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Scott McCloud is better known these days for Understanding Comics, one of the greatest books ever written about art and the creative process; a towering achievement which laid bare the heart of the comic book medium.

(You may have seen me previously discuss Understanding Comics here, here, here, or here.)

Before he created Understanding Comics, however, McCloud created Zot!, one of the greatest superhero comics ever written. The first ten issues of Zot! – the so-called “color issues”, because the rest of the series transitioned into twenty-six black-and-white issues – are a must-read superhero / science fiction epic. And it’s here that we find our third scenario structure challenge.

At the heart of Zot! is the Key:

Not quite a McGuffin according to my stuffy, traditionalist definition of the term, although largely indistinguishable from such for the first six or seven issues of the story, and close enough for our purposes in any case. The Key is a holy relic held sacred by the people of Sirius IV and said to be capable of opening the Doorway at the Edge of the Universe.

The Key has also been stolen.

As the series begins, Zot chases the Key (or, more accurately, the trail of people looking for the Key) through an interdimensional portal to our Earth. There he meets Jenny, and through a series of hijinks they end up forming a small team of unlikely heroes who are pursuing the Key.

But they aren’t alone. In addition to the original owners and the thief, now that the Key is out in the open a whole bunch of factions have become interested in acquiring it. The first few issues of Zot! each have a procedural heart to them, in fact, with Zot needing to deal with some different crazy foe who wants the Key for themselves.

This includes Dekko, a Machiavellian machine who believes that the Doorway – a product of technology which predates all technology – is the “final ascendancy of Man’s perfect art and the end of Man’s greatest flaw: Himself.”

There are also the De-Evolutionaries, who believe that humanity would be better off if it went “back to the trees” (and use de-evolutionary guns to turn people into chimps to make that literally happen). They want the Key because passing through the Doorway will legitimize their crazed religion.

Where the story becomes truly special, however, is when these different factions begin collapsing back into themselves; interacting with each other, forming and breaking alliances with each other, and developing complicated and rich relationships with each other (and with the object of their desire).

McGUFFIN KEEP-AWAY

This scenario shares a lot in common with the Race to the Prize that we analyzed last week: A target object of value with multiple factions competing for its ultimate possession. The key difference (pun intended) is that rather than being the ultimate goal of the scenario, in Zot! the McGuffin is in play and actively shifting possession over and over again.

In the case of Zot! the initial scenario hook is that the item has been stolen. But you can just as easily have the McGuffin secured and instead have the initial scenario hook be the need to steal the item, which then initiates the McGuffin Keep-Away. To some extent the distinction is merely one of perception, however, since the structure ultimately boils down to “X currently has the item, who can take it from them?” The “original owner” of the item is just the one currently in possession of it.

This keep-away dynamic makes the scenario more difficult to design and run. Without the clue trail of the treasure hunt, creating a through-line for the scenario becomes more complex. It also becomes trickier to clearly set up rivalries and the competition between teams, because in the default mode there’s no sequence of events that needs to be achieved before snatching the prize. And as soon as somebody (whether it’s the PCs or somebody else) snatches the prize, they’ll be in the wind.

Okay, so what makes this scenario work?

1. Create X number of factions seeking the McGuffin, in a process that will be fairly similar to that used for Race to the Prize.

Zot! features a couple of interesting variants here. First, there are a number of proxies who end up shifting their alliances (or, at least, which faction they are currently working with) several times throughout the narrative. Second, there are entire secret factions which are using other factions as a front for their own activities. The character of Prince Drufus, for example, notably ends up as both. In fact, he frequently ends up working with the PCs (Zot, Jenny, and their friends) – sometimes because their goals are in accord; sometimes unaware that they are not; and sometimes despite the fact that he knows they are not.

In this, Zot! also highlights the value of giving the factions distinct ideologies which nevertheless overlap with each other. Let’s call these Venn diagram alliances: It’s a powerful technique because the points of commonality will drive the factions to work together, while the points of difference will create conflicts within those alliances which will eventually rip them apart. Remember that this includes the PCs! And, furthermore, remember that you, as the GM, don’t need to determine what the PCs’ agenda will be. These types of ideologically complex environments are great specifically because they force the players to make tough, meaningful choices.

One easy format for these ideologies are characters who desire the same outcome but disagree about how it should be accomplished. (And, inversely, those who desire different outcomes but currently agree on the necessity of a particular course of action.)

2. The keep-away. For each faction, you’ll want to know what tactics they use to steal the McGuffin (stealth, force, etc.) and, if they succeed in obtaining the item, what tactics they’ll use to secure it. Often this can be improvised during actual play, but if you’re unsure about improvising this sort of thing then prep exactly how each team will operate and what they will do (particularly when it comes to securing the item). And, of course, some of these elements will require prep for maximum effectiveness.

