gamemastering

Task-based adventures for RPG campaigns

In a discussion from an RPG forum someone dug up one of my old posts in which I had written a lengthy piece about adventure design. I had actually long forgotten about ever having written it and it turns out to have been just two months before I started this website. Reading it again, I am quite pleased with it, and so I want to preserve it here for the future:

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The standard types of adventure modules

As I see it, there are basically two main types of adventures, when it comes to published adventure modules. Plot-based adventure (“Paizo-style”) and site-based adventures (“Gygax-style”). Both come with a number of advantages and disadvantages. First, let me say a few words about “plot”. A plot is a sequence of events that are put into a logical order that forms a chain of causes and effects. This is not the same as a story. A story can be made up as you go, with new and unexpected things happening and no real idea how things will turn out in the end. When talking about plots, it means the entire chain of events from the beginning to the end. The term “plotting” is often used to mean making a plan, and in statistics it means making a graphic representation of data points (events). In either case, a specific outcome is desired, or the events have already happened and can now be analyzed. When you start reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a video game, the entire story is already determined and the outcome set, which is why the terms story and plot are used interchangably.

Plot-based adventures

In what I called the Paizo-style adventure, the entire is already plotted out. “PCs get their quest from that NPC, go to that location, fight that monster, find that clue, follow to the next location, fight the villain, stop his evil plan.” There is one big problem which usually goes by the name of Railroad. There really is only one possible outcome. At the end of the adventure or campaign, the PCs will be in one specific room where they will fight the main villain, and almost always kill him. This will happen, in exactly this way, regardless of any choice the players ever made. Which means all those choices were effectively meaningless.
You have an adventure that says “the big door at the top of the tower is guarded by a big monster. Behind the door is the wizards lab and on the desk is a letter that mentions the location of his masters base”. The PCs have to fight their way to the top of the tower. The PCs have to kill the monster that guards the door. The PCs have to get through the wards that guard the lab. The PCs have to kill the wizard. The PCs have to take the letter. The PCs have to go to the base of the Big Bad.” All these things have to happen and the have to happen in that order.

They have to fight the guards in the tower, and they have to fight the monster, and they have to fight the wizard. That means they all have to be defeatable. The players know that. Also the players know that the GM does not want a total party kill, so they know when things turn back, the GM will intervene to have them succeed regardless. It still can be a fun and enjoyable adventure, but I think it could be so much more.

Site-based modules

On the other hand, there’s the Gygax-style dungeon module. There usually are many entrnaces into the dungeon and there is no set order in which the PCs have to meet all the encounters and discover all the rooms. Some treasures or even rooms might be hidden and the players might never find them. Since many of the monsters don’t have to be killed to enable the PCs to explore the rest of the dungeon, not all monsters have to be easily defeatable. In fact, the PCs might even lose some fights and hope that at least some of them can flee with their lives. Those are descisions the players have to think about, and they have actual consequences.

Unfortunately, as written, most of those classic modules and many recent retro-clone modules seem to be aimed at tactical wargaming. They don’t have a story. “There is a dungeon with monsters and treasures. You are adventurers. Go into the dungeon, fight the monsters, take the treasures.” If you get lucky, there’s an additional “Monsters from the dungeon attacked local villages. The villagers asked you to kill the monster.” And very often that’s it. Again, people have been having huge fun with it for decades. But again, it could be so much more.

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Some basic plots for fantasy adventure tales

When trying to write Sword & Sorcery stories, I often end up discarding an outline because my initial idea doesn’t really offer much of an actual plot. The first observation I made is that any story that would be considered an action adventure tale needs four basic elements to be great.

A protagonist.
An antagonist.
A conflict.
A memorable location.

