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!

Nodes, Glorious Nodes, Even More Glorious (Night's Black Agents)

The last time I touched on this topic I said:

a Node should be treated no differently from a Villain, for the purposes of campaign design. A Node should have power to affect the plot. A Node has things it wants, things it's in charge of, things it's prepared to kill for. A Node has personality, and it's up to the Director what that personality ought to be.

When discussing Facilities I went on to say:

They:

• Manufacture,
• Collect,
• Distribute, or
• Analyze.

A manufacturing facility makes something, a collection facility stores it, a distribution hub delivers it, and an analyzing facility investigates.

What do all these facilities have in common? They need:

•  Security, and,
•  Monitoring.

Someone has to keep the facility maintained and safe from prying eyes. This may mean a simple padlock on an important door, or a full-fledged electronic surveillance system. Also, someone has to monitor what's going on, whether the facility is doing as it should.

How do these concepts work together? 

In Night's Black Agents a Node is an enemy power center. It can work on the local level, affecting only a small area. It can control a city, a country, a continent.

It can control more than one facility, or only one. As a general rule it's a good idea if all facilities controlled by one Node have the same Security and Monitoring statistics, so you as Director don't have to keep track of too many numbers. It also makes sense from a worldbuilding POV. The Node will want to maintain a standard. 

It may even have the same security firm for each Facility, providing you a chance to drop some handy clues. 'Cerebrus Security? Again? You know what that means ...' Or 'the cybersecurity protocols here are exactly the same as those we encountered at that corporate headquarters, and you remember who was in charge of that ...' As for Monitoring, 'didn't we see that middle manager before? Don't tell me ...'

However, it's reasonable to suppose that one Node might have several different facility types. It might have Manufacture and Distribution facilities working together, or Collect and Analyze. 

Let's go a step further and ask four questions:

1. What is this Node supposed to do?
2. What does it actually do?
3. What are its resources?
4. What are its methods?

I want to talk a little bit about 1 and 2, which seem contradictory. However, if you think about it, just because the bosses up top said 'do this' doesn't mean the Node is only doing this. It has personality, goals and the means to achieve them. If the bosses aren't paying close attention to the Node it might drift from its stated goals.

Think of this as a long-term project. If ever you've worked with a team you know from personal experience that, just because Bob is assigned to X within the overall project structure, does not mean that Bob is actually doing X. Bob might be ambitious and is plotting for his own advancement. Bob might be lazy. Bob might have misunderstood his role in the team, or be quiet quitting, or be doing any number of things that are not X.

Or Bob might actually be doing X but you, as project lead or fellow team member, misunderstood the true nature of X. Oops. Maybe Bob should have your job.

OK, so how does all this work in practice?

Let's take an example from Dracula Dossier: Billington & Sons, Solicitors, Whitby.

A small law firm, mostly handling wills and other property deals for local clients. The firm’s musty offices occupies the bottom two floors of a house on Flowergate Street in the heart of Whitby; their archives, dating back to old Samuel F.’s era in the 1890s, are crammed into the attic on the top floor. Dracula employed them as his local agents to receive and convey his fifty boxes of earth to Carfax.

I'm assuming for the sake of this example that Billington is a Level One node, with assets local to Whitby. It doesn't matter what kind of Conspiracy this is. 

Its function is to Collect. Dracula picks up all kinds of odd things, documents, grimoires, title deeds - you name it, Dracula keeps it. However, often what happens is, Dracula picks up, say, an occult tome and has no need of it right away, so he shoves it at Billington for safe keeping until such time as he remembers to take it back. 

The Collection process is handled by outside forces, couriers (a different, Distribution Node), who deliver the items to Billington. The job of the firm is to make sure they're securely held.

However, old Tom Billington, the traditionalist head of the firm, is the only one who believes in the mission. His sons John and Michael are taking it on themselves to Analyze what they have. The sons have noticed that nobody ever comes to get any of the many, many documents in their keeping. Nobody would ever know if they studied some. Not take - they're too cautious. But if they follow the rituals or chase up on some of the clues, they could get themselves some real power. 

If Tom found out, he'd be devastated. The kids have managed to keep him out of the loop - so far.

I'm assigning Low Security and Medium Monitoring, which applies to all Facilities held by this Node. So, what Facilities does it have?

