Most published adventures are designed around a structure that looks like this:

You start at the beginning (Blue), proceed through a series of linear scenes (Yellow), and eventually reach the end (Red).

Occasionally you may see someone get fancy and throw a pseudo-option into things:

But you’re still looking at an essentially linear path. Although the exact form of this linear path may vary depending on the adventure in question, ultimately this form of design is the plotted approach: A happens, then B happens, and then C happens.

The primary advantage of the plotted approach is its simplicity. It’s both easy to understand and easy to control. On the one hand, when you’re preparing the adventure it’s like putting together a scheduled to-do list or laying out the plot for a short story. While you’re running the adventure, on the other hand, you always know exactly where you are and exactly where you’re supposed to be going.

But the plotted approach has two major flaws:

First, it lacks flexibility. Every arrow on the plotted flow-chart is a chokepoint: If the players don’t follow that arrow (because they don’t want to or because they don’t realize they’re supposed to), then the adventure is going to grind to a painful halt.

The risk of this painful train wreck (or the necessity of railroading your players) can be mitigated by means of the Three Clue Rule. But when the Three Clue Rule is applied in a plotted structure, you run the risk of over-kill: Every yellow dot will contain three clues all pointing towards the next dot. If the players miss or misinterpret a couple of the clues, that’s fine. But if they find all of the clues in a smaller scene, they may feel as if you’re trying to spoon-feed them. (Which, ironically, may cause them to rebel against your best laid plans.)

Second, because it lacks flexibility, the plotted approach is inimical to meaningful player choice. In order for the plotted adventure to work, the PCs must follow the arrows. Choices which don’t follow the arrows will break the game.

This is why I say Don’t Prep Plots, Prep Situations.

Keep on the Shadowfell was the inaugural introductory product for 4th Edition. When it was released, I shared my initial impressions and eventually ended up writing a lengthy series of essays in which I remixed the entire adventure.

One of the major problems I had at the time was the sheer sloppiness of the module: There were continuity errors in the adventure scenario and numerous self-contradictions in the rules. Ignoring some of the larger creative and structural issues with the adventure, on a very basic level the product was a mess.

In April 2009, Wizards of the Coast released a revised version of the module as a free PDF on their website. I didn’t pay much attention to it because I had already sampled 4th Edition, found it lacking in everything I value in an RPG, and moved on. But I did think it was a rather nice gesture on WotC’s part to make a corrected version of the product available.

Recently, however, I decided to re-visit this material with an eye towards using my remixed version of the module as the basis for an OD&D one-shot. Remembering that the module had been revised, I tracked down the PDF. My plan was to re-read the revised version of the module, see what had been improved, and then adapt my remix notes as necessary if I thought incorporating the changes would be worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get past the first paragraph of the first encounter before discovering that WotC’s revision was just as sloppy as the original product.

The original module describes the encounter like this (pg. 16): “The player characters are on the King’s Road traveling toward Winterhaven east to west (or right to left on the map).” They are then ambushed by kobolds, as shown on this map:

The obvious problem, as I detailed in my original remix essay, is that the indicated kobolds are all standing in plain sight for characters traveling east to west along the road.

WotC’s keen-eyed revisers noticed the same thing, but they didn’t want to redo the cartography. So they opted to simply change the direction that the PCs are traveling (pg. 6): “The player characters are on the King’s Road traveling toward Winterhaven, west to east (or left to right on the map).”

Problem solved!

… except that’s completely impossible.

Because two pages earlier in the module we can see this map of the local area:

And, as you can clearly see, Winterhaven is at the western end of the King’s Road. You cannot travel west-to-east anywhere on the King’s Road and end up at Winterhaven.

Mistakes, of course, get made. (For example, both the original and revised versions of the module refer multiple times to the Burial Site being southwest of town. You’ll note that it isn’t.) But what you have here is an acknowledgment that there is a problem that needs to be fixed; a decision being made (either deliberately or ignorantly) to not fix the root of the problem; and ending up with a half-assed effort that just creates an entirely different problem.

And it doesn’t even fix the original problem, because there are still kobolds standing in plain sight.

This is symptomatic of WotC’s general culture of not-fixing (or even anti-fixing).

VS.

(prompted by “Signs of Life” at the Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope)

The reason we look for verisimilitude in the rules of a roleplaying game and not in the rules of Monopoly is because we don’t play roleplaying games as if they were a round of Monopoly.

QED.

Personally, I look at the rules of a roleplaying game as the interface between me and the game world. I want those rules to be fun and interesting, but I also want them to be transparent: My primary interest is interacting with the game world. If I wanted to interact with the rules of a game, I’d play a boardgame like Monopoly or Arkham Horror.

So if the rules in a roleplaying game get in the way — either due to a lack of verisimilitude; or because they’re boring; or dissociated; or too complicated — then I’m going to be unhappy with those rules.

WORST. PLAN. EVAH.

Dwarves: Oh no! All the gold in our mountain has been cursed!

Dwarven God: That sounds sucky. Here’s a magical artifact to remove the curse.

Dwarf 1: Think we should use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s lock all the dwarves afflicted by the curse into the lower vaults.

Dwarf 1: And then use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s evacuate the mountain.

Dwarf 1: And then we’ll use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll hide the magical artifact in the depths of the mountain.

Dwarf 1: And… then use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll create clockwork bodies for ourselves and inscribe the secret of how to find the artifact on the gears and cogs.

Dwarf 1: And… wait, what?

Dwarf 2: Then we’ll go senile. And centuries from now the grandchildren of our disciples will “con” a small group of adventurers into retrieving and using the magical artifact.

Dwarf 1: What the hell are you talking about?

I guess this is what happens when you write adventure modules by committee. (I really wish I was exaggerating this, but I’m not. Although they technically didn’t plan to go senile, this is, in fact, the background used in the module.)

THE SIMPLE FIX

The artifact wasn’t ready-to-use out of the box. The Secret Masters of the dwarves collected the tears of the Hundred Widows who had lost their husbands to the corruption of the curse. The fist-sized teardrop of gold they forged from the cursed gold needed to bathe for a hundred years in the widows’ tears before it could cleanse the mountain itself.

Unfortunately, long before the teardrop was ready, the dwarves had been forced to abandon the fortress. Or perhaps the Secret Masters arranged for the evacuation, planning to return a century later. Whatever the case may be, things didn’t go according to plan: A hundred years passed and, deep in the bowels of the mountain, the Golden Teardrop was completed. But the dwarves were never able to return to the Golden Citadel, and so the teardrop lay forgotten…

A couple months ago I mentioned that I had created counter-intelligence guidelines for the Gather Information skill. Confanity had mentioned that he was intrigued by them, and I promised to get them posted sooner rather than later. For certain definitions of “sooner” and “later”, I suppose that this has now been accomplished.

Counter-Intelligence: A character can attempt to detect other characters gathering information about a particular subject in the area by making a Gather Information check. The DC of the counter-intelligence check is opposed by the original Gather Information check made in the attempt to gather the information.

Avoiding Suspicion: If a character is attempting to avoid suspicion, it becomes more difficult to detect them. Although the character suffers a -10 penalty on their Gather Information check for the purposes of collecting the information they seek, they gain a +10 bonus to their Gather Information check for the purposes of opposing the counter-intelligence check.

In addition, cautious characters can voluntarily increase the penalty on their original Gather Information check, granting an equal bonus for the purposes of opposing the counter-intelligence check. (For example a character could decide to be extra cautious and apply a -15 penalty to their Gather Information check. Their unmodified check result is 30, which is modified to 15 (30 – 15) for the purposes of determining what information they actually glean. But if another character attempts to detect their presence, they would have to make a DC 45 (30 + 15) counter-intelligence check to do so.)

Modifiers: Apply a -2 penalty to counter-intelligence checks for every week that has passed since the original Gather Information check.

USING THE GUIDELINES

For PCs, these guidelines aren’t only useful to find out if someone is asking questions about them. In fact, they’re generally more useful for identifying competing interests. Who else in town is trying to find out information about the Vault of the Dwarven Kings? Or investigating the Baker’s Street Gang?

Resolving these types of checks requires the GM to know two things:

(1) Who else is looking for that information?

(2) What should the DC of the check be?

The answer to the former question, of course, is situational. For the latter you could either set simple, static DCs as you would for any other Gather Information check, or you could actually resolve the opposed check.

FACTION

I generally find it useful to know what kind of information-gathering capacity factions have in my campaigns. For smaller factions (like an opposing group of adventurers or a small gang of bad guys), this is as simple as looking at the highest (or most appropriate) Gather Information skill modifier in the group.

For larger factions, I simply assign a Gather Information modifier to the group. (This number is essentially arbitrary, although I base it on the size, nature, and resources of the group in question.)

When trying to figure out how suspicious a particular group is (i.e., whether they’re performing counter-intelligence to make sure anyone is asking questions about them) or how pervasive their surveillance is (i.e., how often they’re making counter-intelligence checks), I’ve generally just relied on common sense to make a ruling whenever the question needs to be answered. But if you’re running a campaign where intelligence and counter-intelligence is likely to be fairly common (for example, a modern espionage campaign), then codifying those factors might be useful.

(For example, a Paranoid group might check 1/day; a Suspicious group every 1d6 days; a Cautious group once every 3d10 days; a Naive group might never check. In other words, if the PCs investigate a Suspicious group then there would be a counter-intelligence check made 1d6 days later.)