don’t feel as if everything has to be meticulously planned. Plans never last long once play starts, anyway. Know where you want to get to; the hows and whys of getting there is determined in play.

Let’s say this is a Bookhounds of London game, and the decision’s been made to have the store in the West End. As per the main book, the West End is:

Although there are poorer streets and plenty of low commerce in this area, the West End represents fashion, wealth, and power. The term “West End” can refer to the whole area of central London west of the City or to a specific set of districts west of Charing Cross Road ...

So already you have a decent idea of the kind of businesses/offices/services might be found in that part of London. You also have five players (in this example), each of whom are busy scheming and daydreaming about their characters. 

Now’s the time to get those players involved. Five questions, one for each player. A sampling:

• What’s the business right next door to your shop?
• What’s the best short cut to get to the street your shop is on?
• Where does your character go for lunch?
• What’s the traffic like on the corner?
• If you needed to raise money in a hurry, who would you turn to?
• Where do you buy tea?  
• Where does the person you crush on work?

I hope you see the pattern. Ask questions that are directly relevant either to the character or the shop. It doesn’t matter if the local amateur FC meets every week in the sports pavilion two streets away if none of the characters have any interest in football. From those questions, devise neighbors.

If this sounds like the Building, well, that’s because it is the Building. Except it’s those parts of the Building that are directly relevant to the characters, and it’s designed in part by the players, not you. Sure, there’s plot involved, but it’s not long-term plot. It’s character plot. Stuff they get up to in their downtime. It's the equivalent of Night's Black Agent's Solace; it's important to the character but has no immediate main plot function.

Put it another way. Agatha Christie wrote murder mysteries, but more often than not there was a sneaky romantic side plot hiding away in there among the corpses because Agatha Christie liked a bit of romance with her exotic poisons. This is your version of that romantic side plot, except the romance is optional.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

What’s the business right next door to your shop? 

Answer: a family-owned laundry, which shares a back alley with the shop as well as frontage. Sometimes we get their mail, and they get ours. The turnaround in the back alley is tight, which can cause problems when their truck is parked too close. After some discussion with the player, you decide between you that the family is the Gerondis, and there are five of them: mother, father, two sons, a daughter.

Finally, the random element. Something not in the players’ control. 

I like using Tarot for these situations. That gives me a hundred or more combinations determined by the cards, not me; more than enough to be getting on with. I don’t need a lengthy backstory. I need something brief, pithy, and useable in a hurry.  

Quick shuffle and one turn of the card later: Death. Straight up.

Oooo.

Death is major arcana, beginnings, change, transformation. OK. That’s now the Gerondi default state. It doesn’t matter when the character encounters them or when they appear in the plot, there’s always something involving change, beginnings, transformation.

Maybe the father is an inventor in his spare time coming up with peculiar gadgets. Maybe the daughter is a romantic falling in and out of love. Or maybe the mother has a love for travel. Or all these things at once; doesn’t matter. Point being, this is the Gerondi default state. No matter when they come up in the narrative or why, something is always changing.

That gives you plot hooks, or at least something to use as a framing piece. None of this has to be plot relevant. This is character relevant, which is just as useful but doesn’t have to involve zombies, magic items, or the ongoing machinations of cults. When in doubt, the Geronidis change, transform, or begin something new. 

That’s the neighbor.

Do this four more times and you have five neighbors to play with. 

That plus your actual plot should be more than enough to keep your players occupied.

Hope you folks enjoy! See you next week.  

Floating Dragon Bar (Swords of the Serpentine)

Sag Harbor

The swampside docks off the upriver end of the city are in the worst industrial section of town. This is the area where the unmentionable businesses are: the tanneries, the slaughterhouses, the nightsoil collections. It’s where sludge from dredging finds a temporary home, mostly because there’s a surreptitious market for people who want their enemies’ homes filled with the stuff ...

