The 1st Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade was supposed to be “a storytelling game of personal horror.” That was literally the entire back cover text, except for a quote from Günter Dorn‘s Das Ungeheuer Darin (a fictional work). Early in the book, Mark Rein*Hagen writes:

This storytelling game provides a way to experience a terror of an all too immediate nature, for it allows you to experience the horror from the other side of the mirror. The horror of Vampire is the curse of what it is like to be half-beast and half-angel, trapped in a world of no absolutes, where morality is chosen, not ordained. The horror of Vampire is the stirrings of the Beast within and the cravings for warm blood. Perhaps the greatest risk of playing Vampire is seeing yourself in the mirror. To play this game, you must bear witness to the madness within you, that which you strive to master and overcome, that which you cannot bear to face.

Why, then, in actual practice did the game so often manifest as “katanas & trenchcoats” — a style of play that others have described as “superheroes with fangs”?

This shift in focus seemed to happen despite the best intentions: Vampire players were all about the “personal horror” and “it’s an immersive storytelling experience, not a combat simulator” selling points of the game. They strongly self-identified with those values. And yet their games would somehow still often end up being katanas & trenchcoats.

In some cases, of course, this style of escapism was simply more appealing to the players; the vampire as a cool and enigmatic avatar was more fun than the vampire as a form of self-reflection on the nihilism of morality and the fragility of humanity. But if this were the fundamental issue — that the appeal of escapism will necessarily override an RPG’s intended style of play — then you would expect to see this be more or less universally true.

And it isn’t.

Take, for example, Call of Cthulhu. Here is another popular, widely played horror game which emphasizes a shift away from the D&D-style “combat simulator,” featuring characters whose humanity and sense of identity is steadily eroded by their exposure to cosmic, uncaring, inhuman truths. But even in the case of Pulp Cthulhu, which deliberately seeks to blend that style of play with a sort of Indiana Jones savoir-faire, it still appears to be passingly rare for “shotguns vs. Cthulhu” gameplay to emerge.

Why?

Well, there are a number of factors that probably contribute. But the title of this essay probably gives away the fact that I think it largely boils down to the game structures (or lack of those structures) supporting the desired style of play in both Vampire and Call of Cthulhu. Because, as I’ve noted in the past, players gravitate towards structure.

It’s easy to simplify this down to, “Call of Cthulhu has a Sanity mechanic!” And then people say, “But Vampire had a Humanity mechanic!” But this is, in fact, an over-simplification because it fails to look at the game structures that were built around those core mechanics.

HUMANITY vs. SANITY

At first glance, Humanity and Sanity seem similar: Both are numerical meters. Over time, characters lose them. When the meter runs out, the character is permanently “broken” in a way compatible with the overriding theme of horror in each game and can no longer be played as a PC.

In the case of Vampire, however, although a small grab bag of mechanics were based on the character’s current Humanity score, virtually no structures were built around the loss of Humanity. The Degeneration mechanic (which didn’t even have a name in 1st Edition) was something that the GM was supposed to trigger more or less by fiat when the PCs took certain types of actions.

Superficially, this once again appears identical to Call of Cthulhu‘s Sanity mechanic. Here, too, the GM is supposed to trigger a sanity roll whenever a certain condition is met during play. So what’s the difference?

Look at all the game structures in Call of Cthulhu built around the Sanity mechanic: Every creature you face triggers a Sanity check. Virtually every grimoire of forbidden knowledge you read triggers a Sanity check. And the game also has a very specific default scenario hook which is, “Go investigate strange creatures and grimoires of forbidden knowledge.”

So basically everything in Call of Cthulhu is built around the Sanity mechanic. By contrast, Humanity is just off in a corner twiddling its thumbs.

Furthermore, as you lose Sanity in Call of Cthulhu you become more likely to fail your sanity tests. It’s a path of accelerating decay that ends in madness. Vampire, on the other hand, utilized a “hierarchy of sin”:

• Humanity 10: accidental wrongdoing
• Humanity 9: any sort of purposeful wrongdoing
• Humanity 8: shoplifting
• Humanity 7: theft and robbery
• Humanity 6: unintentional killing
• Humanity 5: wanton destruction
• Humanity 4: causing injury and personal harm
• Humanity 3: sadism and perversion
• Humanity 2: murder
• Humanity 1: the most heinous and demented acts

If your Humanity has already fallen below the point where a particular type of act is considered a “sin,” then you no longer have to make checks for it. The system is literally designed to plateau your character at a Humanity score equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop calling for Degeneration checks.

So not only was the system not supported by structures that would make it a central pillar of play, it was actually structurally designed to remove itself from play entirely.

And that’s why Call of Cthulhu remains focused on its existential horror and Vampire… doesn’t. It’s not designed to.