Billington & Sons, of course, which is where the critical documents are kept. What else?

• A lock-up garage (for immediate storage or low-priority items).
• A couple of bribed cops whose job is to provide extra security.
• A ritual chamber under the Star Inn. It used to be a smuggler's haven; now it hosts darker rituals.
• A safe in the storage area of the Whitby Museum, and a curator who's been persuaded to keep an eye on it. (this is for the valuable stuff).
• A special grave in the Church of Saint Mary, for visiting dignitaries.
• Robin Hood's Bay Books & Curiosities. This one's for John and Michael. This is where they conduct their studies. They don't want to be caught by dear old dad looking at the company books. The owner, Sam Carmichael, has a private arrangement with the Billingtons; they pay a high rent and get the back room, undisturbed. The Billingtons don't realize Sam is also studying the papers they bring here.

That should be enough. You could make it more complicated, of course. This is a level one, and I chose it specifically because level ones aren't usually that complex. A National level Node will probably have dozens of Facilities. 

Point being that a Node, like a Villain, has power to affect the plot, personality, goals. Its Facilities will reflect those aspects of the Node. This is a low-level Collection Node; it's not going to have elaborate safes or many assets. It's going to have a few Network Contacts (eg. the local council members, members of Tom's Masonic Lodge, criminals that owe Tom a favor) but none of them are going to be Special Forces or talented necromancers. 

Of course, if you as Director discover that the agents are making a bee-line for the Museum, no problem. You already know that it's Low (difficulty 3) security and Medum (difficulty 4) monitoring. The agents should be able to break in without too much effort but will have to keep an eye out for that meddling curator. The meddling curator in turn can call up those cops on the Billington payroll if things get complicated. Or as a conspiramid reaction Tom Billington can call in a Network favor from some of his low-level criminal clients. 

As for Resources and Methods, Billington probably doesn't have too many Resources and its Methods aren't going to be gung-ho, release the hounds sort of thing. They can't afford hit men. They can afford to have someone Intimidated or rough someone up.

This is the sort of place Dracula would never visit, except out of a sense of nostalgia. However, the auditors - or what passes for Conspiracy auditors - may drop in at any time to look at the Node's policies and practices. Which could cause all kinds of complications ...

Why go through all this trouble?

Because you want to scatter clues. Any Node has to be a clue-rich environment, to give the agents a direction to follow. Remember, all clues lead to Rome and you want them to get to Rome at some point. The vampire temporarily staying in that grave at Saint Mary, the documents in Books & Curiosities, the contents of the safe at the Whitby Museum, they all contain clues and those clues lead further into the narrative. That way if the agents miss out on the actual clue that you intended they find at (wherever it may be) there's no reason to panic; they can find it again at (wherever they actually go).

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

The Facility (RPG Any. GUMSHOE)

The agents gather their forces and prepare to strike. The opposition won't know what hit them - or at least, that's the idea. But what are the agents assaulting, and how difficult will their task be?

Any organized group, whatever its objective, has assets of one kind or another. Often these assets are brick-and-mortar buildings, facilities whose efforts assist the group's goals. For the purpose of this discussion I'm going to use Esoterrorists as an example, but the concepts discussed here could apply across the board. It doesn't matter whether Vampires or Cultists are behind the latest threat to humanity; certain characteristics are shared.

The purpose of this segment is to give you, the Keeper/Director, some basic vocabulary to describe these facilities to the players. This will be particularly useful if you have to do this on the fly, without much prior preparation. This will most often happen in an improvisational game, in which the characters are likely to go off-script in search of adventure.

So what are these facilities?

They:

• Manufacture,
• Collect,
• Distribute, or
• Analyze.

A manufacturing facility makes something, a collection facility stores it, a distribution hub delivers it, and an analyzing facility investigates.

So to take an Esoterror cell devoted to weakening the membrane by any means necessary, that group has means by which it collects material to further its cause, makes that material, distributes it, or tries to find new ways to make, distribute or collect it. For purposes of this example it doesn't really matter what that material is - it's a pure McGuffin.

What do all these facilities have in common? They need:

• Security, and,
• Monitoring.

