Yesterday I was talking about the different types of characters in a scene and why you should think twice (and preferably three times) before having the PCs be anything other than the lead in a given scene. Before that, I was talking about setting agendas as part of scene-framing.

As an example of how NOT to frame a scene, I just got done reading the Harlequin campaign supplement for Shadowrun.

SPOILERS AHEAD

After a series of adventures, the agendas of the penultimate scene in the entire campaign are, “Will Jane Foster help Harlequin?” and “Can Harlequin complete the ritual of chal’han against Ehran?” Neither Foster nor Harlequin, you’ll note, is a PC. Most of the PCs are relegated to being extras for this scene, although PC spellcasters could arguably be called features because they’re allowed to assist in the ritual (although they’ll have no impact on its success or failure).

This transitions us to the ultimate scene of the campaign in which the agenda becomes, “Will Harlequin or Ehran win their duel?” and the GM is specifically told to do everything in his power to prevent the PCs from having any impact on the outcome of the duel.

It’s a terrible way to end a campaign.

The argument can be made, of course, that sometimes reality just works like this: Sometimes you’re side-lined and all you can do is watch other people make their decisions. Let’s ignore, for the moment, that everything about this situation has been designed and therefore could have been designed differently. (If a situation like this had arisen organically through simulationist play, for example, it might be very different.) Instead, take a moment to consider how easily you can shift the agenda of these scenes without changing the given circumstances of the scene.

Instead of, “Will Jane Foster help Harlequin?” the agenda becomes, “Will the PCs turn Jane Foster over to Harlequin?”

Instead of, “Can Harlequin complete the ritual of chal’han against Ehran?” we have, “Can the PC spellcasters contain the magical backlash from the failed ritual?”

Instead of, “Will Harlequin or Ehran win their duel?” we say, “Will the PCs help one of them and, if so, which one?”

The interesting thing about this is that even if you still railroad the outcome of the scene (which I don’t recommend), these re-framed agendas are still clearly superior: Even if Harlequin just takes Jane Foster after the PCs refuse to turn her over, the ethical struggle and moral debate that results from focusing the scene on the decisions of the PCs still tells us something really interesting about the PCs and can serve as a crucible by which they can express or grow their characters.

Harlequin’s ritual is doomed to fail and he’ll definitely save himself by reflecting the energy into a dormant volcano and causing it to explode (which, I’ll admit is pretty cool), but focusing the scene on the PCs trying to contain the rest of the magical backlash allows them to actually contribute to the proceedings.

Similarly, focusing the scene on the PCs’ decision of which morally ambiguous power-player they’re going to help is not only interesting in its own right, but will also have potentially huge consequences for their future. (Who do they make an enemy? Who do they make an ally?) And that’s true even if it turns out that Harlequin still wins the duel and cuts off Ehran’s ear no matter what choice they make.

Go to Part 1

Now that you know what the scene is about and the bang you’re using to launch it, you need to fill it with content. (Although, to be fair, the distinction we’re drawing here is not a hard-and-fast one: By the time you’ve set the agenda and the bang of a scene, you probably already know a lot about it.)

The process of filling a scene with content is an artistic one. And, like most artistic processes, there’s a virtually unlimited variation in the methods people use to do it. I’m not even particularly consistent in how I approach it and I actually think it’s a mistake to treat it as something that can be hard-coded. So I’m going to toss out a whole bunch of ideas that I personally find useful. Maybe you’ll find them useful, too. But regardless of that, you should poke around and see what other people have to say about it. And you should give yourself permission to experiment and really play around until you start getting a feel for what works for you and for your players.

First, however, there’s an all-important maxim:

You may know where the scene begins, but you don’t know where it ends.

You’re not writing a book or filming a movie. Unlike a traditional author, you may know where you’re starting off, but you’ve got no idea where the journey will end. Viewed from one perspective, this is a major limitation. But if you look at it from another angle, it’s a major opportunity.

ELEMENTS OF A SCENE

Here’s my basic philosophy: Take all the elements of the scene – the who, what, where, when – and fill those elements with all sorts of toys that both you and the PCs can play with.

(You could also think of these as “tools” that you use to build the scene. But, personally, I find the imagery of the toy – a thing which is meant to be played with; which becomes the focal point for a liberated imagination – to be far more evocative and, thus, useful.)

Hand-in-hand with this philosophy is the idea that the more flexible these toys become the more useful they will prove. If you include something which only has a single utility, that’s pretty good. But if you include something that can be used eight different ways, then you’re really cooking with gas.