Night Markets

Daytime Sag Harbor is a sprawl of slums and unsavory neighborhoods. Nighttime Sag Harbor (at least along the edges of the District) is a riot of Night Markets. Every night when the sun goes down, the lanterns light and market tents pop up intertwined with the harbor docks and the sprawls of fishmongers, tanners, dyers, outlanders, and other lowlifes. Roving pubs pitch their tents and tap their kegs ...

Family Business

You may be a prestigious member of the ancient nobility, the merchant princes behind a major Mercanti guild, or even a close-knit family of commoners who have taken up a life of crime. For you, family is everything — and when family and friends get threatened by personal or political enemies, you turn to heroics to get your own back ...

Black Lagoon

Let's take some of the principles we've used for Bookhounds and plant them in Serpentine soil.

Assumptions I'm making: this is a Family Business chronicle set in Sag Harbor, the least salubrious part of Eversink. There's no useful law, no second chances. If you fail here, it's a shallow (or watery) grave for you. 

The Family Business runs a night market stall that sells beers of all kinds, brewed by the family in hidden breweries. Given it's Sag Harbor I'm assuming the local water sources are mostly hard (full of minerals) and better suited for stouts than pilsners. The players, as the owners of the business, get to decide what kinds of stout they make, how they sell it, and all the other things that go with running a successful business.

Finally, of the many possible OPFOR I'm assuming that the Monstrosities are the main villains. Other factions powerful in Sag Harbor are Commoners, Sorcerous Cabals and Thieves Guilds. There are plenty of other options of course, but I don't want to get bogged down in the fantasy version of feature creep. Those four will do. 

I'm calling the Family Business the Floating Dragon purely for illustrative purposes. I'd expect the players to actually name it and come up with its features but this is an example, not a full-fledged chronicle. The Floating Dragon sells beer. That means they need a stall, a place to set out their equipment, advertising, servers, security, maybe a barker. All these are roles the players can take, or they can invent new ones. 

So, where does that leave us? In the Night Market - at least to begin with. That's where the action happens. That's the Building, in this narrative.

A night market is where you go to find cheap, small things, easily portable. You don't go there to buy a grand piano. Street food, yes. Illegal stuff, yes. Drugs, books, toys, ornaments, cloth, jugglers, performers of all kinds. Minor sorceries, perhaps. Peculiar carnivals. Freak shows ...

In Eversink everyone knows about Night Markets (or think they do) and even the wealthy and privileged might sneak out of their walled mansions to wander round a Night Market, perhaps in disguise. More often the people you see there are the poor, the desperate, the ones out for a bargain who don't care how they get it.

The Night Market is the focus of the game, Sag Harbor is the outlying district (ie. the place where things not part of the focus happen) and the rest of Eversink is, from the characters' POV, terra nova. They've never been. They know it exists; they've heard all kinds of stories. But from the chronicle's perspective Eversink is London and the characters are on Great Junction Street, Edinburgh. They might as well be on the moon.

For that reason the Night Market gets four markers, Sag Harbor one, and Eversink one. That is, the Night Market gets four detailed areas of interest, Sag Harbor one, Eversink one. Each of those markers gets four descriptive features, one of which has to relate back to the main opposition - the Monstrosities, in this instance. Like the Brotherhood of the Pharoah in the Bookhounds example, the Monstrosities are where all this is going. All roads lead to Monsters.

The Night Market

The Strazzaruola are the other family business, the rivals, the no-goods. If a Strazzaruola did it, it must be wrong. Worse than wrong. You never met a Strazzaruola you didn't hate.

Four things:

1. The Strazzaruola run loan sharking in the Night Market and there are few stalls that don't owe them money or favors - often both.
2. Isabetta Strazzaruola is a sorceror, or at least everyone says she is. Dripping with corruption, no doubt.
3. Baldo Strazzaruola is a notorious duelist, when he's not drunk off his ass. Dangerous, certainly - but unpredictable when drunk.
4. Monstrosity: Several Strazzaruola are Drowned.

