Go to Part 1 – Click for PDF

Where the encumbrance by stone system really comes alive is the equipment sheet, which basically makes tracking encumbrance as easy as listing what you’re carrying.

Encumbrance Rule: You can write down your character’s encumbrance rule (based on their Strength score) in the spaces provided in the lower right corner.

Armor/Shield/Weapons: The assumption is that your currently equipped armor, shield, and weapons will be listed for reference on the front of your character sheet. You can jot down the current encumbrance value for these items in the spaces provided in the lower right hand corner of the sheet.

Coins/Gems: These are listed in the upper right and their encumbrance is calculated as shown. (To quench the “I have one coin and it apparently weighs a ton” complaints, you can allow PCs carrying 20 or fewer coins to list them as “loose change” in the miscellaneous equipment section.)

Heavy Items: This section is for listing anything that qualifies as a heavy item (i.e., weighs 1 or more stones all by itself).

Miscellaneous Items: This column is the heart of the sheet. Simply list everything you’re carrying in bundles of 20 or less. When you’re done, you can immediately see how many stones of miscellaneous equipment you’re carrying. Bam.

Add Misc. Equipment + Heavy Items + Coins/Gems + Armor/Shield/Weapons to determine your Total Encumbrance. In practice, this is all single digit arithmetic and adjusting your encumbrance on-the-fly during an adventure is practically automatic.

Moving equipment to your horse? Picked up a bunch of treasure? Throwing away your shield in order to run away from the goblin horde at your heels? It can all be done in seconds.

TIPS & TRICKS

Stored Items: This section of the sheet is for anything you own that isn’t currently being carried by your character.

Inventory of Gems: The specific value of gems are tracked separately to make calculating coin/gem encumbrance easier.

Containers: This area is used for listing containers in use (which don’t count against encumbrance). Empty containers should be listed as miscellaneous equipment. There are two easy methods for tracking which items are in which container:

1. List miscellaneous equipment slot numbers next to the container.
2. Put a symbol (star, circle, square, etc.) next to the container, then mark items in the container with the same symbol.

Tracking Supplies: The intention is that you list your supplies in the miscellaneous equipment section, but you can quickly check off supplies used on the trackers. At some point of convenience, you can go through your equipment list, adjust the totals, and then erase the supply checklists to start anew.

The Blank Space: After making the sheet I kept expecting something to crop up that I’d forgotten. (At which point I’d have this convenient blank space to slot it into.) After a several years, nobody has suggested anything. (Let me know if you think of something.)

DESIGN NOTES

The goal of the encumbrance by stone system is to simplify the encumbrance rules to the point where:

1. It is virtually effortless to track encumbrance and, therefore,
2. The rules can be used to meaningful effect on-the-fly during actual gameplay.

All the way back in 1974, this type of gameplay was discussed. In Volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, for example, we can read:

If the adventurers choose to flee, the monster will continue to pursue in a straight line as long as there is not more than 90 feet between the two. (…) Distance will open or close dependent upon the relative speeds of the two parties, men according to their encumbrance and monsters according to the speed given on the Monster Table in Volume II. In order to move faster characters may elect to discard items such as treasure, weapons, shields, etc. in order to lighten encumbrance.

But in actual practice the encumbrance rules were such a pain in the ass — and have remained such a pain in the ass — that either (a) they’re not used at all or (b) the amount of calculation required to adjust your encumbrance is sufficiently onerous that no one is going to try to do it in the middle of a chase scene.

When I started using the encumbrance by stone system, however, I almost immediately saw explicit encumbrance-based play crop up in actual play. And although “encumbrance-based play” may not sound all that exciting at first glance, being forced to throw away your favorite shield or abandon several weeks worth of rations on the pack horse actually creates really cool moments! (Going back for your shield, for example, can be a unique motivator. Running out of food because you had to leave the rations behind can throw your plans completely out of whack and force you to start improvising.)

My experience has been that, once you have a fully functional encumbrance system, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Encumbrance certainly isn’t essential to every adventure, but it is particularly vital for expedition-based play: It is a budget you are spending to prepare for the expedition and it is also frequently the limit on the rewards you can bring back. The desire to manage and expand your encumbrance limits for an expedition (by using mounts, pack animals, and/or hirelings) will frequently unlock unique gameplay and storytelling opportunities.

Running expedition-based play without encumbrance is like running combat without keeping track of hit points. The encumbrance by stone just makes it easy to do what you need to do.

THINKING ABOUT STONES

Roughly speaking, for the purposes of estimating the stone weight of larger items, you can assume that a stone is equal to 15 lbs. in 5^th Edition.

Thinking about the “value” of a stone in such concrete terms, however, is to largely miss the point of the system: The stone is deliberately chosen as an obscure unit of measurement whose definition is intentionally vague. The stone is not defined as a specific weight; it exists in a nebulous range, but probably somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds most of the time.

This is based on historical fact: Although eventually set by British law at 14 pounds, the stone historically varied depending on the commodity being traded and the location in which it was being traded. (For example, the 1772 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica states that a stone of beef was eight pounds in London, twelve pounds in Hertfordshire, and sixteen pounds in Scotland.) This makes it fairly ideal to provide a system which uses crude approximation in an effort to vastly simplify the bookkeeping involved with tracking encumbrance. And the slightly archaic nature of the terminology is also immersive for a fantasy world. (“I’m carrying about eight stone.”)

“But I’m British!”

The British still commonly use stones to measure body weight. And I’ve heard from some, but not all, that this makes it too difficult to slip into the medieval/Renaissance mindset where weights are relative and often imprecise.

If you find that to be the case for yourself, I recommend just swapping out the term “stone” for something else. You can go for something generic like “slots,” although you lose the immersive quality of the system (where both you and your character think of their load in similar terms). Another option would be a purely fictional term. For example, you might reframe the system using dwarven daliks.

SPECIAL THANKS

The design of this system was originally inspired by Delta’s D&D Hotspot and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Go to Part 1

This will probably be the most controversial entry I write for the GM Don’t List, because there are a lot of players who absolutely LOVE this. And if the players love it, why wouldn’t you do it?

Well, try to bear with me because we’ll get to that.

The technique we’re talking about is description-on-demand: The GM directs an authorial question at a player, giving them narrative control to define, describe, or determine something beyond the immediate control of their character. Examples include stuff like:

• What is Lord Fauntleroy’s deepest secret?
• You open the door and see Madame DuFerber’s bedroom. What does it look like?
• Okay, so you pull him off to one side, confess your love to him, and demand to know if he feels the same way. What does he say?
• What does Rebecca [your PC] know about the Dachshund Gang? Who’s their leader?
• Robert, tell me what the name of the mountain is.
• Okay, you find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. What is it that he’s done? What evidence do you find?

If you haven’t encountered this technique before, the key thing to understand is that none of the characters being defined here are PCs: The GM isn’t asking Lord Fauntleroy’s player what their character’s deepest secret is. They’re asking the players to step out of their character and create an element of the game world external to their character (often in direct response to their character taking interest in that element of the game world).

