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.

This is something of a belated announcement, but as of December 10th, 2018, I am now the RPG Producer and Developer at Atlas Games. (You can tell it’s the real deal because I have a staff bio and everything.)

As the RPG Producer, I’ll be taking the reins on Atlas’ award-winning games like Feng Shui, Over the Edge, Unknown Armies, and Ars Magica. I’ll also be producing and developing all new RPGs, some of which I hope to be sharing with you much sooner rather than later.

What does this mean for the Alexandrian and Technoir and my other ongoing, non-Atlas RPG projects? Very little, actually. I’ll be able to continue working on the Alexandrian and my other projects outside of Atlas business hours, and I intend to do so. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any effect, though: My writing on the Alexandrian, for example, is often heavily influenced by the games that I’m currently running and playing at my own table. Since I’ll be spending a good chunk of my first six months here getting up to speed on Feng Shui, Over the Edge, and Unknown Armies by reading everything every published for them and also running one-shots and mini-campaigns (since nothing replaces actually getting a game to the table), you probably shouldn’t be too surprised if you see me referencing them more in my examples play, Thoughts of the Day, and the like.

In any case, I’m very excited by the opportunities I’ll have at Atlas Games to continue pushing the boundaries of what RPGs are capable of, and I hope all of you can share in that excitement as we begin this journey together.

Tagline: In 32 slim pages Three Days to Kill manages to not only present a really gut-wrenching, fast-paced, creative adventure, but also conjures into existence a highly entertaining, evocative, and believable slice of a fantasy world.

I’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks reading really bad fantasy modules. It is difficult to describe to you the truly excruciating pain of this experience. Instead, I shall endeavor to demonstrate by way of example:

“The characters are in Boringtown. There is a bar, a temple, and an armory.”

“The characters are in Moronsburg. There is a bar, a temple, and a general store.”

“The characters are in Clicheville. There is a bar, a temple, and a blacksmith. The mayor approaches them….”

“At the bottom of the farmer’s well there is a secret door which has not been opened in centuries. On the other side of the door is a labyrinth containing giant spiders and goblins. Kill them.”

“The abandoned mansion on the top of the hill has become home to a bunch of necromancers and a couple of ghosts. Kill them.”

“The PCs wander around the desert enjoying random encounters until they stumble across a lost pyramid. There they watch two mummies fight over conflicts which existed thousands of years ago (and about which the PCs know nothing). When the fight is over (make sure that the PCs don’t take part in any way) the PCs get to go home.”

Oy.

Between painfully artificial settings, a mind-numbing lack of originality, and stunningly awful “plots”, these so-called “adventures” have earned their designers an eternity upon the racks of the Nine Circles of Hell.

(On the plus side, I think actually playing through these scenarios counts as a form of penance. The equivalent of saying fifty Hail Mary’s or something of that nature.)

(The funny thing is that you think I’m kidding. Outside of those satiric town names, though, I’m not – these things actually exist. They’re out there and they’re waiting for you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

There were days when I felt like giving in to a nascent Oedipal Complex… and by that I mean stabbing my eyes out with pins to take the sight of these monstrosities away from me.

But through the good graces of providence, a copy of John Tynes’ excellent Three Days to Kill fell into my hands, and thus I was saved from a truly horrific fate.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Before we begin:

John Tynes is a roleplaying designer and writer of immense talents: He was one of the founders of Pagan Publishing. He was a co-author of Delta Green. With Greg Stolze he designed the award winning Unknown Armies for Atlas Games. Last year Hogshead Publishing’s New Style line published his amazingly evocative Puppetland and the startlingly innovative Power Kill.

With Three Days to Kill Tynes has taken advantage of WotC’s D20 Trademark License and Open Gaming License (see the Open Gaming Foundation for more details on both of these programs) to produce a module for the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This is the lead-off product in Atlas Games’ new Penumbra line of products. Over the next few months you can expect to see more support material for D&D3 released through this imprint.

Three Days to Kill is designed for a party of 1st to 3rd level PCs.

And now on with the show:

THE SETTING

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Three Days to Kill. Players who may end up playing in this module are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.

Three Days to Kill is set in the Deeps, a valley nestled within a mountain range. At the heart of this valley, located on the shores of Shadow Lake, is Deeptown.

And as quickly as that we have come to the first major strength of Three Days to Kill: Deeptown is a generic fantasy city. It has been specifically designed to slip seamlessly into any DM’s campaign world.

The minute you attempt something like this you’ve placed yourself in dangerous territory: If you make the town too specific, then its usefulness as a generic setting is lost. If you make the town too generic, however, you end up with the triteness of “there is a bar, a temple, and a blacksmith”.

Tynes, however, deftly avoids these pitfalls. On the one hand Deeptown is imminently generic – any DM with a mountain range can slap the town into place. On the other hand, Deeptown is also developed very specifically – it exists for a purpose, the people living there have their own character and culture, and the whole place has a dynamic quality which makes it not only a potential setting for Three Days to Kill, but many other adventures. Despite the fact that Deeptown can be placed almost anywhere in the DM’s campaign world, it has been craftily designed so that – no matter what world you place it in – it will seem as if always belonged there.

So what is Deeptown? Deeptown is a small city located on the shores of Shadow Lake, a way-point on the east-west trade routes that pass through the Deeps. The mountainous terrain of this trade route makes it easy for bandits to prey on caravans, and, in fact, any number of bandit gangs roam the hills. This helps make Deeptown particularly attractive for young adventures and other assorted muscle looking for jobs as guards (or opportunities as thieves, as the case may be).

There are six bandit lords in the area (although, as Tynes points out, “calling them ‘lords’ gives them too much credit, really — they’re just competent thugs”). The two largest groups are controlled by the bandits Modus and Lucien.

Deeptown itself is technically ruled over by the Town Council, but in truth it is the Trade Circle – the local guild of commerce – which rules the city from behind the scenes. In other words, even the law in Deeptown is governed by the corruption of the all-mighty dollar.

This leaves only one major power group left to consider: Religion. In Deeptown the two most significant religious groups are the Holy Order (dedicated to the preservation of life) and the Sect of Sixty (a group of diabolists). (Both of these groups – while having their structure and general role in Deeptown life laid out in the module – are left purposely vague in all the right places to that you can plug in whatever gods you like. For example, the Holy Order might worship Athena and the Sect of Sixty Hades. On the other hand, the Holy Order might revere Adaire, Goddess of Light and Purity; while the Sect of Sixty might practice foul sacrifices to Cthulhu. It’s all up to you.)

Basically the setting information in Three Days to Kill can be summed up like this: A solid, interesting foundation. For a 32 page module a surprising amount of detail is included, giving the setting a life and reality of its own through the expert application of a handful of deft brush strokes – all the while maintaining an openness and flexibility which will make its use simplicity itself.

THE PLOT

Modus and Lucien, the two premiere Bandit Lords, have long hoped to turn “legitimate” (within a broad enough definition of that word). They hope to use their strength in order to convince the Trade Circle to ally with them – essentially moving into the protection rackets (expensive Trade Circle permits would be sold, and caravans which purchased them would be spared from the attention of Modus and Lucien). In the interest of seeing this day come to pass, Modus and Lucien agreed to a pact – stating that neither would enter into a deal with the Trade Circle without the other.

Lucien, however, is no longer willing to wait. He has made a secret alliance with the Sect of Sixty. Lucien wants to use the Sect to use their supernatural powers to help him crush Modus, while the Sect wants to use Lucien to help them gain a foothold over the taxation of trade routes (when his day of power comes).

Modus, although hazy on the exact details of the alliance Lucien is planning, knows that his would-be ally is up to something. Of course, he’d prefer it if Lucien was not allowed to be up to anything…

…and that’s where the PCs come in.

One way or another the PCs are attending the Festival of Plenty (a night of debauchery and infamy which is thrown annually in Deeptown by the Sect of Sixty). Several ways of getting them to Deeptown and into the Festival are given, as are a number of ways of having them prove their worth during the course of the festival. One way or another, however, they come to the attention of Modus’ men – at which point they are approached for The Job.

The Job is this: Modus knows that Lucien is meeting with his mysterious allies at a villa north of Deeptown known as Trail’s End. He wants the PCs to crash the party, screw up the meeting, and make Lucien look foolish and unreliable to his would-be supporters. The PCs, of course, will be well paid for their troubles.

So the PCs head north. On the way to Trail’s End they discover signs of orc activity in the region (which is connected to a coming of age rite), but it isn’t until they reach Trail’s End that the adventure really kicks into overdrive: You see, the villa is packed full of Sect cultists and bandits.

And if the PCs rush the front door of the villa, they’re going to be annihilated.

Three Days to Kill is, in fact, a rather ingenious scenario for bringing the gameplay of computer games like Tenchu and Thief: The Dark Project — which emphasize stealth and cunning over brute strength – into the traditional roleplaying realm of D&D. (Tynes actually uses the analogy Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six – but that requires a larger genre shift in my opinion.) The PCs are given weapons, magical items, and a situation which allows them to scout their enemy, plan a strategy, and then carry out a covert operation.

Done right this can be a lot of fun. Done wrong this is going to be nothing more than a hackfest. Either way you should get a good dose of fun before it’s all said and done. Basically its going to play out something like this:

The PCs are going to take out the bandits and the Sect henchman. As they do so, the Sect acolytes are going to fall back to a secluded room inside the villa. In this room is the Bone Mirror – a mystic artifact of great evil which allows them to start gating low-level minions of Hell into the villa.

As the minions of Hell swarm over the villa – and the PCs fight valiantly to reach and shut off the source of the Hellspawn – the remaining bandits will flee… as they do so the orcs (remember them form the trek north?) will come over the top of the hill and charge the villa as well.

Hellspawn on one side. Orcs on the other. Bandits and PCs trapped in the middle. What’s a hero to do?

Smash the Bone Mirror and fight for their lives, of course!

But we’re not done yet!

When the shattered pieces of the Bone Mirror come to rest they begin to bleed. “The blood wells up from the mirror and oozes out of the bones.” At first it merely trickles, but “then the blood comes faster, coating the floor around the shards, and begins to expand rapidly. Tendrils shoot out across the floor and begin running up the walls. As the blood spreads, it transforms the surfaces of the room. The floor bulges, and bones, flesh, and faces to begin to form. The effect spreads rapidly, accompanied by the screams of the damned.” As the process begins to effect the acolytes and orcs who still remain alive, these poor creatures begin to cry out: “He Who Walks is coming! The coming is at hand!”

The shards of the Bone Mirror transform the Trail’s End villa into the Bone Church – an outpost of Hell; a “pulsing, living, screaming conglomeration of bodies”. The PCs and the remnants of their opponents are forced to flee before the birth of this diabolic power.

And thus Three Days to Kill comes to an end: The PCs have, indeed, succeeded at their primary mission (breaking up the alliance between Lucien and the Sect of Sixty) – at least for now – but only by unleashing the seeds of future adventure: The mystery and threat of the Bone Church, the future of the Bandit Lords of the Deeps, the PCs relationship with Lucien and Modus, the evolving politics of Deeptown. Whether you decide to carry these seeds through to new adventures, or merely choose to have the PCs join the next caravan out of the Deeps, is entirely up to you. Three Days to Kill works equally well as a stand-alone adventure or as the germination point of an entire campaign.

CONCLUSION

Three Days to Kill is one of the best damn modules I’ve ever plunked down my cold, hard cash for. It’s one of those great gaming products that makes you instantly eager to call up your gaming group, roll up some characters, and get down to some serious roleplaying.

In 32 slim pages it manages to not only present a really gut-wrenching, fast-paced, creative adventure, but also conjures into existence a highly entertaining, evocative, and believable slice of a fantasy world.

Three Days to Kill is an exciting product.

And recommendations don’t come much higher than that.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: John Tynes
Company/Publisher: Atlas Games (Penumbra)
Cost: $8.95
Page Count: 32
ISBN: 0-887801-94-4

Originally Posted: 2000/10/29

This represents a major turning point in my life. At this point, as I’d indicated in my review of Tomb of Horrors, I hadn’t played D&D in nearly a decade. 3rd Edition had perked my interest, but I wasn’t really planning to do much of anything with it. Until I picked up Three Days to Kill at GenCon. And, as I said in the review, Three Days to Kill was exciting. It was one of those products that just kind of screams, “Play me!”

So I ended up taking over as GM for what was my regular gaming group at the time. And from that point forward, 3rd Edition would dominate my reviews, my personal gaming, and my freelance writing.

Three Days to Kill generated a lot of buzz when it first came out because it was one of two third party modules available at GenCon when the Player’s Handbook launched. These days it seems to have become something of an unsung classic, though, with fewer people being aware of its existence. I heartily recommend snagging a copy for yourself and running it ASAP.

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