(The good news is that your players are probably a gaggle of creativity: If you let them, they’ll take even the most boring stuff and spin it in ways you never imagined. But the key here is if you let them: Remain open to the players twisting or even completely inverting the people and things you include in the scene. Don’t let yourself get locked down on a preconceived notion of how things are “supposed” to work out.)

LOCATION: This is the “when” and the “where” of the scene. It’s the immediate environment for the actions of the scene and it can be either claustrophobic (“the back room at Bill’s”) or absurdly panoramic (“the highways of Texas”), depending on the nature of the scene and the characters in it. Ideally, remembering that minimizing contextualization makes for a better bang, you want to keep things short and sweet while simultaneously maximizing the number of toys that your players can grab.

A few rules of thumb that I use for crafting evocative descriptions as a GM:

Three of Five: Think about your five senses. Try to include three of them in each description. Sight is a gimme and Taste will rarely apply, so that means picking a couple out of Hearing, Smell, and Touch. (Remember that you don’t actually have to touch something in order to intuit what it might feel like if you did.)

Two Cool Details: Try to include two irrelevant-but-cool details. These are details that aren’t necessary for the scene to work, but are still cool. It’s the broken cuckoo clock in the corner; the slightly noxious odor with no identifiable source; the graffiti scrawled on the wall; the bio-luminescent fungus; etc.

Three-by-Three: Delta’s 1-2-(3)-Infinity talks about psychological research demonstrating that repeating something three times takes up the same space in our brains as repeating something infinitely. Thus, once you’ve hit the third item in a sequence, any additional items in that sequence are redundant.

Extrapolating from this, for minor scenes you can describe three things each with a single detail. At that point, you’ve filled up the “infinity queue” in your players’ brains and their imaginations will impulsively fill in the finer details of the scene you’ve evoked. For “epic” scenes, use the full three-by-three: Describe three different elements with three details each.

CHARACTERS: This is the “who” of the scene. I find it useful to conceptually break the characters present in a scene down into three categories: Leads, Features, and Extras.

Leads are the major characters in the scene. They’re the characters who are most affected by the agenda of the scene or who are capable of having the greatest impact on the agenda of the scene.

Features are the supporting cast of the scene. They wield an influence over the Leads; or provide crucial information; or are important resources in whatever conflict is being fought.

Extras are scene-dressing. They might find themselves being taken hostage or appealed to for mob justice, but they can usually just be thought of as part of the location instead of as active agents in the scene.

PCs in a scene are almost always leads. You may find it useful to think of some PCs as being the leads in the scene and the others PCs as features (because the agenda of the scene is primarily of interest to the former and of less interest to the latter), but if you’ve got a scene where none of the PCs are leads you might want to take a moment and triple-check what you’re doing. Unless you’ve got some amazingly good reason for side-lining the PCs, it’s probably a good idea to find a way of reframing the agenda of the scene.

(Off-hand, the only example I can think of is a situation where the PCs are deliberately not participating in a scene. For example, maybe they’re eavesdropping on a conversation. Although even then you should double-check and make sure that a secondary agenda in the scene isn’t about the PCs avoiding detection. And then triple-check to make sure that the scene isn’t really about something like, “Will the PCs stop Roberta from confessing her love to Charles?”)

CONFLICT vs. COLOR: The “what” of the scene is largely encapsulated by the agenda of the scene, but in actually running the scene I often find it useful to categorize the scene as either being primarily about conflict or primarily about color.

Conflict scenes are about two or more characters who want mutually exclusive things. The result might be a firefight, a formal duel, a boardroom takeover, a political debate, a psychic assault, or a torrid argument. Whatever form it takes, though, heads are going to butt and (in a roleplaying game) dice are probably going to be rolled.

Color scenes, on the other hand, are about exposition, planning, and/or preparation. They’re a time for character development; for showing what the PCs are like (and how they relate to each other) when fireballs aren’t flying at their heads. They’re the scenes when your crew studies the blueprints and calls in their favors. They also provide a valuable contrast – a negative space to highlight the positive space; a moment of calm to emphasize the frenetic chase.

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, color scenes are also where the facts get established which will allow you to minimize contextualization for later bangs. (For example, if you know a character’s long-lost brother is going to show up on their doorstep next week it’s more effective to seed information about the brother into a series of scenes leading up to that bang instead of trying to communicate the full meaning of the bang in the same moment that the brother arrives.)

With all of that being said, most of the time you’re going to want your scenes to be about conflict: Conflict is usually interesting and meandering exposition is usually boring, so try to find ways to build your exposition into conflict. (For example, you might have a scene where the PC’s mother is angry because she feels like the PC has stopped caring about his missing brother.) This frequently allows you to have your cake and eat it too.

