The Alexandrian has received a 2019 ENnie Nomination for Best Online Content.

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who has ever been a patron of the Alexandrian. Without you, this nomination honestly never would have happened: The content would almost certainly not have been there to be nominated.

UPDATE: Voting is now open! If the Alexandrian has ever entertained you or given you insight or proven useful, please consider ranking me on your list for Best Online Content.

(1 is a good rank.)

Many moons ago, I wrote Prep Tips for the Beginning DM, a super-streamlined set of guideposts for a first-time DM to follow. The advice was aimed specifically at D&D/Pathfinder GMs, and over the years I’ve received a number of queries about how GMs can get started with other systems. The truth is that the advice is largely transferable. For example, here’s how you could get started running a fairly typical cyberpunk campaign where the PCs are a crew that runs heists and similar jobs in the style of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

(You might be starting up a new Shadowrun campaign. Or maybe you’re hyped about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 and want to run a game like that for your friends. Whatever works. This advice is widely applicable.)

(1) Start with a simple run featuring a location-based crawl. Keep it simple! Make it a single building with maybe a dozen rooms. Keep the challenges inside the building firewalled (i.e., the PCs can generally muck around in Room A without also bringing everything in Rooms B-Z down on their heads) with the possible exception of a roving security patrol that will also respond to triggered alarms. Keeping things compartmentalized will make it easier for you to run; it’ll also give your players a chance to figure out their characters and the system.

(2) Do a couple of those. You can slowly start building the complexity. Introduce adversary rosters so that the complexes become more dynamic and active. This will increase both the challenge for your players in planning out their runs and the complexity for you in actually GMing those runs.

(3) Take a look a the Three Clue Rule and use it to create a linear investigation scenario: Go to Location A, find clues that lead to Location B. At Location B, find clues that point to Location C. Repeat until you reach the conclusion.

LINK IT TOGETHER

It’s okay to just run a purely episodic campaign where each run is independent from the last. But here’s a simple example of how you can link all of these things together: The PCs are hired by somebody to do a couple of jobs. Then their patron calls them with another job, but when they show up for the briefing they find him dead. Now they need to figure out who did it.

Discovering who their patron was, what he really wanted, and why he was killed will either wrap up the mini-campaign or wrap up Act I of the ongoing campaign and give you a nice launchpad for the rest of the game.

Note: You don’t need to prep all this before you start play. In fact, you shouldn’t because you’ll be learning stuff in play that you’ll want to implement in the next scenario you design.

All you need to get started is #1: A simple run.

As you’re wrapping up Act I, take a look at Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design. Use those to build an Act II.

Read More at Gamemastery 101

The Necropolis had been built upon a low bulging hill that lay just along the Cliffs of Lost Wishes at the eastern edge of the city. As they moved a little further into the Necropolis, therefore, they were able to look over the top of the mausoleums and see seemingly endless rows of gravestones dotted with crypts of various sizes running up the hill. In the farthest distance, an the edge of the cliffs themselves, they could see an enormous, castle-like building.

I’ve talked about foreshadowing here on the Alexandrian before.

In Random GM Tip: Foreshadowing in RPGs, for example, I talk about the difficulties of foreshadowing in a non-linear, improvised medium (and three techniques you can use to work around that).

Random GM Tip: Adaptation & Reincorporation discusses how meaning is built over time through the repetition and reincorporation of creative elements. I also discuss the fact the foreshadowing can be thought of as the repetition or reincorporation of material at a point in time before the moment you actually created the material for.

For example, I know that certain features of the Necropolis are likely to become important later in the campaign, and so when the PCs arranged a funeral for Elestra’s python viper, I made a point of including some of those features (like the Dark Reliquary) into my description of the Necropolis.

This is also an example of opportunistic foreshadowing.

I didn’t plan for Elestra’s python viper to die. And I didn’t plan for her to arrange an expensive funeral for it. So I didn’t plan this bit of foreshadowing. I simply seized the opportunity while improvising the scene.

(You may note that this is not exactly hardcore foreshadowing, either. It’s literally just describing something that the characters happen to see. Which is fine. The point is to pre-establish elements so that when they later become the primary focus, they’ve already become an established part of the players’ understanding of the world.)

Session 20 is actually filled with examples of opportunistic foreshadowing.

When the PCs head to the Cathedral to seek advice from Silver Fatar Rehobath, that’s actually an example of how foreshadowing can build on itself: I had included Rehobath on the guest list for the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard because I wanted to establish his presence for later in the campaign. That’s an example of planned foreshadowing. It also put Rehobath on the PCs’ radar, though, and helped prompt them to seek his counsel here.

