Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny, the second edition of the game making the exciting promise of expanding its core gameplay to include developing local communities and rebuilding civilization in the ruins of the past worlds, is just around the corner.

One response that I’ve seen frequently to Numenera from GMs is that they can’t quite wrap their head around the setting: The core rulebook uses a combination of techniques for presenting the Ninth World, and for many people one or more of those techniques clicks. For others, they don’t. Or, worse yet, the combination of techniques is baffling in its own right. So what I’d like to do here is to focus on just one way of approaching the Ninth World. It’s not one that gets much attention in the core rulebook, so it might work for those who couldn’t find anything to latch onto in the core rulebook, and the focus on just one angle of approach might also be useful for those who find the totality of the Ninth World just a little too much to take in all at once.

Perhaps more importantly, as a GM I’ve found this particular angle — which I’m going to refer to as the Aldeia Approach — to be specifically valuable when it comes to creating cool scenarios for the setting. It’s kind of like a “default action” for the GM: The setting is capable of doing all kinds of other cool stuff, but if you’re ever at a loss for what to do next (or what your first step with Numenera should be), the Aldeia Approach will faithfully serve up something you can use.

A FEW BASICS

Before we dive into the Aldeia Approach, a few general words on grokking the Numenera setting.

First, it’s not a bad idea to read some of the fiction that Monte Cook cites as the primary influence for the game. Not just because it will help you tune into the milieu, but because it’s all really fantastic fiction that you should read in any case. I would direct your particular attention to:

• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
• The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Eternals and New Gods by Jack Kirby
• The Zothique Cycle by Clarke Ashton Smith
• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki

Second, pay attention to how Cook has structured the setting to make it accessible to newcomers (particularly new players): The core of the setting described in the core rulebook is the Steadfast, where a Renaissance movement is reclaiming the lost technology of past civilizations the same way that Western Europe reclaimed the science and technology from Ancient Greece and Rome. The Steadfast very specifically resembles the real world Renaissance in both culture and civilization so that you can easily latch onto it as an entrypoint into the world.

As you move beyond that entry point — into an area of world literally referred to as the “Beyond” by residents of the Steadfast — you begin encountering larger and larger amounts of the weird. Exploring the Beyond is really the point where you start dipping your toes into the truly exotic bizarrity which the Ninth World can be. As you move even farther out into the world, you’ll start encountering the truly alien aspects of the Ninth World.

I’ve seen a number of people complain that the setting (by which they really just mean the Steadfast) is just “D&D with a patina of science fiction”. That’s not really true, because the Ninth World is fundamentally different from D&D. But it is true that both D&D and Numenera use a heavily fictionalized version of the Renaissance as a common starting point to provide something that’s easy-to-run and easy-to-understand. And you can, in fact, have entire glorious campaigns solely within the comfortable confines of the Steadfast. Nothing wrong with that. But there’s also nothing wrong with skipping the Steadfast entirely and jumping straight into the more outrageous aspects of what the Ninth World has to offer.

THE ALDEIA APPROACH

The word aldeia is another name for “village” in the Steadfast and the Beyond, and buried away in one obscure corner of the core rulebook is this text:

Around these claves [of Aeon Priests], small villages and communities known as aldeia have arisen. Each clave has discovered and mastered various bits of the numenera, giving every aldeia a distinct identity. In one, the inhabitants might raise unique bioengineered beasts for food. In another, people may pilot gravity-defying gliders and race along the rooftops of ancient ruins. In still another aldeia, the priests of the clave may have developed the means to stop the aging process almost entirely, making the residents nearly immortal, and some are no doubt willing to sell the secret — for a staggering price. Because the aldeia are remote and separated by dangerous distances, trade of these discoveries is occasional and haphazard.

So communities often have some form of numenera that they’re capable of exploiting. But that construction can also be inverted: Aldeia arise because there is an exploitable form of numenera in a particular region. They’re like technological mining towns; communities growing up around an economic resource.

And the Aldeia Approach basically latches onto that concept: If you’re wondering what to do with Numenera, you can’t go too far wrong by looking for an artifact or cypher and then asking, “What happens if an entire community is based around this?” In my experience, at least one (and usually several) playable scenario hooks will become obvious as you’re answering that question.

