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

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

STRUCTURE 1: GUEST OF THE WEEK

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

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

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

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

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

Which is why Vampirina has a second episodic structure.

STRUCTURE 2: SECRET AT RISK

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREP CHECKLIST

To use this scenario structure, you’ll need:

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

And you should be good to go!

BEYOND THE BED & BREAKFAST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The cinematic technique of the montage is vaguely defined and multifaceted. In the French tradition “montage” refers to all editing. In Soviet montage theory, it is specifically the juxtaposition of non-sequential imagery in order to create specific meaning. The basic definition provided by Wikipedia, however, is, “A film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information.” It is in this sense that one has the “montage sequence” which is specifically designed to show the passage of time, and is what is most often referred to by the shorthand of “montage” in English.

FRAMING THE MONTAGE

The basics of a montage, therefore, can be understood as very hard cuts from one sequence of action to the next.

In The Art of Pacing, I discussed at length how we frame, fill, and close scenes. Creating a montage basically consists of framing very hard and very deep into a scene, spending the least amount of time necessary to address the agenda of that scene, and then aggressively cutting to the next scene (which is similarly framed very hard). This effectively creates a sequence of micro-scenes.

The trouble with doing this kind of hard scene framing as a GM is that it becomes increasingly difficult for the players to meaningfully contribute to what’s happening. (This is why, as I noted in The Art of Pacing, the harder the scene framing becomes, the more likely it is that a game or GM will introduce narrative control mechanics in order to return control back to the players.) For example, consider the famous baptismal montage from the end of The Godfather:

To get cuts that tight and that focused, it would seem as if the GM would basically just be saying, “Okay, cut from the church. We’re in your kitchen. You’re cleaning and assembling your gun. We cut back to the church.” There’s no breathing room for a back-and-forth conversation; no space for the players to propose an action.

When you get this tight, though, something interesting happens: The GM can actually invert the players’ part in the conversation of meaningful choices. Instead of framing the scene, the GM can instead prompt the players to frame each micro-scene.

This is the first secret of the RPG montage.

In this example the players have proposed simultaneously assassinating the other New York dons. Michael Corleone’s player, though, says, “I’ll need an alibi. What if we do it while I’m baptizing my kids?”

(“That’s fucking dark,” says Kay’s player. “I love it.”)

So the GM describes the baptism. And then, rather than framing to the next scene, the GM prompts one of the players:

GM: Rocco, how do you prepare for your murder?

Rocco: I’m in my kitchen, disassembling and reassembling my gun.

GM: Outside the window we can see your family relaxing on the beach. Your fingers shove pieces of metal together with the casual precision of familiarity. We cut to—Clemenza, what are you doing?

Clemenza: I’ve got my shotgun packed in a cardboard box. Looks like I’m delivering a package. I pause to polish a bit of dirt off my immaculately detailed car.

GM: Great. We cut back to the church, where the priest does the sign of the cross, gesturing with his hand as if using a cloth to wipe clean Michael’s sin. He grabs a few grains of salt and presses them to Anthony’s mouth. Anthony’s little hands reach up and touch his own chin. What about you Willie?

Willie: I’m getting a shave.

We finish that cycle of declarations and then the GM presents a second prompt by telling each of the players where their assassination is taking place:

GM: Don Barzini is working in his office building. What’s your plan, Al Neri?

Al Neri: Well, I’m dressed as a cop. Does Barzini leave his office at the same time every day?

GM: Sure. He comes out the front door and gets into his limo. Like clockwork.

Al Neri: Okay, then about five minutes before he’s due to leave, I’ll stroll up and tell the limo to move along.

GM: The driver refuses.

Al Neri: I’ll start writing him a ticket just as Barzini comes out of the building. That should distract him and his bodyguards.

And the GM, once again, goes around the table with this prompt and we get the second phase of the montage, with everyone setting up their attacks. The GM continues cutting back to the baptism. Maybe he’s pulled up the Catholic rite on his phone and is reading it out loud through the entire sequence. He reaches the point where the priest says, “Michael, do you renounce Satan?”

Then we hit the final phase of the montage: The GM calls for whatever action checks are necessary to resolve each murder (which in some cases might be attack rolls; in other cases it might be a Stealth or Deception test). It’s a montage, so the GM will probably want to keep these resolutions mechanically tight (rather than, for example, going into full-fledged combat rounds).

The GM’s on his game, so at the end of each murder he continues plugging in the renunciation of sin, pressuring Michael with the hypocrisy of his answers: “And all his works?” “And all his empty promises?” Maybe he calls for Kay to make an Insight check to see if she notices that something is wrong with Michael.

