I'm not a visual thinker. If I want to describe a scene I don't picture the far-off hills or the shadowed forest paths. I suspect one of the reasons why I go for the Rule of 4 and Rome is that these rules force you to think about what goes into the soup, to create a recipe. That recipe can be made to fit different paradigms, but it's the same recipe. The recipe used to make tiramisu can be adapted to make ice cream. Theoretically the recipe used to make carbonara can also be adapted to make ice cream, but I make no promises as to taste. Eggy, though. Creamy. With a hit of salt and umami.
Drawing leaves me cold. Forcing the recipe to fit into a particular box is no fun. I appreciate the necessity. Not everyone thinks the way I do, and some people need the formula.
Ratatouille
Yes, there is a flow to the diagram. It directs along certain lines and paths. Theoretically you can refer to it when in need to provide a sense of plot direction. But because it's not how I work or think, I find this kind of thing frustrating. So long as your technique is on-point you should be able to flow with the recipe and embrace the end result.
But!
Let's think about this from a design perspective.
Let's say this is a murder mystery, It doesn't matter, for this example, whether it's a locked-room puzzle, a cozy, a whodunnit or some other kind of mystery. There is a body on the floor and our heroes have to find out how it got there, and why.
The body is the opening scene. Theoretically there can be a scene prior to this where the characters are introduced to the victim before they hit the floor, find out a little about them, what-have-you. But for purpose of this example the body is the opening scene.
From that scene, questions follow.
What did they die of?
How was the means of death administered?
When was the means of death administered?
Who had the opportunity, means or motive to administer the means of death?
Some of these questions can be answered in the opening scene. If the victim's head was bashed in, and there's a bloody crowbar lying nearby, safe to say you've found out what they died of and how means of death was administered. You may also have eliminated the weedy secretary from the list of suspects, since it would take significant upper-body strength to do what's been done and the secretary's arms are scrawny.
That said ... suppose the victim was poisoned first and lying on the ground. A toxicology report would show that one way or the other, as might blood splatter. The weedy secretary might be back in play, since it would be easier to do what's been done while the victim's lying face-down. In fact, since that's the only way the weedy secretary might have done it, and that's the way it was done, signs are beginning to point in a weedy direction ...
Point being, each of these questions can be a scene in and of themselves, which means they all need a spot on the diagram. What began with one box becomes many, with arrows pointing hither and thither.
Let's start with two boxes.
One is the opening scene. The inciting incident. Call it what you will.
The other is the end scene. However the detectives get there, this is where they'll end up. The murderer revealed.
All those boxes in the middle? Some of them are set dressing, some red herrings. Notice in the drawing above that the boxes are color-coded and shaped in a particular way. That allows me to see at a glance which scenes are directly relevant to the plot and which not.
There will always be something interesting to do in any scene. Whether or not the interesting thing is also plot-relevant ... well, Doctor Watson's in Sherlock Holmes for a reason. Without him, the stories would be a boring recitation. This-is-how-it-was-done. Yawn, But, with him, a plot-relevant character wanders in and out of intriguing situations, finding things out. Not all those things are as important as they seem at the time, but they all seem important at the time. Eye-catching.
So, to sum up: the diagram might look like a spaghetti nightmare. Nevertheless, it follows a recipe. It has the same rule of 4 and Rome as any other plot. Difference being, it fits those things and Rome into a skeleton which can be referred to, as needed, to give you a sense of plot direction.
The important things remain the same, Something interesting to do must be in each and every scene, whether it's set dressing, a red herring, or something else.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some drawing to do.
Once upon a time I discussed the Clue Trail and recommended, among other things:
Rule of Four. There are Four ways in: Academic, Technical, Interpersonal, General. What you need is one clue for each of the ways in, so one Academic, one Technical, one Interpersonal, one General.
Why do it this way? Well, apart from the usual benefits that come with the Rule of Four, you get one extra: split four ways among the four Ability lists, someone in the group will have at least one of those Abilities with points to spend. That means no matter how Scooby Doo it gets one of your dream team will find their way to the mystery.
I went further and pointed out that this works best when dealing with the unexpected. You didn't think the characters would go to Berlin, say, this week, but here they are, scarfing up the curried bratwurst. What to do when they go looking for trouble?
Now, let's say that this wasn't an accident. Let's say this was planned. Let's say that Berlin was always on the menu and that you had time to design something more in-depth.
The spine, for those of you shaky on the concept, is that part of the scenario structure which holds everything together. It's the bit that connects the dots. The clues characters find along the way are the nerve endings, the capillaries, that wrap around that skeletal structure and put some meat on its bones. Some of these clues lead to valuable information that draws the characters further down the spine. Some are dead ends. Some go unhelpful places. But, in the end, they all lead to the End. The question is, which End?
Let's talk about unhelpful places and dead ends.
Now, in RPGs generally and in GUMSHOE in particular, there should be no such thing as a completely dead end. By which I mean, there should be no such thing as a dead end with nothing fun to do, or nothing interesting to be had. A dead end does not lead any further into the plot. That does not mean it's a complete waste of everybody's time.
In that sense a dead end is very similar to capture scenes, which I've written about before. The same principle applies: as Director it is your job to make sure the characters have something to do if they find themselves in a dead end scene.
A dead end, strictly speaking, is a position with no hope of progress; a blind alley. Your players thought this clue led somewhere, but it doesn’t. Or that this network contact, this McGuffin, this whatever-it-may-be would have a result, but it doesn’t.
Or – and this is the one to keep an eye on – they ignore a clue that could have led somewhere and, because they did that, now it leads nowhere.
Let’s say for the sake of this example that their network contact Anton was working on [X] and said ‘I’ll have more information for you tomorrow.’ The agents then wander off and commit their usual misdeeds, only remembering about a month later (in game time) that their dear old pal Anton was supposed to be working on [X]. Whatever happened about that? Well, nothing happened. Maybe Anton’s information is out of date. Maybe Anton’s dead. Maybe he’s a vampire now because he got too close to the Conspiracy.