In terms of introducing the setting and building its complexity over time (for both the GM and the players), the Aldeia Approach is also an ideal way to launch a campaign: Frame the PCs as some form of itinerant wanderers, and simply have them encounter interesting aldeia in the course of their travels. When you feel like you’re starting to get a grip on things, move up to a small regional town: Such towns would be based around trade with several smaller aldeia, so list a half dozen or so prevalent numenera technologies the city has access to and think about what the resulting town looks like. (Maybe you even run an urbancrawl there.)

The Aldeia Approach is so robust that you can practically randomize it. For example, let’s combine the random numenera tables from Sir Arthour’s Guide to the Numenera (you could just as easily use the tables from the core rulebook alone) with S. John Ross’ Big List of RPG Plots (which I’ll just use in order for the sake of argument) and see what we end up with.

GOLD ‘NADO

Deployer (Atmospheric): “The device collects the most widely available atmospheric aerosols within long range (such as drit dust, water droplets, pollen, bacteria, or smoke). It brings these aerosols together in a whirling tornado that centers around the device itself.” An aldeia has figured out how to reverse engineer a deployer and produce them in a bespoke industry. In combination with specially designed filters, they’re used to mine surface gold. (Or perhaps something more exotic?) Combine with Any Port in the Storm: An unforeseen interaction between the deployers cause their “prospecting ‘nados” to collapse into a single, massive tornado which now threatens the aldeia. (Maybe this even happens with some regularity and the aldeia has gotten used to “battening down the hatches” when it happens?) The PCs are forced to take refuge… but the real danger is in whatever location they’ve taken refuge in.

The threat could be human in nature (a serial killer in a locked up inn, perhaps). But let’s pick a random page from the Ninth World Bestiary and see if we can end up with a threat: “A skysmasher arrives as a red blaze across the sky, leaving a trail of light and smoke. (…) Skysmashers live out most of their span in some useable above the sky, crashing down to solid groun only to spawn and lay eggs.” What if the skysmasher crash actually triggered the malfunction in the prospecting ‘nados? What if its eggs hatch very quickly after being brought to earth and begin trying to breach the PCs’ sanctuary?

THE KINGDOM’S HELM

Ocular Helm: “The wearer of this strange helm sees a variety of visual sensors, clarity enhancers, viewfinders, rangefinders, and other aids to sight.” Let’s say that there’s a great lake which is perpetually covered in a strange, silver-green mist. Navigating through this mist has proven virtually impossible using traditional means, but a set of island kingdoms within the mist control a limited number of ocular helms. The Elite Order of Helmsmen are charged with navigating the lake, guaranteeing the security and prosperity of the islands. Better Late Than Never: Someone has stolen one of the ocular helms. The PCs are hired to track them down (or maybe there’s just a bounty and a bunch of people are trying to find it).

Another option: The PCs find an ocular helm in the course of some other adventure (probably while exploring some mouldering ruins). When the island kingdoms receive word of this, they can’t let the PCs keep it. It’s a huge security risk! But even if (some) of the kingdoms are willing to just make a generous offer, there are other factions in play that will just try to steal it from the PCs.

And another: Some strange technophage has destroyed the ocular helms controlled by the Elite Order. The kingdoms desperately need to secure another: Cue a heist in the great city of Qi, or maybe just a treasure hunt in pursuit of ancient rumors.

EXACTION EXHALATION

So I initially roll up Device Enhancer (Restorer), a cypher which can be attached to a different cypher or artifact and that device now restores a total of 4 points each time it is activated (in addition to its normal function) or 2 additional points if the device already restores points. So I roll again and I get Exalted Vapor, which allows the user to inhale a potent chemical that restores 6 points to any pool. So what we end up with is a vapor which restores 8 points of Might when inhaled.

Let’s go with the obvious: A secluded village where special sauna chambers filled with strange vapors restore the afflicted to health. The exalted vapor cyphers that are placed in these chambers are created by a set of ancient machines held in caverns deep beneath the village.

Combine this with Blackmail: When the PCs arrive in the village, they are surprised to see it clutched by poverty and hardship. The wealth flowing into the saunas seems to just vanish into the vapor. Poking around, they discover that a murden has stolen a crucial numenera artifact which creates one of the reagents required for the exalted vapor. The murden is blackmailing the town into crippling payments and is threatening to destroy the irreplaceable device if they don’t comply.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 1: Tor at the Tourney Fields

The next day, despite the weariness with which they had collapsed, they all awoke bright and early – looking forward to the festivals of Harvesttime and a day of rest and relaxation before attending the party at Castle Shard that evening.