The inclusion of Prelate Adlam as the priest who recognizes Tee and gets her an audience with Rehobath, on the other hand, is an example of opportunistic foreshadowing. (He has his own significant role to play in future events.)

There’s also the White House: A gambling house that I know will become the center of attention later in the campaign. I’d already put together a planned bit of foreshadowing for the White House at this point (you’ll get to see that play out starting in Session 34; the actual pay-off starts in Session 91), but that’s no reason to forego the opportunistic foreshadowing here when Tee goes looking for a place to gamble.

The mrathrach game she sees being installed is also opportunistic foreshadowing, as is the strangely garbed knight she sees later in the Dreaming. (Tee’s training in the Dreaming Arts will frequently offer incredibly rich opportunities for both planned and opportunistic foreshadowing.)

If you want another example of planned foreshadowing, check out Running the Campaign: Foreshadowing Encounters.

SESSION 20A: FUNERAL FOR A PYTHON VIPER

April 27th, 2008
The 8th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

It was only a few all-too-short hours later before they were rousing themselves out of bed once again.

Ranthir was one of the first to wake up. For several days he had been eagerly looking forward to reading the sealed letter that the Iron Mage had given to them at Castle Shard during the Harvesttime party. He had placed the letter on his bedside table the night before, and the first thing he saw upon opening his eyes was the letter lying open.

IRON MAGE’S LETTER

My dear friends—

I am sorry that I could not deliver these instructions to you in person so that I might answer all of your questions. But, sadly, necessities of another nature will make that impossible by the time all of the particulars are known.

By the time this letter opens – which shall be no later than the ninth day of Kadal, if all goes well – the particulars will be known, and thus I have ensorcelled this parchment to reveal them to you.

On the twenty-first day of Kadal, the Freeport’s Sword – a privateer vessel from the Teeth of Light – shall arrive in the Docks of Ptolus. It carries a crate bearing my seal – a plated visor beneath crossed wands.

I ask that you report to Captain Bartholomew upon the arrival of the vessel, collect the crate, and keep it safe. I shall return for it no later than Nocturdei.

I stress that all of this is of the utmost importance. Many lives could be placed in great danger if the crate is not kept safe from the others who seek it.

THE IRON MAGE

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When I joined Atlas Games as the RPG Producer in December 2018, I inherited four of the best roleplaying games ever published: Feng Shui, Over the Edge, Ars Magica, and Unknown Armies. I knew that to do these games proper justice in the future, the first thing I needed to do was fully grasp their past. These were all games which I had played before (although, ironically, none of them in their current edition), but there was still a lot for me to learn. From day one, therefore, I embarked on a year-long project to not only bring every one of these games to my gaming table, but to also read every single supplement ever published for them.

As I worked my way through the corpus of Over the Edge supplements at the beginning of the year, I reflected on how difficult it is to produce scenario support for this type of RPG. Over the Edge is one of those games which presents an incredibly awesome setting filled to the brim with all kinds of amazing things for players and GMs to explore, but which — for precisely that reason! — doesn’t have a specific scenario structure that’s universally shared by its players. Without that universal scenario structure, it becomes very difficult to create published scenarios that can be reliably used by individual GMs.

(Which is not to say that Over the Edge hasn’t had some truly great scenarios written for it over the years. My personal favorites include Robin D. Laws Unauthorized Broadcast, Stephan Michael Sechi’s Welcome to Sylvan Pines, Jeff Tidball’s “In the SACQ”, Chris Pramas’ “The Jackboot Stomp,” and Greg Stolze’s “The Furchtegott File.” But although I love all of those scenarios, it would be virtually impossible for me to fit them all into the same campaign. Which is kind of my point.)

By contrast, for example, it’s very easy to create plug ‘n play scenarios for Shadowrun: Because every group is assumed to be shadowrunners who get jobs from a Mr. Johnson, all you need to do is frame your scenario as a job being offered by a Mr. Johnson and it can probably be used in 99% of Shadowrun campaigns.

