The scene and act divisions in Hamlet pose a troubling scholastic problem.

A little history: The First Quarto and Second Quarto contain no separation of scenes or acts at all. In fact, the traditional five act structure that we typically associate with Shakespeare didn’t actually become popular until the reign of King James. In other words, at least half of Shakespeare’s plays (including Hamlet) weren’t written with the five act structure in mind.

By the time the First Folio was published in 1623, however, the five act structure wasn’t only popular, it had become the de facto standard of the theater. And someone involved in the publication of the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays decided to impose the five act structure onto his earlier works.

In the case of Hamlet they did a literally half-assed job of it: Scene and act divisions appear sporadically throughout the first act and a half of the play… and then they simply stop.

Full scene and act divisions didn’t appear in an edition of Hamlet until the 1676 Quarto. Unfortunately, these divisions are badly flawed.

The primary example can be found in the now-traditional division between scenes 3.4 and 4.1. To understand the error here, one must first understand that the 1676 Quarto was typeset from the Second Quarto, and the Second Quarto contained an error. After Hamlet leaves the stage with Polonius’ body, leaving the Queen alone in her closet, the Second Quarto has a stage direction which reads:

Enter King, and Queene, with Rosencraus and Guyldenstern.

The inclusion of the Queen in this stage direction is clearly in error: She’s already onstage and hasn’t left it. The First Folio corrects this error by removing the Queen from the stage direction. But the 1676 Quarto instead decided to start an entirely new scene and act (although it still neglected to provide an exit direction for the Queen).

Much like Hamlet’s ghost writing, this erroneous scene/act division has had an interpretive impact on the play. There have been many, many productions which have featured Gertrude leaving her closet to seek Claudius in some other corner of the castle. And among these, there have been more than a few that have taken an intermission at this juncture. This obviously disrupts Shakespeare’s intended pace for the play, but it also has a dramatic impact: Claudius entering Gertrude’s closet so closely on the heels of her meeting with Hamlet contributes to the pervasive sense of surveillance in Elsinore. And there is a significant performance difference in viewing the scene of the crime itself and only hearing Gertrude’s report of it at second-hand.

Most editors are leery of abandoning the traditional scene and act divisions in the text because it will mismatch scholastic references to the text. But since my primary concern is in providing an effective acting edition which is true to the original texts, I really felt I had no choice but to fix such an egregious error.

Of course, once I’d completely disrupted the act and scene numbering of the play, I couldn’t seen any good reason not to continue mucking about.

The scene divisions in the ASR script occur at any natural and indisputable clearing of the stage. This corrects the errors of the 1676 Quarto, but I’ve also taken the unusual step of eliminating the division between 1.4 and 1.5 to enforce my sense that these scenes are tightly knit in both time and place (and, furthermore, that Shakespeare intended the re-entrance of Hamlet and the Ghost to overlap with the exit of Horatio and Marcellus). (This also brings the text into agreement with the Folio divisions, which similarly “skip” from 1.4 to 2.1.)

The act divisions of the ASR script, however, are more radically divergent from the 1676 Quarto. In restructuring these divisions, I have chosen to adhere to the three-act structure inherent in the temporal arrangement of the play:

Act I: Two months after Hamlet, Sr.’s death. Ends after Hamlet speaks with Hamlet, Sr.’s ghost.

Act II, III, IV: Two months later. Ends when Hamlet is banished to England.

Act V: Some time later (perhaps two months again?). Ends when everybody in the play dies horribly.

The traditional scene/act divisions are still indicated in the text as emendations (for example, [Act I, Scene 5]) for those who need to reference them.

Originally posted on November 21st, 2010.

Tagline: Unique. Exciting. Different. Enthralling.

The skies are dim always since the Maker died.

The lights of Puppettown are the brightest beacon in all of Puppetland, and they shine all the time. Once the sun and the moon moved their normal courses through the heavens, but no more. The rise of Punch the Maker-Killer has brought all of nature to a stop, leaving it perpetually winter, perpetually night. Puppets all across Puppetland mourn the loss of the Maker, and curse the name of Punch – but not too loudly, lest the nutcrackers hear and come to call with a sharp rap-rap-rapping at the door.