Dekko, for example, retreats to his fortress of Castle Dekko for defense. Another thief uses technological camouflage to hide in plain sight. Prince Drufus has a squad of attack robots at his command. The methods and resources you can design here – both mobile and static – are pretty much limitless, and you’ll want to try to vary things between factions. If everybody is just a squad of goons who then retreats to a fortified position, the scenario will become considerably less interesting.

3. The method to find the item. This is the dynamic that’s tricky to get right, but on which the whole scenario structure really depends. Because, as noted before, if somebody can grab the item and then just trivially disappear, the scenario just doesn’t work.

Zot! addresses this problem by giving the Key a unique radiation signature which can, with some expertise and knowledge, be used to track its general location. This includes tracking it to different planets and also into other dimensions, so there really is no way to escape and take the Key “off the board” (so to speak).

Eventually, however, someone figures out how to cloak this radiation signal. This forces the other factions interested in the Key to intuit what the current holder of the key will use it for (i.e., opening the Doorway at the Edge of the Universe), allowing them to once again zone in on it (i.e., put the Doorway under surveillance and security).

Relying on this kind of intuition can be a little risky when it comes to RPG scenario design (since you can’t control exactly what your players will think of or when they’ll think of it), so for a more robust scenario you’ll want to use the Three Clue Rule. Remember that your clues can include intelligence from other factions that have made the intuitive leap. (“It looks like Indiana Jones is heading for Moscow. He must know something we don’t, let’s follow him.”) The web of alliances between factions can also allow you to become proactive here by having other players approach the PCs with an offer to work together (or simply slip them information they feel will be to their advantage).

The more general realization to make here is that this method of discovery very easily collapses into a chokepoint, and like any chokepoint it becomes a potential weak spot at which the scenario can break. If, for example, you design the scenario so that the PCs need to make a test in order to detect the Key’s radiation and they fail that test, that can very easily turn into the PCs having no idea what to do next.

So you want to avoid that chokepoint. In many ways you can think of this as the default action of the scenario (if the PCs have no idea what to do next, they can attempt to find the current location of the item). You’ll either want to make that default action automatic (so that failure isn’t possible), make it meaningfully repeatable (so that there’s a cost to failure, but you can always try again; a partial success test is another way of accomplishing this); or multiply it (so that if one method fails, the PCs can try another method; this would be a variant of the Three Clue Rule).

4. An endgame, usually in the form of an ultimate goal to be achieved with the item – delivering it somewhere, using it for something, preventing others from using it for a certain amount of time, or maybe just figuring out how to definitively destroy it or hide it so that other factions can’t use it. (This last point, of course, flies in the face of #3, so it should require significant effort of some sort in order to achieve this, giving other factions plenty of time to interfere before the endgame is truly achieved.)

Without some form of definitive endgame, the scenario will never end: The McGuffin will just continue being endlessly passed around. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but what it usually means is a growing sense of frustration and futility as the scenario chews up its inherent interest but continues hanging around without any satisfactory resolution.

One variant to look at here is a PC-specific endgame: The great game surrounding the McGuffin continues, but the PCs have accomplished whatever their goal regarding the McGuffin is and are content to exit on their own terms.

SIMPLIFY THE STRUCTURE

Zot! is big and it’s complicated. The scope is multidimensional and multiplanetary, with time travel complicating things even further and the fates of entire worlds at stake. Rather than immediately tackling something of this scale, it might behoove us to take our scenario structure out for a test drive with something a little more modest.

Let’s try this: The Maltese Falcon has, at long last, been found. Its value is immense, but particularly so to the practitioners of the ancient rites of magick, who know its true purpose. It has been placed as a lot in highly exclusive, black market auction that takes place aboard a small, ultra-luxury cruise ship on the high seas.

This premise allows us to further control the scope of the scenario: Barring extraordinary efforts, the action will be confined to the ship until it comes back into port. Neither the PCs nor anybody else will be able to vanish as soon as they’ve stolen the Falcon.

In addition to deck plans for the ship (which you can probably find online), you’ll also want to prep:

1. The factions involved. This will include the current owner of the Falcon and the security team for Penumbral Holdings, the mysterious organization behind the black market auction. Let’s also toss in a couple of sorcerous sects plus a team of mundanes (who just want the Falcon for its jewels and are way out of their depth here).

2. For the keep-away, you’ll want to prep the initial auction-related security protecting the Falcon. Maybe the PCs are the first ones to steal it, maybe they’re not. Either way, you’ll want that initial condition.

3. For the next step, we need to take a step back and think about how we want to organize our prep for this boat. I’m going to argue that we can prep the week at sea as a big social event, using the party planning scenario structure. Parties are usually short affairs, but the structure can easily be expanded to multiple events over several days. Nick Bate and I did something similar for the second part of the Quantronic Heat mini-campaign for Infinity.