Someone has to keep the facility maintained and safe from prying eyes. This may mean a simple padlock on an important door, or a full-fledged electronic surveillance system. Also, someone has to monitor what's going on, whether the facility is doing as it should.

For purposes of gamification, the Security and Monitoring aspects of any facility ought to be given a basic rating, Low, Medium, or High. This determines the Difficulty of any given test against or within the facility.

So for example: this Collection facility has Low Security and Low Monitoring. It isn't very important to the grand design, or the cell doesn't have the resources to look after this and its other facilities too. This implies that any attempt to Infiltrate the facility, use Digital Intrusion to crack its online database, or really to attempt any test, is, at most, 3, assuming the Gumshoe default of Difficulty 4 for all tests.  

This implies that the Collection facility has only the most basic of security. Maybe there's a guard at the door, or a few badly placed, cheapo cameras. It also implies that the characters may be able to infiltrate the facility without being seen, and if they leave without blowing the place up or burning it down, their actions may not be noticed by the cell for some time, if ever. 

Thus Low = Difficulty 3, Medium = Difficulty 4, and High = Difficulty 5.

This doesn't just affect Difficulty. In Gumshoe, it also affects Investigative ability spends. A Low Security, Medium Monitoring facility implies:

• 0 point clues for anything involving Security, say Electronic Surveillance, and
• 1 point clues for anything involving Monitoring, say, Bureaucracy.  

The point being that a Low Security environment, say, is lax in all areas. The security cameras aren't properly positioned, the guards are rent-a-cops, the fences have holes in them. This isn't the time to make the agents spend points on Military Science to work out guard patterns. Whereas a Medium Monitoring environment has some functioning safeguards, so it shouldn't be a walk in the park when your forensic Accountant goes through its books.

High Security or Monitoring, on the other hand, implies extraordinary safeguards. That in turn suggests that more than one point, or perhaps a combination of points from different abilities, are needed.

It's unreasonable to assume that there's a wide spread between Security and Monitoring. A High Monitoring facility would never have Low Security. Nobody in their right mind puts the most important thing they own in a cardboard box by the side of the road. So a High Monitoring facility will have at least Medium Security. Similarly a Low Security facility is only ever going to have Medium Monitoring, and so on.

If you extend the gamification to transport between facilities, then there's an argument for saying there can be a wide spread between Security and Monitoring, for a very brief period while the McGuffins are in transport. However even then a wide spread isn't really likely. You don't see banks transporting cash in a tuk-tuk. 

OK, all that's the bare bones approach. So what happens when you want to go into more detail?

First, take a moment to think about what it is you're trying to describe. Security and Monitoring are common factors, granted. However there are other factors unique to the kind of facility you're designing. For example:

A Collection facility gathers McGuffins. What does it need?

It needs:

• Space, in which to safely store the McGuffins.
• Materials that are important to the McGuffins.
• Transport for the McGuffins.

Let's say the McGuffins are delicate, and need to be in a temperature controlled environment. This may be the case if the McGuffins are antiques, or bacteria, or high-end computer equipment. Then the facility needs Materials, equipment to maintain temperature, power for that equipment, and probably some kind of electronic monitoring system to ensure the equipment doesn't fail, or, if it does, that the appropriate monitoring body is immediately alerted.

This in turn suggests significant investment - some kind of HVAC, distribution vents, means to control waste runoff from the equipment, some kind of monitoring station either automated or with human personnel. This only gets more important if the facility is somewhere that complicates that process - if, say, this temperature controlled environment has to exist within a tropical biosphere.

Say that the Esoterror cell is operating a facility similar to InGen's Jurassic Park in Isla Nublar, Costa Rica. That environment is fairly harsh: hot, humid, probably lots of salt in the atmosphere since it's an island, subject to intense storms. It's reasonable to assume that any complex technical facility in that environment wages a constant battle against corrosion, and that providing even basic aircon is more difficult there than it would be, say, in Texas.

However it couldn't exist at all if it wasn't close to Costa Rica. Politically stable, with a democratic government since 1948, and economically developed, it permits the transport network a would-be InGen needs to move all the construction equipment, scientific McGuffins and other things required to create the facility in the first place.