There is no easy way to summarize Puppetland. It is a tour de force in twenty pages by one of the most talented creative forces the roleplaying industry has ever seen. It’s a masterpiece. Unique. Exciting. Different. Enthralling.

Merely reading the book is a powerful experience in its own right – one which is quickly matched only by the act of stepping into Puppetland on your own terms, using the evocatively original mechanics of this revolutionary game.

SETTING

Many years ago, there was a war in the real world. Many people were hurt and terrible things happened. The Maker saw all that was happening, and was sorrowful. His creations were the gentlest of creatures, and they were terribly hurt by these tragedies. The Maker made puppets, and in the face of chaos and violence he made a great creation: Maker’s Land, a place where all his puppets could go and be safe until the war was over.

Maker’s Land was a place of peace and prosperity – where all of the Maker’s puppets could be happy and content. But such perfection could not last. Deep within one of the puppets, Punch, a twisted darkness lived and thrived. One night Punch stole into the Maker’s home, and slew him.

With the Maker’s death, no humans lived in Maker’s Land. But the flesh lived, for Punch took the Maker’s face and made a cruel new face for himself. That wasn’t all he made, either: by morning, he had not just a new face, but six loyal puppet-servants sewn of the Maker’s flesh. These six, whom Punch called his boys, stood beside Punch as he announced to all the land that he was now the king. He was Punch the Maker-Killer, and his word was law.

Punch subjected Maker’s Land to a regime of terror and cruelty which was utterly alien to the innocent and naïve puppets. But where there is life, there is hope.

Across the great lake of milk and cookies lies the small village of Respite. The village is run by Judy, who once loved Punch but does so no more. She knows better than anyone the cruelties he is capable of. She knows the evil that lies in his twisted heart. When Punch killed the Maker, Judy was there and she caught the Maker’s last tear in a thimble of purest silver. With this tear the Maker can be brought back to life, Judy says. This is her fondest dream, and the Maker’s Tear her most cherished possession.

The world of Puppetland is the nightmare of a child, rendered through the lives of puppets who are more than puppets. It is a startlingly powerful vision, rendered in an intense barrage of prose, which instantly captures your heart’s imagination. It is a surgical blade slicing through the detritus of maturity and laying open the veins of your inner child.

SYSTEM

Puppetland is very specifically a game, and should be thought of as such. The object of the game is to defeat Punch the Maker-Killer and save Maker’s Land.

The game of Puppetland functions by way of three basic rules:

The First Rule: An hour is golden, but it is not an hour. Like an actual puppet show, a single session of Puppetland lasts exactly one hour – at the end of which the show comes to an end. When the next show begins, the puppets find themselves back home in bed (or wherever they happen to be staying at the moment). Note that this is very deliberately a measurement of time in the real world. In that hour of real world time, the Puppets may expend days of time within Maker’s Land. (For example, a puppet can say: “I sleep for a week!” and a week has gone by.)

The Second Rule: What you say is what you say. Every word an actor says during a session of Puppetland comes out of his puppet’s mouth (you can avoid this by standing up before speaking, but this should be avoided for if it is overused it will spoil the atmosphere of the game). This rule also reinforces a puppet show style of gameplay: You wouldn’t say, for example, “My puppet moves across the room and opens the door.” Instead, you would say, “I shall cross the room and answer the door!”

The Third Rule: The tale grows in the telling, and is being told to someone not present. This is a reminder of the play-style on which Puppetland subsists. The actors and the Puppetmaster should think of themselves as collaborators in the presentation of a puppet show to an audience which is not present.

CHARACTER CREATION

Character creation begins with the selection between one of the four types of puppets: Finger Puppets, Hand Puppets, Shadow Puppets, and Marionette Puppets. (Additional puppets can, of course, be added at your discretion.) Each puppet type is defined by three characteristics: What they are; what they can; and what they can not. For example:

Finger Puppets are: short and small, light, quick, and weak.
Finger Puppets can: move quickly, dodge things thrown at them even if they only see them coming at the last moment, and move very quietly
Finger Puppets cannot: kick things, throw things, or grab things because they have no legs or arms.