In all those cases what could have been a promising spine trail now is not, because there’s nothing more to be gained by going down that path.
However, just because it’s a blind alley doesn’t mean there’s nothing whatsoever to be gained by going down there. It won’t advance the plot, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with the notion.
Here’s some ways you can do that.
Antagonist Reaction. There are bad things down that blind alley and they want to twist your head right off its delicate little neck. This can be a useful moment to kick off a fight scene, a chase scene, or some version of the Thrilling moment.
The Nature of the Beast. You don’t get any useful plot clues but you do find out a little bit more about the nature of the things you’re chasing. Maybe they twist time and there’s some evidence of that down the blind alley, or maybe they have necromantic powers and you discover some of their revivified victims. Oh look! Zombies!
The Nature of the Plot. Just because that laboratory burned down, taking all of its research experiments with it, doesn’t mean you can’t gain something by sifting through the ashes. Or maybe you notice that there’s things missing from the debris that ought to be there. If that safe was empty when the building burnt down, that tells you the records are still out there somewhere, even if you can’t find them at this location anymore.
The Nature of the Game, aka Rome. There may be nothing down that blind alley, but if it’s an evocative nothing, if it chills the blood and quickens the pulse, then it’s not a complete waste of everyone’s time. This is the moment most likely to cause a Stability check. It’s also the most likely to contain squick. Or, as Stephen King famously said, “if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”
The Location of the Plot. This is probably the most useful blind alley, though it may be useful by default. Let’s say that the players had three choices as to where to go next. They went for option A, and it turned out to be a dud. That means the plot’s got to be in B or C, and now they’ve wasted valuable time on A they have less time to deal with whatever’s in store at B or C.
This last option is also the option most likely to frustrate the players so it should be used sparingly. However, there’s juice to be had from building up tension. If the players know it’s a race against time and they realize they’ve wasted some of that precious time following up a bad lead, then their natural reaction is going to be increased motivation spiced with panic.
Academic – History. One point gets the agent a general history of Teufelsberg plus the idea that the NSA left behind some interesting artefacts, buried in the rubble.
Interpersonal – Tradecraft. One point gets the agent a general history of Teufelsberg plus some old NSA files, slipped to the agent by a friendly at the local CIA station.
Technical – Urban Survival. One point gets the agent a general history of Teufelsberg plus some maps and design schematics from back in the day, giving the agent a free Architecture bonus should they want it.
General – Sense Trouble. One point gets the agent a general recent history of Teufelsberg plus some spooky extras (unexplained deaths, criminal activity, ghost activity, whatever suits best).
Now, for whatever reason, Teufelsberg is a dead end. Doesn't matter why; it just is. In that case you still have to slip something in there for the players to chew on. It might be an Antagonist Reaction, a clue to the Nature of the Beast, Plot, or Game, or it might be the Location of the Plot.
For this particular location I favor an Antagonist Reaction. There are enemies at that location, and they will do the characters harm, or try to.
Now, the players spend their one point of History, Tradecraft or whatever it may be. That means they get to Teufelsberg.
What if they spend two points? That usually gets them extra bennies, right? What kind of extra benny can be had in a dead end situation?
Answer: advance warning that it is a dead end, or advance warning of what's waiting for them up there. In this case, the creatures lurking up that dead end give themselves away somehow. Maybe the characters notice peculiar shadows or get a warning of supernatural activity. It's quiet. Too quiet. That kind of thing.
This gives them the opportunity to avoid the antagonist reaction or play into it. Point being, it gives them a choice.
It gives them something interesting to do, even if this is a dead end.
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.
It's the perennial bugbear. The cliche to end all RPG cliches. The adventuring party has to meet somewhere. Why not an inn?
I recently picked up a copy of Curse of Strahd and was unsurprised to see this very idea floated in the first adventure hook in the book: The characters start their adventure in an old tavern, the details of which are for you to describe. It's an old perennial. It crops up everywhere.
Why not? You've got to start somewhere.
The problem is, the more you rely on an old standard the less satisfying it feels. Sure, you need to start somewhere. Yet if you start with something boring that's not a good lead-up to the adventure that follows.
What would make it more interesting?
It's your local. Nameless tavern number 368 in a life full of nameless taverns is not a good start. What if you and your mates have been coming here all your lives? What if you have history with this place? It may even be your family that owns it, the proceeds from your adventuring that keep it afloat. The more stake the characters have in the location, the more likely they are to feel happy about being there. Variant: it's not just your local, you own the place. If you don't look after it, who will?
There's something odd about this place. Just Another Tavern? What if this one's haunted? What if the whole thing is built inside an elemental, frozen in place? What if the inn is secretly run by magical cats that are constantly underfoot? What if the beer is brewed by a God, or at least a Demigod? At least make this place stick out in the characters' minds. They may want to come back here one day; it'd be great if there was a here to come back to, not Just Another Tavern.
There's something very odd about this place. If the tavern is a front for the Zhentarim, or Edom, then it probably looks pretty normal on the outside. That's the whole point of places like these. They don't attract attention. They may be perfectly normal. Pay no attention to the peculiar carts and vehicles that come and go at all hours of the day and night. Don't go looking for secret doors or hidden passages. You won't find any. I swear.
There's something very odd happening right now. Even the most ordinary tavern becomes very interesting when someone sets it on fire. Or perhaps someone important to the ongoing campaign is paying it a visit. Ravenloft, for example, has the bard Darklord Harkon Lukas roaming one of the realms looking for new entertainers to join his act. If someone like that is performing onstage, the inn suddenly becomes a thousand times more interesting. Edom has any number of peculiar characters who might do the same. The Madman might frequent the local bucket of blood, or the Ex-IRA might show up as the behind-the-scenes owner of this particular establishment. Maybe they'll become the characters' patrons. Maybe they'll let slip some important clue.