It’s description-on-demand because the GM is demanding that a player provide description.

MANY PLAYERS DON’T LIKE IT…

Description-on-demand tends to be a fad that periodically cycles through the RPG meme-sphere. When it does so, the general perception seems to be that every player thinks this is the greatest thing since chocolate-dipped donuts.

So let’s start there: This is not true. Many players do love it. But many players DO NOT. In fact, a lot of players hate it. There are a significant number of players for whom this is antithetical to the entire reason they want to play an RPG and it will literally ruin the game for them.

I’m one of those players. I’ve quit games because of it and have zero regrets for having done so.

So, at a bare minimum, at least take this lesson away with you: Check with your players before using description-on-demand. Because it can absolutely be a poison pill which will ruin your game for them.

Okay… but why do they hate it?

A brief digression: If you’re not familiar with the distinction between roleplaying games and storytelling games, I recommend checking out Roleplaying Games vs. Storytelling Games. The short version is that roleplaying games feature associated mechanics (where the mechanical choices in the game are directly associated to the choices made by your character, and therefore the act of making mechanical choices in the game – i.e., the act of playing the game – is inherently an act of roleplaying) and storytelling games feature narrative control mechanics (where the mechanics of the game are either about determining who controls a particular chunk of the narrative or about determining the outcome of a particular narrative chunk).

When I’m playing a roleplaying game (as opposed to a storytelling game), I am primarily interested in experiencing the game world from the perspective of my character: I want to experience what they experience, make the decisions that they would make, and vicariously experience their fictional life. The reason I want this experience can be quite varied. Roleplaying can be enjoyable in a lot of different ways (catharsis, escapism, experimentation, sense of wonder, joy of exploration, problem-solving, etc.) and the particular mix for any particular game or moment within a game can vary considerably.

Description-on-demand, however, literally says, “Stop doing that and do this completely different thing instead.”

This is not only distracting and disruptive, it is quite often destructive. There are several reasons for this, but the most significant and easy to explain is that it inverts and negates the process of discovery. You can’t discover something as your character does if you were the one to authorially create it in the first place. This makes the technique particularly egregious in scenarios focused on exploration or mystery (which are at least 90% of all RPG scenarios!) where discovery is the central driving force.

Not all players who dislike description-on-demand hate it as much as I do. Some will be merely bored, annoyed, or frustrated. Others will become stressed, anxious, or confused when being put on the spot. Some will just find their enjoyment of the game lessened and not really be able to put their finger on why. But obviously none of those are good outcomes and you need to be aware that they’re a very real possibility for some or all of the players at your table before leaping into description-on-demand.

…BUT SOME PLAYERS DO

So why do some players love this technique?

And they clearly DO love it. Some enjoy it so much that they’ll just seize this narrative control for themselves without being prompted by the GM. (Which can cause its own problems with mismatched expectations, but that’s probably a discussion for another time.)

So… why?

If we keep our focus on the tension between discovery and creation, it’s fairly easy to see that these are players who don’t value discovery as much. Or, at least, for whom the joys of creation outweigh the joys of discovery.

I’m one of those players. When I’m playing a storytelling game, I love being offered (or taking) narrative control and helping to directly and collectively shape the narrative of the world.

…

… wait a minute.

How can both of these things be true? How can I both hate it and love it?

Well, notice that I shifted from talking about roleplaying games to talking about storytelling games.

Here we get to the crux of why description-on-demand is a poor GMing technique. Because while there are times I prefer to be focused on in-character discovery, there are ALSO times when I’m gung-ho for authorial creation. And when that happens, description-on-demand in a traditional RPG is still terrible.

Remember that this technique gives us the opportunity to experience the joy of creation, but does so only by destroying the joy of discovery. There is an inherent trade-off. But when it comes to description-on-demand, the trade-off sucks. I’m giving up the joy of discovery, but in return I’m not getting true narrative control: Instead, the GM arbitrarily deigns to occasionally ask my input on very specific topics (which may or may not even be something that I care about or feel creatively inspired by in the slightest).

Description-on-demand techniques in an RPG dissociate me from my character while offering only the illusion of control.

In an actual storytelling game, on the other hand, I have true narrative control. The structure and mechanics of the game let me decide (or have significant influence over) when and what I want narrative control over. This is meaningful because I, as a player, know which moments are most important to my joy of discovery and which ones aren’t. (This is often not even a conscious choice; the decision of when to take control and when to lean back is often an entirely subconscious ebb-and-flow.)

Note: This discussion is largely assuming storytelling games in which players strongly identify with a specific character (“their” character, which they usually create). There are many other storytelling games – like Once Upon a Time or Microscope – in which this is not the case. In my experience many of those games still feature a tension between discovery and creation, but the dynamics are very different in the absence of a viewpoint character.

Towards the end of the movie Inception, Eames looks towards the dream vault they’ve been trying to break into for basically the entire movie and says, “It’s a shame. I really wanted to know what was going to happen in there. I swear we had this one.”

Now, imagine the vault door opening. And the GM says: “Okay, Eames, tell me what you see in there!”

For one player, this is great! The importance of this vault has been relentlessly established. The entire narrative has been pushing towards this revelation and now THEY have the opportunity to create what’s inside it!

For another player, this is a disastrous, gut-wrenching disappointment. They’ve spent all this time anticipating this moment; speculating about what the vault might contain, imagining different possibilities, parsing together clues to try to figure it out. And now they’re going to find out! And, instead, the GM announces that there was never any solution to this riddle. There was no plan. No mystery to be solved. Just an empty madlibs puzzle waiting to be filled. “I really want to find out what’s in that vault,” but instead, “Nope, you don’t get what you want. In fact, you have to actively participate in disillusioning yourself.”

For a third player, they don’t really care about having narrative control, but they don’t really have any strong ideas about what should be in the vault and aren’t interested in making a creative decision about that.

And here’s the key thing: You have absolutely no way of knowing which player is which.

In fact, the answer can very easily change from one moment to the next. One player wants an in-character pay-off for the mystery of the vault, but has strong opinions on what Lord Fauntleroy’s deepest secret is and would love to define that.

(And, yes, I have very deliberately chosen a narrative in which the characters do, in fact, have influence — albeit an indirect one — over what the vault will contain. I want you to challenge your preconceptions within the uncertainties of this liminal space. While you’re here, if you’re familiar with the movie, ask yourself whether your opinion on this interaction would be different if the GM was asking Robert Fischer’s player what was inside the vault instead of Eames’ player. Do you see how a different player of Robert Fischer might want the exact opposite answer?)

The cool thing about most narrative control mechanics is that they give you the ability to say, “This is what I care about. This is what I want to create.” And, conversely, “This is not something I care about. This is, in fact, something I DON’T want to be responsible for creating.”

CONCLUSION

Here’s my hot take.

I think description-on-demand is primarily — possibly not exclusively, but primarily – popular with players who have never played an actual storytelling game or who would desperately prefer to be playing one.