Next you name them. This is done by describing one specific characteristic of the puppet (for example, a puppet with red buttons might be called “Red Buttons”), and then adding to it a common name (for example, Sally Red Buttons or Nadja Purple Hat).

Finally you modify this puppet’s specific characteristics by adding three items to each list.

It should be fairly clear now that actions are adjudicated based on the very simple interaction between the various capabilities and limitations of various puppets: For example, a Finger Puppet can out run a Marionette Puppet (which “move slowly”) every time. That is, after all, the nature of puppets.

One important aspect of character creation which I have glanced over is the drawing of a character portrait. This is done right on the puppet page (character sheet), in the provided picture box which is divided by jigsaw puzzle lines. This picture is actual size — in other words, a player’s puppet can be no larger than the picture box, and you should be able to hold the portraits of two puppets up next to each other and instantly know which is larger than the other.

COMBAT

There is no specific combat system in Puppetland, per se, but there is a specific method of keeping track of “damage” done to a puppet. Basically you do so by filling in the jigsaw puzzle pieces in your puppet’s picture box (this has no relation to the portrait itself – you will use all of the puzzle pieces regardless of whether or not your puppet occupies all of the pieces in the box). You fill in a puzzle piece whenever:

1. The puppet does something it shouldn’t be able to do.

2. Something especially bad happens to the puppet (for example, Punch’s nutcrackers crunch off one of the puppet’s arms).

At the beginning of each new story puppets awake in their bed wholly healed from whatever their prior experiences – but puzzle pieces are never erased. Slowly, over time, the filled-in pieces will accumulate until finally all of the pieces are filled-in. Then the puppet dies (although they do get to live until the end of the current tale, they know their fate).

And that is the full extent of the rules for Puppetland — although some more general guidelines for the Puppetmaster are provided.

CONCLUSION

Bringing this review to a cogent conclusion is no easy task. The game of Puppetland exists on so many levels, with so much power, that I find it difficult to put my thoughts into an order by which they may be expressed.

First and foremost, if there is any doubt left in your mind, let me make it clear that I am all but shoving you out the door and down to your local gaming shop. You simply must buy this game.

In terms of judging Puppetland I can offer nothing except for adulation and congratulations. As I wrote above, the mere reading of the book is an experience well worth the cost of admission all by itself. The combination of poetic prose, rich world design, and potent imagery blows me away every time I come back to it (and I’ve come back to it several times).

Moving beyond the simple act of experiencing the book, I think what most impressed me – after I had given some thought to the matter — is the way in which Tynes effortlessly blends storytelling with gaming. Often when you hear the phrase “storytelling game” what it really means is that the game has been reduced to a set of muddy mechanics that serve “storytelling” by being easily fudged out of existence.

Not so with Puppetland. Here the game creates the story; and the story creates the game. In other words, the mechanics of gameplay are instrumental in the creation of a Puppetland story (note how the three basic rules encourage a very specific type of storytelling experience). On the flip side of the coin, the nature of a Puppetland story (heavily influenced, naturally, by the storytelling mechanics of puppet shows) are the foundation of the game’s mechanics. The symmetry reinforces itself. Brilliant.

Words fail me. Go look for yourself.

SOME MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

The review is done, but I find myself with some housekeeping left undone:

1. There are undoubtedly some of you who don’t understand what you just read. “What the hell is he talking about?” you’re saying. “There are no dice. There aren’t even any numbers! Obviously there are no mechanics!” As I wrote in my review of Baron Munchausen, you folks Just Don’t Get It(TM). Not all games require dice, and the fact that Puppetland succeeds at being a type of game we’ve never seen before does not make it any less a game. But I digress.

2. With Puppetland following on the figurative heels of Baron Munchausen I feel that Hogshead has successfully captured lightning in a bottle twice over – and proven that their New Style line of games is ripe with a potential which most publishers can only dream of. With the forthcoming conceptual sequels to these two games (Whodunnit for Baron Munchausen and Pantheon, a set of five(!) games designed by Robin D. Laws in a single package, for Puppetland), the future looks bright.