With that knowledge in our pocket, we can now consider the method to find the Falcon. For the sake of argument, let’s say we’re running this scenario with Fantasy Flight’s Genesys system. In that case, we might look at something like this:

• You need to achieve X number of successes over any number of checks in order to figure out who currently has the Falcon. Primary checks would focus on social interactions with the other factions onboard. Investigating where the item was stolen from could also contribute additional successes. (Alternative methods might also include sorcerous divinations.)
• Advantages on these checks can be used to determine aspects of how the item is currently being secured (guards, security measures, etc.).
• Disadvantages or Despair might alert one or more of the other factions about the PCs and their intentions. Or attract the attention of Penumbral Holdings’ security team.

4. Our endgame here is simplified by the constrained premise we’ve used: When the ship makes landfall, whoever is currently holding the Falcon will most likely be able to vanish without a trace. The goal of the PCs is to be the one holding the Falcon when the clock runs out.

A possible wrinkle on our endgame is a simple question: Why would Penumbral Holdings put the ship into dock if the Falcon is still missing?

The primary explanation might be exigent circumstances: There may be people onboard that Penumbral Holdings can’t afford to piss off. Or the sorcerous wards preventing teleportation might expire at the end of the week no matter what. Or the true nature of members of Penumbral Holdings prevents them from remaining on the material plane of existence for more than a week.

Alternatively, this might become part of the action: Those holding the Falcon (including the PCs) may need to hijack the ship and bring it into port so that they can make good their escape. Or there’s a rendezvous craft that’s going to arrive at such-and-such a time.

RUNNING THE KEEP-AWAY

The spine of our Maltese Falcon scenario is the social event, advice for which can be found in the original Party Planning article. For the factions, you’ll probably want to prep progressions like those we discussed last week in Race for the Prize.

The social event spine is really a crutch of sorts, giving you a firmer structure to fall back on and build the McGuffin Keep-Away on top of. In its absence, you should be able to just keep spinning events forward through a combination of your faction progressions and responding to the PCs’ actions.

The first issue of Zot! for example, could be framed as the GM triggering the following progressions / faction features:

• THIEF: Attempts to use an interdimensional portal to hide the Key on Our Earth.
• SIRIUS IV: Successfully tracks the Key [locating it on Our Earth] and dispatches a robot kill squad to its location.
• [At this point, the PCs – who have been keeping an eye on the Sirius IV faction – track the robot kill squad to Our Earth and destroy it. They also find the Key and choose to turn it over to the proper authorities in the form of the CPZP.]
• THIEF: Checks his hiding place. [Finding the Key missing, he tracks it.]
• THIEF: Uses a stealthed robot to steal the Key.
• DE-EVOLUTIONARIES: Track the Key and brazenly attack [the CPZP council meeting].
• [The PCs fail to detect the Key being stolen and fight a big battle with the De-Evoluationaries.]

The linear nature of this, mirroring the structure of the original story, may be deceptive. So consider how the GM can trigger the exact same progressions but end up with a completely different result based on the actions of the PCs:

• THIEF: Attempts to use an interdimensional portal to hide the Key on Our Earth.
• SIRIUS IV: Successfully tracks the Key [locating it on Our Earth] and dispatches a robot kill squad to its location.
• [At this point, the PCs – who have been keeping an eye on the Sirius IV faction – track the robot kill squad to Our Earth. They fight, but lose. The robot kill squad captures the Key, but the PCs aren’t aware of this fact. The PCs regroup and pursue the robot kill squad.]
• THIEF: Checks his hiding place. [Finding the Key missing, he tracks it.]
• [PCs arrive back at the home base of the robot kill squad and continue their surveillance. The Sirius IV faction leaders, learning that the robot squad has secured the key, board a shuttle and begin flying towards the compound.]
• THIEF: Uses a stealthed robot to steal the Key.
• [PCs don’t spot the thief’s robot sneaking into the Sirius IV compound.]
• DE-EVOLUTIONARIES: Track the Key and brazenly attack [the Sirius IV robot compound].
• [The PCs notice the stealthed robot sneaking back out of the compound in the chaos. They attack that robot as the Sirius IV shuttle arrives onsite. The Sirius IV representatives spot the PCs, but are ambushed by De-Evolutionaries as they move to intercept. The PCs destroy the thief’s robot and take the key back. Taking the ruined remnants of the robot back to Zot’s Uncle Max, they use it to identify the thief.]

In actual play, what you’ll generally end up with is a cluster of raid (when the PCs go to steal the McGuffin) and siege (when the PCs have the item and need to protect it) scenarios. The more the factions interact with each other, the more crazed these scenarios will become.

BEYOND THE DOORWAY

Our use of the Maltese Falcon in our hypothetical scenario already points the way towards the Dashiell Hammet novel and John Ford movie as another example of this scenario structure in other media. As with Zot!, the scenario begins with the McGuffin already in keep-away mode. (You could also interpret that back story of The Maltese Falcon – with various treasure seekers attempting to trace the Falcon’s trail – as a Race to the Prize scenario, the conclusion of which then bounces directly into a McGuffin Keep-Away scenario).