Because the thing that description-on-demand does — that little taste of narrative control that many players find incredibly exciting — is, in fact, an incredibly shitty implementation of the idea.

If you’re interested in an RPG, this is like playing Catan and having the host demand that you roleplay scenes explaining your moves in the game. (Just play an actual RPG!)

On the other hand, if you’re craving an STG, then description-on-demand in a traditional RPG is like playing co-op with an alpha quarterback who plays the entire game for you, but then occasionally says, “Justin, why don’t you choose the exact route your meeple takes to Sao Paolo?” and then pats themselves on the back for letting you “play the game.”

(This applies even if you’re playing an RPG and are just interested in adding a little taste of narrative control to it: You would be better off grafting some kind of minimal narrative control mechanic onto the game so that players can, in fact, be in control of their narrative control.)

To sum up, the reason description-on-demand makes the GM Don’t List is because:

• If that’s not what a player wants, it’s absolutely terrible.
• If it is what a player wants, it’s a terrible way of achieving it.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE…

There are several other techniques which are superficially similar to description-on-demand, but (usually) don’t have the same problems. Let’s briefly consider these.

FENG SHUI-STYLE DESCRIPTION OF SETTING. Robin D. Laws’ Feng Shui was a groundbreaking game in several ways. One of these was by encouraging players to assert narrative control over the scenery in fight scenes: If you want to grab a ladder and use it as a shield, you don’t need to ask the GM if there’s a ladder. You can just grab it and go!

Notably this is not on-demand. Instead, the group (via the game in this case) establishes a zone of unilateral narrative control before play begins. It is up to the players (not the GM) when, if, and how they choose to exercise that control. Players are not stressed by being put on the spot, nor are they forced to exert narrative control that would be antithetical to their enjoyment.

EXTENDED CHARACTER CREATION: This is when the GM asks a question like, “What’s Rebecca’s father’s name?” Although it’s happening in the middle of the session, these questions usually interrogate stuff that could have been defined in character creation.

This generally rests on the often unspoken assumption that the player has a zone of narrative control around their character’s background. Although this narrative control is most commonly exercised before play begins, it’s not unusual for it to persist into play. (Conversely, it’s similarly not unusual for players to improvise details from their character’s background.) This can even be mechanically formalized. In Trail of Cthulhu, for example, players are encouraged to put points into Languages without immediately deciding which languages they speak. (Each point can then be spent during play to simply declare, “I speak French,” or the like.)

Because it’s unspoken, however, both the authority and boundaries of this zone can be ill-defined and expectations can be mismatched. (The problems that can result from this are probably yet another discussion for another time.)

There’s also a gray zone here which can easily cross over into description-on-demand. “What’s your father’s name?”, “Describe the village where you grew up,” and “You grew up in the same neighborhood as the Dachshund Gang, so tell me who their leader is,” are qualitatively different, but there’s not necessarily a hard-and-fast line to be drawn.

RESOLUTION OF PLAYER-INITIATED ACTION: So if saying, “You find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. What is it that you’ve caught him doing?” is description on demand, then what about when the GM says, “You deal 45 hit points of damage. He’s dead. Describe the death blow,” that must also be description-on-demand, right? I mean, the GM even said the word “describe!”

There is some commonality. Most notably, you’re still putting players on the spot and demanding specific creativity, which can stress some players out in ways they won’t enjoy. But this effect is generally not as severe, because the player has already announced their intention (“hit that guy with my sword”) and they probably already have some visualization of what successfully completing that intention looks like.

In terms of narrative control, however, there is a sharp distinction: You are not asking the player to provide a character-unknown outcome. You are not dissociating them from their character.

This is true in the example of the sword blow, but may be clearer in a less bang-bang example. Consider Mayor McDonald and the difference between these two questions:

• “You find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. What is it that you’ve caught him doing?”
• “You find some juicy blackmail on Mayor McDonald. He’s been cheating on his wife with a woman named Tracy Stanford who works in his office. How did Rebecca find this out?”

In the first example, the GM is asking the player to define an element of the game world outside of their character and their character’s actions. In the second example, the GM has defined that and is instead asking them to describe what their character did. Although it’s become cognitively non-linear (the player knows the outcome, but is describing actions their character took before they knew the outcome), it is not dissociated from the character.

The same is true of the sword blow: The mechanics say the bad guy dies; take a step back and roleplay through how that happened.

(For a longer discussion of closely related stuff, check out Rulings in Practice: Social Skills.)

WORLD DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN SESSIONS: As a form of bluebooking, players may flesh out elements of the campaign world between sessions.

Sometimes this is just a more involved version of extended character creation. (“Pete, it looks like that Order of Knighthood your character’s brother joined is going to be playing a bigger role starting next session. Could you write ‘em up? Ideology, leaders, that kind of thing?”) But it can scale all the way up to troupe-style play, where players might take total control over specific aspects of the world and even take over the role of GM when those parts of the game world come up in play.

The rich options available to this style of play deserve lengthy deliberation in their own right. For our present discussion, it suffices to say that while this is in most ways functionally identical to description-on-demand (the player is taking authorial control beyond the scope of their character), in actual practice there’s a significant difference: Players don’t feel stressed or put on the spot (because they have plenty of time to carefully consider things). And many players don’t feel that inter-session discussions are as disruptive or dissociative as stuff happening in the middle of a session (because they aren’t being yanked in and out of character).

Go to Part 12: Mail Carrier Scenario Hooks

The Quiet Year is a map-making storytelling game by Avery Alder. The group will collectively tell the story of a community which, after a long war, has finally succeeded in driving off the Jackals. The community doesn’t know it, but they will have one quiet year — a time to come together, to rebuild, to prepare for the future — before the Frost Shepherds arrive and the game comes to an end.

The central focus of play is the map itself: We begin with a blank sheet in the middle of the table and a brief setup phase will see the group quickly sketch in the broad strokes of their community. We will also determine which Resources are important to our community, and which one of those Resources is in abundance (with all others being in scarcity).

(The Resources section of the setup phase is subtly brilliant: There are no predefined Resources. Instead, each player creates a Resource and adds it to the list. This, all by itself, radically alters the game each time you play it. A community in which Transportation, Solar Power, and Food are the key Resources is a completely different community than one in which Clean Water, Steel, and Mana are the key Resources.)

Once the setup phase is complete, the game proceeds in turns. On their turn a player will:

• Draw a card
• Advance active projects
• Take an action

CARDS: The game is played with a deck of standard playing cards. There are fifty-two weeks in a year and fifty-two cards in a deck, and thus each turn represents a week of time. Each suit of cards represents one season (hearts are Spring, diamonds are Summer, etc.), and each season of cards is randomized.

Generally speaking, each card you draw will offer you an option between two questions. The active player has to answer the question, which will also often mean adding to the map or updating the map. For example, if you draw the 10 of Hearts you must choose between:

• There’s another community somewhere on the map. Where are they? What sets them apart from you?
• What belief or practice helps to unify your community?

