Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation-by-necessity with the party-planning scenario structure I shared here on the Alexandrian back in 2015. It seems like almost every other time I sit down to design or develop a scenario these days, I find the party-planning scenario structure staring back at me:

• In Welcome to the Island for Over the Edge, I used it to fairly pure effect with Jonathan Tweet to design “Seversen’s Mysterious Estate,” which I describe in more detail over here.
• In Quantronic Heat for the Infinity RPG, Nick Bate and I used it to model a full season in an illegal remote racing circuit. This took the basic structure and spread it across multiple days.
• For “Battle of the Bands,” also in Welcome to the Island, I worked with Jeremy Tuohy to adapt the structure for modeling a road trip studded with micro-adventures.

Basically, the more designers who pitch me awesome, expansive concepts for adventure scenarios, the more I find myself coming back to the party-planning scenario structure as the foundation we can easily adapt to make those concepts work in practical terms.

This has been really interesting and exciting work. I had largely thought of the party-planning structure as being fairly narrow and specific (but very useful!) in its utility, but the more my designers and I have been using it, the more powerful and flexible it has proven to be.

I haven’t been sharing these new insights here on the Alexandrian largely because, for a long time, I thought of these scenarios as just being specific applications of the party-planning structure. (Any time you use a scenario structure, after all, you’re adapting it to the needs of the specific scenario.) But while this is true for some of the scenarios I’ve been designing, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that several of these structures have developed enough that it’s not just a matter of them being adapted to a specific scenario; they’ve been adapted to support whole new classes of scenarios, making them distinct scenario structures in their own right.

Today we’re going to look at the scenario structure for festivals which I developed for Jonathan Killstring to use in his upcoming Burning Dragon scenario for the Feng Shui roleplaying game.

THE FESTIVAL

Burning Dragon is an outdoor art and music festival in the Gobi Desert that gathers each summer to “forge the dragon.” Lasting more than a week, it culminates in a huge wicker effigy of a dragon being literally lit aflame to complete the symbolic purging of the festival.

This structure, however, can be used for any large gathering that the PCs will be exploring in detail: a large convention, a long weekend at RenFest, a visiting carnival, a theatrical fringe festival, the Fortnight of the Blood Moon, the Conclave of the Goblin Princes, the solar migration of the star-whales… whatever.

DISTRICTS

Break the festival location into separate districts. These should generally be diegetic (i.e., the PCs should be able to understand the divisons; they’re not arbitrary game concepts) and are likely to reflect the organization of the festival itself. If the people running the festival were to publish a flyer for participants, what would the map look like if you flipped it open?

Another rule of thumb you might find useful is that if the PCs are in one district they should generally not be aware of what’s happening in any other districts unless it’s an event of cataclysmic proportions. (The idea is that if you want to know what’s happening in another district, you’ll need to go there and find out.)

You don’t need a lot of different districts, but if you’re having difficulty breaking your festival into separate districts then it’s very possible that it would be more appropriate to handle your event using the party-planning structure (even if it’s a party on a very large scale).

DISTRICT CHARACTERS

For each district, create the NPCs the PCs are likely to meet there. Again, you don’t need a lot. Just two or three can be enough. These can include characters who are particularly important to the district (like an event organizer or guest of honor), but also think about characters who can be representative of the average festival attendee in that district.

For ease of use, I recommend that ANY character you want attending the festival be associated with a specific district. (Everybody at the festival has to be somewhere after all.) But although they’re associated with a particular district, don’t be afraid to have the PCs run into these characters in other districts. To that end, I also recommend prepping a master list of festival NPCs (and the districts they’re keyed to) for easy reference.

In prepping the characters, use the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template to make it easy to keep all the characters straight and quickly pick them up during play. Print out on NPC per sheet and keep them loose so that you can quickly pull out the sheets for each NPC participating in a particular conversation.

DISTRICT LOCATIONS

Define your district physically by describing major sites or landmarks there. These points of interest may be places the PCs are going to (and, therefore, potentially serve as motivations that bring them into the district) or the PCs might discover them as they explore a district for the first time.

Once again, a little can go a long way here. In fact, if you find yourself listing a whole bunch of locations in a district, you might want to take that as a cue to split the district into several different districts.

DISTRICT EVENTS

District events are things that happen in the district. Some events will naturally be keyed to specific locations and/or characters, but don’t lock them down too tight unless you need to. (It’s more useful to keep things flexible for when you’re actually running the scenario.)

Every district should have at least one event keyed to it. There’s no limit to the number of events you can choose to include in a district, but an over-abundance of events are likely to be wasted prep. Generally speaking, PCs will tend to go to a district once, do the things they need to do there, and then move on. This generally means that keying more than two or three events to a district will make it necessary to really cram stuff into that single visit. There are situations where that can work, but they’re probably the exception rather than the rule.

(Another exception is if your scenario is structured in such a way that the PCs are motivated or required to repeatedly crisscross the festival, visiting districts over and over again. Additional events can be useful then.)