And that’s your basic structure of a mass assassination montage:

• Prompt micro-scenes by requesting preparations for the murders
• Declare the locations of the murder and prompt declaration of the murder
• Resolve the murders

If any of the PCs aren’t directly contributing to the murders, see if you can frame them into a scene that contrasts or thematically comments on the murders and then cut back and forth between that scene and the rest of the montage. (But this isn’t strictly necessary. It’s okay if only some of the PCs are participating in a particular montage.)

This structure points us towards the second secret of the RPG montage: In order to be an effective montage, the micro-scenes which make up the montage must have an overarching agenda — a question that the montage as a whole is seeking to answer. (In this case, the question would be, “Is the Corleone family successful in taking out all of the other dons?”) Without that unifying agenda, the montage will lack focus and purpose. It will just be a bunch of random stuff thrown in a blender (and you’d probably be better off resolving the elements of the montage separately).

This specific structure probably has limited usefulness, though, because how often are your players going to propose simultaneous mass murder in multiple locations?

(Don’t answer that.)

RUNNING THE INVESTIGATIVE MONTAGE

One response to this could be a GM-led montage. Here the GM basically uses the same technique, but instead of waiting for the players to say something like, “We’re going to try to murder all the dons simultaneously,” the GM initiates the montage by saying, “Okay, at this point you’re going to murder all the dons simultaneously.”

Of course, a GM-led montage doesn’t sound like the right decision in this case. The decision to murder a lot of people is obviously a really meaningful choice and skipping past that choice (effectively taking that choice away from the players and making it for them) is almost certainly problematic and very disruptive to the conversation of meaningful choices which is the fundamental principle of the RPG medium.

(In a storytelling game, your mileage might vary depending on how the narrative control mechanics are set up.)

This doesn’t, however, mean that GM-led montages are never a good idea in RPGs. A common counterexample is the investigative montage, the point in a detective story where there’s a bunch of different leads and legwork to pursue, so we get a montage of the heroes splitting up, investigating the shit out of it, and then coming back together with the insights and conclusions that drive us forward into the next chunk of plot. A GM-led montage (“Okay! It’s time to split up and do the legwork! Farida, how are you working the case?”) can work here because the context has already established that the PCs want to solve the mystery being investigated. The GM is pushing a structure for resolving that desire (and framing hard to do it), but he’s not taking the meaningful choice (“let’s investigate this mystery”) away from the players.

I actually spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to find the perfect cinematic or literary exemplar of an investigative montage for us to work from here, but I have been unsuccessful. (Even as I write this, the back of my brain is trying to sidetrack me by saying, “Wait! What about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I bet we can track down a scene like this with the Scooby Gang! Let’s go spend the next twelve hours trolling through the DVDs!”)

It’s possible that this is a, “Beam me up, Scotty!” moment, where I’m convinced that scenes like this exist in film or television, but they really don’t. I suspect, though, that the reason I can’t find the exact scene haunting the corner of my mind’s eye is because most detective stories in other mediums feature a sole protagonist, so the typical investigative montage just features one guy doing a bunch of stuff in quick succession. But by the time I started looking for an example of this to reconstruct, the concept had already transmogrified itself in my mind into the group context of an RPG scenario.

Long story short: I’m not going to worry about it. I’m guessing you probably already know the type of scene I’m talking about, and if you don’t, then you’ll still find investigative montages useful.

The first thing you’ll want for an investigative montage is a list of montage revelations. This basically works exactly like the revelation list you create when using the Three Clue Rule, except that you’re not going to prep specific clues for each revelation. You’re just listing the things the PCs need to learn. These revelations should generally be leads (pointing towards more fully developed scenes) and there should be several of them (one for every two PCs seems to be a good amount). For example:

• One of the victims of the White Lotus assassins survived the attack. Her name is Lisa Cardo and she’s recuperating in a room at Elkhart General Hospital.
• The albino with the Solomonic tattoos the PCs spotted earlier is Vincent Estadio, a personal assistant to the Spanish ambassador.
• There’s an arms dealer named Dogmull who’s rumored to supply the White Lotus with their poisoned darts.

The investigative montage is then resolved in three steps:

• Each player chooses a line of investigation
• Each line of investigation is resolved (probably with a single action check)
• The GM uses the context of the PCs’ investigations to provide the montage revelations

The actual methods of investigation chosen by the players don’t specifically matter, as long as they’re logically things that a cop or private detective would do to turn up fresh leads. (This is basically a version of permissive clue-finding on methamphetamines, right?) Examples might include:

• Checking the casefile.
• Trying to track down that albino they saw earlier.
• Roughing up local crooks to make them spill information
• Analyzing samples of the White Lotus poison in the crime lab
• Putting surveillance on known associates of the White Lotus
• Talking to an old friend or other local contact

For each successful line of investigation, choose one of the montage revelations and then present a fast-paced, hard-hitting sequence that provides it. For example, the lab technician analyzes the White Lotus poison, recognizes a combination of rare chemicals and checks shipping records that indicate a suspected arms dealer named Dogmull has been importing the chemicals.