Whereas the 5 of Spades offers a choice of:

• Winter elements destroy a food source. If this was your only food source, add a Scarcity.
• Winter elements leave everyone cold, tired, and miserable. Project dice are not reduced this week.

The game ends immediately when the King of Spades is drawn (and the Frost Shepherds arrive). This can happen at any point in the last season of thirteen cards (even the very first week of winter), so as the year continues more and more uncertainty about how much time you have left will begin to creep in. (And this will naturally influence the group’s predilection towards breaking ground on new projects vs. other options.)

ACTIVE PROJECTS: Various cards and actions will establish projects. Most projects are entirely the creation of the player initiating them and will be given a timeline of 1-6 weeks (i.e., turns). These projects are tracked on the map using six-sided dice, and the dice count down one pip each week.

TAKE AN ACTION: Finally, a player can choose one of three actions. They can Start a Project; they can Discover Something New; or they can Hold a Discussion. Each of these influences the story of the community in different ways.

THINGS I DON’T LIKE

There’s one other “significant” mechanic in the game: Contempt tokens. I’ll let the rulebook explain them:

If you ever feel like you weren’t consulted or honoured in a decision-making process, you can take a piece of Contempt and place it in front of you. This is your outlet for expressing disagreement or tension.

(…)

If you ever want to act selfishly, to the known detriment of the community, you can discard a Contempt token to justify your behaviour. You decide whether your behaviour requires justification. This will often trigger others taking Contempt tokens in response.

And that’s it. As a mechanic, Contempt tokens are empty and meaningless. They’re also somewhat incoherent: The beginning of the rulebook specifically points out that we, as players, have two roles in the game: To represent the community itself and care about its fate and ALSO to “dispassionately introduce dilemmas … create tension and make the community’s successes feel real.” So how is acting to “the known detriment of the community” something that needs to be “justified”? Furthermore, there IS no “decision-making process” in which you can be consulted; the game explicitly tells you NOT to discuss the decisions you have to make in the game.

Having played with Contempt several times, I’m simply going to be dropping them from future sessions. They don’t add anything to the game and, worse yet, simply confuse new players due to their incoherence and lack of point.

THINGS I DO LIKE

Everything else.

The Quiet Year is a beautiful game that creates beautiful stories. The choices presented in each season are elegantly balanced to push play in particular directions without drowning out the creative input and interests of the players.

The storytelling engine is specific enough to push interesting events into the narrative, but general enough to never constrain you: You can set The Quiet Year in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a Martian colony, the African savannah, or a Middle Ages village just after it’s been scourged by the Black Death and never hit a discordant prompt.

You can learn The Quiet Year in about 15 minutes, you’ll get 3-4 hours of play before the Frost Shepherds arrive, and then — if you’re anything like the people I’ve played with — you’ll immediately begin trying to figure out when you can play it again.

(There’s also an alternate setup you can use for a shorter game if you’d like.)

A FEW OTHER DETAILS

The game is designed for 2-4 players, but I found that it expanded well to 5 or 6. (I did not play with only two players, although I am curious what that experience would look like.) The designer has noted in online discussions that the primary problem with a larger player count is the down time between turns, so this will be at least somewhat dependent on how much your group is entertained in the audience stance. (Players also often have narrative input on other players’ turns.)

In addition to an $8 PDF, The game is also available in a $50 bag that contains everything you need to play: Rulebook, custom cards (with the text printed on them so you don’t have to consult the tables in the rulebook), dice, and counters. I, personally, don’t think the experience offered by The Quiet Year is worth that much, but your mileage may vary.

A QUIET YEAR

I wasn’t sure how well The Quiet Year would play online in the Era of COVID-19, but it was actually a spectacular experience. You’ll obviously need some form of shared whiteboard for the group (I found that one built into Zoom worked just fine). You can try to get fancy with the playing cards, but I found it easy enough to just act as a facilitator with a physical deck of cards to one side of my keyboard.

The one thing I will say, is that I think post-apocalyptic narratives have a completely different feel when you’re playing them during an actual apocalypse. And this impact is particularly substantial if it’s an interactive medium.

To give you some sense of what The Quiet Year is capable of, this is the narrative of one game that I played: Our community collapsed completely and murdered each other in internecine warfare. (So the year was perhaps not as quiet as it might have been…)

Our village was located in a valley. At sunrise and sunset we all stopped and collectively meditated upon the passing of the days.

Some among us even went so far as to worship the Sun.

Expeditions beyond the mountains to the west returned with members horribly burned by a “bright light.” Clearly they had found the place where the Sun sets and been burned for their hubris.

The Sun Sect grew.

To the southeast there was a horrible Pit; a bottomless black void. It was surrounded by skulls and strange runes. No one had placed them there; no one dared to touch them.

One day a woman named Petra climbed naked out of the Pit and came to the village.

Other outsiders came who wore Moons on their clothes. They were ostracized.

Petra and another girl named Sibyl convinced many young members of the village to enter the Pit and learn its mysteries.

They did not return.

We reclaimed the mine to the southwest. Our supply of metal was abundant! But we discovered that those working at the site contracted a strange disease that made them incredibly pale. They were referred to by the slur of “moon-facers,” and this term was soon being used to also refer to those who wore the symbol of the Moon.

Around this time, a flood destroyed our food stores. Tensions grew between the Sun Sect and the Followers of the Moon.

Faced with this persecution, some of the Followers of the Moon assassinated three of the four Elders who led our village. They then fled to the northern end of the valley, leaving the last remaining Elder — a man named Jonas — in charge.

Jonas was a member of the Sun Sect. He took control of the citizen’s militia and reforged it as the Swords of Dawn.

A few weeks later, foresters heard the voices of Petra and Sibyl among the trees of the forest. Their words could not be understood, but they seemed filled with portent.

A beam of purple energy shot out of the Pit. The faces of the others who had gone down into the Pit could be seen writhing within it. Petra herself emerged from the beam and declared herself a Priestess of the Moon.

Jonas died in his bed, pale as if moon-touched. The community was left leaderless. (Elders could only be nominated by existing Elders, Jonas had refrained from doing that, and now all the Elders were dead.) The Sun Sect moved into the power vacuum and the Swords of Dawn enforced order.

The Sun Sect declared that the Pit had grown ascendant because we had turned out back on the Sun. They decreed that a child must be taken to the highest mountain in the east and sacrificed to the rising sun.

This was done. Almost the entire Sun Sect marched up to the mountain peak.

But as the sacrifice was about to be performed, a huge avalanche wiped out the entire expedition.

Petra and the moon-facers took control of the village. A string of murders followed, leaving mutilated bodies in the woods. Then the beam of energy from the Pit washed across the sky, blotting out the Sun.

One of the last surviving members of the Sun Sect — angry, vindictive, and driven mad by this last divine sign — set fire to the forest! Our stores of lumber and the entire northern forest was destroyed.

When the envoys from the south arrived to trade their grain for our lumber, we were unable to pay them. Trade collapsed. The famine worsened.

But the morning after the fire, a beam of golden energy shot up into the sky from the site of the child sacrifice.

