There are some guiding principles to any campaign design, and this week I want to start applying them to Night's Black Agents. Before I do, let's go over some of the basics:
Power, and goals. The antagonists need both to be effective.
Overall mood. Any scenario, any event needs to be true to the mood of the campaign as a whole.
Initial Arc and Conspyramid. The first story you tell and the Conspyramid's initial Nodes should reflect the power and goals of the antagonists as well as the overall mood of the game as a whole.
I'm going to add one more bit of guidance to those three principles:
A CORE CONCEPT tree bears CORE CONCEPT fruit.
Yes, I know that sounds gnomic. Consider: Nights Black Agents can be played in several different ways. Mutant, Supernatural, Alien, Damned are the main headers, with subheadings Dust, Burn, Mirror and Stakes. These combine in several different ways: Mutant Dust, Damned Stakes, Supernatural Mirror and so on.
Night's Black Agents explicitly tells the Director this at the start, but most RPGs of whatever stripe - Cyberpunk RED, say - can be run in much the same way. Cyberpunk isn't as explicit in its genre tropes; Mike Pondsmith doesn't make a distinction between, say, Dust and Stakes. However for you, the Director, it makes sense to identify specific tropes of the genre early on and stamp them onto your campaign.
Exactly what those tropes are is up to you. For reasons that ought to be obvious you should stick to four core ideas and decide which of them best suits the game you want to run. More than four gets difficult to organize.
Using Cyberpunk as an example, let's say that of the core concepts we could potentially be going with we end up using Crapsack World. Thus: A Crapsack World tree bears Crapsack World fruit.
This means everything important that happens in the game world, whether it happens to the characters or not, is fruit of the Crapsack World. It is part of that world; it reflects its core principles. It is always Crapsack.
Black Lagoon, for instance, is very much this. The whole concept of Roanapur is Crapsack central. This is where the characters live, and perhaps die. Even the nuns have guns and deal drugs. Everyone's an enemy. That noose hanging above the only bridge leading to Roanapur is your only warning.
Similarly, a Damned tree bears Damned fruit, a Supernatural Tree bears Supernatural fruit, and so on. If you add a qualifier, say Dust, then a Damned Dust tree bears Damned Dust fruit, and so on. The Damned Dust world is always Damned Dust. Everything that happens within that world reflects that core concept.
Overall mood is a large part of this. Every event in the game has to be true to the overall mood. A swords and sorcery game, like Swords of the Serpentine, has to have a swords and sorcery vibe. You don't play swords and sorcery the same way you do cyberpunk.
However the key point I'm drilling down to is this: the tree goes beyond mood, because it describes not just the present but also the future. Ideally, this is the future the heroes are trying to prevent. They are subverting the core concept and trying to replace it with something else - anything else, really. That's their struggle. They're trying to prevent that tree from bearing fruit.
Say this was a James Bond film. Bond represents a certain point of view, a set of tropes that almost by definition are opposed to the core concept. The Core Concept, as represented by Blofeld, Goldfinger, or whoever it may be, is usually chaos of some description, the precise nature of which changes from film to film. Bond is trying to subvert that Core Concept and replace it with his own. If this were a cyberpunk film with a Crapsack World core concept then the main characters would be trying to subvert that Crapsack World and replace it with something of their own.
Let's start applying the guidance and see what happens next.
A CORE CONCEPT tree bears CORE CONCEPT fruit. This is a Night's Black Agents game, so the core concepts are helpfully defined for us. Let's go with Damned Stakes, thus: A Damned Stakes tree bears Damned Stakes fruit.
From the main book:
Damned: Their markers are holy symbols and symbolism; their emphasis is seduction. Starting in the 17th century, most literary and legendary vampires are damned.
Stakes: Although more common in earlier spy fiction than now, some spy stories play for higher stakes. The characters derive their actions from a higher purpose than mere survival or “get the job done” ethics: patriotism, the search for knowledge, protection of the innocent, or even justified revenge. This is the world of James Bond and Jack Ryan, of Tim Powers’ novel Declare, of films like Taken, of TV shows like Burn Notice.
The antagonists' power and goals must reflect the core concept, as must the overall mood, as must the initial arc and Conspyramid. All of these things must be Damned Stakes. Power and goal = Damned Stakes, mood = Damned Stakes, and so on. Moreover all these things are trending towards an ultimate endgame which itself is, you guessed it, Damned Stakes. Your agents are playing with the fate of nations (stakes) and if they fail then everyone's damned.
So we're creating antagonists whose power and goals reflect this, creating a mood that reinforces this, designing a conspyramid intended to create this, and writing an initial arc in which the heroes are brought face-to-face with damnation and made very aware of the stakes.
Next week: the fruit, and thus the antagonists and first campaign arc.
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