(You can either just cut away from failed lines of investigation, or maybe inflict some kind of consequence or complication from them. These can be mixed freely into the montage of the other results.)

If you have more successful lines of investigation then there are montage revelations, find ways to either split the revelation into separate parts which can be split up across multiple PCs and/or sequenced so that one PC’s investigation enables another’s. (If you just repeat the same revelation for multiple players, it’s disappointing and anti-climactic for the second player who gets the result.)

For example, the PC checking the casefile might see that there’s a victim named Lisa Cardo who survived the attack but has since vanished. Meanwhile, one of the local thugs being roughed up by another PC tells them that he heard a rumor the Lotus were going to axe a witness who’s being cared for over at Elkhart. (This is one revelation being split into separate parts that are discovered independently.)

Or: The lab technician analyzes the White Lotus poison and recognizes the rare chemicals. She sends out a text to the team, which another PC receives in the middle of questioning their local contact. They ask their contact about the chemicals, and he identifies Dogmull. (The lab technician’s discovery of the first part of the revelation enables the other PC’s investigation to complete the revelation.)

I recommend resolving all of the lines of investigation and THEN contextualizing the results. Among other things, this will make it easier to figure how to pace/structure the revelations.

SCALE OF THE MONTAGE

You can use this same basic technique at different scales. For example, you could use an investigative montage to either hunt Carmen Sandiego across an entire globe or run a CSI crew investigating a single crime scene.

At the smallest scales, you may discover that this becomes virtually indistinguishable from how you were previously resolving such scenes (asking each player what their character is doing, resolving those actions, synthesizing the narrative result, etc.). This can be a valuable insight for how you can set up and frame montages at larger scales.

You can also flip this around yet again for those situations where all the players want to jump in and have their character participate in a Search check. Rather than just letting them all roll their dice and taking the best result, slip into a montage technique and ask them to specify what distinct thing each of them is doing to contribute to the search. (Or, if they just roll reflexively, you can simply assume they’ve divided the task in your descriptions of the search’s outcome.) Rulings in Practice: Perception-Type Tests has a broader discussion of related techniques you might find useful here.

These, of course, are just two types of montages out of many. But I suspect the basic techniques of the RPG montage to remain fairly consistent to the principles we’ve established here. We’ll probably come back later and explore a few more varieties as part of the scenario structure challenge, too.

Go to Challenge #6

Go to Part 1

I was hoping the next installment of the scenario structure challenge would feature a battlefield scenario structure, but what I did instead was beat my head against a wall for six months failing to come up with a structure that made sense. (The only thing I really came up with that seemed to have a chance of working well also featured such a massive amount of over-prep / wasted prep that I couldn’t reasonably recommend that anyone actually use it.)

So instead I’ve shifted my attention to a different target: Ocean’s 11.

(The good one. From 2001.)

Ocean’s 11 is a heist film. Danny Ocean puts together a crew of eleven criminals to simultaneously rob three Las Vegas casinos owned by Terry Benedict. Once the crew is recruited, over the course of the rest of the film we see them plan the heist, cope with a number of unexpected complications which disrupt their plans, and then execute the heist.

Heists are a fantastic scenario structure for a GM to have in their pocket. Heists aren’t limited to cash robberies: You need a thing (document, artifact, maybe even a person). It’s being held some place under heavy security. Come up with a plan to circumvent that security. Carry out your plan and get the thing you need.

That structure is incredibly flexible in its utility. It can be used with endless variety in support of any number of scenarios.

PLANNING THE HEIST

The heist scenario superficially resembles the location-crawl (usually featuring a room-and-key design), but with the – very important! – distinction that the PCs are expected to know the floorplan and some (or all) of the defensive measures present before the heist actually begins. In this it also closely resembles the raid structure, but the difference is that, whereas in the raid scenario the PCs can quickly figure out the floorplan and defensive measures largely through observation in the immediate moment, in the heist discovering these elements usually requires additional effort during the prep phase of the heist.

The heist structure is heavily player-driven, but if the players haven’t done proper heists before, they can prove unusual enough that the GM should let the players know that they have opportunities they might not normally consider viable. This is particularly true specifically because of the heist’s similarity to the location-crawl: Players may assume that they’re “supposed” to engage the heist in the same way that they engage a traditional dungeon.

Once players get comfortable with heists being part of their toolkit, things can start getting really interesting: You won’t necessarily prep something specifically to be a heist. You’ll just prep a situation and it will be up to the players to decide whether or not a heist is the right solution for that situation.

The heist structure consists of five steps.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY THE SCORE. In Ocean’s 11 (like many heist movies), this moment actually happens before the movie begins. But we see a suggestion of it in a newspaper clipping Danny Ocean is studying early in the film:

Often the target of a heist will arise organically out of other events. An urbancrawl structure might allow the PCs to dynamically search for scores and then choose their target. A patron, like “Mr. Johnson” in a Shadowrun game, might hire the PCs as freelancers to target a specific score.