Equally, satisfying those needs may give the agents clues as to the facility's purpose and importance. In Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, when the agency needs to work out whether or not a particular building, out in the middle of nowhere, is or is not a chemical weapons plant, the two things that give it away, from satellite imagery alone, are an abundance of guards, and high waste heat from the machinery it uses to produce its McGuffins. Satisfying needs meant that the facility gave its true nature away. 

A Distribution facility's needs are similar, but not the same. It needs:

• Space,
• Materials, and
• Transport.

But its need hierarchy is different.

If you were to map out a Collection facility's needs, its priority list would be Materials, then Space, then Transport. It absolutely needs to keep the McGuffins safe and viable, so it absolutely needs Materials. It needs Space, but that isn't as important as Materials, since it's reasonable to presume the McGuffins aren't staying forever. Finally, it needs transport links, but that isn't as important to it as the other two needs in the hierarchy.

So a Collection facility could be: out in an allegedly abandoned military base or missile silo. In a warehouse on the outskirts of a small town. In an old freighter anchored offshore. All these places are relatively remote and low-key, but they satisfy the need hierarchy. They offer Materials first and foremost, then Space, then Transport.

Whereas a Distribution facility's need hierarchy is: Transport, Materials, Space. Its purpose is to distribute, so it absolutely needs transport links to help it distribute. It needs to keep the McGuffins safe and viable for the limited time the McGuffins are within its care, so it needs Materials. It doesn't need Space as much as it needs the other two things, since the McGuffins aren't staying very long.

So a Distribution facility could be: a warehouse in a suburb near a major city. Container yards at or near a major port. Slaughterhouses on or near an important railway hub. A hotel at or near an airport. All these places are near the one thing it needs most, but in turn it means that the facility isn't as low-key. It needs some kind of profile, if only to blend in with everything else around it. Abandoned, decaying, marked with hazard warning signs - these are things you don't associate with important transport links. If it's a hotel right next to JFK airport in New York, it probably doesn't look like the hotel from Psycho. 

You can assign a needs hierarchy to all the facility types. Manufacturing needs Space, Materials, Transport. An Analyzing facility needs Transport, Space, Materials. With this needs hierarchy comes the first indication of what a facility is actually like, which in turn helps you design it quickly.

All that said, let's consider an Esoterror Manufacturing facility. Let's also presume that this facility is important but not vital to the cell, so it has Medium Security and Monitoring.

Say for the sake of plot that this particular facility is involved in food production, that it makes chicken nuggets which are infected with a biological agent that, in a percentage of the population, results in a disease which causes brain death. This allows the newly dead brains to be taken over by an Outer Dark entity.

It's manufacturing, so it needs Space, Materials, Transport. Space in this instance implies a lot of space - after all, there are a lot of chickens - and given the nature of the facility there's a lot of waste disposal too, and equipment for processing - the Materials part of the equation. There will be some kind of loading bay or shipping point - the Transport. There's also a small amount of the McGuffin on site. There would be more if this was a High Monitoring or Security site, but we've already decided this is Medium.

When the McGuffins are transported out of the facility, Security drops by one level, from Medium to Low. This in turn suggests that if the agents choose to hit the transport rather than the facility, their odds of success improve.

Assuming there's anything here that might provoke a Stability or Sanity loss, then that loss is probably not enough to drive anyone crazy, but enough to be a concern. Minor, not major; if it were major, the facility would be more important to the cell, and have High levels of Security, Monitoring, or both.

Medium Security implies plenty of locked doors, some kind of electronic alarm system, maybe a minor Outer Dark entity on site depending on how pulp you intend to play it. Medium Monitoring implies that if something happens to the facility the cell will respond reasonably quickly. Within a day if that something is overt, like explosives or a fire, within a week if it's just a break-in.  It also implies that there are resources on site that the agents might want to look at - filing cabinets, computer databases, midlevel management to interrogate. Difficulty for all tests within the facility is 4. Investigative Ability spends are at least 1 point.

Already you have a fairly clear picture of the facility, and thus what the agents can hope to get from the facility. You also know, for gamification purposes, the Difficulty for all tests, and the point spend. Those are the most important things you'll need to know before running any scene within the facility. 

Of course, you'll want to go into more detail for truly important, campaign-relevant facilities. This is just for those emergency moments, when the need arises and you haven't anything planned. Take a breath, consider your options, and ...

Enjoy!