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A lot can happen during a campaign, and you can never be sure what sort of mischief your players going to get up to. The trinity toolbox is a method of prepping for these unexpected dynamics of play. It helps you keep creative focus even when things are collapsing into chaos at the table. Examples of trinity toolboxes include:

• Conflicts
• NPCs
• Locations
• Atmosphere
• Campaign Clues/Rumors
• Themes/Motifs

We’ll discuss each of these in more detail below and there many other possible trinity toolboxes you might want to create. You don’t need to use every trinity toolbox for every campaign — you might only use one or two at a time.

Here’s how it works: For each trinity toolbox, you’ll create three elements. List them in your campaign status document. Then, during play, you can (and should!) reach in, grab these elements, and incorporate them into a session. You might use them:

• To respond when your players head in an unexpected direction.
• To flesh out a scene or make it more complicated.
• To make sure you don’t lose track of long-term planning.
• To buy yourself time.
• To make the game world feel alive.
• To smoothly transition from one scene to the next.
• To provide interesting filler for someone left behind when the players split the party.

You can think of your trinity toolboxes as a box of raw elements or a menu of cool stuff. Exactly how you use them, of course, will depend on the trinity toolbox in question. So let’s take a closer look at some examples.

CONFLICTS

Create three conflicts for the PCs to be confronted by. The easy default in most RPGs is a fight. (A man with a gun who can kick down a door! Or challenge them to a gunfight. Or drunkenly throw a punch in the bar.) But it can often be useful to think further afield than that, with a mix of physical, intellectual, and social challenges: A debtor coming to collect a debt. A political debate. A tense negotiation. A chase through darkened alleys. A crisis in hyperspace navigation. A riddle battle or tricky puzzle.

Another easy default is to frame all conflicts as an opponent vs. the PCs. But you can also create conflicts between others, stick the PCs in the middle of it, and let them figure out which side to support and/or how to extricate themselves.

Conflicts are often the focus of a scene, but your trinity conflicts can also be used to complicate existing scenes (they’re hear court Lord Chambers, but this drunken lout has interrupted them and wants to debate their vote on the Tariffs Act!) or even provide an exit strategy from a scene that’s drawing to a close (this conversation is played out, so let’s have some ninjas leap in through the windows!).

NPCs

Stock your trinity toolbox with three characters appropriate to the campaign’s current milieu. I find a stat block to be essential and you may also find the Quick NPC Roleplaying Template useful.

The more diverse your trinity NPCs are — in temperament, background, social class, expertise, etc. — the more likely it is that one of them will be useful at any particular moment. Make sure to give each of them a strong motivation — a goal that they want to achieve. It may or may not be directly relevant to whatever scene you end up throwing the NPC into, but you’ll be amazed how often even a tangential goal will (a) make an NPC come to life and (b) become relevant in the most surprising ways!

The PCs go on a shopping trip? Your trinity NPC might be either the clerk or another customer. They go canvassing information? One of the trinity NPCs is the person who can tell them all about it. They decided to seduce Lord Chambers and you want to add a romantic rival? Or they’re hiring a new henchman? Or they’ve gotten arrested and meet a cellmate in the county lockup? Those can all easily be trinity NPCs!

LOCATIONS

Three cool, interesting, weird, unique, or dangerous places. You’ll want to make sure they fit in with your campaign’s current locale (no town squares in the middle of the forest! … probably). They might be specific locations (Rick’s Nightclub), but more “generic” locations that could be located anywhere in the Old Forest or Casablanca or the Obsidian Plains may be easier to use. (The trick is to design something interesting, while still leaving it flexible.)

If you’re using battlemaps in your game, make sure to prep them for your trinity locations. If you’ve ever felt frustrated when the players jump in an unexpected direction and you don’t have a map prepared, this is one way of solving that problem.

Tip: If you’re running an urban campaign, you may already have a bevy of locations keyed around town. You can use these to seed your trinity locations (creating locations you want the players to learn about or just have more focus at the table), but I’d also take the opportunity to create some cool locations around town that are perhaps below the threshold of what you might typically prep.