Go to Game Structures

For our second scenario structure challenge we’ll be returning to the Star Wars universe, but to a decidedly more obscure example: Star Wars: Underworld – The Yavin Vassilika was a 5-issue mini-series produced by Dark Horse Comics in 2000-01.

Star Wars: Underworld is not a great comic book, being primarily hamstrung by an artist with a delightfully detailed and stylized vision of the Star Wars universe, but whose panel layouts too often topple over the ledge of “creative” and go hurtling into the vast void of “incoherent”. But what the series does have is a really interesting premise that sets up an action-packed narrative.

The basic hook is that three Hutts learn that a long-lost and extremely valuable artifact known as the Yavin Vassilika is rumored to have been found (or, more accurately, located).

The Hutts decide to make a “friendly” wager to see which of them can obtain the Yavin Vassilika first, with each hiring a team of operatives to track it down. A number of familiar faces from the Star Wars movies and Extended Universe are split up across the teams (Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, Greedo, Bossk, IG-88, etc.), and each team needs to track down Webble, the raving madman who claims to have seen the Yavin Vassilika; backtrack his recent movements to figure out exactly where the Yavin Vassilika is; and then secure the Yavin Vassilika.

Most of the action, of course, is driven from the teams interacting with each other: Spying on other teams, sabotaging their efforts, baiting them into following false leads, openly trying to kill them, and so forth.

The story also utilizes an interesting cluster of sub-agendas. Some of these take the form of specific vendettas between the characters, but also in the more generic form of registered bounties that have been taken out on various characters. It’s under these auspices that Boba Fett enters the fray as an independent party seemingly uninterested in the Yavin Vassilika itself, but intensely interested in the people seeking it. The participants in the “race” are also able to take out (and buy-off) bounties on each other as the opportunities present themselves, creating an ever-shifting tangle of incentives.

The final wrinkle in all this is that, in addition to the Hutts, there’s another major player interested in the Yavin Vassilika: A mysterious figure known only as the “Collector”, but who also has an agent in the field. This agent primarily operates by trying to suborn the agents of the Hutts so that they’ll deliver the artifact to them instead of to their employer.

RACE TO THE PRIZE

The basic structure of Star Wars: Underworld is fairly easy to emulate:

1. Create X number of competing teams/agents. Star Wars: Underworld has, in addition to the PCs, two additional teams directly pursuing the McGuffin and two independent agents pursuing their own agendas (one trying to convince the teams to sell her the McGuffin; the other hired to secretly protect one of the hunters).

This is really the meat of the scenario. Create interesting foes and big personalities for the PCs to compete with and you should have a winner. You can also follow the lead of Star Wars: Underworld here and have the agents in the field working for a variety of employers who have competing agendas for the ultimate use of the prize.

2. Finding the McGuffin is a linear Three Clue Rule scenario, which is super easy to design.

You’ll probably want to make this chain at least four or five links long, giving the PCs plenty of time to jostle for position, conspire with, and be ambushed by the other factions. Making some or all of these links somewhat involved mini-scenarios will make it easier to intensify the stakes by bringing multiple teams into play. (You could also use a node-based structure instead of a linear one to add complexity to the investigation.)

Where this can get a little more interesting is that if you’re not the first group to find a particular clue, you can also just track the team(s) ahead of you and follow them to the next clue. In addition to the PCs investigating other teams, this also provides a motivation for other teams to be investigating them (thus prompting interaction between the teams).

In its most basic form, this is really all you need to run this type of scenario. Run the investigation scenario straight, but then throw in an appearance from a competing team whenever it seems appropriate to make things interesting. Don’t forget that the other factions are also in competition with each other and will have interactions that don’t directly affect the PCs, but may spill out onto them.

ADVANCED OPTIONS

But let’s look at a few advanced options we might use to enhance the experience.

BOUNTIES: As mentioned above, the original Star Wars: Underworld narrative includes a substrate of competition based around various members of the competing teams having bounties on their heads. This provides secondary motivations that can complicate the simple rivalry between the teams and also allows for factions motivated by something completely different from the other factions.

(You might think about other secondary objectives that can bring additional factions into play. Not just because that’s useful for creating additional factions, but because having factions pointed at different things – instead of all being pointed at the same thing – can make it easier for those factions to collide with each other.)

To set up a similar bounty system:

• Set initial bounties on some (but not all) of the participants in the race. (I’d suggest generally including at least one PC on this list.)
• Ideally, have a mechanism which allows PCs and other characters to quickly keep up to date on which characters have active bounties on their heads.
• Figure out how characters (particularly PCs) can place a bounty on another character’s head.
• It can also be useful for there to be a mechanism by which a PC (or other character) can remove the bounty placed on their head. In the Star Wars universe, bonded bounties can literally just be bought out. Another option might be that the death of the person who put the bounty on your head will result in the bounty being removed.