It has a peculiar history. This works very well in settings like London, where there's an established history that goes back centuries and it's not uncommon for pubs to have a past that goes back to the Tudors. Sure, everything's normal now. At least, it seems that way. But fifty years ago there was a string of horrible murders, or a cult, or a conspiracy, and at this very inn ...
It's not really there. What if the adventurers are only dreaming? Or hallucinating? What if the inn only exists because of a shared delusion, perhaps inspired by a peculiar book that the characters all read, one that doesn't want to leave their minds? Let's say this is Ravenloft. In that setting there is a realm called I'Cath, infested by ghosts and hopping vampires. This is a realm with two sides, one of which is trapped in the throes of an eternal dream. Suppose the inn only exists on one side of that paradigm? The inn might be part of the dream version of I'Cath and the characters may only experience it by being part of the dream; God and the DM alone know where their bodies are in the waking world. If this were Cthulhu, and the inn only exists in the Dreamlands, then the characters might be in very different parts of the waking world. You could run a sprawling campaign with characters based across the planet, who meet each night in the Golden Cat to discuss their adventures and plan new ones.
This week’s post comes courtesy of something I disliked.
Fuss! Fume!
I was reading an article about low-level encounters for Dungeons & Dragons groups, encounters which weren’t just ‘go kill the rats in my basement,’ and, while I appreciated the sentiment, the suggested alternatives were … dull.
Unbearably dull.
As in, I would leave the campaign if you tried that crap on me, dull.
The big difficulty Dungeons and Dragons has is that it’s still dragging around Chainmail’s corpse. At heart, it’s a skirmish wargame. Its mechanics, spells, equipment and ethos is all about reducing the other fella’s hit points to zero as quickly as possible.
Other fantasy games do this. GUMSHOE’s Swords of the Serpentine does this. But the difference between Dungeons and Dragons and Swords of the Serpentine is, Swords doesn’t start you off at level 1 and say ‘go forth, hero, and do great deeds.’ With Swords, and games like it, your character starts pretty much at the peak of their career and things can only get better. Whereas in D&D and its iterations you start with a handful of hit points and a gleam in your eye.
A gleam which is quickly extinguished if, say, a goblin punches you in the unmentionables. Fury of the Small is not to be sneezed at.
Other games choose other solutions. Ars Magica deals with this problem by giving you a half-dozen characters or more per player, so if one gets chewed up by a rampaging beast there’s another four or five behind them to fill the gap. Ars also focuses on story goals rather than combat goals, because it didn’t start life as a skirmish wargame with dreams of grandeur.
But Dungeons and Dragons is a skirmish game which means the solution to any problem posed in the campaign is often ‘hit it till it falls down, then hit it again.’ It’s the wargamer mentality. Nobody asks a Civil War tabletop gamer to hug it out; Lincoln didn’t defeat Davis in a spelling bee. Though it would have saved a lot of lives if he did.
Which is why ‘kill the rats in my basement’ is such a popular trope. Rats are small. They have almost no hit points. Their damage output is minimal. It’s a quest that can reasonably be achieved by even the most incompe … the most inexperienced group.
Still, there are only so many basements to go around. Eventually your band of pest controllers will run out of rats. Or get bored hitting them. What to do?
Before I start talking about scenarios, let’s nail down some basic principles.
1)Keep the combat to a minimum.
Yes, there will be combat. It’s still a combat-focused game. But the characters only have so many hit points and short rests plus clerics working overtime is not going to solve that problem. Plan for one or two thrilling fight scenes, not The Game Of Death.
It’s fine if the combat is nonlethal. Particularly in an urban setting where there’s active law enforcement and the death penalty (also known as hanging, drawing, quartering and there goes your weekend) it’s perfectly reasonable for the average ne’er-do-well to prefer nonlethal over lethal violence.
2)Make sure there are exciting things to do.
This ought to be obvious but time has taught me that the obvious is anything but. These are heroes. They need to be doing heroic things. Sure, Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables, but he did it in a heroic way and it was one of his twelve heroic tasks. It wasn’t his Sunday second job.
3)Make it fantastic.
This is a fantasy world where Gods, Devils and things beyond imagining walk the earth. Where physics and chemistry take a back seat to mystics in tune with the mythic forces of the universe. One of the reasons why busting rats in basements gets boring is that it’s just rats, just a basement. Where’s the drama in that?
With all that in mind, let’s talk scenario ideas.
The Laughing Cat
Type: investigative; murder mystery.
This adventure location is a burnt-out travelers’ inn on the high road. When it was still an inn, it was a popular spot for wayfarers on a well-traveled path. The reasonable thing to do would be to rebuild it but it has a bad reputation. Word is, it’s haunted. The [guild/monastery/family/noble house] which owns the land would appreciate it if someone deals with that problem before the inn gets rebuilt. Generous financial reward offered.
Journey: 2-4 days across forest terrain to get to the Laughing Cat. The heroes may encounter a faerie dragon on the way there which, if treated with respect or properly entertained (it likes music) can provide a clue as to what might have happened at the Laughing Cat. Otherwise, combat.
The Laughing Cat is a burnt-out shell. Preliminary investigation (DC10 investigation, history, perception) indicates arson. Someone set the main room on fire while everyone was asleep upstairs. If History is successful, the heroes remember that this happened about ten years ago and there were three survivors; everyone else perished, including the Awakened cat which gave the inn its name.
A DC15 check remembers that the three survivors were Myria Whispermouse, a roguish Halfling who’s gone on to become a renowned hero; Aramil Caerdonel, an elf paladin (now fallen) whose whereabouts are unknown, and the innkeeper Bron, who was badly injured in the fire and now lives with family far away. Among the dead were Proserpine, a renowned Tiefling bard, and her half-orc companion Morg.
That’s all that can be seen during the day. At night, the Laughing Cat comes back to spectral life once more. All of its people go about their business as if no time had passed – which, to them, it hasn’t. It’s always and eternally the last night of their lives. To them, the characters are just other guests at the Laughing Cat. The survivors are also there, as their dream selves; a nightmare none of them can escape.