So there was a golden beam to the northeast and a purple-black beam to the southeast.

A new religious leader emerged: Wren argued that we had strayed too far from the Way of the Sun and we needed to sacrifice MORE children into the Sun’s golden beam, to at least match the number who had passed into the Pit.

Wren led a pilgrimage up into the mountains and they did, in fact, cast many children into the golden beam. The energy of the golden beam spread, blotting out the black dome that had shaded the valley and replacing it with a golden dome of sun-like light.

But the light shone 24/7.

Many in the village suffered from sleep deprivation as the eternal light shone on.

The valley was then hit with a plague, which further decimated the population. Then a massive thunderstorm rolled in. It rained for days and days and days. The river flooded, wiping out our village and forcing the population to scatter into the hills, creating a number of small, scattered “niche” communities.

As the waters receded in the valley below, we saw — in the burnt fields of the forest — what we at first thought were new trees. New trees that grew rapidly with the blessing of the Sun’s eternal light!

But what actually grew was strange: Purple-pink growths that fruited large, pear-shaped fruits that glowed with a bluish light.

Strange goliaths, of whose existence we had seen hints on our earlier expeditions, came from the west and settled among the strange trees, somehow feeding upon the glowing fruits.

An entire niche community vanished mysteriously overnight. When people from a neighboring community arrived, they found food still cooking over open fires. The only clue was the word RELLIK scratched into the dirt.

At the opposite end of the valley, it was discovered that the skulls and bones of the children sacrificed to the golden beam had appeared in the bone ring around the Pit. This connection between the two beams raised metaphysical questions that our desperate community had no time to properly consider.

A children’s crusade led almost all of our remaining children back down to the floor of the valley. There they ate of the glowing fruits.

Petra was badly beaten. She was forced into hiding, circulating from one family to another to hide her from the Sun Sect.

One of these families, seemingly driven mad, killed and ate her.

Other incidents of cannibalism forced the niche communities into armed compounds that no longer spoke to each other.

Strange changes were seen among the children eating of the purple pears.

The Swords of Dawn marched on the mine to wipe out that source of the “moon-faced plague.”

As the mine burned, the Frost Shepherds arrived.

A QUIET YEAR.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Avery Alder
Publisher: Buried Without Ceremony
Cost: $8.00 (PDF)
Page Count: 15

She took a step further in — then two or three steps — always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it.

‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her…

Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. ‘Why, it’s just like the branches of trees!’ exclaimed Lucy.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensey children are sent away from London during the Blitz to shelter at a remarkably large house owned by the Professor. In one of the many, many rooms within this mansion there is a magical wardrobe: If you walk into this wardrobe it will act as a magical portal, transporting you to the land of Narnia.

This is Lewis’ scenario hook: In order for the adventures of Narnia to begin, one of the kids needs to walk into the wardrobe.

(We’re going to be talking about the novel in the context of a roleplaying game, so let’s remember that the Principle of Using Linear Mediums as RPG Examples applies.)

Lewis gets away with this, of course, because he’s writing a book. He controls the characters and so it is quite easy for him to (a) make the kids decide to explore the house room by room and then (b) make Lucy climb into the wardrobe and go looking for the back of it.

To be clear: This is not bad writing. Everything the kids do is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do and completely justified.

But if we imagine C.S. Lewis as a GM running this as a scenario for four PCs, there are several possible ways this could play out:

• The PCs could all find the wardrobe portal together.
• Some of the PCs could find the portal, return, and lead the others into Narnia.
• One of the PCs could find the portal without the others, come back, and then find that the portal has “vanished” due to its strange metaphysics. (But investigation will reveal that it returns.)
• The PCs could all enter the portal separately (or in different groups) and end up making independent alliances with different hostile factions within Narnia.

But, of course, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the PCs never find the wardrobe and never go to Narnia, right? Even if they were LARPing this scenario in real-time, they might never go into that room. And, if they did, they could easily never think, “I’m going to try climbing into that wardrobe and seeing if I can touch the back of it.” And it seems to me that while sitting at a table it becomes even less likely for the players to spontaneously conclude that this one particular course of action is what they should be doing. (Or, if they do say something like, “I’m just going to wander around until something interesting happens,” the experience is quite likely to not be particularly satisfying. Turning it into a location-crawl has similar results because the density of interesting material is too low.)

My point is that premises which work just fine in linear narratives from other mediums don’t necessarily work at all when used in an RPG. So if you use those linear narratives as your model for how to prep an RPG scenario, you can end up very frustrated.

SOLUTIONS

One way to handle this would be aggressive scene-framing:

GM: Okay, so you wake up the next morning and it’s raining out. You all decide to play hide-and-seek. Lucy, you go into a room that’s quite empty except for one big wardrobe; the sort that has a looking-glass door. There’s nothing else in there at all except a dead bluebottle on the window-sill. That’s when the door handle starts to turn! You’ve got nowhere else to go, so you pop into the wardrobe! It’s filled with fur coats and there’s a thick smell of mothballs. You head towards the back where it’ll be harder to spot you… only you can’t find the back. This wardrobe is huge! And then…

This works, and it’s based on accurately identifying where the active premise is — the point where the players know what they’re supposed to be doing (or, in a sandbox campaign, where they are made aware that a particular course of action or type of action is available to them). In this case, the active premise is NOT “the Pevenseys have arrived at the Professor’s mansion” (because it is not clear what action they are supposed to be taking there), but rather “Lucy has discovered a magical portal” (because it is immediately apparent that “go through the portal” is a clear action that they can take).

There are drawbacks to such aggressive scene-framing, however: Players will generally feel less immersed and have less ownership of the hook. If it’s handled poorly, players can easily become upset that they’re being forced to do things they don’t want to do. There are some mechanical structures that can address this (like the compel mechanics in Fate), but they generally can’t solve all of the potential problems.

So if we’re currently standing at “the Pevenseys have arrived at the Professor’s mansion,” what other options do we have for getting the PCs an active premise that will take them to Narnia (i.e., hook them into the scenario)?

The first thing I generally try to do when designing a scenario, unless I have a good reason not to, is to make the hook proactive. It’s just a lot easier to use a proactive hook (i.e., one that comes looking for the PCs) than it is to use a reactive one that requires the players to do something to discover it (e.g., search the house to find the wardrobe). For example, we could have stuff coming OUT of Narnia through the wardrobe:

• A strange creature (perhaps a boggart?) that goes rampaging around the house. It keeps damaging stuff and Mrs. MacReady blames the kids for it.
• Refugees from the tyranny of the White Witch.
• Wolves of the secret police pursuing aforesaid refugees.
• Agents of the White Witch who try to kidnap one of the kids and take them back through the wardrobe.

When the PCs question these NPCs or backtrack them, they’ll be led to the wardrobe.