You’ll probably want to make sure that the PCs become aware of the bounty system fairly early in the scenario (or even before the scenario begins).

TIMELINE: Purely improvising the activities of a half dozen other factions in simultaneous operation with the PCs can be a tad difficult and may have unsatisfying results. One way you can prep the progress of the race is by laying out a simple timeline of how quickly the other factions reach various milestones in the scenario.

Like any timeline, of course, you’ll want to:

• Make sure you don’t spend a lot of effort prepping past the point at which the PCs will almost certainly have meaningfully altered the outcome of events. (I’d guess probably no further than the first two or possibly three milestones.)
• Alter and update the timeline as necessary in order to reflect the actions taken by the PCs (and the impact they have on other participants).

For factions that are pursuing goals tangential to the McGuffin search, their timelines might instead feature sequences of escalating interactions with the PCs (and also the other teams).

The benefit of objectively tracking the progress of the other factions is that it creates a hard deadline for the PCs; the resulting pressure will ratchet up the intensity of the scenario for the players. The advantage of prepping a timeline to accomplish this is that it’s relatively simple and straightforward, and also allows you to put some thought into the types of clues their off-screen activities might generate. The disadvantage is that it’s comparatively likely to result in a lot of wasted prep.

PROGRESSIONS: Alternatively, for some factions you may find that prepping a progression has more utility. Progressions are similar to timelines, but rather than pegging events to a specific time, each progression represents a sequence of actions that a particular faction might attempt.

For example, in Star Wars: Underworld the character of Jozzel could be given this progression:

• Offer Faction #1 300,000 to deliver the Vassilika to her in exchange for a fake that can be given to their Hutt patron.
• Attempt to seduce a PC in order to keep tabs on their progress.
• Plant a homing beacon on the ship belonging to Faction #2.
• If she gets the McGuffin, steal the PCs’ ship (or a ship belonging to another faction) and lead them to her secretive patron for the final exchange.

Progressions aren’t locked in stone, of course. In the case of Jozzel, during the “actual play” of our hypothetical gaming session, she ends up getting basically kidnapped by the PCs and dragged along by them for a good long while. Maybe the next time you run the scenario, she ends up getting killed by one of the factions and they leave her body in a location where it will frame the PCs for her murder.

In other words, just like timelines, progressions can easily get disrupted by PCs. But they can also be a little more flexible in practice, since their additional elements can often be brought back into play (often from an unexpected angle) even after the disruption (whereas the events on a timeline tend to be dependent on the previous events of the timeline).

On a similar note, you can also use weak progressions. These are really just a menu of “things this faction will do” without necessarily putting them in a specific sequence. Weak progressions are more difficult to use in practice because it means that you have more “balls in the air” so to speak, but they give a bigger menu for options of “what happens next” during actual play.

CHASE MECHANICS: Another alternative would be to create some form of mechanical structure for resolving the progress of each team towards the goal. Exactly what this would look like would depend on the system you were using to run the scenario, obviously, but the advantage would lie in giving the players a more direct feeling of control over the outcome of the race by giving them something more tangible to interact with and manipulate. The GM, for their part, would similarly be able to actively play each faction’s interactions with the chase mechanics.

RUNNING THE RACE

Upon reflection, running the McGuffin Race is not that dissimilar from using an adversary roster when running a dungeon; the difference is that rather than managing the activities of the adversaries geographically, you’re managing them temporally (and probably, for most GMs, with a healthy dose of dramatic timing).

If you go with the relatively straightforward options, you’ll have:

• The investigation for finding the McGuffin.
• A set of progressions for each faction, detailing their activities.
• Possibly a timeline for when other factions “hit” each milestone on the investigation.

Note that each of these can really be thought of as a separate linear sequence running in parallel with each other. (Even the investigation is just the linear framework which will form the backbone of the actions which the PCs choose to take.) So when you’re running the race, you just need to look at the top item of each of those lists and decide what happens next.

It seems big and complicated and chaotic, but structurally it’s actually easy peasy.

If you’re still struggling with how to make it all work in practice, try imposing a slightly more formal procedure on yourself:

• Each time the PCs finish a scene, take a moment to provisionally frame the next scene. (As described in The Art of Pacing, that means identifying the PCs’ intention, choosing obstacles, and skipping to the next meaningful choice.)
• Before committing to that scene, however, look at your progressions and pick 1-2 things that the other factions do before that scene takes place. (You can even roll 1d3-1 and randomly determine which factions take their next progression actions if you really want to provoke yourself in unexpected directions.)

Some of these actions won’t actually affect the PCs or what the PCs are doing right now. That’s fine. Make a note (mental or otherwise) that they’ve happened and move on to the next scene. The PCs will likely discover the consequences of what’s happened in a later scene.