The first three seem completely obvious, but I realized that many of my initial ideas were really lacking both clear antagonists and conflicts. A travel adventure can make without them, but for Sword & Sorcery they are essential. (A memorable location is technically optional, but I think any adventure story benefits hugely from having a climactic scene take place on a really awesome stage.) So I sat down and went through all my favorite fantasy stories to see what the basic type of conflict in them is and hopefully find some useful pattern that helps me with coming up with my own plots. All of them would be what critics call “person against person” conflicts. “Person against nature” and “person against self” are pretty much nonexistent in heroic fantasy adventures. (Though Kane occasionally goes there in addition to fighting with lots of other people.) While looking primarily at fiction, all of them actually make for great adventure hooks for RPGs as well.

Assassins! Someone wants to kill someone for whatever reason. The protagonist has to prevent that, and might even be the target himself. (The Phoenix on the Sword, Cold Light, The Lesser Evil.)
Reverse Assassins! Same idea, but this time it’s the protagonist who wants to kill someone and needs to find a way around those who would try to prevent it. Relatively rare, but if you give the protagonist a good reason it’s also a nice starting point to create a plot. (Conan the Barbarian. Worms of the Earth.)
Escape: The protagonist is imprisoned or trapped and has to find and fight his way out. (The Scarlet Citadel.)
Rescue: Someone else is imprisoned or trapped and the protagonist has to save him.
Predator: A person or creature wants something and can get it from people by killing them. The protagonist has to put an end to this. (Alien, Predator, The Thing.)
Assault: Enemies attack a town, castle, or country to take control of goods, territory, or people. The protagonist needs to repell them. You could instead have the protagonist lead the attack, but that’s very difficult to present in a heroic way. (The Hour of the Dragon.
Arcane Power: Someone wants to get his hands on something that would give him great magical power. The protagonist wants to prevent this, either by giving the power to someone else or by making it unreachable. (Raiders of the Lost Arc, The Last Crusade, Bloodstone.)

This is a pretty quick and dirty list and such great stories as The People of the Black Circle and A Matter of Price really don’t fit easily into any of these categories. But if you’re in search of a good plot for an adventure story I think these are a pretty solid start.

Creating a world inspired by Morrowind

Morrowind is one of the truly amazing RPGs among videogames. Over the last 20 years there probably have been hundreds of fantasy videogames, but Morrowind has always been in a category of its own. Even when you look at fantasy works in other mediums, it’s still something very unusual and quite unique. Most recently Skyrim has had a huge impact as the last game of the Elder Scrolls series, but as pretty as the world of that game is, it’s still mostly pretty ordinary European-style medieval fantasy, with Vikings driving out the Roman Empire from their land and some dragons and elves for good measure. Nothing we havn’t seen a thousand times before. But Morrowind, even being set on the same planet and right next door, is a place very much unlike anything else in fantasy. The most similar setting I can think of would be the AD&D world Dark Sun, and you might also consider the venerable common ancestor of all heroic fantasy and space opera Barsoom from A Princess of Mars.

Very obviously on first glance is that Morrowind and these other settings have very unique landscapes and wildlives, as I had mentioned two weeks back. The plants look different and there are many common animals that are not seen as monsters but are completely unlike any animal we have on earth. (Or at least in Europe and North America.) And even more, there is also a noticable absence of almost any animals we are familiar with. But that is only on the very surface and only affects how the world looks. While the visuals in Morrowind look great, it is not all there is to it and this element is mostly irrelevant for stories or campaign settings. Strange looking animals and plants don’t make a difference by themselves in regards to how the world and the people in it tick.

I’ve been discussing this topic with other people over the last weeks and it resulted in quite a number of very great thoughts, realizations, and discoveries about what you can do to create a world that feels similar to Morrowind without being a direct copy of it. And even if that’s not your intention, any single one of these should be useful as a starting point to making your work more unique and different from the standard medieval European fantasy.

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No more D&D for me, please

I feel like I am done with Dungeons & Dragons. I started with this game 16 years ago and while I had a lot of great fun playing, I stopped being thrilled about the rules very soon after. The d20 system just seems excessively over-engineered, and the older AD&D system is just a total mess. But the d20 system was the over-engineered devil I knew inside out and the vast majority of other RPGs I’ve come across over the years were even less suited to my needs. It’s not like I wanted to run Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder games, but there just wasn’t anything there to replace it with.