One solution, of course, would be to simply eschew producing published scenarios for the game. There are any number of similar games which have done the same, focusing their product lines on cool setting supplements that give GMs even more awesome options for their campaigns. This , however, would be in significant conflict with my belief that roleplaying games flourish only in the presence of strong scenario support:

• Published scenarios are the single best way for GMs to grok how the game is supposed to work.
• Ready-to-play scenarios are the best way to convince GMs to try running the game for the first time.
• Incredibly cool scenarios are a great way to get people excited about running the game. (There’s any number of scenarios I’ve personally run because I just needed to see what would happen at the table; or that were so amazingly cool that I just had to share them with my players.)
• There are a lot of would-be GMs who, frankly, need the scenario support: Their time is limited and without published adventure material they won’t be able to run the game.

There’s also the fact the fact that I think published scenarios often improve campaigns in their own right, resulting in cool stuff that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Nonetheless, I knew that if I produced a typical scenario anthology for Over the Edge, a high percentage of the scenarios — no matter how good they were! — wouldn’t be usable by any given GM simply because they weren’t sympatico with their campaign. That would make the book substantially less valuable to everybody. I needed to fix that problem.

So I reached out to existing Over the Edge GMs to talk about the campaigns they had run and the campaigns they were looking forward to running with the new edition of the game.

What I slowly came to realize was that there were, in fact, several broad categories that most Over the Edge campaigns fell into. The specifics were different enough to create a crazy kaleidoscope of endless possibility, but the categories were tight enough that a GM operating within a given category would generally be able to adapt scenario hooks aimed at that category. So for the upcoming Welcome to the Island adventure anthology, I instructed my writers to include hooks for the following categories:

• Agents: Why would someone hire the PCs to get involved in this scenario? (Or, alternatively, why do the PCs need to do this on behalf of their patron without explicit orders?)
• Burger: How would someone who literally just got off the plane and caught a taxi from the Terminal get involved in this?
• Cloaks: Why would the various conspiracies on the Island care about this scenario (and send their trusty agents, the PCs, to deal with it)? Or, alternatively, what opportunity do the PCs become aware of and how do they become aware of it?
• Gangs: How do street-level operatives get tangled up in the scenario?
• Mystics: If the PCs are focused on mystic shit, how does that angle them into the scenario? Does someone/something seek them out due to their mystic powers? Do their mystic powers trigger or respond strongly to the situation? Does ancient arcane lore or a prophecy point them at the scenario?

It was also necessary to keep the hooks tight: Scenario hook sections in published adventures have a tendency to bloat up and claim more of the scenario’s word count than their utility warrants. This would be particularly true if people started writing up elaborate, multi-scene hooks for five different options. All we really needed was one or, at most, two paragraphs for each hook. (In no small part because, in my experience, GMs are going to heavily customize the hook to the specifics of their own campaign in any case.)

This actually lead to some initial confusion as we put this into practice. There was more than one person who produced a draft featuring stuff like, “Here’s stuff that Agents might find potentially interesting about what’s going on.” But I pushed: Brevity doesn’t equate to generality. A scenario hook needs to be specific. What is the specific thing that gets the PCs involved in the current situation?

HOOKS AT THE END

In the future, I will recommend that writers actually write their scenario hooks last. (Or possibly second-to-last depending on how you look at it.)

It probably won’t come as a surprise to most people reading this, but I want scenarios that are situations, not plots. You don’t necessarily need a specific hook in order to design a really cool, interactive situation filled to the brim with exciting stuff for the PCs to explore and for the GM to actively play. Requiring five different scenario hooks for each scenario actually emphasized this: Since the scenarios could not be dependent on any one on of these hooks, the scenarios quickly became independent of all of them, making it much easier for a GM who didn’t find any of those specific hooks interesting to nevertheless find a multitude of ways to draw their PCs into the situation.

At the same time, the fact that the scenario still needed to hypothetically support any one of those hooks also resulted in a richer scenario no matter which hook you used. The requirement necessarily forced the designers to create situations that were more dynamic, complex, and interconnected than they might have otherwise.

This is where this advice is potentially useful for homebrewers, too: If, for example, you use the Three Clue Rule to offer several options by which the PCs might become engaged with a given scenario, you will find that the need to include those three clues will inherently cause you to design more depth into the scenario. And that depth, in turn, will make it easier to improvise ways for the PCs to become engaged even if the three methods you’ve prepped don’t work for some reason.

For similar reasons, I suspect that even GMs who don’t have campaigns fitting one of the five broad categories I identified will nevertheless find it much easier to incorporate the scenarios in Welcome to the Island into their odd-ball campaigns. Having three to five different hooks makes it more likely that one of them can be trivially adapted to unusual circumstances. Or might feature a GMC similar enough to someone close to the PCs that you can make the whole thing intensely personal instead.