Another Humphrey Bogart film to consider is Casablanca, in which the letters of transit function as the McGuffin. The thing to note here is that even though the McGuffin DOESN’T change hands repeatedly, the narrative remains interesting. So don’t feel as if you need to force the item to bounce around amongst your various factions: It’s perfectly okay if it settles into the hands of the PCs (or some other faction). As other factions come to barter with (or threaten) the controlling party, the drama will continue to flow.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an interesting example to break down. There are fewer factions, but a larger number of rogue agents pursuing independent goals within the arena defined by the McGuffin Keep-Away. Consider, too, that the McGuffin in this case – the Green Destiny sword –  has a specific utility which is useful for the keep-away itself. This not only creates an interesting transition of advantage as the McGuffin bounces around, but also encourages the faction currently controlling the item to use it, often creating large, clear paths for the other factions to follow.

Go to Challenge #4

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 3: Tee and the Greeting of Old Friends

This fracture, however, is minor compared to the Reformist movement which began in Astalia (one of the Vennoc Protectorates).

When creating our fantasy worlds, one thing I think we inherit from both published examples and our grade school textbooks is an encyclopedia impulse: We want to list every elven king. We want to create a comprehensive map. We want to nail things down.

What I’ve learned, however, is that it’s better to leave yourself room for future ideas.

For example, I’ll consciously avoid constructions like “The Last Blah-Blah” or “there’s only two Bleurghy-Bloogedy-Bloogs in the whole universe!” This is something that I think is even more vital when developing a shared universe, and something I very specifically cautioned writers against when I was working as the Line Developer for the Infinity RPG: Unless your idea requires a hard limit applied to the entire setting… don’t do it.

And of course, sometimes you do need to draw a hard line. The One Ring isn’t the One Ring if it isn’t the One Ring; it can’t be part of a JCPenney jewelry collection.

(How to know if your idea requires its uniqueness? Simply ditch the uniqueness and see if the idea still works. Is your “Only Female Ninja in the Whole World” still a cool character even if she’s not the only female ninja? Probably. Can you throw the One Ring in Mount Doom and save the world if Sauron has a whole cabinet full of Master Rings? Probably not.)

But the real trick I use is to create deliberate “gray spaces” within my world design. There are actually two of them featured in the Harvestime PBeM campaign journal entry: The Vennoc Protectorates and the Reformists. I have very specifically avoided defining exactly how many nations there within the Protectorates and I have similarly avoided figuring out exactly how many or what all the Reformists sects are.

Why?

When I was creating the Western Lands, a very early step was drawing a map of the Five Empires. (Which were, at the time, called the Five Nations. I renamed them when Eberron ended up using the same nomenclature half a decade later. Personally, I had Kipling and the Iroquois Confederacy bouncing around in my head to make “Five Nations” feel particularly catchy when I brainstormed it. I’m guessing Baker did, too.) But I immediately spotted the trap: I had designed Seyrun, Barund, Arathia, and Hyrtan to cover a broad swath of fantasy tropes, giving me a lot of canvas for fitting in all kinds of ideas. But they were also inherently limited: I had one Emperor. If I needed a different Emperor, I didn’t have one.

So the Vennoc Protectorates – inspired by the Holy Roman Empire and Ancient Greece – exist as a confused tangle of ever-changing city-states, duchies, kingdoms, principalities, and alliances all operating under a loose, common banner. So if tomorrow I think to myself, “You know what would be a cool? A kingdom secretly ruled by Deep Ones!” all I have to do is squeeze in another Protectorate.

The other option, of course, would be to just keep adding bits to the edge of the map. That works, too. But it can also be a little too easy: It encourages you to keep spreading your ideas out, instead of bringing them together, forcing them to rub up against each other, and seeing what happens in the collision.

For the same reason, I limited the Western Lands to a single pantheon of exactly nine gods. I’ve recently discussed how that decision has forced me to develop that pantheon in depth rather than just cramming more thinly realized gods into the setting, but I also recognized that I needed to give myself room within that pantheon to develop cool ideas and variants. If there were just nine gods supported by nine specific churches, the resulting palette would be fairly limited. I wanted the ability to continue adding cool fantasy religion ideas to the game world, and I also wanted to be able to create stories based around religious tension.

The Reformists were a gray space that allowed me to accomplish both goals. The Nine Gods cover a broad array of divine/mythological archetypes; the Reformists allow me to interpret those archetypes into myriad forms. If I need a nature cult that venerates nymphs, that can be reflected within the imagery of Sayl or Tohlen or both. (Maybe the cult believes nymphs are the divine children of those gods?) If I need steampunk machine worshipers, I can place them within a facet of Vehthyl. If I need a repressive religious autarchy, I’m not prevented from doing that by the limitations of the Imperial Church. These will all fit into niches within the Reformist gray space.