ATMOSPHERE

List three images, sensations, impressions, incidents, or vignettes that can capture the “feel” of the campaign’s current location.

This is a trick I picked up from the globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign, which provided both Hopeful beats and Sinister beats to establish the “mood” for each location the PCs visit. For example, in Malta the Hopeful beats are:

• Gulls sing and cry over the harbor, drifting through the air on invisible air currents, careless and free. It’s a lovely day.
• An old couple play chess outside of a tiny Baroque café. The woman makes a joke in Maltese and they both laugh and smile.
• The wind carries the smell of spices and tea down from an open window. Someone is plucking idly on a guitar up there.

And these were the Sinister beats:

• A storm blows in, its thunderhead rolling in dark and low, lightning playing across the sky and touching the sea.
• A dead gull lies rotting in the street, half-crushed by passing cars, its feathers matted and sticky with blood.
• Walking the streets of Valletta at night, a nearby streetlamp bulb pops and goes dead.

The extra layer of Hopeful vs. Sinister atmospheres was designed to help the GM reinforce or reverse the mood at the table, but the more general concept of trinity atmospheres is simply small bits of “local color” that you can opportunistically drop into any scene. I recommend choosing stuff that uniquely characterizes the current setting. What makes Venice different from Berlin? What makes Staten Island different from Manhattan? This is a tool for pushing persistent description at a macro-scale.

CAMPAIGN CLUES/RUMORS

At any given moment during a campaign, there are likely revelations you’re waiting for the PCs to discover: The location of a hidden crypt. The Phantom Jackal has secretly escaped from prison. LX-510 has become infested with pseudomilk predators. The terrifying truth of the Yellow Sign.

If you’re using node-based scenario design and the Three Clue Rule, then you’ve probably keyed clues pointing to these revelations into one or more scenarios. But there’s also stuff like permissive clue-finding and proactive clues. That’s where this trinity toolbox comes into play: It’s a collection of clues that you can drop into the action. You might use them when the players have lost their way, but they can often be used to add color and intrigue to almost any scene; or, as is the case with so many trinity elements, to respond when the PCs follow an unplanned lead.

Trinity clues tend to take one of two forms.

First, you’ve got floating clues. These are specific, possibly unique clues without a canonical location; meaning that you can drop them into any appropriate moment. This might be a treasure map, which could be given to them as a reward; looted from the bodies of a random encounter; or turn up when they make a pilgrimage to the Library of Lacunae. Or perhaps it’s a particular Mythos lore book, which could easily turn up in any collection or be found moldering among a madman’s possessions. And who had access — or stole access? — to the Barcelona Dossier? It could be almost anyone.

Second, there are pervasive clues. These are elements which are very much not unique. This might be noticing cult graffiti cropping up in town or werewolf pawprints out in the wild, or it could be a recent newspaper article printed in a thousand papers. Rumors are also a common form of pervasive clue. In some campaigns, in fact, rumors might be distinct enough to be a completely separate trinity toolbox from your campaign clues.

Trinity clues can involve a great deal of prep, including handouts and the like, but they can just easily be one or two sentences. You might even get good mileage out of simply listing the revelations you want to keep in focus and then improvising appropriate clues for them at the table.

THEMES/MOTIFS

Thinking about what you want the major themes and/or motifs of your campaign to be is something of an advanced technique: Very few GMs, in my experience, think about this sort of thing at all, and those who do often find it difficult to stay focused on their chosen themes and incorporate them into actual play.

Building a trinity toolkit for your themes can be a great cheat code for making sure they remain a tangible and persistent part of the campaign. This can be particularly true if you treat this toolkit as a checklist: Not just three options, but three things that you must include in the next session or scenario.

This is pretty straightforward if you just have one theme. For example, if your theme is Power Corrupts, then the seeds of your trinity toolkit might be:

• The Ring tempts Boromir.
• They hear rumors of Saruman’s warmongering.
• Frodo sees the Eye of Sauron.