3. Puppetland is packaged back-to-back with Tynes’ Power Kill game. Rather than do both games the disservice of attempting to review them together, I am instead going to review them separately. The page count listed for Puppetland is for Puppetland alone; the price is cost of both games together.

4. Puppetland and Power Kill are both available for free from John Tynes’ website, Revland. That being said, I heartily recommend purchasing the book from Hogshead. The artwork of Raven Mimura which accompanies the text is incredibly powerful – and adds much to the experience.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: John Tynes
Company/Publisher: Hogshead Publishing, Ltd.
Cost: $5.95
Page Count: 20
ISBN: 1-57530-601-8

Originally Posted: 1-899749-20-9

I miss John Tynes.

Roleplaying games suffered a great loss when he made the transition to video games over a decade ago.

Puppetland received an incredibly successfuly Kickstarter campaign just a few months ago, however. I’m incredibly excited to see this beautiful game returned to print.

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

Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Note, however, that both parts of this equation are important: The choice must be negated and the reason it’s being negated is because the GM is trying to create a specific outcome. The players must try to get off the train and the GM has to lock the doors.

A simple failure to achieve a desired outcome is not railroading: If the doors are unlocked, but the players can’t figure out how the door handles work that’s not railroading. For example, a player might want to hit an ogre with his sword. If he fails his attack roll, that’s not railroading. (If the GM secretly changes the ogre’s AC so that the PC misses, that’s railroading.) If the PC tries to break down an adamantine door with a fluffy pillow, that’s still not railroading even if the GM says they have no chance of success.

It’s also not railroading if the GM has a preconceived outcome, but doesn’t negate player choices in order to make it happen. As an extreme example, consider a campaign where the PCs are FBI agents in New York during World War II. On May 2^nd, 1945, the newspaper headlines declare that Adolf Hitler died on April 30^th. The GM, of course, knew that Hitler was going to die on April 30^th long before it happened, but the newspaper headlines are not railroading the PCs.

The same remains true on a more intimate level: The GM might make a note that the beautiful dame Jane Adams is going to contact one of the FBI agents on May 15^th with information about a KGB operation targeting Manhattan Project scientists. Unless the PC deliberately goes into hiding for some reason, it’s still not railroading when Jane Adams shows up.

Finally, choices having consequences is also not railroading. If a PC punches somebody in the nose and then they punch the PC back, that’s not railroading. If a player says, “I’m going to hop on I-94 and drive from Minneapolis to Chicago.” Then it’s not railroading when the GM says, “Along the way, you pass through Eau Claire.”

In fact, choices having consequences is the exact opposite of a railroad. Railroading makes a choice meaningless. Consequences make a choice meaningful.

(Of course, not every consequence is a negative one: If the PCs piss off the Red Dragon Gang, the gang might retaliate. But it’s also possible that the PCs might be given a medal by the mayor who also asks them to do a favor for him. Or they might be contacted by the Red Dragon Gang’s rivals who want to hire them as enforcers. And so forth. None of that is railroading.)

RAILROAD BY DESIGN

Railroading, in the purest sense of the term, is something that happens at the gaming table: It is the precise moment at which the GM negates a player’s choice.

In practice, of course, the term has bled over into scenario prep. We talk about “railroaded adventures” all the time, by which we generally mean linear scenarios which are designed around the assumption that the PCs will make specific choices at specific points in order to reach the next part of the scenario. If the PCs don’t make those choices, then the GM has to railroad them in order to continue using the scenario as it was designed.

However, not all linear design was created equal. And it’s not really accurate to describe all linear scenario design as being a “railroad”.

Linear scenarios are built around a predetermined sequence of events and/or outcomes.

Consider a simple mystery:

Scene 1: The PCs come home and discover that their house has been broken into and an arcane relic stolen from their safe. They need to figure out who did it, which they can do by analyzing fingerprints, looking at their neighbor’s surveillance camera, asking questions around town to see who took the job, or casting a divination spell.