STEP 2: GATHER INFORMATION. The next step is for the PCs to gather information about their target. This should include being able to gain access to some or all of the blueprints and defensive measures in the targeted complex. It may also include an event schedule, which will often feature one or more opportunities for performing the heist (by either providing unique access to the target and/or providing cover for the operation).

In Ocean’s 11, Danny Ocean and his partner Rusty Ryan exploit contacts they’ve made to gain after hours access to the files of the security firm that designed the Bellagio’s vault. They’ve already identified, from their previous research, that the ideal time to stage their heist will be on the night of a big fight (which will provide both a distraction for their operation and also increase the amount of money in the vault for them to steal).

In prepping a heist scenario, the GM should give some thought to what form the Gather Information phase might take for the target, but they should always remain open to alternative thinking from the PCs.

It’s important for the GM to remember that, in a heist scenario, the expected outcome is for the PCs to succeed in getting this information. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed: The expected outcome of combat in an RPG is for the PCs to win, right? But that doesn’t mean it always happens. But GMs can sometimes get a little too enamored of keeping their cards close to their chest, and you may need to consciously remind yourself to fight that instinct: 90% of the fun in a heist scenario comes from seeing a problem and coming up with a solution for it. Only about 10% comes from being surprised by the unknown in the middle of the heist (and that will usually arise organically as the heist plays out).

STEP 3: ONSITE SURVEILLANCE. After the initial gathering of information, most heist stories will give the protagonists an opportunity to conduct onsite surveillance before the heist happens. This surveillance allows them to gain information they missed or were unable to gather earlier, clarify the information they already have, and/or discover that some of their information was inaccurate or outdated (and now they have a whole new set of problems to solve!).

In the case of Ocean’s 11 this is relatively easy for Danny and Rusty to achieve because the casinos they’re robbing are public spaces: They literally check into the hotels and can have their crew scope out the place at their leisure.

Other targets, however, may require the PCs to take advantage of special circumstances (or create those circumstances for themselves). The event schedule they found in Step 2 can provide opportunities not only for the heist itself, but also for surveillance. In other cases, they may need to interact with the target under false pretenses or using forged credentials in order to carry out their initial surveillance.

In prepping a heist, it can be useful to figure out explicitly what information can only be obtained through onsite surveillance. One really easy division is to make it easy to obtain floor plans of the target, but to only be able to ascertain limited information about the security measures in place without being onsite.

When running the surveillance opportunity, once again remember that the expected outcome is for the PCs to succeed in carrying out their surveillance. Barring complete and utter catastrophe, the worst outcome for the PCs should be only one of the following:

• They only get some of the information they need
• They get misleading information
• The do something sufficiently suspicious that security is heightened or changed

STEP 4: PREP WORK. Possibly running in tandem with the onsite surveillance, the team will also need to make preparations for the job. This prep often takes the form of altering the information the PCs have received – creating new entrances, blinding security cameras, subverting guards, etc. It may also involve creating bespoke resources (or simply shopping for necessary supplies).

In modern or science fiction heists, prep work almost always includes figuring out some way to tap the security feeds so that the PCs can monitor the entire facility. If you’re not comfortable improvising what they see, use adversary rosters combined with daily schedules so that the PCs can figure out the “usual routine” at the site.

STEP 5: THE OPERATION. Finally, the operation itself. The PCs try to carry out their plan.

In running the operation, there may be one or more twists: Unexpected circumstances that the PCs didn’t anticipate or that they missed in their research. These twists can either be gotchas (twists which the GM prepares ahead of time and which the PCs have no way or anticipating – “Oh crap! Mrs. Roberts came home early!”) or complications arising from failed checks (either during their prep work or during the operation itself).

In my opinion, you’re generally going to want to rely more on complications rather than gotchas. First, skipping the gotchas will save you from unnecessary prep work. Second, in my experience it’s simply more interesting for the players to be able to look back and understand where the complications are coming from.

(Which is not to say you should never use a gotcha: One really great gotcha can elevate a scenario to the next level.)

To break this down more explicitly, successfully executing a heist will usually involve a series of skill checks. A single failed check should not cause the entire plan to immediately fail. Instead, you’ll generate complications using fail forward techniques. These complications on failed skill checks are why you can get away with giving the PCs perfect information during Step 2 and Step 3: Among other things, you can use complications to introduce “oh fuck, he got a new safe” obstacles that effectively alter or reveal gaps in the information the PCs acquired on-the-fly.

