JDJarvis at Aeons & Augauries has the really interesting idea of randomly determining the source of your PC’s starting wealth. Click through for a full table that gives you everything from petty theft to rich uncles to grave robbing.

I’ve seen a lot of “random background tables”, but what caught my eye about this one is that it leverages a common mechanic and seeds the mechanic with interesting narrative hooks. Any of y’all have interesting answers to the, “Where did you get that money from?” question?

In other news, I’m back from Gencon! I ran 5 games and played in 4:

• Numenera: Into the Violet Vale (ran 3 sessions)
• The Strange: Eschatology Code (ran 2 sessions)
• Cthulhu Masters Tournament (played in 2 rounds)
• Eclipse Phase: Detente
• Eclipse Phase: Overrun

This was more intense but considerably less varied than last year, when I played in 6 games (including Call of Cthulhu, Lady Blackbird, Eclipse Phase, Shab–al-Hiri Roach, and Numenera). The lack of variety was not so much by design as accident: Reaching the second round of the Cthulhu Masters Tournament knocked out two other games that were originally on my schedule. (Although the decision to run 4 games for Monte Cook Games prevented me from participating in Games on Demand this year, which is a variety killer.)

Half a decade ago, a fellow named FireLance posted a really interesting breakdown of non-combat challenges over at ENWorld in a post that got, apparently, no attention whatsoever. Which is unfortunate, because I think it’s actually a really interesting way of looking at non-combat encounters.

Before delving into it, though, I should note that this is a lot like the “36 Dramatic Situations” or “7 Basic Plots” or “20 Master Plots” lists that periodically go floating through the meme-verse: These are useful as conceptual tools, but you shouldn’t get too wrapped up in believing the reductivist perception of the creative process they maintain. If you believe that The Terminator and Hamlet are both the same story because they can be boiled down to “Man vs. Man”, then you’re making the same categorical error as believing that the Grand Canyon and your garden are the same thing because they can both be categorized as “earth”.

Tossing that proviso aside, however, I’m going to briefly restructure and revisit FireLance’s basic work.

DISCOVERY CHALLENGES

Discovery challenges involve seeing, finding, or becoming aware of something that was previously lost or unknown.

TYPES OF DISCOVERY CHALLENGES

Knowledge: Determining whether or not a PC already knows a piece of information.

Invention: The creation or revelation of new knowledge. (This can also include the creation or repair of physical objects.)

Observation: Determining whether or not a PC notices something hidden (an object, a person, an intent, a clue, a pattern).

Research: Exploring existing sources of knowledge to discover the information (databases, libraries, warehouses).

Tracking: Discovering the location of a creature or object by following a trail of observations.

DISCOVERY CHALLENGE COMBINATIONS

Movement challenges contribute to Discovery challenges if being in a particular location makes its easier (or necessary) for the PCs to observe or discover something.

Persuasion challenges contribute to Discovery challenges if the knowledge sought by a PC is possessed by an NPC.

Survival challenges may contribute to a Discovery challenge if some information can only be found or pursued in a dangerous location.

MOVEMENT CHALLENGES

Movement challenges involve reaching a particular location. Such challenges can be broadened by including additional characters, creatures, or objects that must be moved along with the PC (e.g., clearing a pile of stones, guiding a group of pilgrims, helping someone climb a wall).

TYPES OF MOVEMENT CHALLENGES

Chase: The PC must arrive at a location before a certain time or before someone/something else does. (Or, alternatively, they must stay ahead of a pursuer.)

Obstacle Course: The PC must traverse some form of physical obstacle in order to reach their destination (e.g., climbing, jumping, swimming, balancing, opening locks, moving heavy boulders).

Sneak: The PC must evade discovery.

MOVEMENT CHALLENGE COMBINATIONS

Discovery challenges contribute to Movement challenges if the discovery makes the movement easier (e.g., providing a short cut, an easier method of travel, or the like).

Persuasion challenges contribute to Movement challenges if the journey requires the PCs to handle mounts, convince NPCs to allow them passage, or if they have to bring NPCs with them.