Other actions will affect the PCs. Those are essentially obstacles standing between them and the scene they wanted to have (or the obstacle you had already anticipated for them): Frame up the new scene and run it. When that scene is finished, let the PCs proceed to their next scene (which may or may not be where they were headed before they got interrupted by the other factions). When that scene is done, repeat the process of seeing what the other factions are doing.

Also: Your progressions aren’t written in stone. As things develop in play, feel free to add (or insert) additional actions into the progressions of the other factions. You might also discover that certain situations will prompt factions to take actions that you didn’t prep onto their progressions. That’s obviously totally fine. Do what feels right and play each faction actively throughout.

BEYOND THE UNDERWORLD

For an additional exercise, consider analyzing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as another example of this scenario type. The basic elements are a little more occluded here (particularly because so many of the factions are pretending to be allies when they’re really antagonists), but it can be a valuable example because the action is more strictly based around Indiana’s POV (which more closely emulates what the typical experience of PCs will be at the table).

Consider, also, Guardians of the Galaxy, which uses a micro-version of the structure to bring the PC party together.

It only lasts for a single scene, really, but you’ve got similar dynamics (including literal bounties as an alternative motivation for factions being involved). A scene like this obviously doesn’t need the full work-up described above, but within its tight confines it can be a useful object lesson in what makes these situations tick: Think about how much less interesting the scene would be if Rocket and Groot were also solely interested in the sphere, thus unifying everyone’s goals instead of having them work at cross-purposes.

Rare and magical artifacts are, obviously, not the only sort of McGuffin that can be targeted in the race which forms the backbone for this sort of scenario. Anything which must be searched for or obtained through a sequence of challenges can have a similar function.

A structure which at first glance seems the same, however, would be multiple teams competing at a single challenge simultaneously. An elaborated example of this would be multiple teams exploring the same dungeon at the same time. Although superficially similar, note how the lack of a series of shared chokepoints makes it much more difficult to bring the various factions into interesting interactions with each other. Despite their similarities, I think you’ll actually need a different structure to make this sort of scenario work smoothly and successfully at the table. (And that might be something we look at in the future.)

Go to Challenge #3

Our first scenario structure challenge is the Death Star sequence from the original Star Wars. More generally, this is an exemplar of a “space station infiltration” mission, but we’ll be using the Death Star as a useful parallel (while acknowledging the limitations of this).

What makes the Death Star scenario tick?

(I’m just going to assume here that everyone is familiar with Star Wars. If you’re not familiar with it, do yourself a favor and immediately track down a copy of the original, unaltered version and watch it ASAP.)

1. The PCs have to gain access to the Death Star. (In the case of the movie, they got captured by its tractor beam and hid in the smugglers’ compartments.)
2. There was a primary obstacle they had to overcome in order to get out. (The tractor beam needed to be disabled.)
3. There was an objective they wanted to accomplish. (Rescue the princess.)
4. There was a grab bag of situational obstacles that needed to be overcome, bypassed, or otherwise resolved in order for the PCs to overcome the obstacle and/or achieve the objective.

When it comes to the situational obstacles, note that there’s only a handful of them: Stormtroopers, Imperial officers, the security protecting the Death Star’s computer network, magnetically sealed doors, and Darth Vader. Rather than introducing entirely new elements, the lesser obstacles get mixed and remixed constantly: Stormtroopers scanning the ship. Stormtroopers guarding the ship. Stormtroopers attacking them in the brig. Stormtroopers chasing them through the corridors. Stormtroopers guarding the ship again.

RAID SCENARIOS

Let’s digress for a moment and talk about raid-type scenarios in general.

John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill module is my personal touchstone for this. It certainly wasn’t the first raid-type module ever published, but it was the one which, for me, made the concept really gel definitively (primarily because Tynes boils it down to an essential core and clearly spells out exactly why he designed the scenario the way that he did; in other words, he breaks down the scenario structure for the GM).

Basically, there are three parts to a basic raid scenario (which Tynes describes as a “Tom Clancy-style special ops mission”):

First, it largely functions using the same room-and-key design of a location-crawl.

Second, the target location is designed in such a way that the PCs can grok the entire floorplan and some (or all) of its defensive measures. (You’ll note that this is distinct from a typical dungeoncrawl, where it is virtually impossible and usually antithetical to the desired gameplay for the PCs to be able to predetermine the entire floorplan.)

Third, the target location should generally feature lots of potential entry points (allowing the PCs to select their approach and make meaningful tactical decisions about how to carry out the raid).

Fourth, the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.

Over the years I’ve refined this structure to include adversary rosters in order to make it easier to key patrol patterns and also to make the defensive forces more dynamic in actual play.

The intended form of play is that the PCs will (1) learn about the target location, (2) have time to plan their raid, and then (3) execute their raid against active opposition.