At which point the Cat enters the picture. Peridot is the only one out of all of them who knows that they’re all dead, and Peridot has a proposition: if the heroes can find out which of the three survivors did it and why, the haunting will stop.
Was it Myria, whose greed for the party’s loot got the better of her?
Was it Aramil, whose unrequited love for Morg tempted him to do something catastrophic?
Was it Bron, whose drunkenness finally had disastrous consequences?
By talking to those present, finding out what they saw and how they died, the heroes can gather the clues needed to reveal the killer.
Potential combat encounters:
Skeletal rats in the cellar (they guard a clue to the villain’s identity, a fossilized memory that will only reveal itself once they are destroyed)
Bar-room brawl with the dead (nonlethal, but Morg has a punch like a mule’s kick).
The imp Pazzu, whose temptations pushed the killer over the edge. Pazzu has a stake in the game; if it can drag the killer’s soul back to the infernal regions, it gets the soul coin that the villain’s misdeeds will mint. But until the killer dies, Pazzu is trapped at the Laughing Cat with the rest of them. If the heroes reveal who did it, the killer will die that night of a heart attack and Pazzu will be free to collect the coin. If the heroes squash Pazzu before that happens then Pazzu won’t have time to collect. Pazzu is a ‘hide-in-the-shadows, rely on invisibility’ kind of miscreant, but Pazzu can’t resist boasting about their clever scheme. This may trip them up in the end.
Immortal With A Kiss
Type: social, romance, urban
The heroes are hired as extra guards at a rich man’s villa, one week only. The eldest daughter Olympia is getting married and valuable wedding presents are arriving every day. It’s the heroes’ job to make sure those presents don’t go missing and that Olympia’s privacy is respected before the big event. No visitors, no scandal; everything’s being coordinated to create the big event of the social season and there cannot be even the slightest hint of hijinks.
This is particularly important to the family because Olympia is magically Blessed; all her life she’s had the Bless spell effect as a permanent, but according to fortunetellers and prognosticators that Bless effect will pass to her true love, when she kisses them for the first time. This story is well known; how true it is, is anyone’s guess.
The villa is besieged by wedding tourists daily. Bards looking to try out their latest ballads; dressmakers wanting Olympia to wear their designs; cake-makers and confectioners who want Olympia to choose their treats for her wedding; ‘friends of the family’ who haven’t been seen in decades who turn up unexpectedly looking for a place to stay, or a short-term loan, or just a quick word with the bride-to-be. The heroes have to manage all of this discreetly.
Among the wedding tourists are a peculiar band of warlocks and astrologers who, day in, day out, prognosticate the wedding based on Olympia’s birthday and that of her husband, Kairon, the handsome and famous Ranger whose exploits and treasure retrieval bought him instant access to high society. These guys just won’t go away; they fulminate and gibber in the street, producing alarming magical effects, incense, smoke, dancing mice – you name it, they’ve got it. Their omens and portents cover the entire wedding from break of day to the last breath of nightfall.
The heroes soon realize (DC10 insight, perception, deception) that Olympia’s younger sister Callistra is up to something, but it’s not clear what. She’s seen chatting with the astrologers and passing them insider information – but to what end?
Further investigation (DC15, and this can involve bribing Callistra’s cat familiar with treats) reveals that wizard Callistra plans to use Disguise Self and Friends on the day in question to pass as her sister on the wedding day. She figures she can get away with it because she physically resembles her sister (size, bodyweight) and most of the day the bride will be wrapped up in veils and dresses. The heroes may work this out when they realize that she’s feeding the astrologers her own date of birth and personal information, not her sister’s.
She thinks she’ll get away with this because Olympia’s planning on skipping the wedding and embarking on her own heroic career as a Thief. Her lover is an important member of the local Thieves Guild who taught her a few tricks. [The guild member may or may not be her true love; they may just be a seducing scoundrel.] The family would be appalled if they knew, and it’s exactly this kind of hijinks that the heroes were hired to stop – if they want to stop it, of course …
Olympia intends to make her getaway on the wedding day, as that’s when there’ll be the most confusion.
What nobody appreciates (except possibly the heroes, if they’ve been paying attention to those astrologers) is that the prognosticators are actually burglars. They’ve been casing the joint all week under cover of magical hoodoo. They know how to get in and how to get out without getting caught, which is exactly what will happen if the heroes don’t intervene.
Potential combat moments:
Brawl with drunken aristocratic youth who think it’s funny to sing romance ballads under Olympia’s window every day up until the wedding.
Chase/combat with the astrologer-thieves as they make their getaway. They prefer nonviolence, ball-bearings and tanglefoot bags to cover their retreat, but they may confuse things by running through a rough tavern hoping that the ensuing bar brawl will help them escape.
Near the village of Three Hills there is a magical well that has become a popular spot for those on pilgrimage. (Life, Light, Nature). The village is within the fief of [noble/church/monastery] and its patron rakes in a small but not insignificant amount of tolls from those on the pilgrim trail. A nice extra comes from the sale of trinkets and medals organized by a small hermit community near Three Hills. It’s also a well-known fact that horses bred near the well have special properties, and the sale of those horses is a nice earner for the family that breeds them which in turn pays the fief holder a tidy sum for the benefice. In short, there’s a fair amount of cash at stake, which becomes a problem when the pilgrim trail is shut down by druids. Angry pilgrims complain to the fief holder, and the fief holder reaches out to reliable third parties to investigate and (hopefully) solve the problem. Enter our heroes, stage right.
The druids, a trio of halflings, (Garth, Morrin, Gynnie, all novice members of a far-off circle), say that they have the right to shut down the trail when it is clear that the balance is negatively affected, and further that this right is in writing. Three generations back the fief holder agreed to this is negotiation with the druids’ circle, when a blight threatened the land. The druids cleansed the blight and extracted this promise as payment.