Alternatively, you can look to reframe the active premise. There’s no clean way to say “you need to search the house in order to find the magic wardrobe” if you don’t know the magic wardrobe exists (and discovering that is the whole point to begin with). But what you can do is give the PCs a different reason for searching the house (during which search they will be able to encounter the wardrobe). For example:

• The Professor has died and they need to find his will.
• You provide a game structure by which the kids earn XP by playing childhood games. “Hide ‘n seek” is on the list.
• A stray raccoon gets into the house and Mrs. MacReady tells the kids they need to track it down before the next tour group arrives.

(I talk about this technique at more length in Surprising Scenario Hooks.)

Another option, or perhaps a supplemental one, is to use multiple hooks. This is often just an instantiation of the Three Clue Rule: You include multiple hooks so that, even if the PCs miss some of the hooks, they’re still likely to get at least one of them. (One of the corollaries of the Three Clue Rule is permissive clue-finding, and you can often achieve a similar effect through organic scenario hooks — i.e., hooks that emerge from the actions of the PCs rather than being pre-planned.)

For example, rather than it being specifically the wardrobe that’s magical, we could say that the entire estate is magical and/or that there’s some powerful fey magic trying to draw the children to Narnia. No matter what they do, we can improvise a hook that offers them a path to Narnia. They go to play Poohsticks in the stream? They find their sticks disappearing through a magical shimmer under the bridge. They help the cook make dinner? They discover a secret passage behind the wine rack in the cellar when they’re sent down for supplies. They read books in the library? They open a magical book! They play hide ‘n seek? Wardrobe!

Design Note: Isn’t the wardrobe a magical portal because it’s made from wood taken from Narnia? How do you square that with there being magical portals all over the damn place?

First, keep in mind that we’re just using the book here as an example. In practice this would be a scenario you’re designing yourself, and you can do whatever you want.

Second, this is actually an interesting example: Lewis didn’t know that the wardrobe was made of wood from Narnia when he wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The wardrobe was just a cool thing he thought up and then he BUILT on that continuity later on. We could imagine the same thing in our hypothetical campaign: The PCs go to play Poohsticks and you improvise a magical bridge; later it occurs to you that the bridge could have been built out of wood from Narnia. Or the magical book in the library turns out to have been the diary the Professor kept during his own adventures in Narnia. After discovering stuff during play you’re free to continue building on it and making new discoveries about your world.

Third, if it is important that the portal be in the wardrobe made from Narnian wood — whether to the scenario, your metaphysics, or just your personal taste — then use one of the other options.

On that note, what if you really do need a reactive premise? For example, you want them to simply stumble across the wardrobe accidentally? In that case, you need to have other active premises in the house to engage the players until the reactive premise can be presented. Basically, you have other adventures (or, at least, interesting things that the PCs are aware they can interact with) happening in the mansion. And then, at some point during those adventures, the wardrobe can appear. (Or maybe it appears several times as part of the background scenery, until the revelation finally happens.)

You can also take a laidback approach to his by asking each player to describe what a typical day at the house looks like for their character. This frames the action declaration at a sufficiently abstract level that the players aren’t trying to fill the minute-to-minute activities of their lives, but it also makes it clear that the active premise is defining routine (specifically, in this case, what the “new normal” looks like for the kids). You can ask questions like:

• After you’ve said good night to the Professor and gone upstairs to your rooms on the first night, what plans do you make for the next day?
• What if it’s a rainy day and you can’t go outside? What do you do?
• It’s been a week and you’re getting bored. What do you do to mix things up?

What you’re looking for as the GM, of course, is the opportunity to say, “While you’re doing that, you happen to see this wardrobe and that’s when the adventures begin…”

As a campaign develops over time, the group will often develop a collective sense of what a “normal day” looks like in any case. This knowledge makes it easier to aggressively frame scenario hooks without the players feeling as if their toes are getting stepped on… which brings us full circle.

Note: In a storytelling game you can use a variant of this technique to simply cut to the chase by giving the players narrative control. You could turn to Peter’s player, for example, and say, “Somewhere in this house there is a portal to the magical land of Narnia. What is it?” And after Peter’s player has said that it’s a wardrobe, you could turn to Lucy’s player and say, “And how do you find this portal?” Similar approaches using the specific mechanics of the storytelling game are also quite common.

REJECTING THE CALL

Sometimes your players will encounter the hook and reject it. There’s often nothing wrong with this! Rejecting the call to adventure is an official part of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey™! (And if you’re running a sandbox campaign, there should be so many scenario hooks hanging around that it would be surprising if the PCs didn’t reject a few of them.)

This rejection can also happen unintentionally. For example, you might design the metaphysics of the wardrobe so that the portal only works intermittently, with the expectation that the players will investigate the wardrobe and figure out the timing. Instead, Lucy finds the portal and comes back, but when she tells the others about it and the portal doesn’t work, the other characters assume she’s just telling funny stories.

So things reset and, later, Lucy goes back into the wardrobe and this time Edmund sees her and follows her. And you think, “I’m so glad he’s got in too! The others will have to believe in Narnia now that both of them have been there. What fun this will be!” But then Edmund’s player tests his Liar personality trait, fails, and says, “Oh, yes, Lucy and I have been playing – pretending that all her story about a country in the wardrobe is true. Just for fun, of course. There’s nothing there really.”

And this prompts some simply amazing roleplaying between the PCs, but the hook of the wardrobe has once again been rejected and it’s all so horrid that now Lucy won’t go near the wardrobe for fear of being teased and none of the others even want to talk about it.

If you were running a sandbox, it might be fine to just let the wardrobe go at this point (as noted above, there would be lots of other hooks for the PCs pursue). And even if you’re running a specific scenario (we’re supposed to be playing in Narnia, not stuck in the mansion!) it can easily be the case that the stuff spinning out from a rejected call to adventure is more than interesting enough to entertain everybody for the entire session. (The stuff with Edmund lying, for example, is really interesting and likely to have a long-term impact on the campaign that’s truly fascinating. Don’t choke it off!)

But in either case, you’ll usually want to offer the hook again – either because this is the scenario you’re supposed to be playing tonight or because the scenario is part of the environment and it will naturally keep crossing paths with the PCs. (If you design the scenario with multiple hooks in the first place, this will often happen organically without any especial effort on your part.)

There can be a natural impulse to make the returning hook more aggressive – they missed it the first time, so it clearly needs to be even more obvious and in-their-face the second time!  But this is often (although not always) the wrong choice. The players will have often chosen to reject the hook. That’s a meaningful choice and directly overriding it simply for the sake of overriding it is railroading.

(This is more or less what Lewis does in the book: The kids are relentlessly pursued  by Mrs. MacReady’s tour group until they have absolutely no choice but to all leap into the wardrobe together. But, of course, it’s a book.)

Even if the players have just flat out missed the first hook, it’s still usually not necessary to use an aggressive hook. If they literally missed it, then the second hook will effectively be their first hook and there’s no need to make it special. If they misinterpreted the hook or didn’t realize that it was a hook, the second hook will usually serve to reinforce the first one and, thus, be stronger collectively regardless. (“Oh! That’s what the crazy rune-writing meant!”)

