I've been watching Black Lagoon recently and am beginning to think that seinen anime like this is excellent viewing for Swords of Serpentine prep. Not because it's a fantasy setting - although a lot of what they get up to is basically fantasy with guns. It's because the action scenes are great fun to watch, and if you're a harried Game Master trying to think of something to throw at your bloodthirsty players then using something like this for inspiration is a good idea.
Also, from a purely Serpentine perspective, main character Rock pulls off a lot of interesting Sway attacks.
Let's talk about One-Shots again.
OK, strong premise, start with action, clear goals. What else?
- Strong Roleplaying Opportunities: A complex network of social and political connections helps define Swords of the Serpentine. Take advantage of that and give Heroes interesting and challenging supporting characters to interact with, both as allies and enemies. Center adventures around social and political needs, as well as traditional adventure hooks such as greed and vengeance.
- A Plot and B Plot: The best adventures have both an A plot — the main goal of the adventure —and a B plot, a secondary plot thread that is likely unrelated. This might be about someone’s family, about personal growth, or about a foe or rival who keeps interfering. Having A and B plots allows you to shift the adventure focus from one plot to another any time play starts to slow down, and quite often the B plot can provide leads to help solve the A plot as well.
- Change the World: It’s a one-shot, so encourage Heroes use their influence to literally change the world around them. Unbalance power structures, seize power, and bring about societal change for good or ill. Why not? In a game where influencing others is a core mechanic, affecting the world around you in permanent ways is a fun way to show off the game’s strengths.
The Black Lagoon team, when not on a mission, often drop in at the Yellow Flag bar, and as luck would have it chaos usually erupts around them. Incidentally in nautical terminology a yellow flag is a disease marker, warning anyone who gets too close that the port is rife with deadly infectious plagues. So without even setting foot in the place you already know what you're getting into.
That's the kind of moment I'm aiming for in this one-shot: the team is about to step ankle-deep in manure, and doesn't even know it.
Let's talk about roleplay.
The best kind of roleplay comes from high stakes. These can be personal high stakes or a more general threat to the area. They can be the kind of high stakes that come from violence or the more intimate sort that arise from, say, a Sway attack on a character's personal beliefs. Point being, this needs to be Serious Business. You can get good roleplay from quiet, downtime moments, but this is rare and usually only seen when the player is already a good roleplayer and relishing the moment. Whereas high stakes can get even the mousy, quiet ones involved.
In improv, the key is to keep moving forward without letting your brain get in the way of your mouth. If you think, you lose control of the moment because you lose momentum. If you want to know what letting your mouth do the work looks like I recommend Canadian lunatics Loadingreadyrun, whose videos can be found pretty much everywhere video content dribbles forth from the quivering demonic buttocks that is the Internet. Critical Role's good for this too. I swear some of those people haven't used their brains in years, but their mouths work just fine.
I joke, but kidding aside, I bet everyone reading this has had something like this happen in their day-to-day:
I need to think of something cool to say. I need to think of something cool to say. I have thought of a cool thing. I am saying the cool thing. Huh. That did not work the way I thought it would.
If you spend time thinking about what to say you are not listening to what's being said, or paying attention to what's happening around you. That takes you out of the moment, so by the time you finally come up with something to say you've lost the chance to say it.
The same applies here. If you think too much about what to do you'll lose the chance to do it.
So what you're aiming for is high stakes + no brain = ACTION. The minute a player says 'let's think about this' it is your job as Game Master to squish that with the biggest boots you have. Preferably hob-nailed, with something nasty already smeared on the sole.
Changing the world goes naturally with high stakes. Maybe the crime boss who rules this district is about to go down in a pool of blood. Maybe someone's takeover plans are about to be thwarted, or assisted. Maybe a landmark is about to get burnt down, blown up, or sink beneath the watery limits of Eversink. There's bound to be disruption and with disruption comes blowback. Maybe the crime boss goes down but her allies are out for blood, or maybe when that landmark vanished it left behind a nasty Corruption stain. Whatever it is, the city changes - and adapts.
A & B plots can be literally anything. The A plot is obvious, the B plot less so, because the B plot will depend to a certain extent on the characters involved. Whereas the A plot is a plot unto itself, and doesn't depend on the characters at all - though they will definitely become involved.
Let's begin.
A Night On The Town
Your heroes have coin in their purses for the first time in a while, and want to have a good time. Traditionally they stop off at their favorite bar for cheap drinks before moving on somewhere more lubricating - get a buzz on, then have fun.
The first thing you do is ask them to describe their favorite cheap bar. They can even name it if they like. For purposes of this narrative it's going to be called the Yellow Flag, but you can call it whatever best suits. Get each player to describe one thing about the bar. It can be anything from their favorite drink to the color of the stains on the wall.