THE DEATH STAR RAID

Once you understand the basic raid structure, the potential trap for a Death Star-style raid is trying to map out the entire space station. That’s valuable for smaller raid scenarios (particularly if you prep it in a way that the blueprint can literally be presented to the PCs so that they can use it during planning), but a space station is just too big for that to be convenient. (Even a space station much, much, much smaller than the Death Star.)

So in planning out a raid on the Death Star, you’ll need to figure out how to design the raid on a slightly more abstract level. Let’s look back at our list of four elements which makes the Death Star sequence tick:

1. Generally speaking, do NOT determine how the PCs will gain access to the station. Instead, take a step back, think about all the ways people can enter the station, and then figure out how those entrances have been secured. Sketch those out briefly. As with any other raid scenario, it’s now up to the players to (a) learn about them and (b) figure out how to bypass them.

2 & 3. Figure out 1-3 objectives that the PCs want on the space station and/or primary obstacles they need to overcome to escape the station once they’re onboard it. (The players may have already determined at least some of this for you when they made the decision to raid the space station in the first place: Why are they there?)

4. Prep your grab bag of 4-6 situational obstacles that can complicate the PCs’ efforts to reach and achieve the objectives/primary obstacle. Include 1-2 big, notable bad guys (Darth Vader, Tarkin). Include some interchangeable mooks (stormtroopers, officers). Include some passive security features (computer network, magnetically sealed doors).

Finally, briefly sketch the general layout of the station. As noted, this shouldn’t be a hyper-detailed map: You want to know the major features of the space station (docks, brig, bridge, engineering cores, Stormtrooper barracks, etc.) and you probably want to have a general sense of where they are in relation to each other (brig is on the upper levels, docks on the lower levels, etc.).

A flowchart structure can work well for this, giving enough structure for the PCs to make meaningful choices without getting bogged down in an unnecessary superfluity of detail.

SITUATIONAL OBSTACLES

As you’re developing this flowchart, try to include at least 1-2 locations between the entrances and the various objectives/primary obstacles. These are the locations where the PCs can encounter some of the situational obstacles. For example, in order to get from the docks (where the PCs enter the Death Star) to the brig (where the princess is being held) you need to pass through the central elevator shafts (giving Imperial officers or other personnel a chance to spot you).

You can sketch out what situational obstacles are found in each location, if you like:

DOCKS

• 2 stormtroopers in the docking bay itself
• 2 imperial officers overseeing the docking bay from the control room
• Magnetically sealed door on the control room

THE DEATH STAR RAID IN PLAY

And that’s basically it. At this point, you’ve got enough material that your players should be able to engage with it and you can respond dynamically whenever they do.

Don’t feel trapped by your prep. Remember, that what you’ve been designing are tools: If they’re in the brig and they blow their Bluff check, send in some stormtrooper squads. If they feel trapped, don’t think they can fight their way out, and they say, “There must be another way out of here! Can we get out through the vents?” think for a moment and then say, “Sure. That works. You can blast a hole in the wall over there and drop down onto the garbage disposal level.” You didn’t prep a garbage disposal level, but it makes sense that a space station would have one, right?

The garbage disposal room they drop into feels like a significant location, though, so let’s add a situational obstacle. Stormtrooper guards? Hmm… No. They just got away from stormtroopers up above, and who would bother guarding garbage? Let’s throw a magnetically sealed door here and… compacting walls? Yeah, that sounds good.

BEYOND THE DEATH STAR

Obviously this basic structure can be used for more than just space stations: Any raid targeting a sufficiently large facility can be set up this way.

As an exercise, you can break down the raid on CIA headquarters in Mission: Impossible and design it as a scenario. The objective is obvious (the NOC list kept in the vault). What are the potential entrances to the facility? What is the primary obstacle(s) that prevent them from leaving once they’re in? What are the situational obstacles that the GM can use to complicate their mission (if they choose to accept it)?

Go to Challenge #2

This is the first entry in a new series I’m trialing here at the Alexandrian. Back in 2012, I wrote a series of essays about Game Structures in RPGs. A major component of this discussion concerned scenario structures – the macro-game structures which allow the GM to prep different aspects of their campaign world and different experiences for their players.

One of the specific things I discussed was the fact that when you try to prep a scenario using the wrong scenario structure, the result can be painful for everybody involved. You can see this with clearly wrong-headed ideas like running dungeon exploration as a linear timeline of events; running conversations using combat initiative; or trying to have players navigate a city as if it were a dungeoncrawl (by prepping every street with a keyed encounter and having the players make intersection-by-intersection navigation decisions).

This makes it truly unfortunate that most GMs don’t have a robust library of scenario structures that they can use to build their campaigns. In my experience, the vast majority of GMs are limited to just three structures:

1. Railroads
2. Dungeoncrawls
3. Mysteries

In actual practice it’s usually worse than this because many GMs don’t really understand how to structure mysteries, so they end up defaulting back towards railroads for their mystery scenarios. And even running a dungeoncrawl is no longer a reliable skill for many DMs because the gateway game, D&D, is no longer teaching it as a skill: The actual procedure by which a dungeoncrawl is run was significantly obfuscated in 3^rd Edition and was completely removed from the rulebooks for 4^th Edition.