I’ve previously discussed my personal background when it comes to general PBeM gaming, but dedicated PBeM gaming is not the only way to take advantage of the medium. Running PBeM sessions for some or all of the players between regular face-to-face sessions of a campaign is a technique which I really love in theory. Unfortunately, I rarely do it. And even when I attempt it, it never seems to quite work out right. (You can see that here, actually, with Agnarr and Elestra basically doing nothing because their players just didn’t reply to the e-mails.)

Let’s back up for a second.

BLUEBOOKING

Inter-sessional play-by-email is a form of bluebooking. Back in 1988, Aaron Allston’s Strike Force campaign supplement for Champions was a revolutionary text, describing techniques for running and playing RPGs that transformed the games of those who read it. (It was also, sadly, an incredibly obscure text.) One of the unique techniques he described was “bluebooking”, named after the semi-disposable exam books.

Bluebooking grew out of what Allston referred to as “paranoia notes”. (When the GM passes a player a scrap of paper or vice versa in order to keep their communication secret from the other players. They’re “paranoia” notes because that’s what they create.) Rather than using scraps of paper, Allston’s group would pass notepads around. And then something interesting happened: The players started passing the notepads to each other, using them to develop privately roleplayed side-scenes. They also started to use the pads for in-character journaling, developing character histories, and the like. The pads were then replaced with the blue books which, to my understanding, allowed specific books to be dedicated to particular characters, interactions, etc.

Eventually, whole game sessions were occasionally given over to blue-booking. In these sessions, the players put their characters through solo activities, or conversations with one another, which pertain to their ongoing stories. One player will write with the GM concerning his investigations; one will be conducting a romance with an NPC; one will be vacationing in Greece; another may actually be conducting a whole solo adventure with the GM.

Allston identified three specific advantages to bluebooking:

• Privacy (for obvious reasons)
• Permanence (the exam books provide an organized record of what occurred)
• Breakdown of Inhibition

The last of these is particularly interesting:

It’s hard to conduct some game activities during active play. For instance, a male GM playing a female NPC who’s having a passionate affair with a male PC may have a tough time uttering the lines of high romance in a roomful of gamers. But while blue-booking the dialogue, the GM can be detached enough to write the NPCs’ lines as he wishes her to say them, can take the time to make sure the dialogue he’s writing isn’t clumsy or inane, and can give the player-character a more satisfying subplot.

I think you can actually broaden this to a more general category of Exploring the Unusual by allowing you to play through moments and topics that you can’t (or won’t) explore at the table. That can be stuff that the group finds uncomfortable (like intense romance for some groups), but it can also just be stuff that people aren’t interested in. It might even be stuff that you’re not interested in exploring outside of your blue book. (For example: What does a typical day in the life of your character look like? That might be really boring to play out moment-by-moment, but really interesting for you to explore interactively.)

To Allston’s list of advantages, I would also personally add two more:

Thoughtful Consideration. Bluebooking allows you to create at a different pace than the immediate demand of live improvisation. It gives you a chance to get your character “right” in a way that doesn’t always happen in the organic, real-time flow of the table. This allows you to explore your character – and their life – in different ways. Not just in terms of your ability to think about what you’re creating, but also the depth with which you are developing your ideas: How does your character think? What are their childhood memories? Who’s important to them in their personal life and why?

In addition to the immediate creative pleasure of this sort of thing, what I find interesting is the ability for this development to feed back into and inform the live improv of the character going forward.

In this session, for example, you might notice that the PCs’ dialogue has suddenly taken on a different feel from previous journal entries. That’s because the players are – consciously or otherwise – exploring how their characters talk in a way that they haven’t before. Some of that (like Tee’s awkward, undefined fear and struggle with feeling like an adult amongst her childhood friends) sticks; some of it (like Tor’s relatively heavy accent) doesn’t. And that’s okay. That’s how creativity works; that’s how ideas grow.

(Bluebooking will also inevitably display some of the stilted traits of amateur fiction. That’s okay, too.)

This isn’t just useful for the players, of course. The GM also benefits from being able to give thoughtful consideration to a PC’s actions. This makes bluebooking particularly useful for complex or uncertain situations where the GM isn’t sure how or what to prep; improvising in slow motion lets the GM respond truthfully without compromising quality, depth, or long-term planning.