The Temple District

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

HARVESTTIME – PART 3: TEE AND THE GREETING OF OLD FRIENDS

PBeM – November 12th through December 1st, 2007
Harvesttime in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

When Tee said her farewells to Tor and asked him to pick up her dress from the Jade Woman her intention was to return to her room and recuperate the injuries she had suffered. Instead she found herself pacing endlessly, lost in eddying currents of hopeless thought.

She knew that only a scant distance away, the Harvesttime Festival in Narred was getting ready to begin. There would be song and dancing on the green. The community hall would be opened for food and drink. All her kin and friends would be there.

It was more than she could bear – to be so close to her old life and yet unable to touch it.

Unable to stay where she was, but unwilling to lead any danger to her community, she decided to seek counsel from Doraedian. She headed towards Iridithil’s Home. But when she arrived, Doraedian wasn’t there. He had been summoned away to a meeting of the Twelve Commanders and would likely go straight from there to the festival at Narred.

Intensely frustrated, Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel. By the time she got there, she’d made her decision: She sat down and quickly wrote out notes for her childhood friends – Aradan, Rissien, and Santiel – saying that they should meet at her house as soon as they could. She paid a messenger to deliver the letters and then hurried over to her house.

By this time she knew that the crowds of the Harvesttime Festival would have already gathered around the communal hall and Moon Lily Pond. So, being as discrete as possible, she circled south around the Herbalists’ Guildhall. Approaching her house from behind, she came up Vadarast Street. The familiar, if somewhat disturbing, scents of Bueles’ potion shop just a few buildings down Iron Street brought back sharp memories as she slipped around the corner of her house and, with a cautious glance, unlocked the door.

She was fairly certain she wasn’t noticed, although she could see the crowd gathering across the Narred green. Her thoughts were naturally distracted as she quickly gathered up the drop-cloths and tried to make the house look a little less deserted – not so much lived in, but at least a little more familiar… a little more welcoming.

Then she sat down to wait. Read more »

For our second scenario structure challenge we’ll be returning to the Star Wars universe, but to a decidedly more obscure example: Star Wars: Underworld – The Yavin Vassilika was a 5-issue mini-series produced by Dark Horse Comics in 2000-01.

Star Wars: Underworld is not a great comic book, being primarily hamstrung by an artist with a delightfully detailed and stylized vision of the Star Wars universe, but whose panel layouts too often topple over the ledge of “creative” and go hurtling into the vast void of “incoherent”. But what the series does have is a really interesting premise that sets up an action-packed narrative.

The basic hook is that three Hutts learn that a long-lost and extremely valuable artifact known as the Yavin Vassilika is rumored to have been found (or, more accurately, located).

The Hutts decide to make a “friendly” wager to see which of them can obtain the Yavin Vassilika first, with each hiring a team of operatives to track it down. A number of familiar faces from the Star Wars movies and Extended Universe are split up across the teams (Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, Greedo, Bossk, IG-88, etc.), and each team needs to track down Webble, the raving madman who claims to have seen the Yavin Vassilika; backtrack his recent movements to figure out exactly where the Yavin Vassilika is; and then secure the Yavin Vassilika.

Most of the action, of course, is driven from the teams interacting with each other: Spying on other teams, sabotaging their efforts, baiting them into following false leads, openly trying to kill them, and so forth.

The story also utilizes an interesting cluster of sub-agendas. Some of these take the form of specific vendettas between the characters, but also in the more generic form of registered bounties that have been taken out on various characters. It’s under these auspices that Boba Fett enters the fray as an independent party seemingly uninterested in the Yavin Vassilika itself, but intensely interested in the people seeking it. The participants in the “race” are also able to take out (and buy-off) bounties on each other as the opportunities present themselves, creating an ever-shifting tangle of incentives.

The final wrinkle in all this is that, in addition to the Hutts, there’s another major player interested in the Yavin Vassilika: A mysterious figure known only as the “Collector”, but who also has an agent in the field. This agent primarily operates by trying to suborn the agents of the Hutts so that they’ll deliver the artifact to them instead of to their employer.

RACE TO THE PRIZE

The basic structure of Star Wars: Underworld is fairly easy to emulate:

1. Create X number of competing teams/agents. Star Wars: Underworld has, in addition to the PCs, two additional teams directly pursuing the McGuffin and two independent agents pursuing their own agendas (one trying to convince the teams to sell her the McGuffin; the other hired to secretly protect one of the hunters).

This is really the meat of the scenario. Create interesting foes and big personalities for the PCs to compete with and you should have a winner. You can also follow the lead of Star Wars: Underworld here and have the agents in the field working for a variety of employers who have competing agendas for the ultimate use of the prize.