Addendum: How NOT to Frame a Scene (Starring Harlequin)

Go to Part 4: Closing the Frame

There are three ways to foreshadow in RPGs:

(1) Strew the foreshadowing around liberally. If the PCs might go to location A or they might go to location B, foreshadow both of them: Whichever one they go to has now been foreshadowed and they’ll think you’re brilliant. The foreshadowing for the other will simply be irrelevant trivia or, at worst, red herrings.

(2) Retroactive foreshadowing. After a few sessions, look at what the PCs have actually done / experienced. Now, take some of that stuff (particularly stuff they liked) and use it as the building blocks for prepping the next chunk of the campaign. (For example, maybe they were fascinated by the small jade statue of a knight that you included as a piece of random treasure. Make the next major villain in the campaign a knight who wears green armor.)

(3) Vague foreshadowing. Simply make statements that would be true or significant regardless of the specifics of a given event. (For example, when Gandalf says, “My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many – yours not least.” Tolkien is very specifically foreshadowing the role he knows Gollum will play in saving Frodo’s life and completing the quest to destroy the ring. But even if Tolkien were just a GM who had no idea where the story was going at that point, he could just as easily have Gandalf say that. The statement, after all, boils down to nothing more than saying, “Gollum is going to do something and this quest is pretty important.” Which is pretty much a given since, at that point in the story, Gollum is already following them.)

If it’s all just a trick, why do it? Well, foreshadowing can be used to give a sense of cohesion and completeness to the campaign. It can also invest the players with a feeling that what their characters are doing is important. It can also be used to reinforce themes. Basically, you can use foreshadowing in a roleplaying game to achieve all (or most) of the things that it can be used for in other mediums; the only difference is that the non-linear nature of a good RPG scenario forces a different execution of the foreshadowing.

Quick update for backers: The first batch of refunds was supposed to go out this week. That didn’t happen. The problem is that PayPal is dawdling in confirming the transfer of funds from my checking account to my PayPal account. Until the money is actually in my Paypal account, I can’t send it to you.

What they’re doing here is holding onto the money for a few extra days so that they can earn a little more interest out of it. I’d forgotten how much of a pain-in-the-ass PayPal is. In any case, PayPal is telling me that the money should clear in the next 2-3 business days. So my expectation is that the first batch of refunds will actually clear some time next week.

And if you were an L&L backer and you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here and follow the instructions.

(Note: The first half dozen or so people who responded to my e-mail have received their refunds. I sent those out using the small balance I had standing in my account.)

Exit, Pursued by a Monster – Alex Drummond

I did a series of teasers for the Art of Legends & Labyrinths awhile back at a time when I thought we were gearing up for the eminent release of the book, but it ran aground on the rocky shores of the project. I’ve still got a half dozen or so pieces that were completed but never previewed and I’m going to go ahead and roll those out now for everyone to see.

One of my goals for the art in Legends & Labyrinths was to have it representative of what actually happens at the gaming table. It’s one of the reasons that I offered an illustration based on a backer’s campaign journal as one of the reward levels for the 8-Bit funding campaign: I wanted to have the visuals of the game drawn from actual play.

This piece is one example of that. Here’s what the original art order looked like:

A cavern which has been excavated to reveal the ancient remains of a city. The surroundings have the feeling of great age; the dust of Sumerian clay. We are looking toward an ancient tower half-embedded into the cavern wall.

On the floor of the cavern in front of this tower a huge, mob-like melee is raging: Tor, Elestra, Ranthir, Tee, and Nasira (or some selection thereof) are fighting large, ogre-like creatures with ebon black skin who are being commanded by a small cadre of robed cultists. (These are the same guys Tee was about to ambush in the illustration for page 67.)

One moment ago, Agnarr leaped through the upper window of the tower – from the third floor or thereabouts; high up. It’s like a stunt out of an action movie and Agnarr looks totally cool in mid-air; like some sort of combination of Conan, James Bond, and John McClane.

What we’re looking at right now is a massive creature which has smashed through that window and large chunks of the wall around it. It looks like a sandworm from Dune except that its mouth is rimmed with needle-like teeth and it’s got two lanky arms thrusting out from its sides.

So: Tower window being smashed open; chunks of masonry hanging in the air. And a giant worm chasing Agnarr in a race to a floor which is filled with a crazy melee.

For those following along at home with the Black Book Beta, this piece was intended to appear on page 74 (replacing the photoshopped placeholder of the volcanic dragon).