Opportunistic Play. The ubiquitous availability of e-mail and other forms of digital communication mean that, unlike for most people in 1988 when Allston wrote Strike Force, you don’t have to be in the same room to bluebook with other people. This means that bluebooking also allows you to continue roleplaying – to continue developing and experiencing the campaign – even when you’re not in a session.

That’s what was happening in this “session”, for example: I was working in a temp job with a lot of dead time, so I was able to swap e-mails with people on the boss’ dime. I don’t actually remember why we did it; what prompted us to explore the daylight hours of Harvesttime via e-mail. It certainly wasn’t something we made a habit of. (We’d already had mixed results attempting something similar at the beginning of the campaign, and my one other attempt to do this within the context of the Ptolus campaign to date –what was supposed to be an opportunity to roleplay through Tithenmamiwen’s birthday party – ended up being such a non-starter that we ended up retconning the entire event out of the campaign.)

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

For those who aren’t interested in full-blown bluebooking (or who, like me, struggle with making it work or getting their players to buy in), a more limited variant that can be very useful – particularly for certain eras of gaming – is in-character correspondence. I often do this with my Cthulhu-related gaming, as the deeper psychological exploration it encourages feeds nicely into Mythos-inspired insanity and it can also be a lovely way of thinking more deeply about historical milieus.

On that note, I recommend checking out Michael Oracz’s De Profundis (which I am excited to have just discovered – having thought it long out of print – is currently available in an expanded second edition from Cubicle 7). It’s a “game” in which each player takes on the role of a particular character experiencing some Mythos-related oddity and then corresponds with the other players, developing that idea over time. It’s not really a game, serving as more of a structured activity, but it’s a rich and insightful text that I’ve found useful as a general resource for correspondence roleplay.

I also remain intrigued by Monte Cook’s upcoming Invisible Sun roleplaying game, which is supposed to be designed to specifically encourage and support bluebooking between sessions.

Our first scenario structure challenge is the Death Star sequence from the original Star Wars. More generally, this is an exemplar of a “space station infiltration” mission, but we’ll be using the Death Star as a useful parallel (while acknowledging the limitations of this).

What makes the Death Star scenario tick?

(I’m just going to assume here that everyone is familiar with Star Wars. If you’re not familiar with it, do yourself a favor and immediately track down a copy of the original, unaltered version and watch it ASAP.)

1. The PCs have to gain access to the Death Star. (In the case of the movie, they got captured by its tractor beam and hid in the smugglers’ compartments.)
2. There was a primary obstacle they had to overcome in order to get out. (The tractor beam needed to be disabled.)
3. There was an objective they wanted to accomplish. (Rescue the princess.)
4. There was a grab bag of situational obstacles that needed to be overcome, bypassed, or otherwise resolved in order for the PCs to overcome the obstacle and/or achieve the objective.

When it comes to the situational obstacles, note that there’s only a handful of them: Stormtroopers, Imperial officers, the security protecting the Death Star’s computer network, magnetically sealed doors, and Darth Vader. Rather than introducing entirely new elements, the lesser obstacles get mixed and remixed constantly: Stormtroopers scanning the ship. Stormtroopers guarding the ship. Stormtroopers attacking them in the brig. Stormtroopers chasing them through the corridors. Stormtroopers guarding the ship again.

RAID SCENARIOS

Let’s digress for a moment and talk about raid-type scenarios in general.

John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill module is my personal touchstone for this. It certainly wasn’t the first raid-type module ever published, but it was the one which, for me, made the concept really gel definitively (primarily because Tynes boils it down to an essential core and clearly spells out exactly why he designed the scenario the way that he did; in other words, he breaks down the scenario structure for the GM).

Basically, there are three parts to a basic raid scenario (which Tynes describes as a “Tom Clancy-style special ops mission”):

First, it largely functions using the same room-and-key design of a location-crawl.

Second, the target location is designed in such a way that the PCs can grok the entire floorplan and some (or all) of its defensive measures. (You’ll note that this is distinct from a typical dungeoncrawl, where it is virtually impossible and usually antithetical to the desired gameplay for the PCs to be able to predetermine the entire floorplan.)

Third, the target location should generally feature lots of potential entry points (allowing the PCs to select their approach and make meaningful tactical decisions about how to carry out the raid).

Fourth, the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.

Over the years I’ve refined this structure to include adversary rosters in order to make it easier to key patrol patterns and also to make the defensive forces more dynamic in actual play.