Zavatera's Marvels is a carnival show with fire-eaters, sword swallowers and the Halls of Mystery. They came from nothing and one day they'll go back to nothing. 

Four Things:

1. Stefano the carnival barker is a truly remarkable public speaker (Firebrand) with a novel line in insults. 
2. Everyone knows you can get sucked, fondled and fingered in the Halls of Mystery - but the price can be more than you may be willing to pay. Stefano keeps a little black book full of potential blackmail victims.
3. Paulina the sword-swallower has a thing going with Baldo Strazzaruola. If you want Baldo and he's not in his usual drinking hole, he's probably in Paulina's hole. If so, he won't be moved.
4. Monstrosity: several of the rattakan-fighting orphans (p 264 main book) have found refuge at the Marvels, but only Paulina believes their stories (and she not very much).

Rocco the Scrivener is a bookseller and letter-writer. He's the one you go to if you want a romantic poem for someone you have your eye on, or a nasty letter sent to a reluctant debtor. He's also the Night Market judge; everyone goes to him to settle disputes.

Four Things:

1. Rocco is in deep with the Sorcerous Cabals, though few know this. He'd do a lot to keep that quiet.
2. Rocco is an accomplished forger who can manage almost anyone's signature. They say at least three aristocratic families owe some very favorable wills to his talented pen.
3. Rocco is an art collector and his house, it's said, is wall-to-wall sculptures, paintings and valuable antiques.
4. Monstrosity: Rocco is a front. A Vampire is using Rocco as a go-between. This bloodsucker lives in Rocco's house and is the one who really likes art; Rocco can't be bothered with the stuff.

Galeazzo's is the light show. If you want candles, lanterns, candelabra, fireworks, illuminations mundane and magical, you go to Galeazzo's stall.

Four Things:

1. Galeazzo has a sideline in narcotics. She calls them Denari's Holly, little pills that make the cares of the world easier to bear. She says she gets them from a private underground stash which in this case is the truth; the fungus she uses comes from the sewers.
2. Her sky lanterns are her biggest sellers; even nobles come to purchase them. Legend has it if you write a wish on one of her lanterns and let it float up to the sky, the wish comes true. 
3. She owes the Strazzaruola a remarkable amount of money and, while she always pays on time, nobody knows what she spends the money on.
4. Monstrosity: Galeazzo thinks she's working as a spy for the Inquisition and uses the money she borrows to pay off informants. In fact, she's working for the Rattakan, and would be horrified if she knew.

That's enough about the Night Market for the moment, and more than enough to kickstart a few plots.

What about Sag Harbor?

This is where you put the small stuff. Remember what was said in the Building:

When designing a setting, think about how people live and what they have to do in order to live well. Not just the big stuff, like which Camarilla faction holds political sway after dark, or whether ghosts are secretly controlling the police force. I mean the small stuff. What do people do for fun? How do they get their food? Do they have light when night falls, and if so how is that managed? What happens when it's hot? What happens in the rainy season?

Four Things:

1. The waters around Sag Harbor are polluted and stinking, and sometimes catch fire. This sudden exhalation is preceded by a peculiar sound, like whales sneezing. Those caught in the blast usually don't last long enough to regret their mistake.
2. The only time Sag Harbor feels clean is when it rains. In downpours people come out to stand in the rain as if it were a crystal-clear waterfall, filling whatever containers they have with rain water. It's the only way to guarantee freshwater supply.
3. There's always barges and carters carrying things to and fro. Night soil, dyes, leathers, meats fresh and not-so-fresh, day in, day out. The best way to get in and out of Sag Harbor without being noticed is by one of these barges, and all the Guilds - Thieves and others - know this. So do the law, but you don't see them poking their noses where it doesn't belong.
4. Monstrosity: the Drowned and the Rattakan are jostling for position in Sag Harbor and while this underground war goes unnoticed by those above, its aftereffects do not. Whole buildings collapse and their demise is blamed on some shifting under-structure; yet those who know the hidden currents understand what really happened.