The druids say that the horses bred near the well do not have special properties; quite the reverse, in fact, which hasn’t stopped the breeders from selling them at inflated prices based on reputation alone. Animal Handling DC10 shows this to be true; DC15 shows that this condition is being disguised by the breeders who use magical feed mash to pep up the stock before sale. The feed makes the horses seem great for a week or so; after that, not so much. The DC15 also shows that the older horses, which the family keep for breeding stock, are still as magical as ever; it’s only the current sale stock that is affected.
The druids say that this shows the well is being over-used, threatening the balance. They demand that the well be given time to recover – perhaps a year or more. This proposal will not please the fief holder, which conveniently lost the paperwork on that druid deal as soon as possible after it was signed. The fief holder isn’t pleased to hear that the druids kept a copy.
What nobody realizes is that the source of the problem is the hermits, who have become warlocks, tempted to more-than-mortal power by a devil who wanted access to the well for its own purposes. The hermits knew how to bypass the magical wards put there by the druids and they let the devil in. The devil did what it wanted and then left a few infernal serpents behind to watch over ‘its’ property. The serpents allow the devil to come and go as it pleases, bypassing the wards. The serpents can be defeated in combat but can also be instantly defeated by one of the magical horses, if that horse is brought to the well (Religion, Insight).
If this is revealed then the druids can restore the protective wards and, after the serpents are dealt with, the well will recover. If the devil is left in place then the well will become permanently affected within a year.
Potential combat moments:
A fight against infernal, poisonous snakes.
A nonlethal brawl with the horse breeding family, or angry pilgrims.
A potentially lethal scrimmage with the druids, or the warlock-hermits. The warlocks are likely to take to their heels if discovered; they got into this for power, not to get stabbed.
The devil, if encountered, will insist on a battle of wits (Arcana) – a riddle challenge. If the heroes win, the devil promises to leave. If the devil wins it will remain at the well for a month. This challenge can be attempted more than once; the devil likes playing games.
Designing a campaign, a scenario, even a scene, can be very difficult. You want it to be memorable, granted. You want the players to have fun. You want something unique, or at least reasonably unique - not a bunch of easily spotted tropes. At the same time you don't want to bust your head open searching when the game's on in a day or so and you really haven't the time to mess about.
I've said before that folklore's the best resource for a Director in search of inspiration, say for cults or creatures. It's also very helpful to know your history, so you can pick out details that will be useful later. Say you want to put something interesting and mysterious in your steampunk fantasy city. You might spend an hour scratching your head and crossing out dud ideas, or you could insert the Crystal Palace. Stolen from history, reborn as - well, whatever you fancy.
But there's one other thing you can try, and that's to look at the very ordinary events and things around you, and play with them.
You already know, as Director, that the players are going to come into contact with certain things just in the course of their day-to-day. Exactly what those things are will depend on the circumstances of the game and the setting, but there are some assumptions that can be made. The characters will need to travel from place to place. They will need to eat and sleep. They may commit crimes, or protect people from them, in which case they will come into contact with the police, other criminals, and victims. Possibly also vigilantes, depending on the nature of the setting - and so on, and on.
The initial assumption is the basis for all the rest of the work, but underlying that initial assumption is another, more basic layer. So say this is a game about investigating mystic mysteries, everything from Templar treasures to the Bermuda Triangle. That initial assumption immediately suggests several things that you know the characters will encounter all the time: occultists, skeptics, believers, sites of mystic significance like haunted houses and stone circles. That in turn suggests that you, as Director, need to make some notes about all those things, for use in those moments when the characters need direction and you haven't got something more significant planned. Are the players at a loss? Maybe it's time to follow up on that tip they heard about the Winchester House. None of this has to be in-depth; it just has to have enough depth to occupy attention.
However that's the initial assumption, not the basic layer. The basic layer is simply this: the things the characters encounter all the time, whether they want to or not. The characters will always want to eat, to sleep, to move around. They'll buy clothing, toys, game consoles. They will have needs and they'll want to fill them. At the same time there will be events happening around them regardless of whether or not the players are directly involved, because everyone else in the game world has needs to satisfy too. This is at the heart of every system, regardless of setting or mechanics, and you can play with this layer in many different ways - so long as you establish it first.
It's been a long time since I've played, but I loved Cyberpunk 2020 way back when, because it spent time on little details like that. The splatbooks told you what guns and chipware were for sale, but they also gave you a little nugget of information about the game world along with it. Jeweldecks are manufactured to order by Faberge of Switzerland. The customer collaborates with the company's designers on the design of the jewelry that the deck will be built into ... Survivable, capable and powerful - when the going gets tough, turn to Spinelli Autotech ... Leisurewear isn't about sports, it's about feeling like you're into sports. Our goal is to make everyone feel authentic, even if they're just sitting at home in front of the Netbox, knocking back Smash.
Look at those flavor comments. They establish the setting quickly and give context for what's going on, more clearly and more succinctly than any data dump. It's all about worldbuilding in the end, and the sooner you establish your world the better it will be for your campaign. Everything you do to make your world yours will encourage the players to explore and inhabit it. BioShock's a classic example; that undersea city wouldn't feel the same without its personalized vending machines, its peppy little sentry bots, its gloomy interiors split by flickering neon lights, the New Year's masks everyone wears, and those mournful, lethal Big Daddies in their diving suits. It's that world more than anything else that draws the player forward, to interact with the setting.
I started this by talking about inspiration, and how the basic layer can be a vital source of inspiration for the Director. By that I mean this: by considering what's in the basic layer, you can design upward and create something for the players to interact with. That's exactly what Cyberpunk did, exactly what BioShock did - they shaped everything in their worlds by playing with that basic layer, by considering the things the characters encounter all the time and then building on those things. The characters have needs and want to fill them. As Director, how you provide fulfilment for those needs shapes everything else in the game going forward.
