Category Archives: What’s he playing?

A little over a week ago ((As I post this; it’s taken me a few days to write.)), I posted an outline of techniques I use to develop campaign storylines during play. Apparently, folks liked it, and I’m glad. But one person requested some more specific examples ((And if one person asked, then more wanted them but didn’t ask. Basic rules of customer service.)), so I’m going to do my best to illustrate some of the ideas with examples from actual campaigns I’ve run.

I was going to do everything in one post, but as I started writing it, it became painfully obvious that, if I did, it would be a terribly, terribly long post. So, I’m going to break it down into sections, each one dealing in some depth with the topics I’m discussing. I’m starting with the Secrets Deck.

Hope you find it useful.

My biggest success with the Secrets Deck was in my Broken Chains campaign, so I’m using that for the example, which means that we’re going to be talking about D&D-style fantasy tropes.. Now, in building this campaign, I had completely ignored the First Rule of Dungeoncraft, as stated by Ray Winninger, which was to not force yourself to create any more than you need to for your game as it stands. I created an entire setting bible – over 200 pages – covering the whole of the world, about 100,000 years of history, the entire religion, culture, and political structures. The Second Rule of Dungeoncraft states that, whenever you create something significant in your campaign, you create at least one secret about it. And then you write that secret on an index card to build your Secrets Deck.

Well, by the time I had finished the world document, I had a Secrets Deck with around 70 cards in it ((Really, this is too much. I made it work, but it was far more work than it was worth, and a lot of stuff never saw the light of day, so learn from my mistake. Rein it in. Seriously.)). Then, every adventure, I would shuffle the deck and draw a card, and see if I could work a hint about that secret into the scenario.

What’s a Secret

So, what do I mean by a secret? There were a couple of Dungeoncraft articles that explored this in some detail, but what it means for me is something that, if the characters knew it, would change the way the characters understand some part of the world. Ideally, this shift in understanding makes the aspect of the world more cool, and prompts the characters to action and adventure.

Secrets generally answer some questions for the characters, but tend to also give rise to other ones, peeling back layers in your standard onion-like analogy ((Problem for me with the onion analogy is that, with an onion, once you peel off the last layer of an onion, there’s nothing left. For a game, you need a core of pure cool to make sure that the players don’t feel the whole thing was a waste of time. Don’t ever waste your players’ time. Reward the effort they put into the story with cool. They will reward you right back.)). The questions reveal interesting things about the world, about the NPCs, about the bad guys, about whatever the secret is about, and will hopefully grab the characters’ interest, or at least draw their attention a little bit.

Let’s look at some examples. Say you create a pub that the characters are going to use as their home base in this town for the early part of the campaign. You write up a description of the building, some notes on the bartender and the serving girl and the cook, a quick list of regulars, maybe even a menu to lend it an easy touch of authenticity ((I’m always amazed how much authenticity you can throw into a game just by describing a few little touches of the mundane. In Broken Chains, I wrote up the contents of the three varieties of standard one-day ration packs that the characters’ military company used. Before long, characters had their favourites, would trade bits back and forth, and complain when I would arbitrarily tell them the quartermaster was out of a particular type. Don’t neglect these little details – five minutes thought can give you hours of great roleplaying.)). For a secret, you decide you want something big here, so you write down that the pub is on the site of an ancient underground prison where a demon has been sealed, and the bartender is actually the head of a secret order placed here to watch the prison and make sure nothing happens.

Now, of course, since you’ve made this a secret, something must happen eventually to start the prison opening. It’s a Chekov’s Gun thing. As play progresses, and more hints about this secret get into the characters’ hands, eventually they’re going to figure out the secret. And then they’ll look at their neighbourhood bar in a far different light. The discovery of the secret may also prompt them to take action – maybe go down into the dark to check on the prison, or go off to distant lands to get the Golden MacGuffin that can destroy the demon once and for all.

Not every secret needs to be earth-shattering, though. It’s just as good to have a small secret that the characters may uncover in short order. This gives them a more immediate reward for paying attention to the game world. In the example above, you could just as easily and profitably say that the secret is that the bartender is on the run from a criminal gang in the nearest big city for having refused the gang leader’s orders to kill a child in revenge for the child’s constable father undermining gang business ((I like The Replacement Killers. Do you like The Replacement Killers?)). It still changes the way the characters look at the bartender – he’s a former assassin, and he’s been handling their drinks – but it gives them a problem that they can help with at a lower level.