2. Finding the McGuffin is a linear Three Clue Rule scenario, which is super easy to design.

You’ll probably want to make this chain at least four or five links long, giving the PCs plenty of time to jostle for position, conspire with, and be ambushed by the other factions. Making some or all of these links somewhat involved mini-scenarios will make it easier to intensify the stakes by bringing multiple teams into play. (You could also use a node-based structure instead of a linear one to add complexity to the investigation.)

Where this can get a little more interesting is that if you’re not the first group to find a particular clue, you can also just track the team(s) ahead of you and follow them to the next clue. In addition to the PCs investigating other teams, this also provides a motivation for other teams to be investigating them (thus prompting interaction between the teams).

In its most basic form, this is really all you need to run this type of scenario. Run the investigation scenario straight, but then throw in an appearance from a competing team whenever it seems appropriate to make things interesting. Don’t forget that the other factions are also in competition with each other and will have interactions that don’t directly affect the PCs, but may spill out onto them.

ADVANCED OPTIONS

But let’s look at a few advanced options we might use to enhance the experience.

BOUNTIES: As mentioned above, the original Star Wars: Underworld narrative includes a substrate of competition based around various members of the competing teams having bounties on their heads. This provides secondary motivations that can complicate the simple rivalry between the teams and also allows for factions motivated by something completely different from the other factions.

(You might think about other secondary objectives that can bring additional factions into play. Not just because that’s useful for creating additional factions, but because having factions pointed at different things – instead of all being pointed at the same thing – can make it easier for those factions to collide with each other.)

To set up a similar bounty system:

• Set initial bounties on some (but not all) of the participants in the race. (I’d suggest generally including at least one PC on this list.)
• Ideally, have a mechanism which allows PCs and other characters to quickly keep up to date on which characters have active bounties on their heads.
• Figure out how characters (particularly PCs) can place a bounty on another character’s head.
• It can also be useful for there to be a mechanism by which a PC (or other character) can remove the bounty placed on their head. In the Star Wars universe, bonded bounties can literally just be bought out. Another option might be that the death of the person who put the bounty on your head will result in the bounty being removed.

You’ll probably want to make sure that the PCs become aware of the bounty system fairly early in the scenario (or even before the scenario begins).

TIMELINE: Purely improvising the activities of a half dozen other factions in simultaneous operation with the PCs can be a tad difficult and may have unsatisfying results. One way you can prep the progress of the race is by laying out a simple timeline of how quickly the other factions reach various milestones in the scenario.

Like any timeline, of course, you’ll want to:

• Make sure you don’t spend a lot of effort prepping past the point at which the PCs will almost certainly have meaningfully altered the outcome of events. (I’d guess probably no further than the first two or possibly three milestones.)
• Alter and update the timeline as necessary in order to reflect the actions taken by the PCs (and the impact they have on other participants).

For factions that are pursuing goals tangential to the McGuffin search, their timelines might instead feature sequences of escalating interactions with the PCs (and also the other teams).

The benefit of objectively tracking the progress of the other factions is that it creates a hard deadline for the PCs; the resulting pressure will ratchet up the intensity of the scenario for the players. The advantage of prepping a timeline to accomplish this is that it’s relatively simple and straightforward, and also allows you to put some thought into the types of clues their off-screen activities might generate. The disadvantage is that it’s comparatively likely to result in a lot of wasted prep.

PROGRESSIONS: Alternatively, for some factions you may find that prepping a progression has more utility. Progressions are similar to timelines, but rather than pegging events to a specific time, each progression represents a sequence of actions that a particular faction might attempt.

For example, in Star Wars: Underworld the character of Jozzel could be given this progression:

• Offer Faction #1 300,000 to deliver the Vassilika to her in exchange for a fake that can be given to their Hutt patron.
• Attempt to seduce a PC in order to keep tabs on their progress.
• Plant a homing beacon on the ship belonging to Faction #2.
• If she gets the McGuffin, steal the PCs’ ship (or a ship belonging to another faction) and lead them to her secretive patron for the final exchange.

Progressions aren’t locked in stone, of course. In the case of Jozzel, during the “actual play” of our hypothetical gaming session, she ends up getting basically kidnapped by the PCs and dragged along by them for a good long while. Maybe the next time you run the scenario, she ends up getting killed by one of the factions and they leave her body in a location where it will frame the PCs for her murder.

In other words, just like timelines, progressions can easily get disrupted by PCs. But they can also be a little more flexible in practice, since their additional elements can often be brought back into play (often from an unexpected angle) even after the disruption (whereas the events on a timeline tend to be dependent on the previous events of the timeline).

On a similar note, you can also use weak progressions. These are really just a menu of “things this faction will do” without necessarily putting them in a specific sequence. Weak progressions are more difficult to use in practice because it means that you have more “balls in the air” so to speak, but they give a bigger menu for options of “what happens next” during actual play.

CHASE MECHANICS: Another alternative would be to create some form of mechanical structure for resolving the progress of each team towards the goal. Exactly what this would look like would depend on the system you were using to run the scenario, obviously, but the advantage would lie in giving the players a more direct feeling of control over the outcome of the race by giving them something more tangible to interact with and manipulate. The GM, for their part, would similarly be able to actively play each faction’s interactions with the chase mechanics.

RUNNING THE RACE

Upon reflection, running the McGuffin Race is not that dissimilar from using an adversary roster when running a dungeon; the difference is that rather than managing the activities of the adversaries geographically, you’re managing them temporally (and probably, for most GMs, with a healthy dose of dramatic timing).

If you go with the relatively straightforward options, you’ll have:

• The investigation for finding the McGuffin.
• A set of progressions for each faction, detailing their activities.
• Possibly a timeline for when other factions “hit” each milestone on the investigation.

Note that each of these can really be thought of as a separate linear sequence running in parallel with each other. (Even the investigation is just the linear framework which will form the backbone of the actions which the PCs choose to take.) So when you’re running the race, you just need to look at the top item of each of those lists and decide what happens next.

It seems big and complicated and chaotic, but structurally it’s actually easy peasy.

If you’re still struggling with how to make it all work in practice, try imposing a slightly more formal procedure on yourself:

• Each time the PCs finish a scene, take a moment to provisionally frame the next scene. (As described in The Art of Pacing, that means identifying the PCs’ intention, choosing obstacles, and skipping to the next meaningful choice.)
• Before committing to that scene, however, look at your progressions and pick 1-2 things that the other factions do before that scene takes place. (You can even roll 1d3-1 and randomly determine which factions take their next progression actions if you really want to provoke yourself in unexpected directions.)

Some of these actions won’t actually affect the PCs or what the PCs are doing right now. That’s fine. Make a note (mental or otherwise) that they’ve happened and move on to the next scene. The PCs will likely discover the consequences of what’s happened in a later scene.

Other actions will affect the PCs. Those are essentially obstacles standing between them and the scene they wanted to have (or the obstacle you had already anticipated for them): Frame up the new scene and run it. When that scene is finished, let the PCs proceed to their next scene (which may or may not be where they were headed before they got interrupted by the other factions). When that scene is done, repeat the process of seeing what the other factions are doing.

Also: Your progressions aren’t written in stone. As things develop in play, feel free to add (or insert) additional actions into the progressions of the other factions. You might also discover that certain situations will prompt factions to take actions that you didn’t prep onto their progressions. That’s obviously totally fine. Do what feels right and play each faction actively throughout.

BEYOND THE UNDERWORLD

For an additional exercise, consider analyzing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as another example of this scenario type. The basic elements are a little more occluded here (particularly because so many of the factions are pretending to be allies when they’re really antagonists), but it can be a valuable example because the action is more strictly based around Indiana’s POV (which more closely emulates what the typical experience of PCs will be at the table).

Consider, also, Guardians of the Galaxy, which uses a micro-version of the structure to bring the PC party together.

It only lasts for a single scene, really, but you’ve got similar dynamics (including literal bounties as an alternative motivation for factions being involved). A scene like this obviously doesn’t need the full work-up described above, but within its tight confines it can be a useful object lesson in what makes these situations tick: Think about how much less interesting the scene would be if Rocket and Groot were also solely interested in the sphere, thus unifying everyone’s goals instead of having them work at cross-purposes.

Rare and magical artifacts are, obviously, not the only sort of McGuffin that can be targeted in the race which forms the backbone for this sort of scenario. Anything which must be searched for or obtained through a sequence of challenges can have a similar function.

A structure which at first glance seems the same, however, would be multiple teams competing at a single challenge simultaneously. An elaborated example of this would be multiple teams exploring the same dungeon at the same time. Although superficially similar, note how the lack of a series of shared chokepoints makes it much more difficult to bring the various factions into interesting interactions with each other. Despite their similarities, I think you’ll actually need a different structure to make this sort of scenario work smoothly and successfully at the table. (And that might be something we look at in the future.)

Go to Challenge #3

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 2: Dominic and the Guidance of Vehthyl

When Dominic headed across the bridge into the Temple District, he made gentle inquiries into the worship of Vehthyl and discovered four options: First, the Order of the Silver God. Second, the Temple of the Clockwork God. Third, the Temple of the Ebon Hand. And, finally, an itinerant minotaur priest named Shibata.

What I’m going to talk about here isn’t really a preconceived or formal technique. It’s something that I’ve just kind of instinctively done in the past without even really thinking of it as being a distinct “thing” that I’ve been doing. But as I was re-reading the campaign journal and thinking about what I had done as a GM, it kind of jumped out and bit me. I’m not even sure I would have noticed at all if it wasn’t for the close proximity of what I did with Tor and Dominic here.

So this installment of Running the Campaign is probably going to be a little more rough around the edges as I kind of grope my way towards both understanding and articulating the technique here.

To start with, you have a PC who has an interest.

• Tor is interested in becoming a knight.
• Dominic is interested in learning more about Vehthyl.