I could add more about Eversink in general, but hopefully you see the pattern by now. There's enough information to paint a picture, not so much information that the players feel they have no place in the narrative. After all, this picture is about their characters and their stories; it isn't a canvas for you alone.

In each case there are Four Things, one of which is Monstrous since this is a game that ultimately leads to Monsters. So for the Commoners, Sorcerous Cabals and Thieves Guilds - the major factions in Sag Harbor - there will be Four Things. All of them play a part in the narrative too, like cogs in a larger machine. The interaction between these cogs - the Commoners and the Night Market, the Sorcerous Cabals and Sag Harbor, the Commoners and the Thieves Guild and so on - is what provides plot.

Next week I'll start putting some scenario ideas in this Building and see what pops.

Enjoy!

The Building 2 - Events (RPG All)

This will be the last post for a short bit, as I shall be off island. Hopefully New York won’t be too cold … 

I’ve been noodling a few campaign ideas for Wraith: the Great War. I don’t know if I’d ever get to play them; Wraith isn’t the most popular World of Darkness setting, and it wants players who a) understand the rules system and b) are willing to get put through the mincing machine, which … I mean, people like that exist, it’s getting them in the same room for several hours on consecutive weekends that’s’s the problem. 

However, expanding on a previous post about the Building, I thought I’d talk a little about RFC Conty. 

The TL/DR of the Building can be summed up as: 

The Building is that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. It is player interaction, not NPC action, that makes plot. 

The last time I talked about the Building I focused on the people in it. This time I want to talk about events. But first, a bit of prologue.

RFC Conty is a Royal Flying Corps air base operating out of the village of Conty, not far from the Somme shortly before that battle is about to begin.  

The action in Wraith: The Great War is loosely supposed to take place in the 1920s shortly after the Great War’s end. It presumes that during the War, sparked by the colossal slaughter that was the Somme, a spectacular outburst of spectral armies shredded the Hierarchy, the Wraiths’ nominal form of government, and as a result of that chaos one particular faction, the Legion of the Grim who represent those who died of violence and especially murder, step into the breach and attempt a coup. That goes about as well as you might expect given all the other carnage that’s taking place, and it’s this cesspit of violence and its consequences that kicks off the main plot. 

I’ve always thought it would be interesting to have a kind of prologue event to all this, hence RFC Conty. That’s the main hub of the plot for this opening chapter. The action takes place prior to the Somme hence prior to the main spectral outburst that kicks off the main event. Think of it as a kind of backstory to the devastation to come.

RFC Conty is the base for Sparrowhawk Squadron, No. 7 Sqn RFC, which flies DH2 single-seater pushers out of Conty. The DH2, popularly known as the Spinning Incinerator, is a recent arrival intended to take on the Fokker Eindecker head-to-head and put an end to the Fokker Scourge. It’s not a bad plane but lack of experience meant that many of the early intake span down to the ground, hence ‘spinning incinerator.’ Some of the RFC’s early aces cut their teeth on the DH2, notably Lanoe Hawker (one of Richtofen’s kills) and James McCudden. 

For settings like this which rely so heavily on real-world details I find it helpful to turn to history, and in this case An Infantry Subaltern’s Impressions of July 1st, 1916, by Edward Livening, which I nicked off of Gutenberg. He describes the area roundabout, just before the battle: 

The country in that part is high-lying chalk downland, something like the downland of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, though generally barer of trees, and less bold in its valleys. Before the war it was cultivated, hedgeless land, under corn and sugar-beet. The chalk is usually well-covered, as in Buckinghamshire, with a fat clay. As the French social tendency is all to the community, there are few lonely farms in that countryside as there would be with us. The inhabitants live in many compact villages, each with a church, a market-place, a watering-place for stock, and sometimes a château and park. Most of the villages are built of red brick, and the churches are of stone, not (as in the chalk countries with us) of dressed flint. Nearly all the villages are planted about with orchards; some have copses of timber trees. In general, from any distance, the villages stand out upon the downland as clumps of woodland. Nearly everywhere near the battlefield a clump of orchard, with an occasional dark fir in it, is the mark of some small village. In time of peace the Picardy farming community numbered some two or three hundred souls. Gommecourt and Hébuterne were of the larger kind of village. 