Survival challenges contribute to Movement challenges if the PCs have to travel through a dangerous area.

PERSUASION CHALLENGES

Persuasion challenges are focused on convincing another person (or group of people) to take a particular course of action.

TYPES OF PERSUADE CHALLENGES

The full gamut of potential social situations allows for a wide variety of potential goals for Persuasion challenges (literally anything a person could know or do for you) and also a wide variety of potential tactics (seducation, coercion, intimidation, flattery, bribery, etc.), but ultimately they are all challenges of the same type despite this vast panoply of possible variations.

PERSUADE CHALLENGE COMBINATIONS

Discovery challenges can contribute to Persuasion challenges by providing leverage over someone (or, perhaps, removing the leverage that someone else has over them).

Movement challenges contribute to Persuasion challenges by giving access to the person you need to persuade.

Survival challenges contribute to Persuasion challenges by keeping people alive until they can do what you want them to do.

Any challenge type can contribute to a Persuasion challenge if it’s being carried out in exchange for a person’s cooperation.

SURVIVAL CHALLENGES

Survival challenges involve characters escaping or enduring physical danger (or helping others escape or endure physical danger). They could also feature the prevention of potentially dangerous situations (like negating a ritual that would summon a demon).

TYPES OF SURVIVAL CHALLENGES

Environmental: Dangerous weather, natural disasters, extreme temperatures, poisonous gases, inimical energies, or any other pervasive hazard.

Health: Recovering from diseases, long-term poisons, curses, or other afflictions. Also enduring shortages in the essentials of life (food, water, oxygen, etc.).

Trap: Hidden hazards unleashed by specific triggering conditions. Traps can generally be disabled so that they no longer pose a threat. (They are usually contrivances created by an intelligent creature with the intention of snaring the unwary, but certain natural hazards may also possess some or all the characteristics of a trap.)

SURVIVAL CHALLENGE COMBINATIONS

Discovery challenges contribute to Survival challenges by giving advance warning of danger or methods of surviving or bypassing the danger.

Movement challenges contribute to Survival challenges by allowing a character to reach a safe area.

Persuasion challenges contribute to Survival challenges if someone is convinced to help the PC survive.

USING THE ABSTRACTION

As a GM, what I generally find these types of categorical analyses most useful for is self-diagnostics: Am I defaulting to a particular type of challenge too often? Is there a type of challenge that I’m usually not including in my scenarios? Are there ways that I could be combining multiple challenge types in interesting ways?

What I don’t recommend doing, however, is designing directly from the abstraction: Thinking something like “OK, I need a Survival challenge of the Trap variety here” is, ironically, a trap itself. As anything other than a creative exercise, that sort of thinking will throttle your creativity and is also likely to artificially restrict you into thinking there’s a “right” way to resolve a given challenge.

On the other hand, that’s a good self-diagnostic exercise to perform: Look at an obstacle you’ve created in your current scenario and think about all the way different ways that someone could overcome or avoid or subvert that obstacle.

For example: Duke Leonardo has ordered the arrest of the PCs for a murder they didn’t commit. The obvious solution is a Movement challenge with the PCs trying to evade the guards or escape the city. But the PCs could also resolve it as a Persuade challenge (bribing guards or even convincing the Duke of their innocence). Or as a Discovery challenge (where they discover the true identity of the killer).

(Which isn’t to say that every challenge needs to be designed with liberal solutions in mind. Sometimes a trap is just a trap… unless, of course, the PCs find the architect who built the dungeon and convince him to give them the construction blueprints.)

John Rogers (the creator of Leverage and author of a bunch of a nifty stuff) wrote a really great essay on “3-Point Plotting” over at Thrillbent. I recommend checking out the whole thing, but I also want to pull out a couple of concepts from it and talk about them in the context of roleplaying games.

