Although marred in the execution, Night Below is still a classic is well worth your attention and effort.

Review Originally Published October 1st, 2001

There needs to be more products like Night Below. Period. End sentence.

Night Below, a supplement for the now defunct AD&D, was marketed as both “The Ultimate Dungeon Adventure” and “An Underdark Campaign”. It fails at the former (there are a plethora of dungeons which succeed at being bigger, more innovative, more believable, more exciting, and/or some combination of the above), but its success at the latter is what makes it notable and worthy of imitation.

To put it simply, Night Below did not content itself with merely being a module: It is, in fact, a complete campaign – designed for months of gameplay and complete with more than a dozen adventures tied into a cohesive plot.

This is a type of product that the industry needs to see more of. (For other examples, check out Dream Pod 9’s The Paxton Gambit for Heavy Gear and Gold Rush Games’ Shiki for Sengoku.) I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I would welcome the ability to pick up a complete campaign in one shot and start playing. If nothing else, it gives me time to prepare for the next campaign.

Let’s take a closer look at what Night Below has to offer:

PLOT

Warning: From this point forward, this review will contain spoilers for Night Below. Players who may end up playing in these modules are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.

The Big Concept: Deep within the Underdark, the Aboleth Savants – powerful creatures with the power to dominate others – lurk within the Sunless Sea. There they have laid plots for the construction of a massive magical artifact, designed to expand their innate domination powers for hundreds of miles, allowing them to subdue surface creatures without any need for battle or risk. The PCs, of course, have to stop them from doing this – although, for a very long time, they won’t have the slightest clue of the true evil which lurks behind their foes.

The Night Below campaign is split into three parts:

The Evils of Haranshire: In Part I of Night Below, the PCs begin as 1st or 2nd level characters in Haranshire, a typical, rural fantasy setting (which can be easily slipped into any campaign setting – suggestions are given for placement in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms). In order to construct their artifact, the aboleths have need of spellcasters – and to get those spellcasters they have established bands of kidnappers on the surface. The campaign, in fact, opens with a kidnapping attempt involving one or more PC spellcasters. As the campaign unfolds, the PCs slowly uncover the full truth behind the kidnapping rings – while also going on some a few side-trips. In the big wrap up for the first part of the campaign, the PCs succeed in destroying what they believe to be the central lair for the kidnappers… only to discover the kidnappers’ connection to an unknown power in the underdark.

Perils in the Underdark: In Part II of Night Below, the PCs pursue their leads into the Underdark. They almost immediately make contact with friendly svirfneblin, who will provide them with cautious aid. This section of the campaign is largely concerned with the PCs slowly building up enough strength to assault the City of the Glass Pool – a settlement of kuo-tua deep within the Underdark which guards the gateway leading to the Sunless Sea and the root of the evil. Along the way, the PCs will make contact with a variety of bad guys (trolls, grells, quaggoth, hook horrors, puddings, oozes, and derro) and good guys (the svirfneblin and a group of good elves living in the Underdark). Part II comes to its smashing conclusion as the PCs succeed in overthrowing the City of the Glass Pool (or, at the very least, pushing through it into the depths beyond).

The Sunless Sea: In Part III of Night Below, the PCs have succeeded in penetrating all the way to the Sunless Sea – wherein dwell the sinister Aboleth Savants. But they will have to make their way the Aboleth’s city – and along the way will encounter a number of other enemies and allies. Again, a thin line needs to be tread in the forming and maintaining of alliances. In the campaign’s epic conclusion the PCs will (hopefully) defeat the Aboleth Savants and overthrow their seat of power for all time.

BOX CONTENTS

Night Below is one of those boxed sets which you can shake without hearing the echoes formed by empty space within. Three 64-page books, 16 pages of Player Handouts, 8 two-sided reference cards, 8 new Monstrous Compendium entries, and 6 full-color poster maps are packed into the box – making it a hearty value for the $30 price tag.

STRENGTHS

Night Below succeeds at crafting a comprehensive, epic campaign. Carl Sargent demonstrates how a well-constructed campaign looks less like a series of disjointed modules, and more like a cohesive story – with a distinct beginning, middle, and end all of its own. This, above all, is Night Below’s most impressive accomplishment, and is reason enough to pick up the boxed set in and of itself.

But you can also strip-mine Night Below with great ease: There’s a great wealth of material here (literally enough on which to base an entire campaign), and you can use large hunks of it without ever touching the overall structure of the campaign at all. For example, I plucked out the source material for two of the towns in Haranshire for use in completely different campaign. You could also pluck out such jewels as the Rockseer Elves subplot and use that as a stand-alone adventure in and of itself (or even as the basis for an entire campaign). And so forth.

WEAKNESSES

Unfortunately, Night Below also comes with its share of weaknesses:

1. The most pervasive problem in the campaign was the lack of clear organization and/or layout in the product. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a lot of material here and – unfortunately – it’s organized in such a poor manner that it’s extremely easy to get lost in it all. In many ways, the campaign is presented almost as a stream of consciousness. As such, it desperately needed to be reorganized into distinct chunks: Here’s the section where the PCs fight the orcs. Here’s the section where we describe Haranshire. Here’s the section where the PCs investigate the troll lair. And so forth.

2. Although he’s constructed an extremely impressive story arc, I feel that Sargent doesn’t always take advantage of the opportunity to foreshadow future developments. Perhaps this is a minor complaint, but I feel that a little more interweaving of the overall structure would have resulted in a story with more depth.

3. Night Below suffers, unfortunately, from the standard 2nd edition problem of referencing/requiring every supplement under the sun. This type of thing drives me nuts: Did these people actually expect their fans to own all 10,000+ supplements they produced?

4. At several points in the course of the campaign, Sargent brings what I can only describe as “XP mentality” into the game world. Most notably, the svirfneblin are constantly advising the PCs to go take care of one threat or another in order to “strengthen them up” (i.e., gain the levels necessary) for the final challenge. I just can’t accept this with a straight face. For example, imagine the United States during World War II saying: “Well, we need to take on Japan. I think we need to go take out Argentina and Venezuela in order to ‘strengthen up’ for the final challenge.”

5. I’m not a big fan of the “1001 fantasy races” model of campaign world design – in which, every time you turn a corner, you’re bumping into a new race of intelligent humanoids. Night Below has this syndrome in spades – which is why, as much as I respect and appreciate the product, I will probably never run it in full myself. If you have a similar distaste for this particular style of D&D, be warned that Night Below will require significant amounts of alteration (and may, in the end analysis, simply not work for you).

CONCLUSION

Night Below is a bang well worth your buck. If you can track down a copy, it’s well worth your time – either to use in whole or in part.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Carl Sargent
Publisher: TSR
Line: AD&D
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 0-7869-0179-9
Year of Release: 1995
Product Code: 1125
Pages: 225

Now that the full campaign model of Night Below has become almost bog standard in the RPG industry, it’s interesting to look back at a time when that wasn’t true. With that being said, I think Night Below has still stolen a march: There are a lot of reasons why these big campaigns just work better as boxed sets. (Although we’re starting to see more and more of that from third-party D&D publishers.)

As I mentioned at the end of the review, Night Below is not a campaign that I ever ran for myself (although I did cut off chunks and use them elsewhere). There was a point where I was dabbling with the idea of remixing it to have a less linear form, but the group I was running for back then fell apart and I haven’t revisited it since.

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

Go to Part 1

Consider two scenarios. In the first:

Player: I want to hack the Lytekkas mainframe.

GM: Make a DC 20 Hacking check.

And in the second:

Player: Okay, I’ve seduced the secretary to social engineer login credentials and Suzie has snuck in and planted a spoofed router to give us remote access. Let’s hack the Lytekkas mainframe!

GM: Make a DC 20 Hacking check.

When reduced to this core dynamic, we can immediately see that something has gone wrong here. Spread out over the course of several actions and multiple minutes of gameplay, however, this is a trap that a lot of GMs fall into. It can get even more egregious if failing the Seduction or Stealth checks can scuttle the entire hacking attempt, resulting in rolling to failure that actually makes the clever, detailed planning LESS likely to succeed than no plan at all.

Either way, though, this sort of thing is hopelessly frustrating to the players, and will quickly result in them no longer bothering to make plans. If their actions are pointless — or, worse yet, debilitating — why would they continue making the effort? Without correction, gameplay will become a flat, rote exercise. Players will also disengage from the game generally.

MAKING PLANS

I don’t know what plans your players might come up with. (That’s the fun part!) They might be simple and straightforward, or they might be astoundingly complex Rube Goldberg machines. But if the players come up with a good plan, then — compared to the default or bullheaded approach — the plan should mechanically do one or more of the following:

• Reduce the number of required rolls. (Which could include reducing how many characters need to make a roll.)
• Eliminate the need to roll at all.
• Increase the number of rolls, but not the total number of successes required across those rolls.
• Reduce the difficulty of the roll(s).
• Grant a bonus to the roll(s).
• Change the skill/ability being rolled (presumably to one the PC is better at).
• Reduce and/or change the potential consequences of a failed roll.
• Improve the potential benefits of a successful roll.

This is, ultimately, a specialized case of allowing player expertise to trump character expertise: The player has gone to the effort of making a plan, and that effort should be reflected in your ruling.

PLANNING TIPS

I frequently find it useful to explain exactly how the plan is benefitting the PCs.

Player: Okay, I’ve seduced the secretary to social engineer login credentials and Suzie has snuck in and planted a spoofed router to give us remote access. Let’s hack the Lytekkas mainframe!

GM: Make a DC 12 Hacking check.

Compared to our earlier example — where it was a DC 20 Hacking check — the careful planning of the players has had a huge effect! But if the players don’t know the original difficulty of the check, their perception may be that their plan was pointless.

GM: The stolen login credentials and wi-fi access point each reduce the DC of your Hacking check by 4, so I need a DC 12 Hacking check.

With a clear understanding of the benefits, these players will go looking for more opportunities to shift the odds in their favor.

What if the PCs come up with a bad plan, though? Do you still need to reward them by following the guidelines above? Absolutely not. (“Yes, I understand that you thought triggering the sprinkler system in the server room would make it easier to hack the network. But what actually happens is the servers are all knocked offline and you’ve lost your vector for making a Hacking check.”)

Along the same lines, it’s OK for plans to go awry. For example, failing the Seduction check can cause all kinds of complications or even scuttle things entirely, IF a success on that check would grant a truly meaningful benefit. That’s not rolling to failure; that’s taking a gamble. (In the movie Sneakers, a partial failure on a Seduction check gives the PCs access to a programmer’s ID card, but also causes the programmer to twig to what’s happening and raise the alarm halfway through their heist.)

COMBAT PLANNING

Tactical planning in combat should follow the same general guidelines as any other planning, but there’s a specific issue to watch out for in combat: action economy.

Whether performing stunts or coordinating with other PCs, if a plan requires a setup or supporting action, the potential benefit for that action must be larger than just making an attack yourself. To put that another way, you need to look at the total cost (including the opportunity cost) of the plan and make sure that the payoff is larger than the cost. If it isn’t, don’t be surprised when the players all default back to, “I hit it with my sword.”

Unfortunately, it turns out that it can be quite difficult to find this balance, particularly if you’re responding on-the-fly to some bespoke plan the players have just thrown together. And it turns out most RPGs aren’t designed to help you with this. (Although there are some that do.) So there are a few rules of thumb that I use.

First, if this is a one-off situation, I’ll err on the side of making the payoff more powerful. I’d rather have it be worthwhile than not, and even if I get it wrong, it’s a one-time advantage, not the end of the world. (If the setup is easily repeatable in every fight, on the other hand, you need to be a little more cautious so that it doesn’t become something abusable and, therefore, boring.)

Second, instead of making a check as a separate action (which carries with it the opportunity cost of whatever else the action could have been spent on), incorporate the check into the existing action. Now you just need to balance the payoff against the increased likelihood of failure (due to the additional check), and that’s a lot easier to do.

Example: You’re playing in a system that doesn’t normally track flanking bonuses, but a player wants to flank an enemy to help another PC’s attack. If you required them to make some sort of bespoke flanking action instead of their normal attack, the benefit to the other player would need to be larger than the potential damage of the attack they passed up. But if you instead rule that they can take a penalty to their attack to grant a bonus to their comrade’s attack, that’s a lot easier to balance.

Alternatively, if a PC is spending an action to do nothing except set something up, then the benefit of successfully setting it up should be, at a minimum, granting a full bonus action (either to their future self or another PC). For some reason, this can often feel as if it’s “too much,” and there are systems and situations where trading one type of action for another isn’t balanced (so I’m not saying that every set up should be granting a blank check). Keep in mind, though, that even with the exact same action, simply delaying when it’s taken from the moment of setup to the moment of payoff is already a disadvantage (albeit it balanced by the potential benefits of being able to batch actions up).

FURTHER READING
The Art of Pacing
The Art of the Key
GM Don’t List

Q. asks:

What’s the difference between a campaign and adventure? I also see you talk about “scenarios.” What’s the difference between an adventure and a scenario?

The short answer is that, for me, a campaign is made up of multiple adventures and I use “adventure” and “scenario” interchangeably.

To understand why, let’s take a little dive into the history of these terms. Plus, I think it’ll be fun.

The origin of campaign is a military campaign. (Which, in turn, comes from the French campagne — literally the “open countryside” in which the armies are maneuvering. The “campaign season” was when warm weather allowed the armies to maneuver and seek battle; to be “on campaign.”) In gaming, it referred to wargame battles which were linked together, so that the outcome of one battle would influence the next. Notably, Dave Arneson ran a Napoleonics campaign in which a heavily modified version of Diplomacy was used to set up the individual battles. The “campaign” was, effectively, the wider world in which individual battle scenarios were set, and this usage carried over when Arneson invented the modern roleplaying game with his Castle Blackmoor campaign.

This early use of the term “campaign” was also influenced by the open table style of play used by Arneson, Gygax, and other early GMs, with a single campaign being not just the adventures of one group of PCs, but many different groups. It wasn’t unusual to hear the phrase “campaign world,” and “campaign” itself was often used as essentially a synonym for “the game setting.”

This also meant, though, that the “campaign” was the collection of all adventures that took place within that shared setting. As dedicated tables became more common, the meaning of “campaign” shifted. It still referred to all of the adventures taking place in a shared continuity, but for most groups that continuity now consisted of the adventures of a single group of characters.

The origin of module was also quite literal: It referred to any product designed to be plugged into your game. It originally referred to all supplements (the game as a whole was seen as literally modular), but the usage rapidly narrowed to refer only to adventure modules, largely because that’s how TSR referred to its adventure products. This resulted in “module” becoming essentially synonymous with “adventure” or “scenario.” (The latter term, you’ll note, also derives from the “scenarios” used for wargames.) This is significant because… well… what does adventure mean for an RPG?

See, the original D&D modules (e.g., Dungeon Module T1: The Village of Hommlet) were really conceptualized as setting supplements: You’d take the location described in the module and literally plug it into the hex map of your campaign world, keying it to one of the hexes. As play moved away from “campaign worlds” shared by multiple groups, however, dedicated tables increasingly gravitated towards episodic play: The DM would buy an adventure module (Keep on the Borderlands or The Lost City or White Plume Mountain or Steading of the Hill Giant Chief) and that would be the next adventure their group would play through.

(This is also influenced by the fact that many of TSR’s earliest modules were originally created for us in convention tournaments.)

Because these modules were now being used by so many DMs as episodic adventures, it naturally followed that published adventures began being written with this in mind: They’re not just cool places for the PCs to explore; they’re specific premises (rescue the princess! recover the stolen gem!) that point at specific conclusions. (The Day the Old School Died dives into a very explicit example of this.)

This all evolved fairly quickly at the dawn of the hobby, and by the mid-‘80s the terms had settled into a pretty common usage: A campaign was a collection of linked adventures (and that link was usually the dedicated group of PCs who played through those adventures together). And the terms module, adventure, and scenario were all used pretty much interchangeably.

But that brings us back to the question: What is an adventure? Is it dungeon? A mystery? Unraveling a grand conspiracy? Obviously, it could be any or all of those things, and the length/scale of a single adventure can vary wildly. For example, a dungeon adventure could be a micro-dungeon with just a couple of rooms or it could be a large dungeon with multiple levels and dozens of rooms.

This became significant when companies started publishing collections of linked adventures. The original Dragonlance modules — a linked series of sixteen modules (including non-adventure modules) — were notable, with their massive success being followed up by Scourge of the Slave Lords (which collected the original A1 thru A4 adventure modules) and Queen of the Spiders (collecting G1-G4, D1-D2, and Q1), but it was a widespread trend. (For example, this is the same time period in which Chaosium was publishing Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Masks of Nyarlathotep.) Are these one big adventure or many different adventures? The perception of Scourge of the Slave Lords and Queen of the Spiders was certainly influenced by the fact they were previously published as separate adventures, and they were labeled “Campaign Adventures” by TSR.

The distinction, though, could be (and can be) pretty vague. For example, DLE1 In Search of Dragons was a single large “Official Game Adventure” from TSR, but it’s made up of a dozen different adventure locations. What, if anything, makes it different from Scourge of the Slave Lords? Where’s the line between “investigating a cult” (single scenario) and “investigating multiple branches of the cult, each of which is a separate scenario” (Masks of Nyarlathotep)?

On the other hand, Scourge of the Slave Lords and Queen of the Spiders were still being described as books you would slot into a larger campaign, running them for PCs who would go adventuring before and/or after these mega-adventures/campaign adventures/adventure collections. But these two books were also linked. So were they collectively on big adventure spread across two books? A campaign with two adventures? A campaign made up of roughly a dozen different adventures?

Fast-forwarding three or four decades, we can see that very little of this muddiness has actually changed: Is Lost Mine of Phandelver a single adventure or a collection of adventures? Is the answer the same for Dragon of Icespire Peak, which uses an explicit jobs board? What about Curse of Strahd? That has a single, dominant villain. Is that different from Storm King’s Thunder, which has several independent villains scattered across the world, but all linked to the same current events? And is that different from Rime of the Frostmaiden, which has multiple bad guys with no direct connection, but all operating in the same area? Is Hoard of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat a campaign when it’s published as two separate books/adventures, but no longer a campaign when it’s published in a single-volume edition? What about when it was published in a slipcase or as a giant boxed set with a bunch of individual adventure booklets?

Or consider a megadungeon. Is a megadungeon a single adventure? Or can you think of the megadungeon as being made up of many different scenarios divided up into separate levels? (There’s a reason why true megadungeons are sometimes referred to as “campaign dungeons.”)

To make a long story short, the line between “campaign” (many adventures” and “mega-adventure” (one adventure, but its scope is vast!) can be pretty fuzzy, and it has been for a long time.

Personally, I think it likely that most “adventures” that last more than ten sessions are likely to actually be a campaign made up of several different linked scenarios. I think this distinction has gotten a little muddier over the last decade because Wizards of the Coast has such a predilection for publishing 200+ page campaign books, but I think it still largely tracks to how most people are using the terms.

I like handouts.

I like them a lot.

If you’ve seen the Alexandrian remixes for Eternal Lies or Dragon Heist, then this won’t come as a surprise to you. Those campaigns are fairly representative of what my games look like: There will be dozens or even hundreds of handouts. Photographs, letters, lore books, artifacts — anything I can get into the players hands enhances the experience and becomes a tangible touchstone for what’s happening in the game.

In running a single adventure — like Left Hand of Mythos — keeping track of the props is pretty straightforward. Over the course of a campaign, though? Things can get more complicated.

It’s not at all unusual for my players to pull a sheet of paper out of their notes and say something like, “Hey, this letter from Lady Scarlet to Thornai that we got thirty-seven sessions ago — can we pull that from the evidence bag and dust it for fingerprints?”

Now, somewhere in my notes is likely the information I need to answer that question (i.e., who handed this letter before the PCs snagged it). But where, exactly, is it?

Well, almost certainly keyed to whatever location they found the letter in.

… and where is that?

Damned if I know. It was, after all, thirty-seven sessions ago.

What I’ve learned to do is put tracker IDs on my paper handouts. That way I know where to look up my notes about them later on.

I use alphanumeric codes for my scenario notes. For example, scenarios in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign include:

• BW03B Alchestrin’s Tomb
• BW06 Chapel of St. Thessina
• CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors
• NOD2 The Secret Meeting

And my current Night’s Black Agents campaign has scenarios like:

• CS03 Paymaster
• CS06 Dragovir Monastery
• PP01 Arkady Shevlenko
• SJ02 Serbian Mafia

These are just generally useful for keeping stuff organized, but are particularly useful for tracking props. In pencil, I lightly write the alphanumeric code somewhere on the prop. No matter how much later the prop surfaces, I can just reference the code and know exactly what notes I need to reference.

If you don’t want to use scenario codes, another option might be maintaining a master handouts index, listing every prop you’ve prepped and the adventure it comes from. The tip here isn’t the specific method of the tracking; the tip is that having some way of knowing the provenance of your props becomes important as you begin running rich, complicated, long-lasting campaigns.

If you’re using node-based design, does that mean you’re prepping a plot?

No.

We’re talking about “plot” in the sense of Don’t Prep Plots:

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

Plot, in this case, means the sequence of events that happens in a story. Prepping a plot in an RPG means you’re predetermining what the PCs will do: A will happen, then B will happen, then C will happen. If by “plot” you mean something else — a villain’s scheme, a ground plan, etc. — then the answer might veer closer to “maybe,” but it’s also outside the scope of this discussion.

If you’re familiar with node-based design, then it’s likely you’re scratching your head right now: Obviously node-based design isn’t about prepping a plot, so why is this even a question?

But it’s actually a question I get asked several times a year. This is sometimes because people are using some other definition of “plot,” but, based on conversations that I’ve had, it’s frequently that they’re so deeply entrenched in plot-based prep (including railroading) that they have difficulty comprehending any other paradigm. Even when they look at alternatives, they subconsciously think to themselves, basically, “Well, obviously I would use this to prep a plot.” And then sometimes they go farther and say, “Why is this guy lying when he says he doesn’t prep plots?” Strangely, this even seems to happen with people who are virulently opposed to prepping plots.

This isn’t limited to node-based design, either. I’ve seen the same attitude applied to everything from clocks to hexcrawls to faction turns. No matter what the structure is, the GMs trapped in this way of thinking start by trying to guess what their players will do and/or figuring what they want to force their players to do, and only then do they try to figure out how the structure can help them do that.

This, of course, is really unfortunate. It’s a massive blindspot. And I’ve seen this enough — and been asked this enough — that I think it’s worth taking the time to take a closer look at these misapprehensions.

THE MANDATED MYSTERY

The first argument I often see is that:

1. Node-based scenario design is used to design mysteries (e.g., figuring out who’s selling red opium).
2. A mystery scenario means that the GM is dictating the scenario concept to the players. (“Thou shalt figure out who’s selling red opium.”)
3. This is a plot.
4. Therefore, using node-based scenario design means that you’re prepping a plot, not a situation.

To start, let’s accept as a given that node-based scenario design means that you’re designing a mystery. (I’d actually quibble with that a bit, but it’s not important here.)

Next, I think we need to define what a sandbox campaign is: This is a campaign where the players can either choose or define what the next scenario is going to be. The second premise being asserted here is that if the GM is the one assigning scenario concepts (as they might in an episodic campaign where the PCs are cops being assigned cases to solve, for example), then this is not a sandbox campaign.

This is, of course, true. I actually describe this as the “lightest form of railroading” in Part 3 of The Railroading Manifesto. (Which is not to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with this sort of campaign structure. Quite the opposite. There all kinds of diegetic and non-diegetic reasons for running an episodic campaign and, as I point out in the manifesto, lots of people wouldn’t consider it to be railroading at all.)

But is this, in fact, a plot? Is the GM prepping a predetermined sequence of events? Well, if you squint hard enough and are sufficiently liberal with your definition of “sequence of events,” you can make a case for this being true. (For reasons pretty similar to why I refer to it as “the lightest form of railroading.”) Personally, I think what you’re actually discussing here is campaign structure rather than the scenario structure, and I think putting this much weight on the nature and presentation of the scenario hook is more deceptive than revealing when it comes to the overall design of the scenario, but there’s certainly a semantics debate to be had.

Ultimately, though, none of that is really relevant, because nothing about mystery scenarios or node-based design requires the GM to dictate scenario concepts to the PCs.

If you’ve never experienced a player saying, “I want to do X,” and then the GM designs the scenario that results from them wanting to do X, then you might find this confusing. But I do this all the time.

The type of scenario you design, of course, will depend on what X is and how the PCs are planning to do it: If they want to steal the Ruby of Omarrat, then I’m probably prepping a heist. If they want to travel from Neverwinter to Waterdeep, then I’m prepping a travel route. If they want to attend Burning Man, I might prep a festival. And if they want to figure out where their rival gang is sourcing red opium from, I’d probably use node-based scenario design.

So even if we believed that scenario hooks are plots, once we realize that mysteries do not require GM-mandated scenario hooks, we can easily see how this entire line of argument collapses.

CLUES = PLOT

This brings us to the second common argument, which is that by designing clues and placing them in a scene you are prepping a plot. For example, by saying that Rachel works for Bobby (and, therefore, the PCs can discover this connection and follow it to Bobby), you are predetermining events.

This is, again, certainly something that you CAN do: The breadcrumb trail of clues, each of which can only be found in one specific way and used in one specific way.

I suspect, though, that most people reading this are already sensing that something doesn’t quite feel right here. How is stating “Rachel works for Bobby” a plot? Is that not clearly a situation — a description of the world state?

Imagine that I created a room in the game world and I said, “This room has a door and two windows.”

And then Bob said, “THAT’S A PLOT! You are predetermining that the PCs will enter the room through the door or the windows!”

I’m very hopeful that you can understand that Bob’s not making any sense here.

First, the players could easily enter the room in other ways: They could chop a hole in the wall. They could teleport in.

Or they might choose NOT to enter that room. Either because they simply choose to go somewhere else, or because they figure out some way of accomplishing their goals in that room without entering it. (They could scry on the room. Hire someone to search the room for them. Burn the house down and force the threat inside the room to come running outside.)

The leads in node-based scenarios work just like the doors and windows of that room, and stuff like permissive clue-finding is analogous to chopping holes in the wall. Node-based design is a way of thinking about how different parts of the game world are connected to each other — Rachel works for Bobby; Mathieu has a treasure map revealing the location of Shandrala; the street dealers get their red opium from a house on Oak Street — and prepping scenarios in which the PCs use information (i.e., leads) to navigate the game world.

You can hypothetically use node-based scenario design to force a plot, the same way that you could build a room with adamantine walls and endless GM fiat to force the players to solve the riddle that will unlock the door. But that’s something you’re choosing to do.

CONCLUSION

I’m mostly writing this essay because, when I get these questions in the future, I want to be able to just point people here. But I’m also hoping that it might help some people break out of a paradigm that’s limiting them as both GMs and players.

If you see a GM create a tree and your first thought is, “There’s no other explanation for this than that the GM is going to force me to climb that tree,” it’s important to understand that this is a warped perception. Even if that’s been your experience with one GM, you should know that there are other GMs running their games in very different ways.

And if you’re a GM who either (a) can’t create a tree unless you’re planning to force your players to climb it or (b) are paralyzed at the thought of creating a tree because you’re afraid it means you’re railroading your players into climbing it, then I truly believe your games will be better if you can jettison that way of thinking and, instead, embrace the simple maxim:

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.