Having previously discussed the Hook and Where To Begin before, this time I want to put those principles into practice and design an opening scene, using Bookhounds of London as an example. This is going to be part of a series in which I discuss scenario design from soup to nuts - and this is the soup course.
In Where To Begin I outlined a Bookhounds scenario, which I'm going to call Buyer's Remorse. In that scenario I said:
Opening Location: small village outside London. This allows a fish-out-of-water comedy element. Task: looking for rarities at a house sale. Opening Moment: The Hounds are out of their element in a village on market day and have just spotted a rarity - Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, unauthorized edition 1642 with additions not sponsored by the author) using scientific imagery to illustrate religious truths. The village doctor had a copy, somewhat foxed but well worth repairing. Apparently the old fellow recently keeled over and his replacement is clearing out his belongings. Some seedy looking oik also eyes the manuscript, for unknown reasons. How to get the book from the new doctor without running foul of the oik? There's the rub.
Again, giving the characters something to do but this time there's no potential combat (unless someone punches the oik). There is a prize on offer and if they're successful they take away the prize - though they may earn themselves an enemy. The oik could be a nobody, a necromancer, or anything in between. It pays the Hounds to be a little cautious, but too cautious and they'll lose the prize.
Let's fill in some of the blanks.
When designing any scenario, I prefer starting with action, but the type of action is going to depend on the type of game you run. You wouldn't start a combat-heavy Cyberpunk game with a four-hour ceremonial tea party, not unless the teapot immediately gets kicked over by a samurai robot.
However, Bookhounds is a more peaceful setting. Its main activity is illicit commerce, the buying and selling of books that probably ought to get burnt to ash, if everyone was being reasonable. It makes sense for action, in that instance, meaning a book sale.
What do you know, as Keeper, going in?
Well, you know the characters' strengths and weaknesses. You know their ability pools. You know what Rome is, and where all this plot is finally headed. You know, thanks to session zero, whether this is Technicolor, Sordid or Arabesque. Finally, you know, because you wrote this thing, exactly what this particular copy of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici is, and what's in those mysterious additions not sponsored by the author.
For the purpose of this series Rome shall be Cthugha:
Cthugha
“For this shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea, and the Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man.”
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
From the Trail main text: Cthugha is a neutral force, a repository of energetic information. The race known as “fire vampires” established their own caches of Cthugha on many worlds, including Earth. Under the guise of the Magi, the ancient fire-priests of the Aryan Persians, they created the Elder Lore of fire-magic, the infrastructure to access Cthugha on our world.
Additional Stability +3 Additional Sanity +1
Keywords: energetic information; Magi, the ancient fire-priests; Elder Lore of fire-magic.
Knowing all those things, what does that mean for the opening scene?
It means, first, that there's no point assigning clues or actions that do not match the players' pools. You need to give them something to do, and the fewer impossible challenges in the opening scene, the better. Challenge them, by all means. Don't put them in a conflict where they're beaten before they start, because none of them have pools in Astronomy.
If this is a scenario that you bought rather than designed yourself, then you need to go through the text and see where the potential pitfalls are. If the text relies heavily on Astronomy and none of the players have that skill, you need to come up with a solution to that problem. Perhaps there's a knowledgeable contact that they can bring in - not ideal, since it assigns the fun stuff to an NPC, but it works in a pinch. Or perhaps the annotations in Religio Medici shed some light. Perhaps there's a means by which one of the players can pick up temporary Astronomy pools. Whichever best works for you.
It means, second, that this opening scene needs to mesh with the Technicolor, Sordid or Arabesque nature of the setting, and it needs to reference Rome in some small way. Always bear in mind, a CORE CONCEPT tree bears CORE CONCEPT fruit.
Finally, it means that this opening scene will introduce Religio Medici, give the characters a clear idea of its importance going forward, and potentially decide into whose hands it falls - at least for now. If it ends up in the oik's hands at the end of the opening sequence, the characters should have means by which they can snatch it for themselves.
What do you, as Keeper, need to know about the immediate setting and surrounding area?
Well, you already know that this is a small village outside London proper. You need to name that village and give some means by which it connects to London. Let's say it's part of Metroland, some hideous mix of mock-Tudor new build surrounding an older core. There's a train station with a connection to London Bridge, so the Bookhounds can slip back to London any time they like. It's vaguely rural but most of the people who live here are London clerks and white-collar managerial. You could design some local landmarks, the pub, name a few NPCs, but this is all frill on the cake; you could just as easily do that in play, not beforehand.
But you do need at least one or two elements that mesh with the Core Concept, which in this case means Rome - Cthugha. Nothing dangerous; but you need to remind the players at all times what the Core Concept is. Perhaps the telephone lines crackle with mysterious life, or the old men in the pub mutter in peculiar tongues.
Finally, you need to have an idea of where this scene will lead. At least one option is obvious: there will be one Core scene, which describes what happens if the Hounds get the book (and if they don't). You probably want at least two Optional scenes, to cover what might happen if the Hounds go for options X or Y. You may want a floating scene, not part of the Spine proper, in the event that the Hounds do something completely off-the-wall, though that seems unlikely this early in the scenario. Still, unlikely isn't the same thing as impossible.
OK, all that said, my notes would look like:
Buyer's Remorse
Small village outside London; looking for rarities at a house sale; the Hounds are out of their element in a village on market day and have just spotted a rarity - Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, unauthorized edition 1642 with additions not sponsored by the author) using scientific imagery to illustrate religious truths.
Names: Doctor Hargrove (elderly dead physician); Doctor Blunt (the new face on the block); Kingshill (the village); Blue Dog (pub); Railwayman (pub, has rooms for rent); Miss Twistleton's (tea parlor); Collier & Sons (combined bakery, restaurant, dance hall, rooms for rent); Constable Wainwright (policeman); Samson, Wallis, Beresford, Poole, Fairbrother, Gallant, Norbert, Miller (names to be used for NPCs)
Locations: Doctor Hargrove's practice, based in a timber-frame thatched roof building that clearly has been here for many years; the plaque on the door still has his name on it, though workmen are busy dealing with that and other issues. Clues: Architecture (0 point is genuine 15th century build, 1 point shares a roof void with the building next door and if you want an easy access point that would be the way to go; Occult: (0 point Doctor Hargrove's name is familiar, 1 point was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was good friends with Aleister Crowley. Might be worth checking out what the new man is throwing in the skip; the old boy's magical equipment had to end up somewhere.)
The Blue Dog: rather horrible mock Tudor, aka Stockbroker's Tudor, but the underlying structure (buried under modern tat) is an older building, probably late 1700s or early 1800s. Clues: The Knowledge (0 point: when this was a coaching inn, back in the 1790s, this was a highwayman's haunt, and the blue dog on the pub sign was supposed to have been a highwayman's faithful hound. 1 point: the last highwayman to hang from the gallows here, Fast Tom Nolan, swore, with his last breath, that 'the hound will take you all!' It's said his corpse mysteriously disappeared from the gallows.) Oral History (0 point, the workers have stories to tell about the peculiar artefacts they took from the doctor's house as they stripped it bare; 1 point: Mickey MacFarlane, a Rough Lad working on the house clearance job, has the good stuff) Architecture (0 point: it's odd how the pub uses none of the rooms on the upper storey. Most pubs like this would turn that empty space to good use.) Special: The upper rooms are unusable due to a peculiar aura that infects everyone who goes up there, energetic information potential 2 point Stability, prolonged exposure grants 1 Mythos)
The Market Not many farmers here; it's all clerks & stockbrokers playing at being common. There's been a market here since the 1600s but the tradition seems to be dying out. Held in the main square, round the statue of Queen Victoria. The old girl looks bored to tears. Clues: The Knowledge (0 point: before the sad statue of Queen Victoria there was a permanent gallows here, from about the 1600s to the early 1800s. Many a rogue danced the hempen jig for passers-by to see. 1 point: after highwayman Fast Tom Nolan swung here the gallows mysteriously burnt down and was never rebuilt. There's some who swear Nolan's ghost dog roams here on moonless nights.) Cop Talk (0 point: that seedy looking oik who's interested in the Religio Medici has the pale skin and shifty eyes of someone who's spent a long time in prison; 1 point: the oik is book scout Samuel Penman, recently released from HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs. Legend has it he's already died three times. That mark round his neck? Hanging. It didn't take.)
The Graveyard Next to an unimpressive Gothic Revival church that had all of its best bits of architectural frippery stripped away in the 1850s, this cemetery has tombs that go back to the Elizabethan period. The most interesting tomb by far is a mausoleum with peculiar statues and marking, almost Orientalist. According to locals (0 point) this belongs to an antiquarian named Hargrove - related to the Doctor, perhaps? Clues: Occult (0 point: now that you see those markings, you remember noticing similar marks all over Kingshill. Casual graffiti and architectural add-ons, scattered about town, all much like these symbols. 1 point: there was a badge with an identical mark attached to the cover of the Religio Medici). Mythos (0 point: marks like these indicate the creator had some knowledge of the Plateau of Leng and the things that dwell there) Clue which can only be found if the Hounds go into the locked mausoleum: four mummified corpses from different eras. One is clearly the antiquarian Hargrove, another a highwayman who could be Fast Tom Nolan, the third unknown, and the fourth Doctor Hargrove, who's supposed to have been buried elsewhere. One of the corpses clutches an amulet whose markings are almost identical to the symbols carved on the mausoleum and elsewhere. Occult 0 point: the slight differences between the other symbols and this amulet remind you of religious traditions where the faithful consider it blasphemy to accurately copy out the works of God. Those other marks are meant to remind onlookers of the Powers, but this amulet is the original on which they were based.
OK, that's as far as I'm going to go with this post. Were these notes I was taking for a game I intended to play at table I would lay them out differently, but otherwise this is all I'd need to run a game at table. I'd want notes on the OPFOR - the book scout Penman, the Hound-Lich at the heart of the scenario - and I'd want notes on the Religio Medici, but for the purpose of this example you can consider them written.
Notice the terms I'm using: Gothic Revival, Mock Tudor, Orientalist. I don't claim to be an architectural expert; that's what Wikipedia's for. But if I want to give a taste of what this place is like when I'm describing it at the table, I need to have a rough idea of what I'm describing. It takes maybe a second or two to wiki architectural styles and it pays dividends. If you're trying to engage the players you need to engage all the senses, and that includes sight. Smell too, for that matter - the vague, crumbling moldiness of the graveyard, the iron and pitch of a railway yard, the rich dungy stink of horse manure - or taste, or feel. These are things you don't have to write down, but you do have to know, if only a little bit.
I've written all the reminders I need to run a game at table and establish the opening scene. I've got a reasonable idea of some optional scenes I can run, and I know where the next Core link is.
Next week: the Midpoint.
Enjoy!
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