OK, so that gives me a bird’s-eye view of what Conty is probably like. Clay earth, used to be a corn field, a large community nearby, probably an orchard nearby (apples, why not – it’s cider country after all). A chateau, always good for plot. Anywhere that long-lived is bound to have a hidden history that the current population don’t know about or remember, and hidden histories are meat and drink in Wraith games.  

What about the Squadron? 

Total aircraft: 15, in three Flights, of which 12 are in the air at any one time and the others – the knacker’s yard – used by replacements or if one of the flight is too badly damaged to fly. 

Commander:  Major Bob Lennox 

Flight Commanders:  Captains David Lynch-Hardinge (A Flight), Robinson ‘Mule’ Fairbrother (B Flight), Eustace ‘Skipper’ Wainwright (C Flight) 

Flight: Leftenants Eric Quarry, Norman Fitzhugh, Daniel Rutledge (A Flight);  

                Andrew ‘Crasher’ Lacy, Geoffrey Vine, William ‘Billy’ Mason (B Flight);  

                Victor Crawthorpe, Harold ‘Crackers’ Parrot, Percy Warnock (C Flight) 

Also present, though No. 7 Sqn has no knowledge of this, are two relic aircraft. One is a Fokker Eindecker, and the other is a SPAD SA two-seater recon aircraft. These fly daily, keeping an eye on events on the battlefield and reporting back to Hierarchy higher-ups on the ground. 

Pilots & Observers: Otto Rall (d. 1916, Eindecker); Arthur Bonneton (d. 1915, SPAD Pilot) Sir John Fastolf (d. 1459, SPAD observer)   

Additional Hierarchy support on the ground at No. 7 Sqn is provided by the Office of Maelstrom Preparedness which has an outpost in what is now the munitions store and was a barn. This small Iron Legion outpost is led by Chevaleresse Marie Allard (d. 1804) who employs a small number of scouts, couriers and administrators kept constantly busy by the changing tide of events on the battlefield. 

Ammunition Store: Seems constantly ablaze (burnt down in a fire), has spectral horses (plasmics, always screaming), wraiths coming and going at all times of day and night. I see the Ammunition Store as having been built on the remains of some past tragedy, the burning down of a stables, hence the spectral horses. Places like that have a lot of energy humming away.  

In Conty I’ve already placed a few people but haven’t gone much further than names and nicknames, because this time around I want to talk about events. 

Events don’t have to directly affect the players. However, events happen whether the players get involved or not, and the consequences that flow from those events are also things that might affect plot.  

An event in its simplest form is a thing that happens, and the great thing about a setting that involves real world situations is that you have some events baked in. If this was about the Titanic or the Lusitania disasters, there’s a predetermined sequence of events; the iceberg or the torpedo always arrives at such-and-such time on such-and-such date. In a battlefield situation as GM you know roughly when the battle starts and stops, but beyond that there’s a whole smorgasbord of events you can pick from. 

The Somme has a defined start point: 1 July, the Battle of Albert. That’s when the Maelstrom kicks off, with massive exhalations of spectral energy. From my perspective, that’s where the Chronicle ends. 

I mentioned RMS Lusitania a moment ago. She went down in May 1915, after being torpedoed by U-20. That sounds like a good start point for the Chronicle; it provides a meaty inciting incident and is exactly the sort of thing that might kick off an uptick in Maelstrom activity. An outburst of spectral activity inspired by the sinking is exactly the sort of thing that might inspire the Iron Legion to set up its Office of Maelstrom Preparedness outpost at Conty. 