B/X was a bit of a pleasant surprise, being a much more lightweight version of the incomprehensible chaos of AD&D. But even if you replace the magic system and fix the way attack rolls are made, it’s still the basic D&D system at the core. The system where characters start extremely fragile and you have double your starting hit points at 2nd level, tripple your starting hit points at 3rd level and so on. Using a d20 as the standard die for attack rolls, ability checks, skill checks, and saving throws is certainly an improvement over using d100s, but you still end up with a game of pretty big numbers you have to juggle around. And because of those two things, the gameplay changes quite a bit as your characters progress. At lower levels you can’t fight giants and by the time you’re able to deal with giants goblins are no longer a threat. And if you play relatively rarely with a moderate pace of level advancement, a great number of possible adventures only becomes possible after you’ve been playing for a very long time. And my campaigns usually go only two to three years. Except for the one time we played a published adventure for high level parites and started at level 16, I’ve only seen characters reach 10th level once. I almost never got to use dragons, giants, and demons. And all those huge piles of magic items!

At it’s very heart, this game is made for dungeon crawling and tactical combat. And that’s just not what I want or what I need. E6 was an interesting patch and I heard the 5th edition actually adresses some of the things I’ve long been having problems with. But there is still so much about the game I can’t stand anymore. Alignment is what I consider the worst idea in RPG history, and the magic system can’t emulate any other kind of fantasy. As someone said a while back, “Dungeons & Dragons really only can represent Dungeons & Dragons.” And I just don’t plain like this style of fantasy.

Planescape and Dark Sun are wonderful settings, which I still enjoy and consider among the best that were ever made. Planescape completely embraces the strangeness of the D&D system and commits full to creating a fictional world based on its assumption. That works for me. Dark Sun does almost the opposite and shoves all the conventions of the game out of the window. It’s a great world, which I think actually works perfectly well using entirely different rules system to play it. And I still like the old Baldur’s Gate games. But not because of being Dungeons & Dragons, but despite it. There are so many compelling things about them, that I can live with the mechanics being weird. And being a videogame, I actually don’t have to bother with the mechanics at all. That all happens invisible from me inside the computer.

The most interesting thing currently happening with D&D are the creations of the OSR crowd. Say about the rules of the old editions whatever you want (and I want to say “they are crap”), but there were a couple of good ideas that are very much worse being reexamined again to learn lessons from them. “XP for treasure” being one of them, and of course the highly important “Rulings, not rules”. The effect of using Encumbrance and tracking supplies is also a very interesting one, as is the whole idea of wandering monsters, morale, and reaction rolls. And of course, there’s been a good number of very intriguing settings and adventures in recent years, which are being released for use with various retroclones, but really exist mostly independent of the rules. While I think the old editions of D&D are terrible, the general ideas of the Oldschool style are still very intriguing. So I’ll still be keeping an eye on what the OSR people are doing.

Just no more 1d20+14, please.

AGE of High Adventure

I’ve been reading the Fantasy Age Basic Rulebook for the last week and I am really quite taken with it. It feels a lot like an expanded version of Barbarians of Lemuria in many ways, being somewhat more complex but using a very similar approach to how to design and run a game. Though the options for races, specializations, spells, and monsters are very generic, the rules and mechanics of the AGE system have really won me over. It’s a fantasy RPG like I would have done it myself, if I would attempt to create my own game. When someone in a forum thread pointed out that Fantasy Age is a game he’d run pretty much without houserules, I realized that this pretty much goes for me as well.