In Ocean’s 11, for example, you can see how one complication can trigger an escalating chain of additional complications, constantly creating new and interesting problems for the PCs to deal with: Basher Tarr’s prep work turns to shit when the demolition of a casino inadvertently scuttles their plan for cutting power to the casino. (That might be a GM-prepped “gotcha,” but is more likely a complication arising from Tarr’s original Electrical Engineering skill check.) To solve the problem, the team has to put together a mini-heist to boost an EMP generator. During that heist, however, their greaseman injures his hand. And then, when they deploy the EMP, it blows out the team’s earpieces so they can’t communicate any more.

Finally, to reiterate something of primary importance: Avoid twists of any type that automatically scuttle the entire job and/or negate all the PCs’ planning. Not only do they suck, they will also strongly discourage your players from pursuing heist strategies in the future. It’s much more interesting to create a new problem and let the players figure out how to solve it.

ON THE SUBJECT OF BLUEPRINTS

Heists will benefit greatly from having player-friendly versions of the blueprints that can be given as a handout. It’s well worth your time as the GM to spend the time to make these. In fact, you might want to prepare several:

• A full blueprint (i.e., a complete map of everything in the complex)
• A version with some inaccuracies (what these are is situational; for example, maybe the players get their hands on an older set of blueprints from when the facility was first built and it lacks newer features or secret areas added by the new owners)
• Partial versions, particularly those reflecting limited knowledge of certain underlings who might be questioned. (Although it may be easier to simply sketch these ad hoc as they come up during play.)

PREP CHECKLIST

Okay, so what does the GM need to prep for a heist scenario?

• Blueprints (both the GM’s and those intended for PCs to discover)
• Defensive Measures (most likely including adversary rosters, security cameras, traps, etc.)
• Event schedule (including surveillance and heist opportunities)
• Gotchas (optional)

It’s actually a very short list. Everything else flows out of the process of play, rather than any sort of laborsome preparation.

A FEW MORE THINGS ON THE MATTER OF HEISTS

COMPETING GOALS: In Ocean’s 11 robbing Terry Benedict isn’t Danny Ocean’s only goal. He’s simultaneously using the heist to win back his estranged wife. In the course of the movie we’re led to believe that this goal is in conflict with the goals of the rest of the team, and although that eventually turns out not to be true (everyone except the rookie Linus was onboard with what Danny was doing and actively assisting him) there’s no reason it can’t be true for other heists. Introducing multiple, overlapping goals into a single heist is a great way to spontaneously generate more complications and more interest.

NO AUDIENCE TWISTS: On the note of perceived truth versus actual truth in heist stories, it should be noted that most heist movies will feature a twist for the audience. This usually takes the form of thinking that something has gone wrong for the team, but then it’s revealed that the “problem” was actually part of the plan the whole time.

This is an example of where playing through a scenario in an RPG is fundamentally different from being a passive audience member of other storytelling mediums. These types of audience-focused twists simply aren’t possible when the participants ARE the audience. And that’s okay. RPGs offer different forms of reward than passive viewership does.

COMPETING TEAMS: An advanced technique for adding interest to a heist is to add a second team onsite. They might be attempting the exact same heist, or maybe they have a different goal. Either way, their actions can add both complications and opportunities for the PCs.

BEYOND VEGAS

For a very compact version of the heist, consider the opening of Mission: Impossible (the 1996 film). The job at the Embassy at the beginning of the film is a tight little heist, and adds the additional layer of complication by having a traitor on the team.

For a more action-packed heist, look at Fast Five. Often the “ideal” image of a heist features a clean job – the team gets in and out without being detected. But that’s not the only way to run a heist. Sometimes the plan will call for big guns and fast cars. Sometimes the big guns and fast cars will come out because the plan has gone sideways.

Go to Challenge #5

Go to Part 1

Scott McCloud is better known these days for Understanding Comics, one of the greatest books ever written about art and the creative process; a towering achievement which laid bare the heart of the comic book medium.

(You may have seen me previously discuss Understanding Comics here, here, here, or here.)

Before he created Understanding Comics, however, McCloud created Zot!, one of the greatest superhero comics ever written. The first ten issues of Zot! – the so-called “color issues”, because the rest of the series transitioned into twenty-six black-and-white issues – are a must-read superhero / science fiction epic. And it’s here that we find our third scenario structure challenge.

At the heart of Zot! is the Key:

Not quite a McGuffin according to my stuffy, traditionalist definition of the term, although largely indistinguishable from such for the first six or seven issues of the story, and close enough for our purposes in any case. The Key is a holy relic held sacred by the people of Sirius IV and said to be capable of opening the Doorway at the Edge of the Universe.

The Key has also been stolen.

As the series begins, Zot chases the Key (or, more accurately, the trail of people looking for the Key) through an interdimensional portal to our Earth. There he meets Jenny, and through a series of hijinks they end up forming a small team of unlikely heroes who are pursuing the Key.