If your theme has multiple aspects, consider assigning one trinity element to each aspect. Similarly, if your campaign has multiple active themes, assign one element to each theme. For example, if your campaign themes are the Fallibility of the Gods and the Ethics of Truth and Lies, then your trinity toolkit might be:

• [Fallibility] A broken temple, long abandoned, but with signs that it was ransacked by heathens.
• [Truth] The Landgraf confesses that his wife has been demonically possessed. The news blazes across the city.
• [Lies] Jordayn has promised not to reveal Benedict’s secret. Raethea will confront him and demand to know what Benedict is doing at the Hawk & Talon.

Framing trinity theme elements around dilemmas can be a powerful way of making them an active part of play.

You should not, obviously, feel like these are the only ways you’re allowed to implement your themes. You’ll still be building them into your scenarios and opportunistically looking for how you can frame scenes to feature them.

WHY A TRINITY?

Why not four or five or ten elements? Obviously you can include as many as you want. It’s not at all unusual for me to have a rumor list with ten or twenty entries that I can throw onto a random table. But, from a practical standpoint (and based on experience), there is a good minimum number to shoot for. If the three options are varied and distinct, they’ll give you enough options to cover a wide range of possible needs during the session. Some trinity elements will also become obsolete as a campaign progresses, and keeping the number of elements to a minimum will reduce the risk of wasted prep. Often you’ll get more mileage out of adding a new trinity toolbox rather than doubling or tripling an existing toolbox.

RESTOCKING, RECYCLING, REINCORPORATING

After each session, review your trinity toolkits:

• If you used an element, remove it.
• If an element is no longer relevant (because the PCs have traveled to a new city, for example), then remove it.
• Look at the gaps left in your trinity toolkits and restock them with new options, reflecting the current state of the PCs and the world, with an eye towards where you and the players want the campaign to go.

When you pull stuff from your trinity toolkits, though, don’t just throw it in the trash. Whether you used the element or not, tuck it away in an archive. In the future you can often dip back into this archive for inspiration. Sometimes stuff that became obsolete will become relevant again (e.g., the PCs go back to Malta). Stuff that was used can be directly recycled (you can mention that abandoned church again or include more cult graffiti). It can also be reincorporated, transforming it or using it in a different context

You can also build on previous elements that resonated at the table: The scene with the old couple playing chess developed into a fun scene, so maybe we can bring back one or both of those characters. Raethea collapsed in tears and ran away… what does she do next and how might that vector back in on the PCs?

Sometimes, based on what happens at the table, stuff will exit your trinity toolkits entirely and spin off into new scenarios. That’s great!

Conversely, if your struggling for inspiration in restocking your trinity toolkits, look at the scenarios in your campaign — the ones the PCs have already played, the ones they’re currently engaged with, and those you have planned for the future. How you can bring back elements from the older stuff, show the wider effect of the current ones, and foreshadow what’s to come?

Your trinity toolkits, after all, are just one set of tools among many for running your campaign.

The trinity toolbox was inspired by S. John Ross’ troika method for brainstorming adventure design, as described in the Digital 2.0 supplement for Mage: The Ascension and the Narrator’s Toolkit for the Last Unicorn Games’ version of the Star Trek RPG.

Brindlewood Bay is a delightful Powered by the Apocalypse mystery storytelling game where no one knows the solution until somebody makes it up. It combines classic mystery TV shows like Murder She Wrote, Twin Peaks, Remington Steele, Columbo, and Magnum PI with Lovecraftian Mythos. Solve Agatha Christie-like cozy mysteries while the the Midwives of the Fragrant Void slowly unravel your reality.

Featuring Kristina Fjellman as super sleuth Amanda Delacourt. Visit Kristina at kristinafjellman.com.

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If you’re an Alexandrite member of the Alexandrian Youtube channel, you can check out the latest After Action report from my Mothership open table. This one has bloodwights!

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I’m also releasing another video tonight: An unboxing video for The Crooked Moon, which you can find over on my Patreon!

You don’t need to be a member to watch this one, but I’ve decided not to release this unboxing video on Youtube because our previous unboxing videos have performed very poorly and they seem to torpedo the algorithm.