Scene 2: Having discovered that Jimmy “Fast-Fingers” Hall was responsible for the break-in, the PCs track him down. They need to figure out who hired him, which they can do by interrogating him, following him, analyzing his bank statements to figure out who paid him, or hacking his e-mail.

Scene 3: Having discovered that Bobby Churchill, a local mob boss, was the guy who hired Jimmy, the PCs need to get their relic back. They can do that by beating Bobby up, agreeing to do a job for him, or staging a covert heist to get it out of his vault.

That’s a fairly linear scenario: House to Jimmy to Bobby. But because we used the Three Clue Rule to provide a multitude of paths from one event to the next, it’s very unlikely that a GM running this scenario will need to railroad his players. The sequence of events is predetermined, but the outcome of each scene is not.

Non-linear scenarios do not require specific outcomes or events, allowing freedom of player choice.

Linear scenario design and non-linear scenario design exist on a spectrum. Generally speaking, requiring specific events (“you meet an ogre in the woods”) is less restrictive than requiring specific outcomes (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him”). And the more specific the outcome required, the more likely it is that the GM will have to railroad the players to make it happen (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him and the killing blow has to be delivered by the Rose Spear of Vallundria so that the ogre’s ghost can come back and serve the PC at the Black Gates of Goblin Doom”).

With that being said, it’s often quite trivial for an experienced GM to safely assume that a specific event or outcome is going to happen. For example, if a typical group of heroic PCs are riding along a road and they see a young boy being chased by goblins it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll take action to rescue the boy. The more likely a particular outcome is, the more secure you are in simply assuming that it will happen. That doesn’t mean your scenario is railroaded, it just means you’re engaging in smart prep.

My point here is that you can’t let fear of a potential railroad make you throw away your common sense when it comes to prioritizing your prep. This, by the way, leads to one of the most potent tools in the GM’s arsenal:

What are you planning to do next session?

It’s a simple question, but the answer obviously gives you certainty. It lets you focus your prep with extreme accuracy because you can make very specific predictions about what your players are going to do and those predictions will also be incredibly likely to happen.

Where you get into trouble is when your scenario expects something which is both very specific and also very unlikely.

For example, in the Witchfire Trilogy from Privateer Press, there’s a moment where the PCs have all the information necessary to realize that a specific NPC is the bad guy they’ve been looking for. This makes it incredibly likely that the PCs will simply confront the bad guy. The author doesn’t want that, though: He wants the PCs to put her under surveillance and trail her back to her secret hideout. So he throws up a bunch of painfully contrived roadblocks in an effort to stop the PCs from doing the thing they are nevertheless overwhelmingly likely to do. (So You Want to Write a Railroad? is an almost endless litany of even more egregious design failures from another published scenario.)

THE RAILROAD EXCUSES

Another way of thinking about this is that the more specific and unlikely the necessary outcome, the more fragile your scenario becomes: It will break if the PCs deviate even slightly from your predetermined sequence. Once the scenario breaks, you’ll have to resort to railroading in order to fix it. This is why I often refer to railroading as a broken technique seeking to fix a broken scenario.

It’s fairly typical, for example, to hear someone say, “I only railroad my players if it’s really important.” And when you delve a little deeper, you virtually always discover that “really important” is a synonym for the GM making sure their predetermined outcome happens. These are literally people saying that they need to railroad because they designed a railroad.

Another common rationalization for railroading is that GMs have to use it in order to keep problem players in line. However, if your relationship with your players is that they’re naughty children who are testing their limits and you’re a parental figure that somehow needs to keep them in line, then your relationship with your players is fundamentally broken. More generally, what you’re talking about are issues outside of the game. Attempting to handle those issues with in-game behavior modifications is simply dysfunctional. It’s no different than if a player at your table was cheating or if they poured a drink over the head of another player: These are all problems which require intercession. But none of them are going to be solved through railroading.

One specific example of this is often cited as an exception, however: Behavior which is deliberately disruptive through the agency of the game world. For example, the guy who tries to assassinate the king when the PCs are called in for an audience. Ultimately, however, this example only cycles back to the previous two: Either the guy involved is a jackass (which is a problem that needs to be solved outside of the game) or this is really only a “problem” insofar as it disrupts your preconceived notion of how the royal audience was supposed to play out (which means we’ve arrived back at “I need to railroad them in order to maintain my railroad”).