One important note about both of these examples is that they produce or increase emotional investment in whatever the secret is about. Usually, by the time the secret is revealed, characters will have been interacting with that element of the world long enough to already have some opinion of it, and the revelation of the secret will increase that dramatically ((Heh.)). It may also change the polarity of the emotion associated with the element: a villain turns out to be working to save the world, the friendly priest actually sacrifices children, whatever. Either way, if the secret is good, the cool is enhanced.

Some Secrets

I no longer have the Secrets Deck ((Or the setting document. Computer drive failure is vicious.)), but here are some examples of things that I can remember:

1. The Mother and Father – the primary god and goddess in the cosmology of the world – had almost destroyed themselves working the magical cataclysm that destroyed the ancient Dragon King empire and freed the other sentient races from slavery. They have been slowly dying for the past 10,000 years or so.
2. The Three Who Fled – Dragon Kings who had escaped the cataclysm by ascending to godhood as Lord Mourning, Lady Spite, and the Smiler ((Yeah, the naming and style are stolen directly from the Ten Who Were Taken in Glen Cook’s most excellent Black Company series.)) – had corrupted the current Primarchs of the church of the Mother and Father.
3. Lady Elorewyr, ambassador for one of the kingdoms to the High Seat – essentially, this world’s United Nations – is actually a demon in disguise.
   The same kingdom, renowned for its harsh treatment witches (those with psionic power), was secretly run by a hidden cabal of witches serving as advisors to the noble families.
4. The footprints of the saint of travel where he first set foot on the main continent had the power to transport any who stood in them anywhere they wished to go.
5. A noble family in another kingdom were plotting to put their eldest son on the throne of the kingdom ((This one was especially fun, because said eldest son was one of the PCs, and we had some good times playing with his loyalty to family and nation. His duel to the death with his father is one of the highlights of the game.)).
6. Four powerful oracles, the Weirds, were lost in the cataclysm, but could be found in hidden, remote locations, and would prophesy for those who brought them offerings.
7. The ghost of a king who had gone mad and starved his capital city mostly to death was pinned to the mountainside where his rebelling citizens had crucified him, and was doomed to remain there until he had fulfilled a task set for him by the Mother and Father – delivering a message to the prophesied saviours of the world ((These were, of course, the PCs. Or rather, the PCs were in the running for this; I was playing with the idea of prophecy as a set of requirements, rather than a prediction.)).
8. One Dragon King sought to aid the other sentient races in obtaining their freedom. Called the Turncoat, he prevented five other Dragon Kings from ascending as a five-part god capable of throwing down the Mother and Father, and has remained locked in battle with that creature in the 10,000 years since the cataclysm, at the heart of the blighted area in the centre of the continent.

Now, the first item and the last item on the list were the core of the overarching story of the campaign, as the characters slowly uncovered the secret of the dying god and goddess, and went to free the Turncoat from his eternal torment by defeating the Dragon King god. They don’t really illustrate the point of emergent storylines because of that, but still illustrate the use to which I put the Secrets Deck.

The Secrets Deck and Scenarios

So, armed with this deck, I would come up with a scenario, like going into the Blight – the area at the centre of the continent still stained by the magical cataclysm – to help a small group of settlers with their black dragon problem. Then I would pull a card, and maybe get secret #2, about the Primarchs of the Church being corrupted. I would then try to work in a hint about that.

How direct the hint would be was determined by how big the secret was, and how ready the characters were to do something about it. This one is a pretty big secret – the equivalent of the Pope and the Dalai Lama being revealed as satanists – and it’s not really a thread that the characters could pursue at the current level. In this case, perhaps the hint could be a village priest who is playing politics in the village, undermining the mayor and sheriff, playing up his status as the voice of the Church. This causes the characters to question the mandate of the Church, and they may do something to remove the priest. More importantly, it will sow a seed of doubt about the Church, and allow you to drop more clues that they will eventually assemble into a suspicion about the Church leadership, which will come into play at higher levels, when the characters may actually meet the Primarchs.

If, instead, I had pulled up secret #4, well, that’s something that I could be far more open about. Access to a great teleport point is a valuable thing to adventurers, but this is a stationary thing, so it’s not game-breakingly powerful. Still, I don’t just want to hand the secret to them. Maybe the hint in this case is a body dressed in the vestments of the travel saint’s order stuck in an old well in the ruins, skeletonized by scavengers, with a rotted, mangled book in his pack with a shredded page talking about him sneaking to use the footprints of the saint in order to follow up hints of a valuable treasure. Don’t say where the footprints are, so if the characters want to follow this up, they need to figure out who this priest is, where he’s from, and then go snooping for the footprints.

Now, it’s usually enough to drop in a single secret in a given adventure unless you’re trying to build connections between two secrets ((I’ll deal more with that in a later post.)). Too many unrelated secrets are distracting and misleading, causing players to make associations that don’t actually exist ((Although, they could, if they’re cool enough. I’ll talk about that in a different later post.)), and diverting them from the main goal of the scenario, whatever that is. If the adventure is really long, stretching over several sessions, you may want to pull another secret at the half-way point and lay in a hint about it in the last half of the adventure, when there’s sufficient separation from the first hint that it won’t confuse anything.

Other Uses of the Secrets Deck

Remember the original Keep on the Borderlands? Like many gamers my age, it was my first module. One of the things that really sparked my imagination was the table of rumours in it. There was a mechanic that could allow the players to know certain things about the hazards they would face in the adventure ((And some of them were wrong! THAT was sheer brilliance, in my opinion.)).

You can use your Secrets Deck either as a rumour table on the fly, or to pregenerate a rumour table that you can roll on when you want to, well, disseminate a rumour. Rumours work just like hints in scenarios, except they’re explicitly things that one person says to another, and they might be wrong. Even if they are wrong, they still draw attention to the element the secret is about, and that gives some information to the characters. It’s a subtle way of working in information, and some players really like the sense of accomplishment when they weed out inaccurate information from accurate information.

Now, rumours don’t just have to be things overheard in a bar or at the market. They can be legends, letters, ancient records, whatever. As long as it is information coming from one person to another (or many others). Patrick Rothfuss makes great use of legends about secrets in The Name of the Wind and Wise Man’s Fear, so take a look at those books for inspiration ((Actually, if you haven’t read those books, you should do so, whether you care about gaming or not. They’re great.)).

When I ran Broken Chains, I used the Secrets Deck to drop hints into the news stories in the campaign newsletter I sent out before each session, too. This plays into the idea of Sandboxes, which I’ll deal with in more detail in a future post, but mainly it was my way of accomplishing two things. First, it made me feel like I hadn’t wasted a whole lot of work ((Yes. Doing a whole lot of work on the newsletter was my way of feeling that I hadn’t wasted previous work I’d done. I don’t really know what the hell is wrong with me sometimes.)) coming up with all those secrets. Second, it helped me with one of the primary goals I have in any campaign, which is to make the world seem as if things keep happening even where the characters aren’t. I don’t really recommend doing a newsletter like I did – though it worked to great effect, it was a lot of effort – but if you’ve got a forum or wiki for your game, you could do worse than seed some news stories there, using the secret deck.

The Big Reveal

The revelation of a secret from the Secrets Deck should spur action by the characters. Which means, it should lead to an adventure that resolves the secret. The core of the secret should be cool enough, and compelling enough, that it motivates the characters to do something, and that something should be cool enough to merit the attention they’re paying to it.

For little secrets, like the former-assassin-bartender idea above, that can be pretty direct: go to the city, find the gang leader, and kill him. For big secrets, like the demon prison below the bar idea, it can be more involved: go down into the prison, find that the demon is stirring and has corrupted his jailer, so that the characters have to seek out other members of his order to get the information about the Golden MacGuffin, retrieve said MacGuffin from the Lair of Evil Badness, and bring it back to kill the demon and free the bartender.

Even little secrets, if the players are interested enough, can spawn involved adventures at their revelation. Instead of just killing the gang leader in the above example, maybe the characters have to dismantle his byzantine criminal network piece by piece, forming alliances with rival gangs and citizen groups to gather information and support for the final confrontation. If the players are extra-excited when they find out the secret, and immediately start putting together a lengthy and involved plan to deal with the revelation, sit back and let them plot, and savour that warm glow that you get when you create a moment in the game when the players care enough to go the extra mile. You’ve won roleplaying, at that point.

On the other hand, if they look at the revelation and go, “Crap. I guess we better take care of this before we get back to looting dungeons,” it’s time to hand them a simple adventure to resolve things. So maybe they just have to go down into the demon prison and defeat the Underdark invaders who are tampering with things, and then everything is fine again.

That’s about all I’ve got to say about the Secrets Deck. I’m off to GenCon next week. When I get back and get recovered, I’ll post about Sandboxes.

Meantime, you can look for some GenCon posts here starting on Wednesday when my friend Clint and I set off on our annual pilgrimage.

Let me get this out up front: I like campaigns that tell a story.

When I create a campaign, I always try to have it tell a story ((Though, to be fair, it’s usually more like a series of books with a through-line of metaplot than like a single book, if you see what I mean.)). Sometimes, as with my Broken Chains campaign, I know what the end of the story is when I start the game, but sometimes, as with my Armitage Files campaign, I don’t.

But I need to.

Once upon a time, I ran an Unknown Armies campaign. It went very well, right up to the last few months, when it suddenly lost steam and petered out. In retrospect, I can see what the problem was: I had reached the end, but didn’t stop, and so the game lost power, motivation, and direction. I wasn’t able to provide a new direction because the story had been told, and I didn’t have another one to tell right then. I hadn’t recognized the end when it came up and bit me ((Really, I mean, I should have seen it. The PCs brave the mystic gates of Central Park to retrieve the gun that killed Dutch Schultz from the Lady in the Lake and deliver it to the True King of New York. Along the way, they face their deepest selves, and manage to destroy the doppelganger that had been haunting them since the first session. How did I not see that was the end of the story?)), and so the game died an ignominious death, rather than going out on a high note.

That’s why I need to have an end.

But what if I don’t have one when I start?

The Secrets Deck

Ray Winninger wrote a series of articles in Dragon magazine many years ago that should be required reading for anyone starting any kind of campaign. It was called Dungeoncraft ((I’m not going to include a link here, even though I think everyone should read it, because I’m not sure who owns the copyright to those articles. That said, thirty seconds worth of searching will find them on the web.)), and while it dealt mainly with D&D, there was a lot of great, solid advice in the series for anyone running any kind of campaign.

One of the best pieces of advice in those articles is the construction of a Secrets Deck. This is a simple idea: for each major thing that you create for your campaign world, come up with at least one secret about it, and write it down on an index card. Once you’ve done the initial brainstorming for your campaign, you should have a healthy little stack of cards. Then, when you come up with a scenario, give the cards a shuffle, draw one (or maybe two, if it’s going to be a big scenario) and work a clue about that secret into the adventure.

Now, how big a clue you work in will depend on how big and cool the secret is. If it’s something that affects the whole campaign, you’ll want to be subtle and careful with the clue, so that you don’t blow any big surprises. If it’s something that only affects a small portion of the campaign, it can be more blatant, and can lead to a short series of adventures as the characters follow it up.

I used the Secrets Deck extensively during Broken Chains, both working it into the adventures, and in the in-game newsletter that I distributed before every session ((This was called The Gazette, and had a number of news stories, a Q&A column, articles on history and legend, and a recap of the last session. Yeah, I made a new one before every session. I had a lot more time back then.)). It provided a number of side quests during the campaign, and helped me fill the time until the characters were tough enough to take on the big bad at the end of the story.

Sandboxes

Providing lots of options is also important in developing the campaign storyline. The Armitage Files is a brilliant example of this, throwing mountains of unexplained clues at the party. City creation in The Dresden Files RPG does this in spades, and incorporates a heaping helping of the next couple of topics, as well. Now, on the surface, it seems kind of counter-intuitive to provide too many options when you don’t know where you’re going, but the reality is that it both reinforces the feeling that the world is bigger than the characters, and provides players with a sense of self-determination.

This latter bit is especially important as you start gearing up to a finale. If players can look back and see places where they could have made different choices, then they don’t feel railroaded into the climax ((This is true whether or not the choices would have made a difference or not. It’s all about the perception of free will. Which may be a topic for a future post.)). That, in turn, gives you player buy-in, and a much more satisfying finale.

Having lots of choices for players to explore also gives you plenty of places to seed in your secrets from the Secret Deck, which leads us to the next topic.

Watch Their Eyes

Once you’ve got your secrets and your sandbox set up, let the players loose, and pay attention to what catches their interest. See what clues they pick up on, and whether or not they want to follow up on them. After a few sessions, they should have enough hints that they start really paying attention to one or two specific threads that you can then flesh out, building them into more explicit ((Not that kind of explicit!)) scenarios. The smaller secrets may get resolved this way, and the bigger secrets can reveal more layers to themselves.

Don’t discard things that they didn’t pay attention to, though. Keep those in your back pocket for when you need them. There’s a special kind of GM glee that comes only when you trot out a plot development that you hinted at ten sessions ago, but no one paid any attention to ((Is this making any of my players nervous, yet?)).

It may seem obvious, but I better say it right out. If you collect the threads that your players like, you will have a collection of threads that your players like. Picking from these for the next step makes sure that you’ve got emotional investment in whatever your story turns out to be, because they’ve already bought into the constituent pieces.

Make Connections

Once you’ve got a good idea of which things your players are interested in, take a look at them for any common elements or themes. There’s usually one or two underlying similarities that can let you turn four separate mysteries into one grand conspiracy worthy of being the main storyline of the campaign. For example, in Broken Chains, I was able to tie corruption in the church, discrimination against psionics, and legends of an ancient kingdom into a single plot that had a demon backing a psionic clan secretly controlling a nation renowned for their tendency to burn psionic-using creatures at the stake. All of a sudden, three different problems came to a head in one vast conspiracy and a battle against a demon and her construct built of thousands of self-aware psi crystals ((Remember that one, guys? That was fun.)).

Once you’ve got an idea of what the main thread is, look at the other secrets – the ones the players didn’t pay attention to. See if any of them fit in, or could be made to fit in. Don’t go too far with this, though; it will start to strain verisimilitude if everything odd in the campaign traces back to one source. But look at rival factions, or themes that contrast nicely to accentuate the main theme. Look for something that you can tie retroactively into the main story, so that your players see that the threads reach all the way back to the beginning of the campaign.

Some themes are spelled out at the beginning of the game – DFRPG city building does this explicitly – while some emerge during play, like the ideas of higher dimensions and the nasty observer effect that’s coming up more and more in my Armitage Files game. Either way, you’ll see some commonalities coming up, so make note and use them. This lends your game consistency of theme, mood, and flavour ((Which is not to say you can’t break from these commonalities from time to time, but you’ll do it more deliberately, and everyone will recognize when you’re back on the main track.)).

Give Your Head a Shake

Once you’ve got that worked out, take a step back and look at your central story objectively. Does it work? Is it cool? Does it require stupidity on anyone’s part ((This is a surprisingly important question. Plots that require someone to be an idiot are bad plots. You will run up against players who will ask, “Yeah, but why don’t they just do X?” and all of a sudden you clever conspiracy is revealed to be completely hopeless. Rule of thumb: compare it to the Evil Overlord list, and look for similarities.)) ? Shore up the weak bits, add cool as needed, and pull out the stupid. Be ready to kill your darlings if they aren’t working, and always, always, always keep both the characters and your players in mind as you examine the idea for cracks.

I like to run through a few cycles of the Walt Disney Method with my fleshed out idea to make sure it’s workable and fun.

Discard Liberally

When you hit the play button, be ready to toss out a lot of what you’ve done. Players will, as players do, come at your story from an unexpected angle, with a strange plan, and completely unforeseen resources. They will bypass sidelines that would have given them fresh information, and run into areas that you haven’t planned, or even thought about.

If that’s the case, why do all the work? Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential.” That pretty much applies here. With the planning you’ve done, you’ll have the foundation you need to adjust things on the fly, moving important elements into place for players to encounter them, and improvising with confidence when you get caught off-guard.

So, What Have We Got?

I find that, when I through the steps I’ve talked about above, I wind up with a campaign storyline that has emerged during play, and has the following advantages:

• It fits the game that we’ve been playing. Because it’s come out of play, it’s got roots in the game, and everyone can see them. It also can look as if I had the whole thing planned all along, which just reinforces my sense of GM omniscience.
• The players are invested in the story, because I’ve drawn it from the things that I’ve seen that they’re interested in during play.
• There is less sense of railroading, because at least the early choices in the campaign were completely free. Characters remember that, and later constraints on their choices seem more like consequences of their actions, rather than GM fiat.
• It’s flexible enough to handle what the character throw at it, because I’ve been paying attention to how the players play, and have a good enough idea of what’s going on that I can adapt it at need.

Last Words

Once you’ve got your storyline, that’s not the end of the job – it’s the beginning. The end comes when you and your collaboratively play through the story and find out what really happens.

Anyway, that’s my take on it, and what works for me. Anyone else have any tricks for pulling a throughline out of a campaign in a similar fashion? Let me know below.