But I did want to spread the word about The Crooked Moon, which I think looks really, really cool. Unboxing this one got me very excited to dive deeper! So we’re going to see how hosting videos on Patreon works out.

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Tactical Space Support is filled with a plethora of high-quality material – including two complete tactical systems – providing a breadth and depth of coverage that make this an invaluable resource for any campaign that gets within spitting distance of orbital velocity.

Review Originally Published in Games Unplugged Webzine – June 16th, 2000
Republished at RPGnet – May 22nd, 2001

The title is Tactical Space Support, but make no mistake: This book provides as much support, if not more, for a roleplayer as it does for a tactical Heavy Gear player.

In the fashion which their fans have become quite accustomed to, the Podsters have crammed more material into this slim, 96-page volume than most publishers include in massively oversized tomes. The short list: A history of space travel in the Heavy Gear universe; campaign background material; coverage of hardware, spacecraft, outposts, and space life; along with a vehicle compendium of specific vehicles – all discussed with a depth of understanding and breadth of coverage that makes this book absolutely invaluable for a Heavy Gear campaign which gets within even spitting distance of orbital velocity.

In addition to all this, roleplayers will find adventure seeds and NPC archetypes, plus expanded rules covering common space hazards — such as lack of atmosphere, effects of gravity, and exposure to radiation. In constructing these rules Vézina, the author, demonstrates what good game design is all about: A wealth of scientific research is boiled down to a set of formulas simple enough to be used at the gaming table, while still bringing with them all the reality you need.

The tactical player, on the other hand, will find two complete tactical systems, along with expansions for the VDS (Vehicle Design System) and additions to the standard Heavy Gear tactical game. Both of the new tactical systems use the core of the Silhouette system, but in a radically different way than a standard tactical game. The first, and primary, space tactical system abstracts the entire process – eliminating hex maps and miniatures altogether. This is due to the nature of space combat in the Heavy Gear universe, where secrecy, stealth, and first strike capability are of key importance. The second system is optimized for simulating a lightning strike combat situation – where two fleets pass each other at extremely high velocities and the entire combat lasts for a few fractions of a second.

Unfortunately, a couple of problems with recent Dream Pod 9 releases also crops up here: Specifically, a continuing fight with typos and copy-editing errors and the decreasing size of the average Pod release (from 112 or 128 pages down to 96 pages over the past year). In the former case, I am happy to report, the battle is obviously being won – Tactical Space Support is (almost) typo-free. The latter, however, makes its presence keenly felt in the total absence of tactical scenarios, and the shallowness of some of the other game-oriented resources (only four adventure seeds and NPC archetypes, for example). These slimmer books are still high quality products, and well worth the price of admission, but those dozen or two dozen pages make all the difference between a product being sublime and merely excellent.

While bearing some reservations in mind, there can still be only one verdict where Tactical Space Support is concerned: This is a fantastic book. If you have any intention of taking your Heavy Gear campaign to the stars, then you’d be making a serious mistake to pass this one up.

Grade: A-

Writers: Marc-Alexandre Vézina
Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Price: $18.95
Page Count: 96
ISBN: 1-896776-68-X

In 2001, I used RPGnet to archive a review which was no longer available on Games Unplugged’s website. Now here I am, finding new ways to archive it and make it available. It seems that much of a writer’s life — and perhaps any artist’s life — is finding new ways to enshrine and distribute their work.

I think I was a little too kind with my grading on this one. Or, rather, I was grading on a curve reflective of the other reviews appearing in Games Unplugged at the time. Proper scenario support feels really essential for novel mechanics/structures like this, and its absence here probably drops the book down to a B in my own grading scheme.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

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In the final act of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, the bad guys have taken over a hospital. Realizing that the cops are closing in on them, they prevent an evacuation of the hospital and take the patients hostage. Now the heroes need to figure out how to rescue the hostages and get them out of the hospital before it explodes!

In the film, the bad guys remotely lock the doors and send out roving bands of gun-toting thugs. The patients try to make their way to the exits, but many get rounded up the bad guys or get pinned down in various hiding spots around the hospital.