(Note, too, how often these “problems” can quickly be solved by having the game world respond naturally to the circumstances: Crazy McGee has just assassinated the king. What happens next? Well, the king’s guard is going to try to arrest them. If they escape, there’s going to be a manhunt. Then there’s going to be a power struggle to fill the vacuum. The other PCs need to decide whether to help hunt down their former comrade or help him escape. There may be a rebel group who concludes that the PCs are on their side because of the assassination. And so forth. That all sounds like interesting stuff.)

Nobody minds the railroad if the destination is Awesome Town!

The theory here is that if you offer a big enough carrot, nobody will mind being hit by the stick a few times.

There’s a fair amount of truth to that, but what always strikes me about this popular meme is the extraordinary amount of hubris it demonstrates. See, any time that a player chooses to do something, that implicitly means that it’s something that they want. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they should automatically succeed at everything they attempt, but if you’re artificially negating their choice in order to enforce your preconceived outcome, what you’re saying is, “I know what you want better than you do.”

Which might be true. But I’m willing to bet that 99 times out of 100, it isn’t.

The railroad creates specific situations. The goal is to see how the PCs react to those specific situations.

This is a more nuanced and deliberate application of railroading techniques. The idea is that the choices you’re interested in are those made in specific moments. The methods by which individual moments are reached are of less interest, and, in fact, it’s more important to create specific moments of particular effectiveness than it is to enable choice outside of those moments. You’re basically stripping out the strategic choices of the players in order to create intense tactical experiences.

In practice, however, railroads warp the decision-making process of the players. When you systematically strip meaningful choice from them, they stop making choices and instead start looking for the railroad tracks.

So railroading PCs into a situation to see what choice they’ll make doesn’t actually work: Having robbed them of free agency in order to get them there, you’ve fundamentally altered the dynamic of the situation itself. You’ll no longer see what their reaction is; you’ll only see what they think you want their reaction to be.

I suspect that GMs who habitually railroad have difficulty seeing this warping of the decision-making process because it’s the only thing they’re used to. But it becomes glaringly obvious whenever I get the players they’ve screwed up: Nothing is more incoherent than a player trying to figure out where the railroad is when there’s no railroad to be found.

For example, I had a group who spent all their time trying to figure out which NPC was the GM NPC they were supposed to be following around because that was the method their last GM had used to lead them around by the nose. Since the scenario I was running for them revolved around a conspiracy with multiple factions who were all more than happy to use the PCs to achieve their own agendas the result was… bizarre. (Unfortunately, I only figured out what had gone so horribly wrong in the postmortem.)

Of course, it gets even more obvious once the players start demonstrating Abused Gamer Syndrome.

Go to Part 2: Methods of the Railroad

THE RAILROADING MANIFESTO
Part 2: Methods of the Railroad
Part 3: Penumbra of Problems
Part 4: Chokers
Part 5: More Chokers

Addendum: Random Railroads
Addendum: I Want To Be Railroaded
Abused Gamer Syndrome
How a Railroad Works

Recently I’ve been watching a really nifty web-series from Double Fine called Dev Play: They grab game designers and play through classic video games with them. The best episodes are the ones featuring designers playing their own games, like this one of John Romero playing through Doom:

Watching that brought back fond memories of Doom II. One of the things that you could, of course, do with the Doom games was designing your own levels. And way back in 1994, that’s exactly what I did.

In order to really understand and appreciate the vintage deathmatch map I’m about to share with you, though, you have to understand something about the weapon design of Doom II (which I still maintain had the absolute best weapons balance of any deathmatch ever designed). Specifically, you have to understand the quirks of the BFG-9000.

With this gun you could rain the destruction of green plasma down upon your enemies. But for a significant period of time, the exact mechanism by which the BFG-9000 worked was largely unknown. It wasn’t really until Tony Fabris, after painful experimentation, released his “BFG FAQ” that people really began to appreciate just how clever this weapon was. The short version is that the BFG-9000 deals damage in two steps:

First, there is the primary plasma ball. The plasma ball deals a ton of damage, but often not enough damage to outright kill the target.