Say this is a fantasy setting with Gods and their clerics, or similar. The basic layer is this: the trappings and dogmas of that religion. Its shrines may be everywhere - are they decorated with flowers, candles, incense, something else? Do its worshippers leave offerings, and if so of what? How are the dead treated? These are the questions you need to answer, and you need to pepper the game world with that answer as often as possible. After all, the characters would see these shrines every day; they've probably made offerings at them many times. But by ensuring these shrines have just a little bit of detail, you help to build the world.
Don't feel as if you have to kill yourself with detail. Grim Fandango, for example, never tells you a great deal about the world of the dead; its worldbuilding is established in a few little details, such as how florists become insane weaponsmiths because floral bullets are the way the dead are killed. A few little tricks like this make the world seem developed, perhaps more so than it actually is. Brief but informative should be your watchword, not unlike the one sentence description I've recommended for character archetypes.
However there's one other use for the basic layer, and to cover this final point I'm going to draw your attention to something I swiped from the magnificent garbage fire that is the internet:
Six thousand cell phones, lost each year. Over three thousand digital cameras, eighteen thousand hats, seven thousand five hundred autograph books, lost and gone in one theme park. Think about that for a moment, then go to the basic layer and ask yourself: in my campaign world, what happens to the lost and found?
Say this is a pre-industrial revolution setting, where much of it probably gets re-used, not because they were all eco-warriors back in the days of Camelot, but because they didn't have many resources to begin with so they had to stretch what they had. This is why we often find lost manuscripts and forgotten artworks hidden on the canvases and pages of classic paintings and old books; someone scraped the original clean, and started fresh. Absolutely everything gets used, which is why you could make a living in a medieval setting by scouring the streets for animal dung, and why even up to the Victorian period there'd be someone willing to cart off your 'night soil' - also known as feces.
So if this is a fantasy setting, and your character loses, say, a notebook - or worse yet, a wizard's spellbook - then now would be a good time to track down whoever it is that collects all this stuff for resale. Somewhere out there is a man with a cart and a vision, and he's got your spellbook in his pile. Alternatively, what happens if you scrape down a spellbook so you can write new spells in it? Who knows - but I bet you could have fun finding out.
There's also magical consequences to consider. In Japanese folklore there's an entity called the Tsukumo-gami, a wraith made up of the things we leave behind. Shoes, pots, chairs, umbrellas, telephones - everything has a spirit, and if slighted these items can become furious, stalking the night, attacking people. Guy de Maupassant once wrote of a very similar thing, in his short story Who Knows? in which a sinister, enormously fat furniture dealer may, or may not, have persuaded a man's entire house, beds, chairs, cabinets and all, to walk out the front door and into his shop.
When a thing becomes lost, is it really lost, or has it walked away? In Esoterrorists it may be possible for a notebook, a tablet, a camera to have a soul, and to express its disgust by escaping from its owner. In Bookhounds it's quite possible a grimoire might be alive. Or, if this is a Disney situation and all those items are lost each year in one place, what happens next to all that magical energy, bound up with nowhere to go? Are those sunglasses, cameras, cell phones used in some ritual, extracting mana from the lost and found to power - what, exactly? A ride? The lights in the Magic Castle? The ritual keeping Disney's frozen head viable?
With all that in mind, consider this scenario seed:
Let the player pick something valuable, which the character has lost. The character goes looking for it, and finds it - but before the character can pick it up, it's whisked away by something small, fast, and almost silent. What happened, and where is the item now?
1) Future tech: a cleaning robot assigned to this building grabbed the unattended item, and took it away to 'lost and found.' Except someone has reprogrammed this robot - and all the others like it - to bring lost items to a secret room hidden away in the building. The question is, who did it? Is there an actual person behind this, or have the robots developed a peculiar hive mind, and bring these items here in some form of religious worship?
2) 20th Century/Supernatural setting: the item was grabbed by a gremlin or similar, that wants to make a nest for its prospective mate. Getting it back means delving into the forgotten supernatural underbelly of the city, possibly even a pocket dimension in which everything seems like, yet is not like, the world in which we live. In a Cthulhu-esque setting, the gremlin could be an extension of a Great Old One, say the Brood of Elihort, and its reasons for wanting to collect the lost and found are bound to be malevolent.
3) Fantasy/Swords and Sorcery setting: a magical entity, possibly an archwizard, created a spell intended to help it find things it has lost. It wrote the spell down on a scroll and forgot about it, and now that scroll lies in a monastery, library or other archive. However spells have a way of reminding the world that they exist, and when this scroll realized it was due to be scraped clean so other things could be scribed on it, the spell began 'finding' things other people had 'lost' and moving them to the archive, so they could be scraped clean in its place. Of course, not all the items it 'finds' are scrolls, but it has no good way of picking the useful from the useless, so everything it gets ends up in the same place. Which would puzzle the monks/librarians no end, except the junior member meant to be cleaning up the archive each night has worked out, at least in part, what's going on, and is selling these 'lost' items at a premium discount, at the local tavern. All of which ticks off the local thieves' guild no end; after all, the guild's not getting its cut from all this unsanctioned thievery.
I've been watching a lot of Mad Men recently. This drama, set in the 1960s, does an excellent job of portraying all the little details that make up a world, and it's not just in the obvious points, like male/female relations, or the cars and houses. No, it's in the little things, like the constant cigarette smoking, the way the office completely clears out for lunch, and the perfect dress sense of characters like Don Draper or Joan Harris. A host of little details, swarming together, to create a cohesive whole.
It made me think of the efforts Keepers go through to create a cohesive imaginary campaign world. Mad Men, as with all period pieces, has to show you the time as well as place where everything's happening. However it's always a particular window in time that it wants you to look through. There's no point in pretending that Mad Men is a complete, cohesive and entirely accurate portrayal of the sixties. Instead it selects the kind of sixties it wants you to know about and shows that, because that particular kind of history best suits the story it intends to tell.
The same applies in scenario and campaign structure. If your game is set in the 1920s, it needs to reflect that era. Same for the 1930s, the Victorian period, or indeed for any other period you, as Keeper, intend to portray. But the window that you let the players look through needs to reflect the story you intend to tell.