I’ve said in the past that you Don’t Prep Plots when you’re game mastering, but a lot of what Rogers is talking about is still applicable. His basic conceit is that the plot of any given story consists of three points: DISRUPTION, REVERSAL, and CONCLUSION. (By “plot” he’s specifically talking about the causal chain of events that make up the narrative.)

Let’s start with the DISRUPTION:

THE DISRUPTION is readily apparent in episodic structure. It’s the inciting incident, the problem, the change which the characters in the show MUST deal with. (…) “Some problems can wait twenty minutes. Sometimes you gotta solve a problem in the next five minutes or unpleasantness shall occur. And sometimes there’s a guy in the room with a fuckin’ knife. Deal with the guy with the fuckin’ knife, and move on from there.”

The Disruption, ideally, is the guy in the room with the fuckin’ knife. Now, it’s not necessarily that. As you move the intensity of the Disruption back in the timeline, the tone of the piece changes. “Guy in the room with a knife” gives you danger, pulp plotting. A “five minutes from now” problem gives you urgency, but control. Part of the fun is in watching the ad hoc planning your characters throw together to deal with the “five minutes from now” problem. Competence porn lives in the world of the “five minutes from now” problem.  A “twenty minutes from now” problem gives you dread.

In general terms, the DISRUPTION is the scenario hook. And if we’re talking in terms of the Art of Pacing, it’s also the Bang that you use to launch a scene. (Rogers is primarily talking about the plotting of serialized drama, but a lot of the stuff he’s talking about can also be seen fractally throughout a narrative.)

I find that conceptual distinction between knife problem/five minute problem/twenty minute problem in the second paragraph very useful (particularly when it comes to the emotional implication of each type of disruption). A lot of GMs (including myself) find it easy to fall into a rut with the way we handle our disruptions: If the PCs are exploring a dungeon, every disruption takes the form of a “knife problem” (i.e., the goblins jump out and attack the players.) But given the exact same goblins, you can also frame that in terms of a “five minute problem” (i.e., you can hear a large group of goblins coming towards you from the west, what do you do?) or a “twenty minute problem” (i.e., the ogre told you there was a large encampment of goblins on the second level of the dungeon).

Similarly, if you’re running a Shadowrun campaign and every scenario starts with Mr. Johnson calling one of the PCs and asking them for a meeting, see what happens if you start the next scenario by having Mr. Johnson come jumping through the window of the PC’s apartment with a bullet in his shoulder and assassins on his tail! (In other words, reframe your twenty minute problem as a knife problem.)

Next up:

THE REVERSAL is best described by my friend DJ McCarthey: “It’s the moment, when the movie … becomes an entirely different movie.” Too many scripts I’m submitted have a bunch of mini-reversals, the dreaded “and then” syndrome. Stuff happens, and then other stuff happens … Even in a well-plotted story when all the plot developments occur primarily because of the actions of the characters or logical but unexpected complications of the setting (the much loved SOUTH PARK creators advice “replace all moments in the outline  of ‘and then’ with ‘therefore’ or ‘but’) the story feels flat.

It’s a subtle distinction, but a good central reversal — and the middle of the story is the right place for it — always seems to elevate even a straight-ahead episodic-style story.

Because the GM isn’t in control of how a scenario actually plays out, REVERSALS can be a lot more difficult to pull off in roleplaying games than in other mediums. However, I would point out that the lack of control can actually make for some really fantastic reversals as long as the GM remains open to them: Allow the actions of the PCs to radically reframe events.

For example, in my Ptolus campaign there was a scenario I introduced where the order of knights that one of the PCs belonged to was experiencing a religious schism. I had the leaders of both factions send messages to the PC urging them to meet with them ASAP to discuss the schism. The intended scenario was that the PC knight would choose which of the factions he wanted to join. The PC, however, decided that one of the messages had to be a honeytrap: His loyalty was being tested. So he responded by reporting the message to the leader of the other faction. FIRST REVERSAL: This is now a story about the PC accidentally betraying their friend. This was followed shortly thereafter by the SECOND REVERSAL when the PC discovered their mistake and was now faced with the need to somehow warn and save their friend.

(Simpler example: You think this is the story of Noble Hero A. But then Noble Hero A is arrested and, instead of being rescued or staging a daring escape, he’s summarily executed by the Evil Overlord. What the fuck? Of course, this sort of thing happens all the time when you’re determining the outcome of combat randomly and don’t give your PCs or NPCs script immunity.)

The other thing to keep in mind about REVERSALS is that they’re frequently based on incomplete or inaccurate information: You think one thing is happening and then the story suddenly reveals that the reality is something completely different. A lot of GMs make the mistake of having the official or unofficial mission briefing for the current scenario accurately report exactly what the scenario is going to be.

For example, the scenario the GM wants to run is a ruined castle full of soul-sucking undead. So he has the local villagers tell the PCs: “Hey, there’s a castle full of soul-sucking undead.” Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the GM could very easily stage the scenario for a major reversal by simply making the villager mistaken: “There’s something weird going on up at the old castle ruins. We think another band of gutter goblins have moved in there.” That way, when it turns out to be soul-sucking undead, the PCs will be totally surprised.

(An example of this that always sticks out in my memory: John Givler, who used to frequent the AD&D FidoNet Echo, once ran an adventure featuring an albino red dragon. The players, who heard reports of a “white dragon”, bought supplies to protect themselves from cold. “Imagine the looks on their faces when it breathed fire.”)

And finally:

… THE CONCLUSION. The end. The new status quo. Not the return of the status quo, but the new one. Whatever new equilibrium has been reached. “Equilibrium” because it’s a situation, in serialized storytelling, which should be able to be easily disrupted. The status quo is always a delicately balanced thing, little stepping stones of resolution as you leap across the river of your season-long Stories.

Effective conclusions can be one of the hardest things for a GM to pull off when they leave the broken training wheels of railroading behind them. But a lot of RPGs are essentially serial storytelling and, as a result, Rogers’ advice regarding conclusions is particularly useful: When the status quo or equilibrium returns, try to focus the group’s attention on how the events they’ve just experienced have altered that status quo. (This change can be either internal or external in relation to the characters or the group.)

You can emphasize this alteration by using it to frame the next Agenda that will disrupt the equilibrium and drive the action forward.

Last week I introduced to Sezaran’s Dwarfhold in Dweredell, courtesy of Fictive Fantasies. This week I get to point you in the direction of even more cool stuff from that campaign: The PCs have apparently dug their way into a gang war and now they’re trying to find a home base for the gang they’ve allied with. Enter the Dwarven Temple of Khorus:

Dwarven Temple of Khorus

Once again, you should head over to Fictive Fantasies to get the full story and all the cool details.

(And if you’re looking for other cool Dyson Logos maps turned into abandoned temples, check out my own Ruined Temple of Illhan.)

Not that long ago I told you to check out the revamped, no-key map of Dweredell that Andrew Shields had photoshopped. And today I’ve got more Dweredell-related content, this time coming from Fictive Fantasies.

One of the cool things about Dweredell is that it’s a dying city: Three hundred years ago it was a teeming metropolis; the last city on the road to the great dwarven kingdoms of the east. But when the dwarven kingdoms fell, Dweredell lost its glory. Two centuries of decay have taken their toll, leaving the Outer City a wasteland of abandoned buildings that are now home to squatters and roving gangs.

The fellow over at Fictive Fantasies sent his players into the Outer City to explore Sezaran’s Dwarfhold, a ruined building in the old Dwarven Quarter that was now occupied by drug addicts and giant spiders. The PCs rooted out the spiders… and took over the dwarfhold as a base of operations!

Sezaran’s Dwarfhold

You should head on over to Fictive Fantasies to get the full story and larger maps and other cool stuff.

On a personal level, what I love about this sort of thing is discovering awesome new stuff about something that I created: I didn’t know dwarfholds had been built within the walls of Dweredell. I didn’t know who Sezaran was. I was previously unfamiliar with dwarven ash trees. And I’m really curious about the dwarven monastic orders looked like.