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.
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!
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