Let's consider the 1920s for a moment. What kind of period touches make up that decade?
To begin with, there's the Great War. The world's just this minute climbing out of an earth-shattering crisis, one which smashed great nations to dust, and then, mere months later, a plague breaks out that kills something in the region of 100 million people. Those events in combination make everything seem fragile, and contribute to a devil-may-care youth culture determined to have a good time regardless of how awful the world is. Then there's a sweeping rise in transport and communications, linking the furthest reaches of the planet. The automobile reaches its ascendancy, with new roads snaking across the planet, and architects like le Corbusier propose cutting through the great cities of Europe to make way for the car. Psychiatrists like Freud are becoming incredibly popular, even if their work isn't fully understood by the millions of people who swear by psychiatry. In the United States there's the question of Prohibition, and with it a completely new culture in which Federal law enforcement agencies suddenly appear, in great numbers, all over the country, determined to enforce an unpopular new law.
No doubt you can think of many other touches. The point then becomes, which of these touches best suits the story the Keeper intends to tell?
Is it an Innsmouth-style tale of corruption from within, with the ultimate reveal that we are all somehow infected by strange and terrible genetic putrefaction? Then the Keeper will want to concentrate on medical issues, perhaps linking the Spanish Flu, sleeping sickness and all other plagues that sweep through the population to this Mythos decay. The psychiatrists may be fighting a losing battle against the horrors that are hard-coded into the psyche. There could be a dozen different threads, but whatever they are, or become, the Keeper needs to emphasize them again and again in the background details. The characters travel to a decayed New England town, and note among other things that the people living there all suffer from a particular disease. Another outbreak of plague occurs in a far-off land that the characters suspect is a hotbed of Mythos activity. An outbreak of suicides among psychiatrists in, say, New York, suggests that terrible horrors are overwhelming those unlucky souls who try to delve further into the murky recesses of the mind.
Perhaps it's all about the vastness of the machine, and the unknowable Nyarlathotep-inspired creations that we unwittingly construct each day, with our new technology. Then the background details should all be about construction, new developments, architectural marvels, scientific advancement, all leading, of course, to an inevitable and tragic conclusion. Or perhaps its about the destruction of old values and their replacement with new, corrupt ideals. Then the characters could be broken refugees from the Old World, fleeing a land devastated by war, only to discover new tendrils of the Mythos in all these fancy innovations their new home expects them to adopt. Changing hairstyles, attitudes, a lack of respect for religion, the modern whirl and rush, all of these could be signs of Mythos activity.
You take that part of history that works for the story, and you bend it to your liking. Then you show it to the players.
Say you wanted to run a Victorian period game. That's a time of great political upheaval masked by apparent tranquility at the top. You've got revolutionaries brewing up political doctrines, or just ordinary explosives, to be used in acts of terror to support their goals. Small wars are kicking off all over the planet, leaving destruction in their wake. Religion is a much more important part of their lives than it is today, but it's a religion of rules and patterns, a little elderly and creaky. Spiritualism and mediumship are fast becoming more attractive, as an alternative to religion. Scholars like Mayhew are beginning to pay attention to the poor, and to tell the world how the poor live. Massive tidal waves of immigration are sweeping across the Old Country, flowing to the New. People are writing things down, in massive tomes that can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about public decorum, how to behave, how to cook, how to dress, what to see if you're abroad. Indeed, what you know and how you demonstrate your knowledge mark you out as an educated gentleman, or lady; a slip here, a misplaced haitch there, and you damn yourself in the eyes of everyone.
So perhaps you want a story in which the forces of the Mythos are crushing out spirituality and replacing it with ennui and despair. In that case emphasizing the spiritual decay of the church and the rise of corrupting spiritualism is key; the Fox sisters as outriders for Nyarlathotep, or the Cottingley Fairy photographs as inspired by Hastur. Or a story in which strange forces of destruction toil away in the darkness while the world goes by in blissful ignorance. In that event, play up the terrorists, the small wars, the limbless veterans begging in the gutter for their daily bread. Again, you take those aspects of the period that best support your story, and emphasize them.
If you're reading this and reminded of a previous column, Murder Most Foul, there's a reason for that. Both ideas use the same principle. In order to create a broad canvas in which the characters operate, you take relevant details and seed the canvas with them. In Murder, I suggested that a clue found in a newspaper report be juxtaposed with other information which helps build the world in which the characters live.
... it can be something
like: ‘buried on page 12, underneath a
photo array showing exactly where the Battersea Torso Killer hacked up his
victim, you find …’ Or alternatively something like ‘the radio announcer is describing the crowd outside Birmingham Prison,
where baby killer Victor Parsons is about to be hung, as the jingle of the
doorbell announces the entry of a customer.’ ...
These are throwaway details, yes, but the fact remains that it's when you throw them out, and in what context, that helps build your campaign world. Continuous reinforcement will create the kind of world you want to operate in, without the characters being buried in text dumps and historical research.
This is another one for the aspiring Games Masters out
there. Remember a while back, when I said that scenario design will become a big part of your life? Let’s talk a little more
about that, and about the three act structure, a literary device that, used
properly, will save your butt.
The three act structure is sometimes defined as the Setup,
Confrontation, and the Resolution. John Yorke calls each of these acts “a unit of action bound by a
character’s desire,” and in this case these are your player’s characters. They
drive the story forward with their own actions and desires; you provide the
structure, in which their actions are played out.
Each act has its own beginning, middle and end, which means
that, for instance, the Setup has its own internal three act structure going
on. In each unit of action that makes up the act as a whole, the characters follow
their own desires and goals, which move the plot forward. At the end of the
Setup there will be a turning point which leads naturally into the
Confrontation, and once the Confrontation reaches its conclusion, there will be
another turning point that leads naturally to the Resolution. Beginning,
middle, end.