The result is that GMs generally don’t even consciously realize what scenario structures are, so they end up just kind of muddling around using gut instinct and a random amalgamation of half-realized scenario structures they’ve picked up through osmosis, most or all of which are just various flavors of railroading.

So I obviously think it’s really important for GMs to make the conscious decision to think about the scenario structures they use, and make sure they’re using the right scenario structures for the scenarios they want to run (or which they need to run because of the decisions their players are making). One of the things that storytelling games have been doing very well compared to RPGs over the last ten to fifteen years is, in fact, spelling out specific procedures for GMs to follow.

As part of that original series on Game Structures, I also talked about designing custom game structures, using the example of how to design structures for running a campaign about a starship plying interstellar trade routes.

With this series I want to challenge myself – and you! – to do more of this. The truth is that even one of these structures unlocks the ability to confidently prep and run dozens of scenarios. When I figured out node-based scenario design, it meant that I could suddenly design and run incredibly complex mystery scenarios as a matter of simple routine. When I figured out the party planning structure for effectively running large social events, it was like opening a door to a room that I’d never even knew existed. What else is hiding out around here, lurking just within arms reach and yet somehow completely beyond our grasp because we’re blind to the possibility?

So this series is going to look at specific types of experiences and say, “How would you prep this – and then run this – for an RPG?” The results won’t have been playtested (yet!), so it’s possible that what we come up with won’t work in actual practice. But the goal will be to get specific enough to provide a concrete framework for prepping any number of scenarios. Or, if we run into something truly challenging, enough detail to spark meaningful analysis and discussion (similar to my Thinking About Urbancrawls series, which did, eventually, result in a specific structure being created).

I suspect that most of our challenges will be prompted from linear mediums like films, books, and comics, but real life could also easily provide examples. (Hexcrawls, for example, were born as much from the inspiration of real life expeditions like Shackleton or Marco Polo as they were from the travel sequences of The Lord of the Rings.)

Of course, some would-be “challenges” will have obvious answers: Sherlock Holmes? Well, Three Clue Rule with a side-helping of node-based scenario design. Next!

We’ll be skipping those.

Our goal is also not to specifically ape our point (or points) of inspiration: Even if we could create such a narrowly focused scenario structure, what would be the point? What we’re interested in is finding a structure that will allow us to create any number of similar experiences, preferably with so much flexibility that the results might end up looking absolutely nothing like our original inspiration. (Think about how something like Moria becomes the incredibly flexible structure of the dungeoncrawl, which in turn expands into the generic structure of the location-crawl, which can end up being used to model a technologically-riddled skyscraper in a cyberpunk setting.) The points of inspiration exist to help us think about and unlock that structure.

I’m also hoping that seeing my process of working through these challenges will also prove more generally useful by demonstrating the process by which I create and prep these structures.

Finally, I really do want to be challenged here. So if you have some tricky situation or a narrative example of an experience you’d like to create for your group, throw it my way, either in the comments here or via Twitter.

We’ll be getting stated on Wednesday with…

Raiding the Death Star!

SCENARIO STRUCTURE CHALLENGES
Challenge #1: The Death Star Raid
Challenge #2: Race to the Prize
Challenge #3: McGuffin Keep-Away
Challenge #4: Heists
Challenge #5: The RPG Montage
Challenge #6: Innkeepers

Big social events are a great set piece for an RPG campaign: They’re hotbeds of intrigue. If violence needs to break out, the innocent bystanders raise the stakes. If there’s to be a murder, they provide a wealth of suspects. If the PCs are trying to pull a heist, they delightfully complicate the proceedings.

I’ve also found them to be effective as a way of signaling when the PCs have changed their sphere of influence. You rescued the mayor’s daughter from a dragon? Chances are you’re going to be the belle of the ball. And you’re going to discover that powerful and important people have become very interested in making your acquaintance.

When these events work, they’re exciting and engaging experiences, often providing a memorable epoch for the players and spinning out contacts and consequences that will drive the next phase of the campaign. The difficulty, of course, is getting them to work properly: They require the GM to juggle a lot of different characters and getting the players to actually form a meaningful relationship with the NPCs at the party can often feel like a crapshoot.

Fifteen years ago, however, largely through trial and error, I sort of “cracked the code” on how to prep and run these types of scenarios. Over the years, I’ve used the same scenario structure repeatedly in a wide variety of circumstances – political caucus, soiree on a flying ship, dinner in a mystic castle, journey on a long-haul space freighter – and it’s proven to be remarkably reliable in producing great gaming experiences featuring intensive roleplaying opportunities.