Let’s break down the elements we see on screen.

1. The hospital has many distinct areas — lobby, surgery, security office, nursery, stairwells, morgue, recovery rooms, admissions, entryway, and the secret armory in the sub-basement.
2. There are multiple groups of hostages, including a dozen or so babies in the nursery.
3. There are bad guys holding the hostages, seeking more patients to take hostage, and/or hunting down the heroes.
4. In addition to the bad guys, there are additional security measures including locked doors, security cameras, and explosives.
5. There are police squads active in and around the building, who have created a perimeter around the building (creating a safe zone the hostages can escape to) and who can also help the heroes in freeing, protecting, and escorting the hostages.

HOSTAGE SITE

The action in Hard Boiled seems to flow pretty freely between different locations, so we could model the hospital as a sector crawl, with the PCs hopping from one action set piece to another.

In practice, though, the tactical concerns of a hostage rescue likely require something a little more concrete: For hostages to be pinned down, for example, they need to be blocked from reaching the exits. Conversely, the PCs will need to figure out how to reach the hostages and get them out.

So what we probably want is a pointcrawl — a flowchart-style map showing how the various areas connect to each other. In designing this, there are a few things we’ll want to keep in mind:

• We should know our entrances/exits to the site — doors, windows, etc. You’ll want multiple options here, but you’ll want to make sure that each one is either secured, difficult to use, or both.
• We’ll want deep areas in the hostage site — locations that are not directly connected to the exits.
• We’ll likely want chokepoints to create tactical challenges and opportunities. Multiple levels — like the three floors of the Hard Boiled hospital — can easily create natural chokepoints around the stairs and elevators used to move between the levels.

As a pointcrawl, remember that the areas you’re mapping are not necessarily individual rooms — they might be, but they can just as easily be multiple rooms or suites. (For example, “Surgery” could include multiple operating rooms and the prep areas around them.)

HOSTAGE TAKERS & SECURITY MEASURES

We’ll write up the bad guys in action groups and organize them into an adversary roster. This will keep them fluid and let them actively respond to what the PCs are doing.

Passive security measures can be keyed to the various locations on your site map. This includes the security cameras, secret doors, locked doors, and explosives seen in Hard Boiled, but there are lots of other options, like secured computer networks, motion detectors, or environmental hazards.

HOSTAGES

Finally, we have the hostage(s). I’m going to refer to them as hostage groups, but each “group” could actually be a single individual. Your scenario might have just one hostage group or, like Hard Boiled, there could be multiple hostage groups scattered throughout the site.

Determine whether each hostage group is secured or free. Most groups will likely be secured, meaning that they’re locked up and/or being guarded by an action group of bad guys. Free groups aren’t currently in the control of the bad guys, and may even be seeking to escape by themselves, but are more likely pinned down, cut off by bad guys between them and the exit, or simply in hiding.

Optionally, distinguish large hostage groups from smaller ones by giving each of them a size. The goal here is to provide a simple model for how difficult the group is to handle and maneuver — it’s easier to move five people quickly from one area to another than it is twenty. The exact form this takes might depend on the rule system you’re using, but here’s a simple structure:

• Small: 1
• Large: 2
• Unwieldy: 3+

Finally, create a hostage roster, which will work just like an adversary roster. I think we’ll want to keep these rosters separate from each other because it will be easier to manage them in play that way.

OTHER STATS

In addition to (or instead of) Size, you might give your hostage groups other stats. For example, maybe they have a Stealth modifier that will make it easier or harder for the PCs to slip them past the bad guys. Or the PCs might need to overcome a group’s Fear DC to convince them to take action.

OPTION: ALLIES

The other police officers in Hard Boiled can be modeled in a couple different ways.

First, they establish a cordon around the hospital. This is a common element in a lot of hostage rescue stories, and it effectively just contains the bad guys (and possibly the PCs!) to the hostage site. (Your bad guys, of course, may have some secret plan for bypassing this cordon when the time comes.)