Second, a moment after the primary plasma ball detonates, twenty invisible traces are sent out from the player who fired the BFG-9000. Each of these traces deal less damage, but the closer you are to the person who fired the gun the more of the traces will hit you. (The damage from these traces also decreases over distance.)

Note that the key feature here is that the traces emanate from where you are when the detonation happens, not the location from which you fired a gun. That allows you to, for example, fire the BFG-9000 at a wall, step out from behind the corner, and allow the blast traces to kill someone.

BFG WONDERLAND

Which brings us to the deathmatch level I designed, which was specifically designed to be an arena for high-skill BFG-9000 maneuvers. As I wrote in the original data file for the level:

BFG WONDERLAND is composed of a main central room — from which four corridors lead off. The rocket launcher is available along the northern passage, shotguns available along the eastern. If you take the western passage you’ll find a plasma rifle and a door leading to an ammo dump which will be discussed later.

The central challenge of the level, however, is the southern passage — which is several thousand units long. At the end of it is the BFG9000. Due to the great length of this corridor (and the general openness of the rest of the level) the BFG does, indeed, become a “thinking man’s weapon”. Dodging the green ball as it comes down the corridor and then getting behind your opponent before the ball detonates or racing after your ball because otherwise your opponent will be too far away before it detonates makes this an “intelligent” level with instantly deadly consequences for mistakes.

Many, many hours were spent dancing around the southern passage in LAN deathmatches. Maybe next time you get a hankering to pull out Doom II, you might do the same.

BFG WONDERLAND

One of the problems a lot of RPG sourcebooks have is that they don’t include enough practical, game-able material: The type of stuff that you can actually bring to the table and start playing with. Over the past few years, however, I’ve started leveraging a lot more utility out of my RPG setting sourcebooks by simply rolling back the clock.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain what I mean is by way of example.

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE: DROPLET

In the Eclipse Phase universe, the Pandora Gates allow humanity to skip across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds. The Gatecrashing supplement details a selection of the many worlds which lie beyond the gates, including the world dubbed Droplet.

One of the cool things about Eclipse Phase is that Posthuman Studios has licensed the entire game under a Creative Commons license. So if you want to follow along, you can download the Gatecrashing PDF for free from Rob Boyle’s site and follow along. (The section on Droplet starts on page 89.)

The core thing to know about Droplet is that it was once home to an intelligent race that humanity refers to as the Amphibs. The Amphibs gave rise to a technological civilization about 1 million years ago and then abruptly died out. They left remarkably durable ruins scattered all across the planet, but the most significant Amphib artifact is the titanic Toadstool:

TOADSTOOL

This unique alien construct rises from the floor of a shallow ocean, just offshore from Davis Island, approximately 600 kilometers from the Droplet Gate. It is shaped like a mushroom with a stalk 80 meters in diameter, rising 90 meters above the ocean’s surface and extending 80 meters down to the ancient volcanic bedrock that makes up that coastline. Above this “stem” is a flattened ovoid, 460 meters in diameter and 110 meters thick. It is clearly artificial and seamless, made of unknown but sturdy composite materials. After detailed examinations, scientists now believe this structure is over a billion years old, likely established well before the evolution of the Amphibs, when Droplet itself was a much different planet. Despite its age, the Toadstool appears to be in perfect condition, as if it was created no more than a few years ago. Close scrutiny has revealed that its walls swarm with specialized nanotechnology that keep it in perfect repair, removing algae-like biological growths that would normally accumulate from the ocean.

Researchers also assume that these nanomachines— or some other unknown mechanism—are responsible for the fact that the stem of the Toadstool is only 200 meters from the shore despite a billion years of erosion and slowly shifting geology. Though the Toadstool has proven to be impenetrable to all forms of scanning, a careful examination of the underlying rock indicates that this structure is mostly hollow. So far, all attempts to gain entrance to the Toadstool have failed. The walls are made of exceptionally hard materials and repair themselves within moments of any damage being done. No one has been willing to use nuclear weapons or other similarly devastating means to breach this construct’s walls, since the goal is to get inside and not to destroy it. Extensive Amphib ruins have been found in the vicinity of the Toadstool. The native life forms clearly built a large city around it and considered the Toadstool important to their culture. There is no evidence that they ever learned more about it than transhumanity currently knows, but simple graphics of the Toadstool can be found on many of their items that were in daily use.