The point to take away is this: when designing scenarios, if
you bear the three act structure in mind and write accordingly, it will lend
your ongoing narrative coherency and drama. It will order your thoughts, and
let you plot your boss encounters accordingly; it will show you where the best
place is to leave clues as to what’s going on, when it’s a good idea to
introduce significant antagonists, and where it’s time to introduce dilemmas.
With that in mind, I’m going to discuss a basic fantasy
scenario, in terms of the three act structure.
Starting with the Setup: the characters are in a trading
town looking for adventure and loot. They’ve been chasing up rumors of a
dungeon somewhere nearby, and discover that, according to legend, a robber
baron who was killed many years ago left a castle behind somewhere out in the
King’s Woods, near the Old Road. That discovery is the first unit of action in
the Setup.
The second unit of action comes when the characters try to
find out more about this castle, and the dungeon that allegedly exists below
it.They discover that, according to
local traders, the King’s Woods have become very dangerous within the last four
months. Caravans have been attacked, people carried off, and nobody knows why;
the caravans are never looted, so whoever’s doing it isn’t after money. The
attackers seem interested only in captives, but they never send a ransom
demand, and they don’t abduct everyone they meet, just a few people. This would
be a good time to insert a few clues, which will pay off later. In this
instance, the clues could be something like: your wizard or your cleric, being
knowledgeable fellows, can work out that each of the abducted people were born
in a very lucky year. Evil sorcerous types sometimes use people born in a lucky
year for human sacrifices, and it’s said that dragons find them extra crunchy.
So maybe not so lucky after all …
The third unit of action in the Setup comes when the
characters go into the woods for the first time, and have their first minor
boss encounter. Skeletons and other undead horrors rise up and attack them,
and, if they happen to be with a caravan – maybe hired as guards? – the undead
try to abduct anyone born in a lucky year. They seem to be directed by a
special undead, stronger and better armed than the rest, who apparently can
tell which humans are born in lucky years. Each of the undead wears the rotted
livery of the robber baron. The special undead carries a magic item which
allows it to pick out lucky year targets. None of them are intelligent, which
means someone else is running the show.
This third unit of the Setup is sometimes called the
Inciting Incident: this is the moment where, the background of events having
been established, the characters are given the first real hint that all is not
as simple as it seems. After all, the special undead couldn’t have made that
magic item, so who gave it to him, why, and can that person’s plan be stopped?
This is the question that will be answered in the third act, the Resolution.
That’s the Setup sorted out. The characters came in driven
by their desire for adventure and loot, and now they have a mystery to solve.
All roads lead to that robber baron’s castle. Hopefully the captives are still
alive!
So now we move on to the Confrontation. That’s going to take
place at the robber baron’s castle, abandoned for many decades. Perhaps, in the
first unit, the characters try to find out more about the robber baron, or they
try to scout out the castle before attacking it. This is another good place to
start dropping some clues, which will pay off later. If they try to find out
more about the baron, they learn he was a particularly vicious warrior, whose
acts were so vile that the townsfolk, led by some heroes, stormed his castle
and destroyed it. He tried to escape, via a secret passage, into the woods, but
was caught and killed. If they scout the castle, they see that it was sacked
and burned many years ago, but recent tracks indicate that creatures, most of
them undead, have been coming and going here for the last few months.
In the second unit, the characters go into the castle and
start clearing out the undead, of which there are quite a bunch. Led by a black
knight dressed in the baron’s armor, these creatures pose a significant threat,
and the dungeon beneath the castle is inhabited by other powerful creatures.
Yet when all the fighting’s over, and the loot tallied up, the characters are
left with a quandary. None of the captives are here, nor does it seem as if
they ever were here. Moreover none of the creatures the characters have faced
so far, even the knight, are intelligent. They couldn’t have come up with this
scheme. So who did?
In the third unit of the Confrontation, the characters
discover signs that lead to the real culprit. That secret passage mentioned in
the first unit has to lead into the dungeon, and it has to exit in the forest
somewhere. Perhaps they should search for it, either in the dungeon or in the
woods, where the exit ought to be. Or maybe they just search the dungeon really
thoroughly, looking for the captives, and find it that way. One of the heroes
from that long-ago first raid may even have left a clue of some kind, but
however it’s done, the third unit of the Confrontation must lead to the first
unit of the Resolution, which is in that secret passage.
Now we’re coming to the meat of the matter. The first unit
of the Resolution sees the characters discover that secret passage, which the
real villain of the piece has been using as a hiding place. That villain is a
necromancer, with a few tough hirelings and sorcerous apprentices, as well as
some more undead. This necromancer – perhaps he’s a descendant of the baron out
for revenge, or maybe he’s just using the baron’s castle as a convenient base -
has been capturing those born in a lucky year for sacrifice, in a ritual which
the necromancer hopes to use to build a particularly powerful magic item.
From this point forward it’s going to be a series of action
scenes. The first unit has the characters facing off against the necromancer’s
least powerful hirelings and apprentices in the secret tunnel. This allows them
to rescue some of the captives, who can tell them about the necromancer’s
ritual site deep in the forest. The necromancer has gone there, trying to
complete his ritual with the remaining captives before the characters can catch
up.
The second unit has the characters in a race against time,
tracking the necromancer to that ritual site. They’ll encounter some tough
resistance along the way, including the necromancer’s remaining hirelings and
apprentices. All of which leads to the final unit of the Resolution, at the
ritual site.The necromancer’s
conducting the ritual there, with a few undead or summoned entities as
bodyguards. Now the true enemy has been revealed, the stage set, the final boss
encounter primed and ready to go. Whether or not the characters prevail, or end
up with the other captives, sacrificed so the necromancer can gain more power,
is up to them.
Setup, Confrontation, Resolution. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
But within that three act structure is the building blocks, the units of
action, for any scenario you care to design, and if you’re the Game Master,
scenario design is going to become a major part of your life. That’s why people
show up every week or so and buy you pizza; they expect entertainment, high
adventure, a few laughs, and loot. Don’t panic. Scenario design isn’t that
hard. But if you need a helping hand, bear in mind these three acts, and write
accordingly.