The exception tends to be when the rejection of the first hook carries obvious consequences that are going to be aggressive. For example, if the PCs choose to just ignore Old Joe’s gang threatening to burn down their ranch… well, Old Joe’s gang burning down their ranch is probably going to be pretty aggressive.

PROACTIVE PLAYERS

Proactive players are the ones who will pursue courses of action even when they haven’t been presented with an active premise for that action.

For example, in my OD&D open table one of the PCs spontaneously decided to buy up all the garlic in the local community and then use their monopoly to jack up the prices. (They knew that the local adventurers had discovered vampires and had concluded that the demand was about to spike.) The result was the creation of the Halfling Mafia, who grew to become a pervasive presence in the campaign.

That’s an example of proactive play: There was no “buy up all the garlic and form a mafia” hook that I had put into play.

By contrast, in my current Blackmoor open table I use a set of Special Interest XP rules that specifically encourages PCs to, for example, set up philanthropic societies. So when one of the PCs decided to set up the Vampire Awareness and Relief Foundation, that was really awesome, but it wasn’t proactive play. (The mechanical structure had offered the active premise of setting up philanthropic societies.)

Some players are naturally proactive. Others will never be so. (And that’s okay!) But often proactive players are created in the sandbox: When they are inundated with scenario hooks and it becomes clear that THEY are empowered to choose what they will do next, often the leap will be made that they do not need to choose but can instead create.

When you say, “You’ve arrived at the Professor’s house. What do you want to do?” a reactive group, in the absence of an active premise, will stare at your blankly. But if you have proactive players, don’t feel like you need to immediately start hurling scenario hooks at them. Let the Pevenseys tell you what they’re going to do and follow their lead, giving them the incredible reward of knowing that the action THEY created is the one which sets everything into motion. It is the proactive player who will say, without prompting, “I’m going to explore the house!”

Everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures began. It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried led only into spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected they would; but soon they came to a very long room full of pictures and there they found a suit of armor; and after that was a room all hung with green, with a harp in one corner; and then came three steps down and five steps up, and then a kind of little upstairs hall and a door that led out onto a balcony, and then a whole series of rooms that led into each other and were lined with books — most of them very old books and some bigger than a Bible in a church. And shortly after that they looked into a room that was quite empty except for one big wardrobe…

FURTHER READING
Design Notes: Scenario Hooks for Over the Edge
Juggling Scenario Hooks in the Sandbox
Surprising Scenario Hooks
Players Who Won’t Bite
Bringing the PCs Together

Go to Part 1

The cinematic technique of the montage is vaguely defined and multifaceted. In the French tradition “montage” refers to all editing. In Soviet montage theory, it is specifically the juxtaposition of non-sequential imagery in order to create specific meaning. The basic definition provided by Wikipedia, however, is, “A film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information.” It is in this sense that one has the “montage sequence” which is specifically designed to show the passage of time, and is what is most often referred to by the shorthand of “montage” in English.

FRAMING THE MONTAGE

The basics of a montage, therefore, can be understood as very hard cuts from one sequence of action to the next.

In The Art of Pacing, I discussed at length how we frame, fill, and close scenes. Creating a montage basically consists of framing very hard and very deep into a scene, spending the least amount of time necessary to address the agenda of that scene, and then aggressively cutting to the next scene (which is similarly framed very hard). This effectively creates a sequence of micro-scenes.

The trouble with doing this kind of hard scene framing as a GM is that it becomes increasingly difficult for the players to meaningfully contribute to what’s happening. (This is why, as I noted in The Art of Pacing, the harder the scene framing becomes, the more likely it is that a game or GM will introduce narrative control mechanics in order to return control back to the players.) For example, consider the famous baptismal montage from the end of The Godfather:

To get cuts that tight and that focused, it would seem as if the GM would basically just be saying, “Okay, cut from the church. We’re in your kitchen. You’re cleaning and assembling your gun. We cut back to the church.” There’s no breathing room for a back-and-forth conversation; no space for the players to propose an action.

When you get this tight, though, something interesting happens: The GM can actually invert the players’ part in the conversation of meaningful choices. Instead of framing the scene, the GM can instead prompt the players to frame each micro-scene.

This is the first secret of the RPG montage.

In this example the players have proposed simultaneously assassinating the other New York dons. Michael Corleone’s player, though, says, “I’ll need an alibi. What if we do it while I’m baptizing my kids?”

(“That’s fucking dark,” says Kay’s player. “I love it.”)

So the GM describes the baptism. And then, rather than framing to the next scene, the GM prompts one of the players:

GM: Rocco, how do you prepare for your murder?

Rocco: I’m in my kitchen, disassembling and reassembling my gun.

GM: Outside the window we can see your family relaxing on the beach. Your fingers shove pieces of metal together with the casual precision of familiarity. We cut to—Clemenza, what are you doing?

Clemenza: I’ve got my shotgun packed in a cardboard box. Looks like I’m delivering a package. I pause to polish a bit of dirt off my immaculately detailed car.

GM: Great. We cut back to the church, where the priest does the sign of the cross, gesturing with his hand as if using a cloth to wipe clean Michael’s sin. He grabs a few grains of salt and presses them to Anthony’s mouth. Anthony’s little hands reach up and touch his own chin. What about you Willie?

Willie: I’m getting a shave.

We finish that cycle of declarations and then the GM presents a second prompt by telling each of the players where their assassination is taking place:

GM: Don Barzini is working in his office building. What’s your plan, Al Neri?

Al Neri: Well, I’m dressed as a cop. Does Barzini leave his office at the same time every day?

GM: Sure. He comes out the front door and gets into his limo. Like clockwork.

Al Neri: Okay, then about five minutes before he’s due to leave, I’ll stroll up and tell the limo to move along.

GM: The driver refuses.

Al Neri: I’ll start writing him a ticket just as Barzini comes out of the building. That should distract him and his bodyguards.

And the GM, once again, goes around the table with this prompt and we get the second phase of the montage, with everyone setting up their attacks. The GM continues cutting back to the baptism. Maybe he’s pulled up the Catholic rite on his phone and is reading it out loud through the entire sequence. He reaches the point where the priest says, “Michael, do you renounce Satan?”

Then we hit the final phase of the montage: The GM calls for whatever action checks are necessary to resolve each murder (which in some cases might be attack rolls; in other cases it might be a Stealth or Deception test). It’s a montage, so the GM will probably want to keep these resolutions mechanically tight (rather than, for example, going into full-fledged combat rounds).

The GM’s on his game, so at the end of each murder he continues plugging in the renunciation of sin, pressuring Michael with the hypocrisy of his answers: “And all his works?” “And all his empty promises?” Maybe he calls for Kay to make an Insight check to see if she notices that something is wrong with Michael.

And that’s your basic structure of a mass assassination montage:

• Prompt micro-scenes by requesting preparations for the murders
• Declare the locations of the murder and prompt declaration of the murder
• Resolve the murders

If any of the PCs aren’t directly contributing to the murders, see if you can frame them into a scene that contrasts or thematically comments on the murders and then cut back and forth between that scene and the rest of the montage. (But this isn’t strictly necessary. It’s okay if only some of the PCs are participating in a particular montage.)