From the Game Master's perspective, the Yellow Flag is a bar at water level with two storeys above it and a cellar below that isn't completely waterlogged yet. The level immediately above is a gambling house. The level immediately above the gambling house is open to the elements after a fire, and is currently occupied by squatters trying to repair what's left of the roof. The cellar below is used by a cheap sculptor who makes funerary statues for the very poor, claiming the corpses' hair in exchange to make wigs. Think Rashomon the short story rather than the film. Consequently the available floor space down there that isn't covered by half-made statuary is devoted to wig-making, and what little space there is left is where the sculptor lives.
There are almost certainly other aspects to this building but those can be described in play. Are there secret chambers below the cellar? Bridges that lead from the squatter's section to the building next door? Some secret slide that goes straight to the water from the gambling house, so they can slice up deadbeats and get rid of the remains easily? Sure, why not?
This is a bad night to be at the Yellow Flag. Earlier that night the McGuffin was stolen from Two Smiles (Gang Boss stats), one of the most dangerous criminals in the area. The McGuffin was supposed to be handed over to the thief's patron at the Yellow Flag. Trouble is, the patron's second-in-command betrayed the op and Two Smiles knows where & when the handover's supposed to take place.
Two Smiles is hopping mad. An example has to be set. The best example Two Smiles can think of is to kill everyone in the Yellow Flag and take back the McGuffin. Meanwhile the second-in-command wants to knife the patron and steal the McGuffin for themselves.
The action begins when the thief (Burglar stats), sometimes called the Mortician on account of her somber dress, gets to the Yellow Flag. She's clearly worried; she's seen Two Smiles' people gathering outside and fears the worst. She stops at the bar and slides a package to the bartender while she gets a drink. (She might slip the package to the heroes if the group decides they know the Mortician personally.) The heroes don't know what the package is but they should get a chance to see it and guess that it's important. Then the Mortician goes to one of the private booths at the back of the bar, where someone is waiting for her. (She doesn't entirely trust her patron, which is why she's leaving the McGuffin with the bartender. Or maybe she didn't leave the McGuffing with the bartender, and it's all a clever fake-out for the benefit of witnesses. Whichever it is will be determined in play.)
Little does the Mortician know that Dancing Meg (Sorcerer's Apprentice stats) has already made her move. Her master and the Mortician's patron, Zuane the Herbalist, is dead, his eyes burnt to a cinder as well as whatever's left of the contents of his skull. His corpse still sits in the private booth, awaiting discovery. Dancing Meg is upstairs with a few Mercenary bodyguards, pretending to gamble while waiting for the kick-off. As soon as Dancing Meg knows that Zuane's corpse has been discovered (she's keeping an eye on a magical hand-mirror whose counterpart overlooks the private booth) she'll make her play.
What nobody appreciates is that Two Smiles is not playing around. He has plenty of mooks at his disposal as well as his favorite Duelist, Stefano the Undying (two near-mortal wounds so far, and he's not dead yet) but his opening gambit is to block off every conceivable ground floor exit with mooks and then fling bottle after bottle of alchemist's fire in at every window and door. Anyone who tries to run outside to fling themselves in the canal gets sliced to pieces. The McGuffin is proof against flames, and besides Stefano and a group of mooks have special protective gear that will defend them from the fire (effective Armor 4 against alchemists fire only). It's their job to go in and get the McGuffin. Two Smiles' mooks have bows and arrows (or firearms, if used) as well as swords, so anyone who tries to get out an upper storey window or across the squatters' bridge will have problems.
So: the place is on fire. Anyone who goes outside will be brutally murdered. Upstairs is the sorcerer's apprentice and some heavily armed Mercs who want to get downstairs and take the McGuffin, were it not for all those pesky flames. Meanwhile everyone else in the bar, the gamblers upstairs, and the squatters all have immediate quality-of-life concerns.
Objective: survive the night, with or without the McGuffin. There are effectively three factions: the Mortician, Two Smiles and his people, and Dancing Meg and her Mercs. All three will need to be dealt with somehow.
Complication: if the heroes get out of the Yellow Flag without the McGuffin whichever of the enemy factions that doesn't have it will be convinced the heroes have it, since they don't. So they'll chase down the heroes and try to get the McGuffin from them. It'll take a lot of convincing to get them to back off.
B Plot: the (in)famous private detective Yalo the Unhinged (Foreign Spy stats) is also after the McGuffin. Yalo claims he's working on behalf of the McGuffin's actual owner. He's sitting at the other end of the bar nursing a drink when the action starts, having followed Zuane to this location. Think of Yalo as a combination Inspector Clouseau and Inspector Zenigata with an unfortunate curse: once a day he falls madly in love with someone. Anyone. Like one of the heroes, perhaps. This condition is completely out of Yalo's control, always lasts a day and a night, and Yalo's desperate for a cure. It's because he's been promised one that he's after the McGuffin.
Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment