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Rhodarin Press has published five supplements fleshing out Avernus, presenting a unique vision of the first layer of Hell. The first of these I stumbled across was Tyrants of the Purple City, a brief gazetteer describing an entire infernal city that lies somewhere along the Styx.

TYRANTS OF THE PURPLE CITY: The city is primarily presented through a number of distinct factions, each of which has a barebones quest/job that they want accomplished. This is an interesting lens for viewing the setting, but seems very practical, resulting in a lot of bang for your buck in a relatively short supplement.

The biggest shortcoming of Tyrants of the Purple City is the appalling proofreading. (Although the malapropism of “portuary ward” is almost delightfully evocative.) This is a problem which unfortunately persists throughout the Rhodarin supplements.

• Grade: B-

CHARON’S DROWNED SHRINE: Charon’s Drowned Shrine presents another Avernian city lying along the Styx, but this one was utterly destroyed in a flood forty years ago.

I will just never understand paragraphs like this:

Characters will most likely approach the city through the main course of the river. If they traverse the town to the Temple they should come across the districts in the order Outskirts, New Harbor, Eastern Gate, and then the Inner City, where the Temple resides, but through magic means or other strategies, they might be able to circumvent some wards.

First, there’s a map, so this is immediately obvious and the text is irrelevant. Second, stop trying to force non-linear environments into being linear, plotted experiences. Third, the phrase “if the PCs figure out how to do something, then they can do something” seems to be the #1 favorite way for RPG authors to write “I feel a need to write something, but have absolutely nothing to actually say.”

With that grumpy pet peeve out of the way, the biggest problem Charon’s Drowned Shrine has is that Orinxis, the ruined city, is… mundane. Absurdly so given that it is a CITY IN HELL ITSELF.

For example, the first keyed location is the Old Water Mill. Oooh… A mill churned by the cursed waters of the Styx itself! What alien and infernal purpose could it have been built for?

Grinding flour.

In similar fashion, the adventure just kind of blithely assumes that the PCs will be casually wading (and even diving!) into the waters of the Styx. The whole thing just feels like an adventure designed for the Material Plane that has been awkwardly copy-pasted to Avernus.

This one just doesn’t do it for me.

• Grade: D

ESCAPE FROM THE BLOOD FORTRESS: Originally written as a one-shot that could also be potentially used as part of a longer campaign to bring the PCs to Avernus for the first time (by having them kidnapped and then locked in an infernal prison from which they must escape), the author has hypothetically retrofitted Escape from the Blood Fortress to be used as part of a Descent Into Avernus campaign (although, as far as I can tell, no actual effort has been put towards achieving this goal).

The dungeon from which the PCs are escaping is painfully linear, which is made worse because options ARE given.. it just turns out they’re designed to murder you if you’re stupid enough to take them. For example:

Exiting through this exit is highly inadvisable, as it would probably mean a very complex encounter and almost certainly incarceration or death.

So go back to the Preapproved Exit™ you dummies.

Other design problems include encounters which are… vague. For example:

The denizens of this kitchen are mainly imps and quasits following the orders of Jakll, a blind and very old tiefling (non-combatant) with excellent cooking skills.

How many imps? How many quasits? No idea.

The aforementioned “gonna kill you dummies for picking the wrong door” encounter is similarly undefined. There’s just, like, so many devils out there!

Eventually the PCs follow the linear dungeon up high enough that they can look out a different window and see a huge cut-scene play out which is, despite them having no agency in it whatsoever, the “climactic moment in the adventure.” Oddly, the adventure then continues.

This one is a miss for me, too.

• Grade: F

THE ADMIRAL’S SUCCESS – A GUIDE ON SAILING THE STYX: This supplement consists of two parts. First, a set of alternative mechanics for handling exposure to the Styx designed to moderate the consequences of doing so.

Second, ten scripted random encounters designed for groups traveling along the Styx. These encounters are mostly serviceable, but also fairly pedestrian.

Unfortunately, several of them once again suffer from the “I forgot to put combat stats in this combat encounter” problem seen in Escape From Blood Fortress, which is fairly crippling in a product pretty much exclusively designed to provide ready-to-use encounters.

• Grade: D

VYSIANTER’S GUIDE TO THE RED WASTES OF AVERNUS: This is an example of what I mean when I talk about GMs lacking scenario structures. The author’s concept here is a blasted swath of Avernian wilderness called the Red Wastes, but the only scenario structure he knows is “linear plot.” And so the trackless waste through which the PCs are supposed to “roam” is presented as… a road.

With a sequence of programmed encounters that play out as the PCs walk down the road.

Once again, several of these encounters are vague, with some basically consisting of the author saying, “Here’s an idea for an encounter that might work. Maybe. I dunno.”

The typos also remain on point with this one, producing “bad-reliefs” and a temple to “Armodeus” (who I’m assuming is Asmodeus’ n’er-do-well cousin who’s also a frat boy).

The book is rounded out with the Lost Temple of Dak-Thrael. This dungeon is very atmospheric and evocatively packed with a ton of lore about the Queen of Lilies (who once ruled over the verdant paradise which preceded the Red Wastes). I find the key to be a little muddy – with boxed text that violates the “don’t tell the players what their characters are doing” rule and a presentation primarily based on theorizing about things the PCs might do (instead of just clearly describing the room so that I can run the game) – but it’s serviceable.

If you’re looking to add a little enigma to your version of Avernus – a reminder that its history stretches back through countless aeons beyond human comprehension and its wastes are filled with the lost palimpsest of unknowable epochs – Vysianter’s Guide to the Red Wastes might be worth snagging for Dak-Thrael alone (to which I’d give a grade of C-).

• Grade: D+

After stumbling into Tyrants of the Purple City and being pleasantly surprised, I was really excited to discover that Rhodarin Press had done a whole slate of Avernus-focused supplements. Unfortunately, I was pretty consistently disappointed by the rest of the line. With that being said, I see a lot of potential here, and will be keeping an eye on Rhodarin in the future to see how they develop.

One last thing to note, which may not have been immediately clear from the above, is that all of Rhodarin’s Avernus products are loosely bound together, forming a shared continuity. Each book stands on its own, but they’re also designed to work with each other.

Go to the Avernus Remix

Go to Part 1

Vampirina is childen’s television show created by Chris Nee for Disney Junior. Although based on the Vampirina Ballerina books by Anne Marie Pace, our focus today is strictly on the TV show (which is almost unrecognizably altered from its source material).

For reasons which are, as far as I can tell, never truly explained by the series, Vampirina and her family (vampires don’t drink blood and just have kids normally in this universe) decide to move from Transylvania to Pennsylvania and open a bed-and-breakfast for ghouls, goblins, and other creatures that go bump in the night.

STRUCTURE 1: GUEST OF THE WEEK

The central structure here is pretty straightforward:  Each week a new monster (or group of monsters) shows up at the Scare B&B and they bring an adventure with them. This often takes the form of some sort of problem the guest is suffering from which Vampirina and her friends need to solve.

For example, in “Mummy Mayhem” a mummy sneaks out of the local museum for a vacation at the B&B. The museum believes the mummy to have been stolen and sends search parties to go looking for him. In “The Ghoul Girls” the Transylvanian girl group Scream Girls makes a pit stop on their tour and need an opening act.

It’s pretty easy to see how this structure can be adapted to any number of roleplaying games in which the PCs might end up in charge of an inn or similar establishment:

• In Over the Edge, it’s a seedy motel where each featured guests brings a little weird with them.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade, it’s a safe house for vamps passing through the area.
• In Stars Without Number, it’s a small space port where each adventure arrives in a ship.

This is good as far as it goes, but this is very much the exemplar of an incomplete game structure: Like a Mr. Johnson in Shadowrun or the briefing rooms of Paranoia, the “guest of the week” is a very flexible template for reliably delivering scenario hooks, but doesn’t really help you with the scenario itself. You still need to create that from scratch (presumably using other scenario structures).

Which is why Vampirina has a second episodic structure.

STRUCTURE 2: SECRET AT RISK

Other than a few close friends, the humans who make Pennsylvania their home cannot be allowed to find out that Vampirina, her family, or her guests are supernatural, and the series includes several characters (mostly neighbors) from whom this secret must be kept.

One way we could structurally implement this in a roleplaying game is to make a random check each time a PC or one of their guests exhibits supernatural abilities or properties to see if they’re at risk from a human. The key words here, however, are “at risk.” The result of this check should not be a human immediately seeing the supernatural manifestation. Instead, it should create a point of uncertainty: a crisis that has to be solved to prevent the human from discovering the truth.

This second structure largely completes the first one. As long as the guest is either innately supernatural (like a walking, talking mummy) or has some motivation for manifesting their supernatural abilities, the crisis points created by the second structure (combined with the solutions to those crisis points created by the characters, which may feature the use of supernatural abilities themselves, creating a cascade of trigger events) will innately create a complete scenario. You’ll probably want to play around a bit to figure out the right “pace” at which supernatural abilities trigger risk in order to create a satisfying adventure.

The episode “Dancelvania” is a pretty clear-cut example of this: A sleep-walking zombie shows up while Vampirina has some of her human friends over. The episode consists entirely of Vampirina and the other main characters (i.e., the PCs) trying to make sure that the zombie doesn’t expose himself.

Of course, you can also drape additional stories off of the visiting guests. Having a complete scenario structure isn’t a straitjacket that prevents you from having other content in your game after all.

Note, too, that this Secret At Risk structure isn’t the only way we could complete the Guest of the Week structure. Similarly, you could also take the Secret At Risk structure and pair it to a difference scenario hook.

PREP CHECKLIST

To use this scenario structure, you’ll need:

• The inn or similar facility where NPCs come to visit.
• The themed “secret” which needs to be kept and which the guests put at risk. (In Vampirina this is simply “the supernatural exists,” and this can work in any number of settings where the “masquerade” needs to be kept.)
• The guest for the current adventure, who should either inherently reveal the secret or have a motivation which will cause them to take actions which do so.
• A set of NPCs who can put that secret at risk.

And you should be good to go!

BEYOND THE BED & BREAKFAST

For an additional exercise, consider Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca. This is a bar (and, shockingly, a “secret” casino) rather than a bed and breakfast, but the application of the structure is fairly straightforward. Although at the beginning of the movie Rick infamously “sticks his neck out for nobody,” slightly more proactive PCs could be confronted with a cavalcade of refugees seeking help (and usually having secrets which must be kept from the Nazis).

A similar example can be found in Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Here the eponymous saloon is visited in each story by some strange creature or character out of speculative fiction. Often these visits are simply the framing device for the visitor to tell their story, but not always, with the visitor’s problems often following them into the saloon itself.

Callahan’s doesn’t particularly lend itself to the Secret At Risk structure, so it might be a good opportunity to think about what other structure(s) you might pair up with the Guest of the Week.

In the case of both Rick’s and Callahan’s, there’s a natural pairing with the Tavern Time™ system for fleshing out a wider cast of characters (including those who put the Secret At Risk if that applies).

For another example, consider the Continental Hotel from the John Wick movies. With a multitude of assassins constantly taking up residence, it feels as if the PCs filling Winston’s role as proprietor should be constantly intersecting various adventures. However, the rules of Continental more or less ban those adventures from actually crossing the threshold.

Is there a second structure we could implement that would resolve that? Or would we be better off with a completely different set of structures for a Continental campaign?

In 2015 I shared my Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, which is designed to structure the description of NPCs so that they can be quickly picked up and played at the table while simplifying the prep you do for them.

More bang for your buck, in other words.

The template is designed to be used with any system: I’ve used it in adventures for D&D, Numenera, Eclipse Phase, Trail of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, The Strange, Star Wars… The list goes on. I also implemented the template when I was the lead developer on Modiphius’ Infinity and, as the RPG Producer at Atlas Games, we now use it across most of our titles, notably to date in Over the Edge and Feng Shui.

Since posting the template, my use of it in development and at my personal table has seen further refinements to the system. I’ve also had a number of people contact me with either questions or suggestions. I thought this might be a good time to revisit the template with some advanced tips and tricks that you might find useful in enhancing your use of it.

BRIEFING SHEETS

The first thing I’ll note is that, when I’m using the template, I often think of and use NPCs as briefing sheets: For my personal campaigns, I try to have one NPC per page. And will try very hard to keep them on just one page. That’s not always possible, but the benefits in being able to quickly access information during play are usually worth tightening the NPC up if it means keeping them to that single page.

I say “page,” but I also try to keep it to just one sheet. (So the back of the page is usually blank, which – if the front of the page is rather full – can be a great place to keep notes for updating the NPC for future sessions.)

In addition to having easy, clear access to the information for an NPC I’m currently playing, when I’m setting up a scene this also allows me to “cast” the NPCs in it by simply grabbing the appropriate sheets.

I usually keep my campaign notes in a three-ring binder, so I can just pop these sheets out and lay them all out on the table behind my GM screen. I can swap between characters with just a flick of my eye.

Similarly, when running a scenario using my party-planning scenario structure, I can just pull all the guests’ briefing sheets and then quickly rifle through them, making it easy to constantly mix and remix the social situations the PCs are in.

For added utility, if there’s room on the page, I will always try to include a picture of the NPC at the top of the sheet. (Assuming I have one, of course.) This simple visual cue makes it infinitely easier to quickly find the NPC I’m looking for, particularly in large, complicated scenes.

In published books we have to compromise, but I will generally try to segregate the template from the main text (placing it in a box or sidebar). This also usually guarantees that an NPC’s description stays entirely on a single page in layout. (You can see an example of this from Paul Stefko’s Feng Shui: Apeworld on Fire! on the right. You’ll note that we also dropped the bullet points here for stylistic reasons.)

QUOTE NO MORE

The original Universal NPC Roleplaying Template included a section for a sample quote from the NPC (e.g., “Just give me time to think. There must be a way,” or, “You’re a goddamn crazy freak! A certifiable circus clown! Fuckin’ hell, man!”).

Truth be told, I don’t use these any more. Your mileage may vary, but I found they just weren’t providing reliable value, and they were almost always the first thing I’d cut when trying to reduce the size of a particular NPC write-up (e.g., to make it fit on a single page).

If it seems like it would be useful for a particular NPC – i.e., that the word choice and phrasing of the character is the best way to clearly communicate character to yourself – it can be dropped into the Roleplaying section as one of the bullet points.

ROLEPLAYING: NO REPETITION

A note I frequently give when looking at the Roleplaying section of the template is to avoid repetition.

I recommend having three separate bullet points in that section, and the key word there is “separate.” Too often I end up seeing the same idea expressed in two or three slightly different ways:

• He respects hard work when he sees it in others.
• He’s worked for years to make the Talon & Eagle the best tavern it can be.
• Hard work is how he finds solace from the death of his wife.

“Hard work is important to him” is clearly a crucial concept for this character, but it can almost certainly be more clearly (and usefully!) expressed as a single bullet point. (Which will also leave you with more space to explore other aspects of the character.)

One tip for avoiding this trap is to have each bullet point describe a completely distinct classification of things: values, physical mannerisms, ways of speaking, personality, etc. This is far from being a hard-and-fast rule, but it’s a useful tip if you’re struggling to flesh out a character. (I talk about this a bit more in Random GM Tip: Memorable NPCs.)

BACKGROUND BOLD

The Cool Mama used the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template on her website and introduced the idea of using bold text to call out key concepts in the Background section. This is really smart and makes it even easier to pick up your NPC briefing sheet and almost instantly re-familiarize yourself with the character.

For example, you can take this character background:

Bhaltair is Ariadnan of Caledonian stock. When he was just a young kid, his father went off to fight in a bloody frontier conflict between Caledonia and Rodina. He never came back. Bhaltair made a pledge that he would work to never see his homeworld torn apart by such senseless violence again. He became a politician and quickly discovered how difficult the dream of peace can be. When the Human Sphere returned to Ariadna, he was at first overjoyed at how it unified the planet…and then watched in horror as the Commercial Conflicts ripped his planet apart again. He lost himself in drink for a time and then, concluding that the only way to bring true peace to Ariadna was to solve the off-planet problems that were manifesting themselves there, he became a diplomat. He did not participate in the negotiation of the Tohaa Contact Treaty, but he has recently arrived to take part in the Alliance Summit.

And greatly enhance it with some key bold:

Bhaltair is Ariadnan of Caledonian stock. When he was just a young kid, his father went off to fight in a bloody frontier conflict between Caledonia and Rodina. He never came back. Bhaltair made a pledge that he would work to never see his homeworld torn apart by such senseless violence again. He became a politician and quickly discovered how difficult the dream of peace can be. When the Human Sphere returned to Ariadna, he was at first overjoyed at how it unified the planet…and then watched in horror as the Commercial Conflicts ripped his planet apart again. He lost himself in drink for a time and then, concluding that the only way to bring true peace to Ariadna was to solve the off-planet problems that were manifesting themselves there, he became a diplomat. He did not participate in the negotiation of the Tohaa Contact Treaty, but he has recently arrived to take part in the Alliance Summit.

Knowing that you want to call out key concepts in bold, you can also write to make those most effective. For example:

Bhaltair is Ariadnan of Caledonian stock. During the frontier conflict between Caledonia and Rodina, his father fought in the war and never came back. Bhaltair made a pledge that he would work to never see his homeworld torn apart by such senseless violence again.

The slight rewrite there allows for a much tighter and actually more comprehensive bold key point.

EXPANDED KEY INFO

The Key Info section of the template is frequently misunderstood: This is not where you put important information ABOUT the character. That’s what the Background section is for. The Key Info section contains the essential details about whatever the character’s structural function in the current adventure is.

For example, if it’s a mystery scenario then you would probably list the clues that this NPC can give to the PCs. If the NPC is a noble the PCs are approaching to join their alliance against the White Hand, then the Key Info section would probably describe their reaction to that request (what they might want in exchange, what aid they’re capable of giving, suggestions they might make for other potential allies, etc.). If it’s a heist scenario, then it might be the score, information, or resources they can offer to support the heist (and what they want for it). And so forth.

Usually, the Key Info section should be short and straight to the point. Its whole function is, in fact, to pull these essential details out to make sure that you don’t overlook them during play. The longer and less focused the section becomes, the more likely you are to overlook stuff even when it’s listed as Key Info.

Some NPCs, though, are natural nexuses for lengthy Key Info sections: Either they’re crucially positioned to serve a lot of different functions, or the information they have to share is complicated or very detailed.

In those situations, what I’ve found useful is to actually use multiple Key Info sections.

These might be distinguished by a specific function. For example, if an NPC who has clues for solving a mystery is attending a party, I might include both:

• Key Info – Clues
• Key Info – Topics of Conversation

With the former, obviously, listing all of the clues, while the latter has any notes pertaining to the various topics of conversation being bandied about at the party.

In some cases, you may also find it useful to create multiple Key Info sections by topic. For example, an NPC might have some information on the werewolf sightings and also a lengthy account of the Haunting of Greybear Mansion, and thus:

• Key Info
• Key Info – Werewolf Sightings
• Key Info – Greybear Mansion

I’ll note that you should try to avoid doing this capriciously. Just because you break up one NPC’s lengthy Key Info section by topic, it doesn’t mean that every other NPC needs to have the section broken up in the same way (or at all). Most of the time, a single Key Info section with a couple bullet points is all you need.

UNTESTED: ADVANCED KEY INFO

These Key Info section types are things I’ve been experimenting with, but which have not yet been put through rigorous testing at the table. They may prove useful or they might turn out to be pure bupkis. (If you use them, let us know how it goes!)

KEY INFO – REACTIONS: This special Key Info section lists an NPC’s reactions to specific prompts from the PCs. This section can be a little trick in actual practice, because it can be real easy to fall into contingency planning here. (If the PCs say A, then the NPC will do X. If they PCs say B, then the NPC will say Y. And so forth.)

I think the key here is to think of the section as being stuff that gets “unlocked” in response to specific stimuli. One example would be what the GUMSHOE system refers to as a leveraged clue: Just talking to someone will never elicit a particular piece of information. You first have to ask exactly the right question (which is usually predicated on learning a revelation elsewhere

But you can also imagine a similar rationale being applied to non-clue information. For example, in some cases the Topics of Conversation category I mentioned earlier for party scenarios might, in some cases, be interpreted as being of this type: The NPC will only offer their opinion about X if it comes up in conversation.

KEY INFO – ACTIONS: This is the section is for proactive social gambits that the NPC might attempt. I’ve always tried to play my NPCs proactively, but the presentation of the Universal NPC Template can often lend itself to a reactive presentation — it lists what the NPC knows, with the implicit assumption that the PCs will need to do something to extract that information.

Particularly in published material, there’s frequently a need to communicate clearly what courses of action the NPC will actively pursue in a social situation. For example:

• Carefully question the PCs regarding Old Man Rigger.
• Try to arrange a marriage between Fiona and their eldest son, Frederick.
• Slip a nano-tracker into a PC’s drink.

One thing I’m playing with here is the line between the NPC’s general goals (which I think probably fit better in either the Roleplaying or Background sections of the template) and the sort of specific actions (i.e. “this is a thing you, as the GM, should make sure this character does during this conversation”).