Dominic’s interest has arisen out of play and is primarily player-driven, and so the response is being created on-the-fly. (Fairly literally in this case, as the bluebooking for this session allowed me to basically roll along with the player’s intentions and develop material in a very reactive way.) Tor’s interest was collaboratively built up in character creation, so I built a good chunk of this material up in parallel with that character creation process and have been waiting to incorporate it into the campaign for several sessions now.

(Although the specific impetus, it should be noted, was still ultimately player-driven even here: Tor’s player had seen the tourney fields on the map of the city and said, “I want to go to there.” I just needed to figure out how I could use the existing material I built in support of this impulse, and vice versa.)

He cantered Blue over to the Board of Ranks, on display just outside of the lists. Each name was noted with heraldry, and he noted that most of the names were accompanied by the three prominent heraldries on display (along with a smattering of others): The cross upon a field of a crimson of the Knights of the Golden Cross; the sword-and-vortex of the Knights of the Pale; and the dawning sun above the martial field of the Order of the Dawn.

The key technique here is that, in response to these PC interests, I haven’t built one thing which would satisfy that interest: There’s not one Church of Vehthyl for Dominic to go ask his questions at. There’s not a single order of knighthood in Ptolus for Tor to pursue.

Instead, I’ve created – or pulled forward – a nest of factions surrounding their area of interest. In the case of this particular session, the factions are actually quite explicitly spelled out (although that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case; there are a lot of different ways to introduce these factions into play), as you can see in the quotes above.

These factions all inherently have overlapping interests and competing agendas regarding those interests because they’re all specifically related to the PCs interests. (Which means that the PC – and presumably their player – will also be inherently vested in those interests.) At this point, I don’t really have a firm idea of how the interactions between these factions are going to play out, but if you’ve got enough people pointing guns at each other (either literally or figuratively) something interesting is probably going to fall out as a result of the PCs bouncing around like ping-pong balls.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

First, it gives the player a meaningful choice in how their character is going to pursue their interest.

What you want to avoid here, of course, is reverting this back to a meaningless choice where, for example, there are eight different Churches of Vehthyl, but it doesn’t matter which one the player chooses. The factions Dominic has to choose between can, on a certain level, be boiled down to:

• The Imperial Church
• A well-established Reformist Church
• A Reformist cult
• A lone, unaffiliated religious teacher

Ignoring all of the other details about those factions, this essential choice about where Dominic will turn first in his desperate need for guidance is going to speak volumes about his faith and about who he is as a person.

Tor, by contrast, isn’t really in need during this session. He’s really just checking out the buffet and seeing what’s available, so you can see that the distinctions between the different orders of knighthood are not as sharply drawn here. That’s partly because the player wasn’t motivated to dig deeper: Tor could’ve taken the opportunity of the tourney to meet more of the knights and learn more about their different missions and ideologies. The fact he didn’t at this particular time is actually a meaningful choice in itself. But even if it wasn’t, that’s fine: The meaningful choices are going to come later for Tor and they are going to have a ton of weight.

Second, the inter-relationships between the factions turns the PC into a billiard ball. The player’s initial choice is their first shot, and the effect they’ll have on the table full of balls is impossible to predict. As a result, the outcome of that choice (and their subsequent choices) will be completely surprising to everyone at the table, including the GM. The campaign will be forever different as a result, and it’s quite likely the campaign world will be, too.

As a result, it’s not just a meaningful choice, it’s a momentous choice.

Players can sense that. They know when their choices have completely and irrevocably shaped what the experience of the campaign is. And they love it. They eat it up.

OTHER THOUGHTS

As you’ll see, Tor’s and Dominic’s factions actually end up overlapping and interacting with each other as the campaign continues. This increases the chaotic unpredictability of your campaign once you set these forces in motion; it also helps to draw the PCs closer together.

This overlap is something that you can specifically design into the factions when you set them up, but you’ll also find it arising organically through play: After all, these factions will all end up having a common connection through the PCs. Eventually, that will bring them into orbit with each other… and send them crashing into each other.

What about wasted prep? I’ve been talking about smart prep lately, and here I seem to have deliberately set up wasted prep: Dominic chooses one of the Vehthyl-related factions to seek advice from and then nothing happens with the others.

Well, first, this stuff usually doesn’t require a heavy initial prep load. Most of the time you can probably get away with one or two paragraphs, and then you can develop more in response to the direction the PC chooses to leap. Prep will also overlap. For example, knowing how the orders of knighthood operate in the Five Empires is going to be meaningful to Tor’s character goals regardless of which order of knighthood he chooses to pursue.

More importantly, the prep you don’t immediately use will almost certainly end up getting reincorporated in other ways down the line. These are, after all, significant factions. The whole point is that they’re deeply involved in your campaign world. And they are, after all, related to each other, so no matter which one the PC chooses, the others are likely not too far away.