But they aren’t alone. In addition to the original owners and the thief, now that the Key is out in the open a whole bunch of factions have become interested in acquiring it. The first few issues of Zot! each have a procedural heart to them, in fact, with Zot needing to deal with some different crazy foe who wants the Key for themselves.

This includes Dekko, a Machiavellian machine who believes that the Doorway – a product of technology which predates all technology – is the “final ascendancy of Man’s perfect art and the end of Man’s greatest flaw: Himself.”

There are also the De-Evolutionaries, who believe that humanity would be better off if it went “back to the trees” (and use de-evolutionary guns to turn people into chimps to make that literally happen). They want the Key because passing through the Doorway will legitimize their crazed religion.

Where the story becomes truly special, however, is when these different factions begin collapsing back into themselves; interacting with each other, forming and breaking alliances with each other, and developing complicated and rich relationships with each other (and with the object of their desire).

McGUFFIN KEEP-AWAY

This scenario shares a lot in common with the Race to the Prize that we analyzed last week: A target object of value with multiple factions competing for its ultimate possession. The key difference (pun intended) is that rather than being the ultimate goal of the scenario, in Zot! the McGuffin is in play and actively shifting possession over and over again.

In the case of Zot! the initial scenario hook is that the item has been stolen. But you can just as easily have the McGuffin secured and instead have the initial scenario hook be the need to steal the item, which then initiates the McGuffin Keep-Away. To some extent the distinction is merely one of perception, however, since the structure ultimately boils down to “X currently has the item, who can take it from them?” The “original owner” of the item is just the one currently in possession of it.

This keep-away dynamic makes the scenario more difficult to design and run. Without the clue trail of the treasure hunt, creating a through-line for the scenario becomes more complex. It also becomes trickier to clearly set up rivalries and the competition between teams, because in the default mode there’s no sequence of events that needs to be achieved before snatching the prize. And as soon as somebody (whether it’s the PCs or somebody else) snatches the prize, they’ll be in the wind.

Okay, so what makes this scenario work?

1. Create X number of factions seeking the McGuffin, in a process that will be fairly similar to that used for Race to the Prize.

Zot! features a couple of interesting variants here. First, there are a number of proxies who end up shifting their alliances (or, at least, which faction they are currently working with) several times throughout the narrative. Second, there are entire secret factions which are using other factions as a front for their own activities. The character of Prince Drufus, for example, notably ends up as both. In fact, he frequently ends up working with the PCs (Zot, Jenny, and their friends) – sometimes because their goals are in accord; sometimes unaware that they are not; and sometimes despite the fact that he knows they are not.

In this, Zot! also highlights the value of giving the factions distinct ideologies which nevertheless overlap with each other. Let’s call these Venn diagram alliances: It’s a powerful technique because the points of commonality will drive the factions to work together, while the points of difference will create conflicts within those alliances which will eventually rip them apart. Remember that this includes the PCs! And, furthermore, remember that you, as the GM, don’t need to determine what the PCs’ agenda will be. These types of ideologically complex environments are great specifically because they force the players to make tough, meaningful choices.

One easy format for these ideologies are characters who desire the same outcome but disagree about how it should be accomplished. (And, inversely, those who desire different outcomes but currently agree on the necessity of a particular course of action.)

2. The keep-away. For each faction, you’ll want to know what tactics they use to steal the McGuffin (stealth, force, etc.) and, if they succeed in obtaining the item, what tactics they’ll use to secure it. Often this can be improvised during actual play, but if you’re unsure about improvising this sort of thing then prep exactly how each team will operate and what they will do (particularly when it comes to securing the item). And, of course, some of these elements will require prep for maximum effectiveness.

Dekko, for example, retreats to his fortress of Castle Dekko for defense. Another thief uses technological camouflage to hide in plain sight. Prince Drufus has a squad of attack robots at his command. The methods and resources you can design here – both mobile and static – are pretty much limitless, and you’ll want to try to vary things between factions. If everybody is just a squad of goons who then retreats to a fortified position, the scenario will become considerably less interesting.

3. The method to find the item. This is the dynamic that’s tricky to get right, but on which the whole scenario structure really depends. Because, as noted before, if somebody can grab the item and then just trivially disappear, the scenario just doesn’t work.

Zot! addresses this problem by giving the Key a unique radiation signature which can, with some expertise and knowledge, be used to track its general location. This includes tracking it to different planets and also into other dimensions, so there really is no way to escape and take the Key “off the board” (so to speak).

Eventually, however, someone figures out how to cloak this radiation signal. This forces the other factions interested in the Key to intuit what the current holder of the key will use it for (i.e., opening the Doorway at the Edge of the Universe), allowing them to once again zone in on it (i.e., put the Doorway under surveillance and security).

Relying on this kind of intuition can be a little risky when it comes to RPG scenario design (since you can’t control exactly what your players will think of or when they’ll think of it), so for a more robust scenario you’ll want to use the Three Clue Rule. Remember that your clues can include intelligence from other factions that have made the intuitive leap. (“It looks like Indiana Jones is heading for Moscow. He must know something we don’t, let’s follow him.”) The web of alliances between factions can also allow you to become proactive here by having other players approach the PCs with an offer to work together (or simply slip them information they feel will be to their advantage).

The more general realization to make here is that this method of discovery very easily collapses into a chokepoint, and like any chokepoint it becomes a potential weak spot at which the scenario can break. If, for example, you design the scenario so that the PCs need to make a test in order to detect the Key’s radiation and they fail that test, that can very easily turn into the PCs having no idea what to do next.

So you want to avoid that chokepoint. In many ways you can think of this as the default action of the scenario (if the PCs have no idea what to do next, they can attempt to find the current location of the item). You’ll either want to make that default action automatic (so that failure isn’t possible), make it meaningfully repeatable (so that there’s a cost to failure, but you can always try again; a partial success test is another way of accomplishing this); or multiply it (so that if one method fails, the PCs can try another method; this would be a variant of the Three Clue Rule).

4. An endgame, usually in the form of an ultimate goal to be achieved with the item – delivering it somewhere, using it for something, preventing others from using it for a certain amount of time, or maybe just figuring out how to definitively destroy it or hide it so that other factions can’t use it. (This last point, of course, flies in the face of #3, so it should require significant effort of some sort in order to achieve this, giving other factions plenty of time to interfere before the endgame is truly achieved.)

Without some form of definitive endgame, the scenario will never end: The McGuffin will just continue being endlessly passed around. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but what it usually means is a growing sense of frustration and futility as the scenario chews up its inherent interest but continues hanging around without any satisfactory resolution.

One variant to look at here is a PC-specific endgame: The great game surrounding the McGuffin continues, but the PCs have accomplished whatever their goal regarding the McGuffin is and are content to exit on their own terms.

SIMPLIFY THE STRUCTURE

Zot! is big and it’s complicated. The scope is multidimensional and multiplanetary, with time travel complicating things even further and the fates of entire worlds at stake. Rather than immediately tackling something of this scale, it might behoove us to take our scenario structure out for a test drive with something a little more modest.

Let’s try this: The Maltese Falcon has, at long last, been found. Its value is immense, but particularly so to the practitioners of the ancient rites of magick, who know its true purpose. It has been placed as a lot in highly exclusive, black market auction that takes place aboard a small, ultra-luxury cruise ship on the high seas.

This premise allows us to further control the scope of the scenario: Barring extraordinary efforts, the action will be confined to the ship until it comes back into port. Neither the PCs nor anybody else will be able to vanish as soon as they’ve stolen the Falcon.

In addition to deck plans for the ship (which you can probably find online), you’ll also want to prep:

1. The factions involved. This will include the current owner of the Falcon and the security team for Penumbral Holdings, the mysterious organization behind the black market auction. Let’s also toss in a couple of sorcerous sects plus a team of mundanes (who just want the Falcon for its jewels and are way out of their depth here).

2. For the keep-away, you’ll want to prep the initial auction-related security protecting the Falcon. Maybe the PCs are the first ones to steal it, maybe they’re not. Either way, you’ll want that initial condition.

3. For the next step, we need to take a step back and think about how we want to organize our prep for this boat. I’m going to argue that we can prep the week at sea as a big social event, using the party planning scenario structure. Parties are usually short affairs, but the structure can easily be expanded to multiple events over several days. Nick Bate and I did something similar for the second part of the Quantronic Heat mini-campaign for Infinity.

With that knowledge in our pocket, we can now consider the method to find the Falcon. For the sake of argument, let’s say we’re running this scenario with Fantasy Flight’s Genesys system. In that case, we might look at something like this:

• You need to achieve X number of successes over any number of checks in order to figure out who currently has the Falcon. Primary checks would focus on social interactions with the other factions onboard. Investigating where the item was stolen from could also contribute additional successes. (Alternative methods might also include sorcerous divinations.)
• Advantages on these checks can be used to determine aspects of how the item is currently being secured (guards, security measures, etc.).
• Disadvantages or Despair might alert one or more of the other factions about the PCs and their intentions. Or attract the attention of Penumbral Holdings’ security team.

4. Our endgame here is simplified by the constrained premise we’ve used: When the ship makes landfall, whoever is currently holding the Falcon will most likely be able to vanish without a trace. The goal of the PCs is to be the one holding the Falcon when the clock runs out.

A possible wrinkle on our endgame is a simple question: Why would Penumbral Holdings put the ship into dock if the Falcon is still missing?