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION

The last tool you’ll prep, as with other social events, are the topics of conversation.  These might be momentous recent events, fraught political debates, or just utter trifles (like an argument about which ska band is the best). For example, in Burning Dragon the topics of conversation include:

• Ganbaatar is the odds-on favorite in the traditional wrestling competition this year. He bench-pressed a pickup truck over in the Badlands earlier. For real, though!
• There’s a big-shot director (S. Khünbish) shooting a film here at the festival.
• Did you know the festival grounds are actually the site of an ancient Mongolian fortress? I heard that the place was ruled by four Wu sorcerers, but it was burned down by four evil shaman-kings who came to steal the secrets of the Wu.
• A young woman was apparently assaulted or kidnapped during the opening ceremony this year.
• How many wheels are too many/not enough on a vehicle. (Later, the topic shifts to how many spikes are too many/not enough on a vehicle.)
• How far along has construction gotten on the dragon effigy.
• There’s a big turtle over in Dust Town. Like, a really big turtle. Nobody seems to know how it got there, but everybody’s trying to get a selfie with it.

I recommend mixing in a few “irrelevant” topics of conversation to camouflage (or, at least, contrast) the “important” stuff. During play, these topics of conversation should also pick up stuff that’s been happening in play (either keyed district events or just whatever mischief the PCs have been getting up to).

RUNNING THE FESTIVAL

Start with your Opening Shot: What happens when the PCs arrive at the festival? What do they immediately see? What’s immediately happening that they can either choose to interact with or be provoked to interact with?

Ideally, this opening shot will also orient the PCs. By the end of it, the players should clearly understand how the festival is organized — i.e., which districts exist and how they relate to each other.

Now that the PCs are at the festival, follow their lead as they attempt to accomplish whatever goal brough them here in the first place. This will usually involve them going to one of the districts. (If they don’t choose a district and instead just want to do something “at the festival” in a general sense — look for information, look for a GMC, etc. — that’s fine. You can either arbitrarily choose a district in which they find the thing they’re looking for or are interrupted by something interesting happening.)

When the PCs are in a district, you’ll mostly be picking up the various tools you’ve prepped for that district, putting them together in different ways, and figuring out how to have fun with them. Broadly speaking, in each district there are three “slots” that you can drop elements into:

• Arriving in the district.
• While doing something in the district (i.e., the reason the PCs came to the district in the first place).
• Leaving the district.

Pay particular attention to how different elements can be combined. For example, if the PCs want to talk to a NPC, could that conversation be happening in one of the specific locations within the district? Are there other NPCs who could join the conversation? Could the district event start happening in the middle of the conversation?

Similarly, if the PCs are in a location, what NPCs might be hanging out there? If there’s an event, how might it affect one of the locations? And so forth.

Although some things may happen to the PCs and force them to react – for example, an NPC might com up and start talking to them – mix things up by also including characters, locations, and events that the PCs can observe and then choose to react to (or ignore). If they don’t react to Old Bill stealing horses from the inn’s stables, that’s fine! They’ll probably see them again.

Similarly, if the PCs are wrapping up a scene, don’t feel like you need to immediately push them into a new one: Ask the players what they want to do next and then use their answer to frame up the next set of tools.

If the PCs are heading into a particular district and you find yourself looking at all the tools in the district uncertain of what should happen, just trigger the district event when the players arrive and see where things go from there.

TIMING OF EVENTS

Festival-type events often have a formal schedule of events: Such-and-such a convention panel happens at 1pm on Friday; so-and-so is performing on the Lilliputian Stage at 6pm on Saturday; the draconic convergence will be at high noon on Sunday.

It will therefore be tempting to prep this schedule. Inasmuch as possible, however, you actually want to try to avoid drawing up or otherwise establishing any such specific schedule.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, even a modest festival-type event will likely have dozens and dozens of events on its schedule. Few of them will be relevant to the PCs, creating a ton of wasted prep.

Second, this type of schedule tends to tie your hands too much when actually running the scenario: It would be ideal for the PCs to see Professor Clayton’s presentation on quantum fluctuations in Antarctica, but the event was scheduled for 1pm in the Lilac Room and the PCs went  to the Lilac Room at 2pm instead. (This is why the structure keys events to districts instead of specific times. The events are being mapped to the decisions and actions most likely being taken by the PCs.)

Note: If this still feels weird to you, take a look at a typical dungeon key. Frequently these keys will feature room descriptions in which some specific event is happening at precisely the moment when the PCs arrive at that location. It’s not that the game world is standing still; it’s that our prep is abstracted in order to make it possible to manage the infinite complexities of the world.

This is also why festival-type events, unlike other social events, don’t have a main event sequence: You don’t want the festival to feel like a meeting with a specific agenda. You want it to feel big and messy, with lots of things happening all the same time.

So what should you do when the players want to know when a particular event is happening? Broadly, there are two responses:

• It’s happening right now, so you’d better hurry if you want to make it.
• It’s happening a little later, giving you enough time to either make preparations or do something else first.

Now, there can be exceptions. The two most common ones are, in my experience, an Opening Ceremony (which probably doubles as your opening shot) and the Big Finale at the end of the festival (which might be the epilogue of the scenario or a huge, tangled convergence of everything and everyone the PCs have encountered, mixed together into a single, huge gathering modeled as a subset party-planning scenario.)

Other Landmark Events like this are possible depending on the exact nature of the festival you’re creating, but my recommendation remains that, unless it’s absolutely necessary, you’re better leaning away from this and just keying these events to an appropriate district.

If you’re interested in seeing this scenario structure in practice, Jonathan Killstring’s Burning Dragon will be released in June 2021. If you’d like to get early access to the PDF next month, you can join the Feng Shui Dragons subscription program, supporting the creation of new Feng Shui supplements.