Design Note: Neither the Reactions nor Actions sections are meant to be comprehensive. They’re for keying very specific content that is essential to the structure of the scenario. It’s unlikely that they will be needed for every NPC. Most of the time you’ll be better off actively playing the NPC and discovering their actions and reactions in the moment.

KEY INFO – RESOURCES: This section would list any resources that the NPC has available to them. These might be resources that they can offer to the PCs aid (I’ve frequently included this sort of thing in the Key Info section without specifically calling it out). Or they might be resources they’ll employ to some other purpose.

Several of these tools were inspired by DragnaCarta’s social encounter stat block.

UNTESTED: SOCIAL PROFILE

This is another experimental tool, but the Social Profile would be an entirely new section of the roleplaying template.

An NPC’s Social Profile summarizes what social tactics may be particularly effective and/or ineffective when interacting with them. When used in conjunction with D&D 5^th Edition, I think this could be cleanly keyed to the mechanical hook of advantage/disadvantage on subsequent social checks:

• Advantage: Complimenting Frederick on his clothing or sense of fashion.
• Advantage: Anyone signaling their sympathy for the White Hand.
• Disadvantage: Offering a bribe.

Something to potentially think about is how the PCs might learn or be cued into this information. (It might involve research or perhaps Wisdom (Insight) checks. See Rulings in Practice: Social Skills for some additional discussions along these lines.)

It’s possible that the Social Profile should actually be folded into the Key Info – Reactions section (i.e., someone complimenting Frederick’s sense of fashion causes him to react favorably), but at least for the moment I see a clear and distinct utility for the Social Profile.

Once again, I’m not sure the Social Profile is something that needs to be done for every single NPC. (Although maybe so if it got hooked into a wider social resolution structure in which the PCs were expected to investigate the NPCs they’re socially interacting with to figure out how to approach them. In that case the Social Profile would be kind of like Armor Class for social encounters.) But significant, central figures in a scenario, particularly those the PCs are likely to need to negotiate with or need to sway one way or another in their opinions, would almost certainly benefit.

Go to Part 2: Activity Logs

The PCs just shot the Evil Overlord in the head in the second session. Now what?

People in both the Alexandrian Hangout Club for my Patreon and viewers on Twitch have recommended that I spent some time on Youtube looking at filmic tropes. I think there are some interesting videos to be made along those lines, and it’s certainly a natural fit for the medium.

This video is kind of a beta test, featuring several film clips as I figure out the workflow and pacing for including then. (The short version is that it’s a huge pain in the ass to source the clips, but I think the end result is quite nice.)

Also reminded me that I still need to spend more time with old Hammer horror films.

Desert Orange asks:

I’m trying to use node-based scenario design for the first time. I’m designing a Hangover-style scenario on a superyacht: the PCs wake up on the ship surrounded by corpses and with no memory of how they got there.

If I’m using a funnel design, is it possible to only have two nodes before the first funnel? There’d only be two clues per node. That can’t be right. But what bugs me is that I only have two locations for the PCs to explore: the ship they’re on and the island that’s nearby.

I’m not sure if I should use the locations as nodes or the conclusions that the characters have to reach. The funnel would be figuring out how the previous night ended. After this, they’d begin figuring out how it started.

Easy answer first: If you’re designing a node-based mystery, think of each node as a place where you can investigate for clues.

Each node (other than the starting node) is also a revelation/conclusion because the players have to conclude that they can go to the node and investigate. (The three clues pointing to Node X are basically pointing to a conclusion which says, “You can find more clues at Node X.”)

But in a mystery scenario you can also have conclusions that aren’t nodes – i.e., things that the PCs need to learn that aren’t places they can go to investigate for more clues.

In my more recent writing, I’ve started referring to clues that point to places where you can continue your investigation as leads – they lead you somewhere. In node-based design it’s the leads that need to adhere to the Inverse Three Clue Rule:

If the PCs have access to ANY three clues, they will reach at least ONE conclusion.

Because as long as the PCs have somewhere to continue investigating the mystery, the adventure keeps working. It’s only if they run out of places to investigate that the adventure breaks.

So in your Hangover cruise adventure, for example, you’ll have a list of revelations which consist of Things That Happened To Us That We’ve Forgotten. And you’ll want clues for each of those (and three clues for any that the PCs need to know about). Those probably aren’t leads.

NOT ALL MYSTERIES HAVE NODES

But here’s the thing: I don’t think your mystery is actually a node-based scenario. At least not at first.

The PCs are not trying to figure out where to look for clues: The clues are on the ship.

So what you actually have is a location-crawl in which they explore the ship room by room, finding clues in each room. You’re still using the Three Clue Rule:

For every conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.

And you’ll have a revelation list so that the PCs can piece together what happened to them, but the players aren’t really finding clues in the helm station that tell them they should check out the stern deck for clues. They’re just methodically searching the ship for clues (while also potentially dealing with other crises or conundrums).

(This isn’t to say that a location-crawl can’t have clues in Room A that point the PCs to Room B, for example. That’s a great way to make a location-crawl feel cohesive and, if those clues are revealing hidden secrets that the PCs might have missed in Room B the first time they went, can add a lot of depth to the experience. But that’s not really node-based design and doesn’t structurally function as a node-based adventure.)

Now if there are clues on the ship that point the PCs to another location where they need to continue their investigation, that would suggest a node-based design. (Maybe they need to realize that the superyacht was at a different location at some point last night and they need to go there. Or they discover the ritual that opened a gateway to a dark dimension that they need to go back to in order to continue piecing things together.) But I still wouldn’t try to break the ship up into multiple nodes: The superyacht as a whole would just be one node, with that node basically being a mini-location-crawl inside the larger scenario.

You’d mentioned that you wanted the scenario to start with them figuring out how the previous night ended and then, after that, they’d begin figuring out how it started. You can see how this structure would essentially accomplish that: The superyacht has all the clues that let them figure out how the previous night ended, which allows them to figure out where the night started (i.e., the other node where they can look for the clues to figure out what happened there).

In fact, this node-based scenario might consist of just these two nodes: The superyacht and where the night started.

There’s nothing about node-based design that says you have to get super-complicated about it.

REGARDING FUNNELS

Although I don’t think it necessarily applies to this scenario, let’s talk about your specific question regarding funnel design for a moment: The key thing about the Inverse Three Clue Rule is that the PCs should have access to at least three clues at all time.

(This doesn’t necessarily mean they will FIND all those clues. The whole reason you have redundancy is in case they don’t, after all. But they should have ACCESS to them, by which I mean that in locations which the PCs know about, there should be at least three clues pointing to locations that they don’t already know about. Or, in the final scene(s) of a scenario where they’ve almost finished their investigation, three clues that point to all the conclusion(s) they need to bring the scenario to its conclusion.)

In addition, the Three Clue Rule still applies! You still need three clues for each conclusion the PCs need to reach!

So your current structure is:

• Node 0 ➞ A, B
• Node A ➞ B, C
• Node B ➞ A, C
• Node C

We can immediately see that in Node 0 (the opening scene) they only have access to two clues. That’s a structural problem which violates the Inverse Three Clue Rule.

In addition, you basically have three conclusions:

• You need to investigate Node A.
• You need to investigate Node B.
• You need to investigate Node C.

But for each of those conclusions, there are only two clues, which means you’ve violated the Three Clue Rule.

Adding enough clues to satisfy the Three Clue Rule will, conveniently, also satisfy the Inverse Three Clue Rule. Here’s a symmetrical example:

• Node 0 ➞ A, A, B
• Node A ➞ B, B, C
• Node B ➞ A, C, C
• Node C

You could also saturate the opening scene:

• Node 0 ➞ A, A, B, B
• Node A ➞ B, C
• Node B ➞ A, C, C
• Node C

And other patterns are also possible:

• Node 0 ➞ A, A, A, B
• Node A ➞ B, B, C
• Node B ➞ C, C
• Node C

If you walk through these simple node structures, you can clearly see how the PCs always have access to three clues pointing towards nodes they haven’t investigated yet.

You may also be able to see how different patterns of clues will make certain paths through the adventure more or less likely. For example, in the third arrangement it’s much more likely that the PCs will end up going 0 ➞ A ➞ B ➞ C, but if they DO go from 0 ➞ B, then it becomes likely they’ll never go to Node A.

If you’re dabbling with node-based scenario design for the first time, I recommend doing a couple of symmetric designs first. It will give you more reliable results and a better sense, after running the scenarios, of what node-based scenarios “feel” like.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #4