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

EXAMPLE DEATH STAR RAID
Remixing Avernus: Zariel’s Flying Fortress

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
Challenge #7: Hostage Rescue