The structure can be broken down into four tools: The location, the guest list, the main event sequence, and the topics of conversation.

LOCATION

Where is the social event taking place?

You’ve got a lot of flexibility with this. I’ve run these types of events in everything from a simple ballroom to multiple flying ships (with the event moving back and forth between the vessels).

What you want to avoid, however, is making the location too small or too simple. The key to any good party is having multiple zones of activity, so that social groups can form and break apart freely. Similarly, as we’ll see, what makes this scenario structure tick is that the PCs are NOT simultaneously engaged with every single NPC at the event. (That’s a different kind of event – a board meeting or a union rally or something of that ilk.) In order for that to work, there needs to be a lot of different areas that the group can move between.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need lots and lots of different rooms. For example, in a nightclub the dance floor, the bar, and the VIP area are probably all in view of each other, but they’re distinct areas that people can congregate in.

On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to incorporate a wholistic environment, either. The Enchantment Under the Sea dance in Back to the Future, for example, uses the dance floor, the punch bowl, the backstage area, and even the parking lot outside. Including private areas (or at least theoretically private areas) can also be a good idea, not just for the opportunities they provide for the PCs to seclude themselves, but because seeing NPCs slipping into or out of such privates areas can immediately invoke intrigue.

GUEST LIST

Next, you’ll want to prep the guest list. In my experience, you’re generally going to want 10-20 people. Fewer than ten and the event isn’t dynamic enough and doesn’t really feel “large”. More then twenty and the lack of focus kind of just devolves into noise. Fifteen or so feels like a pretty good sweet spot to aim for.

(Obviously many events will have a larger attendance than that. But you’ll want to focus on the circle of NPCs that are immediately relevant to the PCs.)

First, you’ll want to prep a master list of names that you can use as a quick reference while running the event.

Next, you’ll want to prep each of these important NPCs using the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template. The template will let you quickly pick up each NPC and slip into their role during the event.

I recommend printing out one NPC per sheet and keep them loose-leaf. That will let you quickly pull out the sheets for each NPC participating in a particular conversation for easy use. If you’ve got the time and resources, it can also be rewarding to prep a visual handout for each NPC. During each conversation, you can just quickly prop up the visual handouts for each NPC present, making it easier for the players to track who they’re talking to and enhancing their memory of each character as a separate individual. (They can also serve as handy visual reminders for you.)

KEY INFO: The Key Info section of the roleplaying template is designed for scenario-essential information that is crucial for the GM to remember when using the NPC. When using the template for a social event, this can include:

• The character’s relationship with or attitude towards other NPCs. (“Despises Susannah.” or “Will enjoy swapping war stories with the naval officers.”)
• Specific reactions that they might have to stimuli. (“Is angered by anyone suggesting that her father is dying.”)
• Particular actions or interactions that should be triggered. (“Will try to poison Cassandra’s drink.” or “Wants to sell the PCs timeshares in Venice Beach.”)
• Clues that can be gleaned from them. (“Knows the knife belonged to Cassandra.” or “Perception check (DC 20) to notice that her dress has been torn.”)
• Scenario hooks.
• Cross-references or common experiences that they share with particular PCs. (“Was raised in the same orphanage as Bella.” or “Was a friend to the duke they killed in session 3.”)
• Unusual or important gear they might be carrying. (“Her glass eye allows her to see through walls.” or “The golden cross she wears is made of aurum (true gold).”)

Obviously some of these categories overlap with each other, and there are plenty of other essential details that will be scenario- or character-specific.

MAIN EVENT SEQUENCE

Next you’re going to prep what I call the main event sequence for the event. For example:

• Announcing Guests of Special Honor
• Iron Mage Appears
• Aoska Arrives
• Urlenius Arrives
• Lord Dallimothan Arrives
• Lady Rill Joins the Party
• Arguing About the Balacazars
• Debate of the Twelve Commanders
• Sheva and Jevicca Seek Out the PCs
• A Poetry Reading

I usually prep these as a linear sequence (A happens, then B happens, then C happens). You could also just prep a grab bag of events that could happen in any sequence. (You could even stock a random table and roll to see what happens next.) If you want to run something a little more complicated, you could also try prepping multiple event sequences. (This is a variant of the Second Track.)

Obviously the PCs can also initiate alternative “major events”, or they may end up derailing (or transforming) the events that you’d originally planned. More power to them. The main event sequence should be seen as a tool, not as destiny.

It can also be tempting to think of the main event sequence as the “Story of the Party”. But it isn’t. It’s more like the piece of string that you dip into a saturated sugar solution in order to make rock candy. The experience of the party – the cool and unique events that you and your players are going to remember – will crystallize around the string. If you’re eating the string instead of the candy, you’re doing it wrong.