In Hard Boiled, the bad guys keep assaulting the police cordon with machine guns and rocket launchers from the upper windows of the hospital. This, however, is essentially set dressing: It provides a lot of sound and fury (and cool explosions!), but never meaningfully threatens to destroy or break through the cordon. (If you wanted to model a meaningful assault on the cordon, of course, you could probably model that as a combat encounter.)

Other police officers in Hard Boiled, however, are taking action inside the hospital: They’re fighting bad guys and helping hostages escape. If we want to include something like this in our scenario, we’ll want to design some ally groups.

RUNNING THE HOSTAGE RESCUE

We’re going to run our hostage rescue using tactical turns. As a general guideline, on each tactical turn:

• PCs and adversary groups can each move one area. (Option: They can move two areas instead, but this also increases the range at which others can potentially detect them.)
• 5 rounds of combat can be resolved.

HANDLING HOSTAGES: Hostage groups can move from one area to an adjacent area in a number of tactical turns equal to their size.

Hostage groups can be attended to by one or more PCs. Attending to a hostage group should be beneficial, and there are a few options for this (any of all which could be true in your scenario):

• A hostage group MUST be attended in order to move. (Option: Not all action groups must be attended to move, but Hapless groups must be attended.)
• Larger hostage groups can reduce the time required to move by one tactical turn.
• Attending to a hostage group may give them unique access to evacuation routes. (In Hard Boiled, for example, tactical teams rappelling from the roof can evacuate hostages through upper floor windows.)

DETECTION: Bad guys have a chance of detecting PCs in neighboring areas. (Resolve this appropriately with Stealth checks or similar mechanics.) This distance might be increased by combat or other particularly loud activities.

Hostage groups can be potentially detected at a range equal to their size. (So if the PCs are trying to move a Large group through the hostage site, any bad guys within two areas of them on the pointmap could potentially notice them.)

ALLIES: An ally group can attend to a hostage group, helping the PCs to evacuate them from the hostage site. (Imagine dialogue like, “Get these people out of here! I’m going to help Rodriguez!” and “Go to the nursery! Help Teresa get the babies out!”)

Ally groups could also get into conflict with adversary groups:

• Clearing paths.
• Blocking bad guys from passing through an area.
• Protecting hostages.

You’ll want to think about how you want to resolve these conflicts. Some options include:

• Using your RPG’s full combat system. (If the PCs aren’t with the ally group, you might run this as a cut scene where the players are controlling the allies.)
• Setting up a countdown clock. (Unless you can reach the allies in 5 turns, they’ll be overrun by the bad guys!)
• A single check or die roll. (For example, roll 1d6. On a roll of 1 the allies win; 6 the bad guys win; 2-5 it’s a stalemate, check again next turn. Shift the weighting of this roll based on the relative strength of each side.)

An ally group might also have a special resource. (Like our rappelling tactical teams or medical expertise.)

HOSTAGE NEGOTIATIONS

Negotiating with a hostage-taker can be a pretty typical element in scenarios like these, but it outside the scope of this article. This is likely something I’ll tackle as a scene structure challenge in the future.

BEYOND HONG KONG

Die Hard is an interesting companion piece to Hard Boiled for a hostage rescue scenario. In some ways, the scale is smaller: The allied cops are limited to providing a cordon (instead of taking action inside the building), the hostages are generally kept in a single large group, and the bad guys are fewer in number (although more fleshed out as individual characters). On the other hand, the scale of the hostage site (a skyscraper) is much larger, and you might find techniques from a Death Star Raid useful here. Consider, too, John McClane’s use of air vents throughout the film: Would you want to add these to your pointmap? Or do the vents provide more flexible, open-ended shortcuts?

You could also think outside of the box a bit with something like Air Force One. Obviously the plane gives a very different hostage site on a much smaller scale. Here we also find that some of the hostages are very specific individuals rather than large groups.

Pushing things even further afield, what if the bad guys are zombies and the “hostages” are people trapped by the shambling horde? Would our scenario structure hold up here? What changes, if any, might we need to make?