But to run a Sword & Sorcery game with Fantasy Age, there’s still a few tweaks I think work very well for it:

Normally in Fantasy Age, characters get training in a number of default weapon groups and that’s it. (Warriors get two additional groups later on.) For Sword & Sorcery I feel it’s entirely appropriate to allow rogues and even mages to become somewhat decent with bigger weapons. So when characters are able to take a new weapon group Focus for either the Accuracy or Fighting ability when gaining a new level, they can instead pick training for a new weapon group. All characters can get both training and the Focus for a weapon group this way (though obviously at different levels.
“Magic” weapons and armor of the Uncommon and Rare categories are not actually magic. They are simply made from superior materials and with advanced craftsmanship. Only items of the Legendary category are actually enchanted.
In a Bronze Age or Iron Age setting, the Black Powder, Dueling, and Lances weapon groups would not be available. In the Heavy Blades group, two-handed swords might be removed and the bastard sword replaced with a kopis or falcata.
When using experience points, the default way to award XP for an encounter is to judge how hard the player characters had to fight for their success. In a Sword & Sorcery campaign, the amount of XP can instead be based on how heroically, impressive, and flashy the players were fighting. This encourages the players to not play it safe but to constantly try to do things that are entertaining and impress the GM, even if they are reckless and foolhardy.
Since Sword & Sorcery characters generally have few possessions, are frequently broke, and there isn’t a lot of things to buy with money in Fantasy Age, you can easily run a campaign in which money plays no role at all. However, an exception can be made for unusually and extremely valuable treasures, such as a gold idol or a giant ruby. Since their monetary value has very little meaning to the players, you can still use this classic element of pulp adventures by rewarding them with experience points instead. Whenever the players manage to get their hands on such a special treasure and manage to sell it, award them 400 XP as if they had overcome a Hard (or Heroic) encounter. If they somehow lose it again before selling it, they get nothing. Finding such special treasures and successfully getting them to a town and sold can be thought of as an optional bonus objective that doesn’t have much to do with the main subject of the adventure. This encourages players to still look for valuable loot and break into well protected places to satisfy their greed, and also can make for great side-adventures if they somehow happen to lose one or having it stolen.

My approach to running Sword & Sorcery campaigns

Someone was asking me about advice for running a Sword & Sorcery themed campaign in an RPG. Since that’s a pretty open question regarding a rather wide topic, I thought this might be a good subject for a full length post.

I think the first thing here would be to establish what I specifically mean when I am talking about Sword & Sorcery. Unlike most names for fantasy sub-genres, Sword & Sorcery has an actual and pretty specific meaning. Not everyone is using it the same way, but in this case we know exactly who created the term and what his intention was by doing so, so we can actually say that some people are just using is wrong. In 1961, Michael Moorcock wrote in a letter printed in a magazine that it would be a good idea to somehow distinguish the kind of fantasy he and others were writing from works like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia. They are all “fantasy” but drastically different in many, and perhaps even most details. In reply to that, Fritz Leiber wrote that he thought a great name for the subgenre would be “Sword & Sorcery”. And later he somewhat elaborated by saying “The best pulp Sword and Sorcery writer was Robert E. Howard”. So the actual definition of Sword & Sorcery could be said to be “Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock and specifically not Tolkien”.

But that doesn’t actually tell us what makes Sword & Sorcery what it is, which is necessary when you want to capture the spirit of Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock either in writing or running a roleplaying game. Now I admit that there is some validity to statements like “Those are just lables, don’t blindy follow old conventions, be creative and don’t immitate”. But in reality you often see works that are cool and you’re able to tell that there are other cool works that are similar, but you can’t put your finger on it what it actually is that makes them both similar and cool. Saying that you want to “create Sword & Sorcery” is not creative bankrupcy or being a sellout. When you want to play Heavy Metal or Blues, there is a good deal of established conventions that make the genres what they are. You don’t have to follow every single one of those conventions, but you have to follow most of them or the result will be something completely different. Same thing with fiction. A really great attempt at a definition of Sword & Sorcery heroes does not come from me, but is actually from Joseph McCullough, and I think he really quite nails it. A Sword & Sorcery hero is someone who is a.) using decisive action to b.) to pursue self-motiavted goals while c.) standing outside the normal rules and conventions of society. And pretty much everything else about the genre follows from that. Continue reading “My approach to running Sword & Sorcery campaigns”