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION

The last tool you’ll prep are topics of conversation. These might be momentous recent events, fraught political debates, or just utter trifles (like the series finale of a television program). For example, in a scenario I ran as part of In the Shadow of the Spire, the topics of conversation included:

• A recent riot
• A magical battle that the PCs had been involved in
• A string of terrorist attacks that had been plaguing the city
• Rumours of war to the south
• The health of a guest who canceled at the last minute
• A magical STD that had been afflicting merchant families
• The recent prison escape by a criminal the PCs had arrested
• A new restaurant that recently opened in the Nobles’ Quarter

I recommend mixing in a few “irrelevant” topics of conversation to camouflage (or, at least, contrast) the “important” stuff.

The topics of conversation can also pick up elements from the main event sequence as they happen. (“Did you see Astoria rush out in tears? What could Rupert have possibly said to her?!”)

In some cases, you may want to reference topics of conversation in the Key Info section of the NPCs from your guest list (i.e., what they think about or can contribute to a particular topic). But for the most part you should be able to simply improvise what various people have to say about each topic. What can be more useful is figuring out two or three different general viewpoints on a particular topic (supporting the new Ironworkers’ Guild vs. thinking it’s a front for criminal activity), and then you can just have each NPC ad lib within that debate.

RUNNING THE PARTY

First, you’ll want to know what happens in the first moment that the PCs show up for the event. What will immediately attract their attention? Who will they see? Is there a major announcement (about them or otherwise)? Is there something big and loud going down? Is there something subtle that only they might notice?

This will generally be the first event on your main event sequence. It’s the initial hook and it should give your players enough context to begin taking action in the scene. (Reacting to what they see. Going to speak with someone they know. Et cetera.)

From that point forward, running the event is largely a matter of picking up the various toys you’ve constructed and then putting them into play in different configurations.

• Which NPCs are talking to each other? (Consult your guest list.)
• Who might come over and join a conversation that the PCs are having? (Again, guest list.)
• What are they talking about? (Look at your topics of conversation.)

Encourage the PCs to split up. Cutting back and forth between various conversations is extremely effective in large social events, and you’ll want to use crossovers between various interactions to make the party feel like a unified whole. (For example, if one of the PCs gets involved in a huge shouting match with the Ariadnan diplomat, the other PCs should either hear it directly or hear people talking about it.)

Keep the social groups circulating. You don’t have to completely use up everything interesting about a particular NPC in a single interaction. In fact, you shouldn’t. Reincorporate characters that the PCs met earlier in the scene. Similarly, reincorporate topics of conversation – let the players discuss similar things with different people in order to get (and argue) different points of view.

Pay attention to which NPCs “click” with the PCs (whether in a positive or negative way). In my experience, there’s really no way to predict this: Part of it is just random chance. Part of it is which character traits particularly appeal to your players. Part of it will be which NPCs are clicking for you (and therefore providing stronger and more memorable interactions). Regardless, make a point of bringing those NPCs back and developing the PCs’ relationships with them.

If things feel like they’re lagging, either cut to another group of PCs or trigger the next event on the main sequence.

Don’t hog the driver’s seat. Allow the PCs to observe things that they can choose to react to. (For example, instead of having every NPC come to them, instead allow them to notice NPCs walking past or overhearing a group talking about a topic of interest. Let them choose whether and how to engage.) Make a point of asking them what they want to do (and if they don’t have an answer, trigger the next event).

What essentially makes this scenario structure work is that you have not prepped a dozen specific interactions for the PCs to have. Instead, you’ve prepped a couple dozen different toys – people, topics, events – and you’re going to constantly remix those into new configurations for as long as they hold the players’ interest.

QUICK ‘N DIRTY VERSION

The full scenario structure I’m describing here obviously requires preparation to run to full effect. But what if the players have just spontaneously decided to crash the society debut of the Governor’s daughter? Is there any way to use this scenario structure on-the-fly?

Here’s the five minute version for emergency use:

• Make a list of 3-5 places people can congregate.
• Make a list of 10 characters.
• Make a list of 5 events.
• Make a list of 5 topics of conversation.

Don’t go into detail. Just list ‘em.

If this social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs and the topics of conversation prepped – you just need to pull them onto the lists for this event.

Finally, if the PCs are going to the social event in order to achieve some specific goal, use the Three Clue Rule and figure out three ways that they can do that. Notate it in the appropriate places. (For example, if they’re trying to figure out who in the Governor’s circle of friends might have assassinated Marco’s sister, then you’ll probably want to identify a couple people who can tell them that. And maybe one of the events is an opportunity to witness the Governor’s chief of staff slipping off to talk to a known Mafioso.) Of course, when you’re actually running the scenario don’t forget the principle of Permissive Clue-Finding – there may be a bunch of other ways for the PCs to also accomplish their goal. Follow their lead.

For a detailed example of this scenario structure in practice, check out Running the Campaign: A Party at Shipwright’s House.