The primary explanation might be exigent circumstances: There may be people onboard that Penumbral Holdings can’t afford to piss off. Or the sorcerous wards preventing teleportation might expire at the end of the week no matter what. Or the true nature of members of Penumbral Holdings prevents them from remaining on the material plane of existence for more than a week.

Alternatively, this might become part of the action: Those holding the Falcon (including the PCs) may need to hijack the ship and bring it into port so that they can make good their escape. Or there’s a rendezvous craft that’s going to arrive at such-and-such a time.

RUNNING THE KEEP-AWAY

The spine of our Maltese Falcon scenario is the social event, advice for which can be found in the original Party Planning article. For the factions, you’ll probably want to prep progressions like those we discussed last week in Race for the Prize.

The social event spine is really a crutch of sorts, giving you a firmer structure to fall back on and build the McGuffin Keep-Away on top of. In its absence, you should be able to just keep spinning events forward through a combination of your faction progressions and responding to the PCs’ actions.

The first issue of Zot! for example, could be framed as the GM triggering the following progressions / faction features:

• THIEF: Attempts to use an interdimensional portal to hide the Key on Our Earth.
• SIRIUS IV: Successfully tracks the Key [locating it on Our Earth] and dispatches a robot kill squad to its location.
• [At this point, the PCs – who have been keeping an eye on the Sirius IV faction – track the robot kill squad to Our Earth and destroy it. They also find the Key and choose to turn it over to the proper authorities in the form of the CPZP.]
• THIEF: Checks his hiding place. [Finding the Key missing, he tracks it.]
• THIEF: Uses a stealthed robot to steal the Key.
• DE-EVOLUTIONARIES: Track the Key and brazenly attack [the CPZP council meeting].
• [The PCs fail to detect the Key being stolen and fight a big battle with the De-Evoluationaries.]

The linear nature of this, mirroring the structure of the original story, may be deceptive. So consider how the GM can trigger the exact same progressions but end up with a completely different result based on the actions of the PCs:

• THIEF: Attempts to use an interdimensional portal to hide the Key on Our Earth.
• SIRIUS IV: Successfully tracks the Key [locating it on Our Earth] and dispatches a robot kill squad to its location.
• [At this point, the PCs – who have been keeping an eye on the Sirius IV faction – track the robot kill squad to Our Earth. They fight, but lose. The robot kill squad captures the Key, but the PCs aren’t aware of this fact. The PCs regroup and pursue the robot kill squad.]
• THIEF: Checks his hiding place. [Finding the Key missing, he tracks it.]
• [PCs arrive back at the home base of the robot kill squad and continue their surveillance. The Sirius IV faction leaders, learning that the robot squad has secured the key, board a shuttle and begin flying towards the compound.]
• THIEF: Uses a stealthed robot to steal the Key.
• [PCs don’t spot the thief’s robot sneaking into the Sirius IV compound.]
• DE-EVOLUTIONARIES: Track the Key and brazenly attack [the Sirius IV robot compound].
• [The PCs notice the stealthed robot sneaking back out of the compound in the chaos. They attack that robot as the Sirius IV shuttle arrives onsite. The Sirius IV representatives spot the PCs, but are ambushed by De-Evolutionaries as they move to intercept. The PCs destroy the thief’s robot and take the key back. Taking the ruined remnants of the robot back to Zot’s Uncle Max, they use it to identify the thief.]

In actual play, what you’ll generally end up with is a cluster of raid (when the PCs go to steal the McGuffin) and siege (when the PCs have the item and need to protect it) scenarios. The more the factions interact with each other, the more crazed these scenarios will become.

BEYOND THE DOORWAY

Our use of the Maltese Falcon in our hypothetical scenario already points the way towards the Dashiell Hammet novel and John Ford movie as another example of this scenario structure in other media. As with Zot!, the scenario begins with the McGuffin already in keep-away mode. (You could also interpret that back story of The Maltese Falcon – with various treasure seekers attempting to trace the Falcon’s trail – as a Race to the Prize scenario, the conclusion of which then bounces directly into a McGuffin Keep-Away scenario).

Another Humphrey Bogart film to consider is Casablanca, in which the letters of transit function as the McGuffin. The thing to note here is that even though the McGuffin DOESN’T change hands repeatedly, the narrative remains interesting. So don’t feel as if you need to force the item to bounce around amongst your various factions: It’s perfectly okay if it settles into the hands of the PCs (or some other faction). As other factions come to barter with (or threaten) the controlling party, the drama will continue to flow.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an interesting example to break down. There are fewer factions, but a larger number of rogue agents pursuing independent goals within the arena defined by the McGuffin Keep-Away. Consider, too, that the McGuffin in this case – the Green Destiny sword –  has a specific utility which is useful for the keep-away itself. This not only creates an interesting transition of advantage as the McGuffin bounces around, but also encourages the faction currently controlling the item to use it, often creating large, clear paths for the other factions to follow.

Go to Challenge #4

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