The OMP is a small organization at this point; the main book describes it as being a couple hundred field researchers. Sounds like a great group patron for the sort of miscellaneous vagabonds who make up the average Chronicle. 

The story begins with the sinking of the Lusitania, in which one (or more) wraiths are killed. They have fetters in Conty – we can thrash out the whys and wherefores in session 0 – so they snap to that location after the tragedy. That’s where they meet Chevaleresse Marie Allard, who at that point is just setting up the Office that her superiors have asked her to create.   

[For those not familiar, fetters are things that link wraiths to the living world. They can be anything from a favorite doll to a house but are usually small personal items of one kind or another. When a wraith dies, assuming they don’t disincorporate altogether, they go to a fetter. That's how these wraiths get to Conty from the murky depths of the Atlantic.]  

Right there we have events Zero and One. Zero being the sinking, One being the snap to Conty and the initial meeting with Chevaleresse Marie Allard. Those are fixed points, and they have to happen for plot to proceed. In theory they can happen in session 0 and not involve dice or any kind of ability check; it can be their introduction to the setting and the world at large. 

Broadly, a fixed point is something that has to happen. Think of it like a Core Clue in Gumshoe. The players will always be given Core Clues since without them the plot can’t proceed. The same principle applies here. Fixed points have to happen because without them the plot can’t proceed.  

Whereas a floating point is something that may/may not/will happen at some point, but don’t have to happen directly to the characters. The death of Major Bob Lennox may/may not/will happen at some point and the characters may be affected by that death, but it does not have to happen to them directly. A big party in the officer’s mess, a sudden uptick in maelstrom activity, a raid by the Grim Legion, the last ride of the ghostly coach-and-four that’s been going up and down the Conty road since the 1700s, the arrival of a group of pretty Irish nurses, the card game that nets Crackers Parrot a significant sum, a bombing raid – all these things are floating events. They provide useful background to what’s happening on the main stage, or they become the main stage, depending on whether/how the players interact with them. 

As GM you don’t need to go chapter and verse on every single event. That way madness lies. However, it can be very useful to go over the calendar month by month and pencil in a few things. That way even if the players never interact directly with, say, the last ride of the coach-and-four, you at least know when it happened and can work out what affect it may have on the plot. Perhaps it deeply affected Chevaleresse Marie Allard, or robbed the OMP of a useful resource, or its end somehow brought Major Lennox’s career to a premature close. Or maybe it just provides water-cooler gossip for a few weeks.  

An event can be absolutely anything. The day the sewer backed up is an event. The day the house got painted is an event. Its significance may be anything or nothing; often the things that seem the smallest to those on the outside matter a great deal to those intimately connected with the event. 

There’s a sad moment (one of many) in Capt. J.C. Dunn’s WWI account, The War the Infantry Knew, in which a number of trees in the village of Le Nord are cut down to make gun limbers. An old woman watches it happen. ‘Soon there will be no trees in Le Nord,’ she says. A small event or a large one – who can say, except those who were there and experienced it? 

Point being, it’s worth having a few floating events to hand either to have the players bounce off them, creating plot, or at least as hints dropped for future plot. The players may not care that much about the coach-and-four, but if they care about Chevaleresse Marie Allard then they care about what happened to the coach-and-four. That means plot. It may also determine future plot.  

If this wasn’t Wraith, if this was a fantasy setting without a Gregorian calendar much less the fixed points described here, what then? 

Exactly the same. You frame it differently. You might say that this happens in Spring, this Summer, this in Autumn and this in Winter. The crops are planted in spring, the crops harvested in Autumn. Or the great storm that shatters the old oak tree happens in Summer, or the taxes go up in Winter, or the wizard turns all the children into mice in … and so on.  

The process does not change. There are still fixed points, and floating points. The difference is in the description, but not the details. 

Enjoy! 

I'll be back later in December (briefly) to talk about New York and will probably take a hiatus after that until January when we'll pick up the weekly posts.