Amongst the Amphib ruins which surround the Toadstool there are also a number of ruins belonging to another extinct race known as the Iktomi. Gatecrashers have found Iktomi ruins all over the galaxy, but it’s quite unusual to find them on Droplet because the physical conditions of the planet are completely dissimilar to their other habitats. The most logical conclusion is that the Iktomi were just as fascinated by the Toadstool as humanity is. As with their other sites, however, the Iktomi appear to have vanished a few thousand years ago, leaving only their dream shells.

The other odd thing about the Toadstool is that async psi-sensitives find its proximity intensely unpleasant.

USING DROPLET

And that’s pretty much it as far as Droplet is concerned.

If you wanted to use Droplet in your campaign, one way of doing that, of course, would be to figure out what happens next: What is the secret of the Toadstool? Does it manifest its purpose in some terrible way? Are there hidden archives within the Iktomi ruins which might shed light upon it? And so forth.

These approaches, however, take only minimal advantage of the material found in the Gatecrashing supplement. The stuff you’re creating is certainly being built on the foundation of the material found in the sourcebook, but the active material — the stuff you’re really using in your game — is all being created from scratch.

There’s nothing wrong with simply standing on the shoulders of giants and creating new stuff, of course, but the other way you could approach Droplet would be to simply rewind the timeline. Back things up to the point before humanity had found Droplet and then have the PCs step through as the first explorers of this unknown world. Now all of the stuff described in the supplement becomes active fodder for your game:

• The PCs get to stumble through the Amphib ruins surrounding the Pandora Gate and become the discoverers of a lost alien race.
• They’re the ones who discover an Amphib map guiding them to the Toadstool.
• They get to probe the Toadstool and discover its strange properties.
• It’s a PC async who first experiences the “blinding stimuli” of the Toadstool.

And so forth.

After you’ve leveraged all that material, of course, you’re now free to continue building on that foundation in exactly the same way that you could before. But now that foundation has been made intensely personal for your and your players: They lived that stuff. So when a Go-Nin team comes through the Pandora Gate and tries to stake a claim to the Toadstool, the conflict which erupts between the scientific missions the PCs have been sponsoring and the hypercorporate stooges becomes intensely meaningful to them.

SELECTIVE REWINDING

In the case of Droplet we’re basically rewinding the whole setting. That’s a technique that can actually work in a lot of RPG settings, but it’s also quite possible to take just one aspect of the setting and back it up half a step.

For example, in Shadows of Asia for Shadowrun, we can read about how Queen Michelle of Shaanxi rose to power by funneling support from her sanctuary in England to the rebels fighting the military junta in her homeland. We don’t have to wind back the entirety of the Shadowrun setting in order to back the clock up a couple of ticks and have the PCs running Michelle’s guns.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I think what’s going on here is some combination of two factors:

First, the creation of an RPG setting is an inherently narrative creation. And we have a strong desire to bring our narratives to a conclusion.

Second, most of us live in a world that we largely perceive as as status quo: The United States government was here yesterday. Our job was here yesterday. They will still be here tomorrow. (Of course, we all occasionally experience big changes in our lives. But the change generally comes to an end and then we’re in another form of status quo.)

But when it comes to an RPG, the status quo is generally not very useful. What we’re interested in is the cusp. The thing that is about to happen (or which is currently happening) that the PCs can get caught up in.

Some setting supplements, of course, are better at this than others. For example, I had Heavy Gear: Life on Caprice readily to hand as I was writing this up and I flipped through it looking for a good example I could use. I couldn’t find anything, though, because every single gazetteer entry seemed to make a point of describing what was happening right now. For supplements like that, this tip becomes irrelevant. They’ve already got you perched on the cusp. You just need to push!