The intended form of play is that the PCs will (1) learn about the target location, (2) have time to plan their raid, and then (3) execute their raid against active opposition.

THE DEATH STAR RAID

Once you understand the basic raid structure, the potential trap for a Death Star-style raid is trying to map out the entire space station. That’s valuable for smaller raid scenarios (particularly if you prep it in a way that the blueprint can literally be presented to the PCs so that they can use it during planning), but a space station is just too big for that to be convenient. (Even a space station much, much, much smaller than the Death Star.)

So in planning out a raid on the Death Star, you’ll need to figure out how to design the raid on a slightly more abstract level. Let’s look back at our list of four elements which makes the Death Star sequence tick:

1. Generally speaking, do NOT determine how the PCs will gain access to the station. Instead, take a step back, think about all the ways people can enter the station, and then figure out how those entrances have been secured. Sketch those out briefly. As with any other raid scenario, it’s now up to the players to (a) learn about them and (b) figure out how to bypass them.

2 & 3. Figure out 1-3 objectives that the PCs want on the space station and/or primary obstacles they need to overcome to escape the station once they’re onboard it. (The players may have already determined at least some of this for you when they made the decision to raid the space station in the first place: Why are they there?)

4. Prep your grab bag of 4-6 situational obstacles that can complicate the PCs’ efforts to reach and achieve the objectives/primary obstacle. Include 1-2 big, notable bad guys (Darth Vader, Tarkin). Include some interchangeable mooks (stormtroopers, officers). Include some passive security features (computer network, magnetically sealed doors).

Finally, briefly sketch the general layout of the station. As noted, this shouldn’t be a hyper-detailed map: You want to know the major features of the space station (docks, brig, bridge, engineering cores, Stormtrooper barracks, etc.) and you probably want to have a general sense of where they are in relation to each other (brig is on the upper levels, docks on the lower levels, etc.).

A flowchart structure can work well for this, giving enough structure for the PCs to make meaningful choices without getting bogged down in an unnecessary superfluity of detail.

SITUATIONAL OBSTACLES

As you’re developing this flowchart, try to include at least 1-2 locations between the entrances and the various objectives/primary obstacles. These are the locations where the PCs can encounter some of the situational obstacles. For example, in order to get from the docks (where the PCs enter the Death Star) to the brig (where the princess is being held) you need to pass through the central elevator shafts (giving Imperial officers or other personnel a chance to spot you).

You can sketch out what situational obstacles are found in each location, if you like:

DOCKS

• 2 stormtroopers in the docking bay itself
• 2 imperial officers overseeing the docking bay from the control room
• Magnetically sealed door on the control room

THE DEATH STAR RAID IN PLAY

And that’s basically it. At this point, you’ve got enough material that your players should be able to engage with it and you can respond dynamically whenever they do.

Don’t feel trapped by your prep. Remember, that what you’ve been designing are tools: If they’re in the brig and they blow their Bluff check, send in some stormtrooper squads. If they feel trapped, don’t think they can fight their way out, and they say, “There must be another way out of here! Can we get out through the vents?” think for a moment and then say, “Sure. That works. You can blast a hole in the wall over there and drop down onto the garbage disposal level.” You didn’t prep a garbage disposal level, but it makes sense that a space station would have one, right?

The garbage disposal room they drop into feels like a significant location, though, so let’s add a situational obstacle. Stormtrooper guards? Hmm… No. They just got away from stormtroopers up above, and who would bother guarding garbage? Let’s throw a magnetically sealed door here and… compacting walls? Yeah, that sounds good.

BEYOND THE DEATH STAR

Obviously this basic structure can be used for more than just space stations: Any raid targeting a sufficiently large facility can be set up this way.

As an exercise, you can break down the raid on CIA headquarters in Mission: Impossible and design it as a scenario. The objective is obvious (the NOC list kept in the vault). What are the potential entrances to the facility? What is the primary obstacle(s) that prevent them from leaving once they’re in? What are the situational obstacles that the GM can use to complicate their mission (if they choose to accept it)?

Go to Challenge #2

This is the first entry in a new series I’m trialing here at the Alexandrian. Back in 2012, I wrote a series of essays about Game Structures in RPGs. A major component of this discussion concerned scenario structures – the macro-game structures which allow the GM to prep different aspects of their campaign world and different experiences for their players.