This structure points us towards the second secret of the RPG montage: In order to be an effective montage, the micro-scenes which make up the montage must have an overarching agenda — a question that the montage as a whole is seeking to answer. (In this case, the question would be, “Is the Corleone family successful in taking out all of the other dons?”) Without that unifying agenda, the montage will lack focus and purpose. It will just be a bunch of random stuff thrown in a blender (and you’d probably be better off resolving the elements of the montage separately).

This specific structure probably has limited usefulness, though, because how often are your players going to propose simultaneous mass murder in multiple locations?

(Don’t answer that.)

RUNNING THE INVESTIGATIVE MONTAGE

One response to this could be a GM-led montage. Here the GM basically uses the same technique, but instead of waiting for the players to say something like, “We’re going to try to murder all the dons simultaneously,” the GM initiates the montage by saying, “Okay, at this point you’re going to murder all the dons simultaneously.”

Of course, a GM-led montage doesn’t sound like the right decision in this case. The decision to murder a lot of people is obviously a really meaningful choice and skipping past that choice (effectively taking that choice away from the players and making it for them) is almost certainly problematic and very disruptive to the conversation of meaningful choices which is the fundamental principle of the RPG medium.

(In a storytelling game, your mileage might vary depending on how the narrative control mechanics are set up.)

This doesn’t, however, mean that GM-led montages are never a good idea in RPGs. A common counterexample is the investigative montage, the point in a detective story where there’s a bunch of different leads and legwork to pursue, so we get a montage of the heroes splitting up, investigating the shit out of it, and then coming back together with the insights and conclusions that drive us forward into the next chunk of plot. A GM-led montage (“Okay! It’s time to split up and do the legwork! Farida, how are you working the case?”) can work here because the context has already established that the PCs want to solve the mystery being investigated. The GM is pushing a structure for resolving that desire (and framing hard to do it), but he’s not taking the meaningful choice (“let’s investigate this mystery”) away from the players.

I actually spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to find the perfect cinematic or literary exemplar of an investigative montage for us to work from here, but I have been unsuccessful. (Even as I write this, the back of my brain is trying to sidetrack me by saying, “Wait! What about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I bet we can track down a scene like this with the Scooby Gang! Let’s go spend the next twelve hours trolling through the DVDs!”)

It’s possible that this is a, “Beam me up, Scotty!” moment, where I’m convinced that scenes like this exist in film or television, but they really don’t. I suspect, though, that the reason I can’t find the exact scene haunting the corner of my mind’s eye is because most detective stories in other mediums feature a sole protagonist, so the typical investigative montage just features one guy doing a bunch of stuff in quick succession. But by the time I started looking for an example of this to reconstruct, the concept had already transmogrified itself in my mind into the group context of an RPG scenario.

Long story short: I’m not going to worry about it. I’m guessing you probably already know the type of scene I’m talking about, and if you don’t, then you’ll still find investigative montages useful.

The first thing you’ll want for an investigative montage is a list of montage revelations. This basically works exactly like the revelation list you create when using the Three Clue Rule, except that you’re not going to prep specific clues for each revelation. You’re just listing the things the PCs need to learn. These revelations should generally be leads (pointing towards more fully developed scenes) and there should be several of them (one for every two PCs seems to be a good amount). For example:

• One of the victims of the White Lotus assassins survived the attack. Her name is Lisa Cardo and she’s recuperating in a room at Elkhart General Hospital.
• The albino with the Solomonic tattoos the PCs spotted earlier is Vincent Estadio, a personal assistant to the Spanish ambassador.
• There’s an arms dealer named Dogmull who’s rumored to supply the White Lotus with their poisoned darts.

The investigative montage is then resolved in three steps:

• Each player chooses a line of investigation
• Each line of investigation is resolved (probably with a single action check)
• The GM uses the context of the PCs’ investigations to provide the montage revelations

The actual methods of investigation chosen by the players don’t specifically matter, as long as they’re logically things that a cop or private detective would do to turn up fresh leads. (This is basically a version of permissive clue-finding on methamphetamines, right?) Examples might include:

• Checking the casefile.
• Trying to track down that albino they saw earlier.
• Roughing up local crooks to make them spill information
• Analyzing samples of the White Lotus poison in the crime lab
• Putting surveillance on known associates of the White Lotus
• Talking to an old friend or other local contact

For each successful line of investigation, choose one of the montage revelations and then present a fast-paced, hard-hitting sequence that provides it. For example, the lab technician analyzes the White Lotus poison, recognizes a combination of rare chemicals and checks shipping records that indicate a suspected arms dealer named Dogmull has been importing the chemicals.

(You can either just cut away from failed lines of investigation, or maybe inflict some kind of consequence or complication from them. These can be mixed freely into the montage of the other results.)

If you have more successful lines of investigation then there are montage revelations, find ways to either split the revelation into separate parts which can be split up across multiple PCs and/or sequenced so that one PC’s investigation enables another’s. (If you just repeat the same revelation for multiple players, it’s disappointing and anti-climactic for the second player who gets the result.)

For example, the PC checking the casefile might see that there’s a victim named Lisa Cardo who survived the attack but has since vanished. Meanwhile, one of the local thugs being roughed up by another PC tells them that he heard a rumor the Lotus were going to axe a witness who’s being cared for over at Elkhart. (This is one revelation being split into separate parts that are discovered independently.)

Or: The lab technician analyzes the White Lotus poison and recognizes the rare chemicals. She sends out a text to the team, which another PC receives in the middle of questioning their local contact. They ask their contact about the chemicals, and he identifies Dogmull. (The lab technician’s discovery of the first part of the revelation enables the other PC’s investigation to complete the revelation.)

I recommend resolving all of the lines of investigation and THEN contextualizing the results. Among other things, this will make it easier to figure how to pace/structure the revelations.

SCALE OF THE MONTAGE

You can use this same basic technique at different scales. For example, you could use an investigative montage to either hunt Carmen Sandiego across an entire globe or run a CSI crew investigating a single crime scene.

At the smallest scales, you may discover that this becomes virtually indistinguishable from how you were previously resolving such scenes (asking each player what their character is doing, resolving those actions, synthesizing the narrative result, etc.). This can be a valuable insight for how you can set up and frame montages at larger scales.

You can also flip this around yet again for those situations where all the players want to jump in and have their character participate in a Search check. Rather than just letting them all roll their dice and taking the best result, slip into a montage technique and ask them to specify what distinct thing each of them is doing to contribute to the search. (Or, if they just roll reflexively, you can simply assume they’ve divided the task in your descriptions of the search’s outcome.) Rulings in Practice: Perception-Type Tests has a broader discussion of related techniques you might find useful here.

These, of course, are just two types of montages out of many. But I suspect the basic techniques of the RPG montage to remain fairly consistent to the principles we’ve established here. We’ll probably come back later and explore a few more varieties as part of the scenario structure challenge, too.

Go to Challenge #6