One of the specific things I discussed was the fact that when you try to prep a scenario using the wrong scenario structure, the result can be painful for everybody involved. You can see this with clearly wrong-headed ideas like running dungeon exploration as a linear timeline of events; running conversations using combat initiative; or trying to have players navigate a city as if it were a dungeoncrawl (by prepping every street with a keyed encounter and having the players make intersection-by-intersection navigation decisions).

This makes it truly unfortunate that most GMs don’t have a robust library of scenario structures that they can use to build their campaigns. In my experience, the vast majority of GMs are limited to just three structures:

1. Railroads
2. Dungeoncrawls
3. Mysteries

In actual practice it’s usually worse than this because many GMs don’t really understand how to structure mysteries, so they end up defaulting back towards railroads for their mystery scenarios. And even running a dungeoncrawl is no longer a reliable skill for many DMs because the gateway game, D&D, is no longer teaching it as a skill: The actual procedure by which a dungeoncrawl is run was significantly obfuscated in 3^rd Edition and was completely removed from the rulebooks for 4^th Edition.

The result is that GMs generally don’t even consciously realize what scenario structures are, so they end up just kind of muddling around using gut instinct and a random amalgamation of half-realized scenario structures they’ve picked up through osmosis, most or all of which are just various flavors of railroading.

So I obviously think it’s really important for GMs to make the conscious decision to think about the scenario structures they use, and make sure they’re using the right scenario structures for the scenarios they want to run (or which they need to run because of the decisions their players are making). One of the things that storytelling games have been doing very well compared to RPGs over the last ten to fifteen years is, in fact, spelling out specific procedures for GMs to follow.

As part of that original series on Game Structures, I also talked about designing custom game structures, using the example of how to design structures for running a campaign about a starship plying interstellar trade routes.

With this series I want to challenge myself – and you! – to do more of this. The truth is that even one of these structures unlocks the ability to confidently prep and run dozens of scenarios. When I figured out node-based scenario design, it meant that I could suddenly design and run incredibly complex mystery scenarios as a matter of simple routine. When I figured out the party planning structure for effectively running large social events, it was like opening a door to a room that I’d never even knew existed. What else is hiding out around here, lurking just within arms reach and yet somehow completely beyond our grasp because we’re blind to the possibility?

So this series is going to look at specific types of experiences and say, “How would you prep this – and then run this – for an RPG?” The results won’t have been playtested (yet!), so it’s possible that what we come up with won’t work in actual practice. But the goal will be to get specific enough to provide a concrete framework for prepping any number of scenarios. Or, if we run into something truly challenging, enough detail to spark meaningful analysis and discussion (similar to my Thinking About Urbancrawls series, which did, eventually, result in a specific structure being created).

I suspect that most of our challenges will be prompted from linear mediums like films, books, and comics, but real life could also easily provide examples. (Hexcrawls, for example, were born as much from the inspiration of real life expeditions like Shackleton or Marco Polo as they were from the travel sequences of The Lord of the Rings.)

Of course, some would-be “challenges” will have obvious answers: Sherlock Holmes? Well, Three Clue Rule with a side-helping of node-based scenario design. Next!

We’ll be skipping those.

Our goal is also not to specifically ape our point (or points) of inspiration: Even if we could create such a narrowly focused scenario structure, what would be the point? What we’re interested in is finding a structure that will allow us to create any number of similar experiences, preferably with so much flexibility that the results might end up looking absolutely nothing like our original inspiration. (Think about how something like Moria becomes the incredibly flexible structure of the dungeoncrawl, which in turn expands into the generic structure of the location-crawl, which can end up being used to model a technologically-riddled skyscraper in a cyberpunk setting.) The points of inspiration exist to help us think about and unlock that structure.

I’m also hoping that seeing my process of working through these challenges will also prove more generally useful by demonstrating the process by which I create and prep these structures.

Finally, I really do want to be challenged here. So if you have some tricky situation or a narrative example of an experience you’d like to create for your group, throw it my way, either in the comments here or via Twitter.

We’ll be getting stated on Wednesday with…

Raiding the Death Star!

SCENARIO STRUCTURE CHALLENGES
Challenge #1: The Death Star Raid
Challenge #2: Race to the Prize
Challenge #3: McGuffin Keep-Away
Challenge #4: Heists
Challenge #5: The RPG Montage
Challenge #6: Innkeepers