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I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last couple of weeks working on the next adventure in the Zenith-3 campaign, and the techniques employed have enabled me to illustrate some of the techniques that I’ve written about in the past.

Normally, I would not post an article on the subject until after the adventure had been played, because I know that several of my players read Campaign Mastery regularly if not religiously, but since my intent is to generalize a fair bit, that shouldn’t be a problem in this case – and it’s usually better to write these things when thoughts are fresh in your mind and recent experience.

Because I intend to touch on a range of issues, this article might seem a little less organized than usual. You have been warned!

Adventure Structure

The basic structure of this adventure is as follows:

1. Real Life of the characters I (for 4 PCs and 2 NPCs)
2. Incident
3. Real Life of the characters II (for 4 PCs and 2 NPCs)
4. Murder Mystery
5. Investigation
6. Complication/Setback
7. Solution

The Blank Page

One of the advantages that I didn’t mention in my various posts on the Real Lives of the PCs but that was presented to me fairly forcefully in the writing of “Cold Cases” is that it provides an easy icebreaker. There was very little blank-page angst; I was able to just dive right in and start writing.

It’s never that simple.

I had a list of subplots and pieces of real life that I was supposed to touch on in the course of the two Real Life segments, but for the most part they were sufficiently vague in content that they could go anywhere. I had the basic outline of the mystery and complication segments in a fair amount of detail but nothing more than a wealth of possibilities and no idea how they would all go together into a coherent form. As a result, I hit writer’s block almost immediately.

More than anything else, two particular tools are my go-to solutions to this problem: the Adventure Title, and the Adventure Theme.

Adventure Title

I strongly believe that names matter enormously, even if the title’s relevance is going to be vanishingly obscure to the players, or not even revealed to them. Not just adventures, but characters, and places, and campaigns. They are a crystallization of the thought process of the GM, especially when they apply to the totality of the thing being named. That’s why I wrote a major series on Names a few years back.

Ideas for the adventure title in this case began flowing very quickly and easily. In short order, I had a dozen – I’ll quote some of them because trying to understand them won’t give my players any real clues: “What if they held a Zombie Apocalypse and no-one came?”, “Always In The Kitchen At Parties,” “CSI: Arcanum,” “A Bad Moon Rising,” and “Hallowed be thy name.”

Picking a name helps because it lets me examine each of the minor plot points to be incorporated from the perspective of linking it to the title in some way. When there is only one title that really sums up the major part of the plot – items 4 through 7 on the list in this case – as was the case with “The Monster Makers,” the adventure that’s about to wrap up and which I have written about extensively over the last 6 weeks or so – that provides context that can be used to generate ideas and expand the vague list of items into situations that enhance or reinforce the heart of the story.

Take, for example, the “Incident” phase of the plot. This is just an encounter that has no direct bearing on the plot. I had a character name but no real concept for either the character or the way that character would produce a situation for the PCs to have to resolve; it was just window dressing, present to show the team doing the things that superhero teams do, i.e. take down a bad guy. If I had chosen “Zombie Apocalypse” then I might have picked some other interpretation of the phrase “Zombie” and built the incident around that. This in turn would make “Zombie” or “Loss of self-control” or “Slave to whatever” the theme of the adventure and away I would go.

In this case, the title was no help – I had too many titles that touched on part of the main plot without really summing it up. So, I turned to plan B: the Adventure Theme.

Adventure Theme

Again, this is a conceptual touchstone about which everything in the adventure should revolve in one way or another. But themes are rather more slippery than a title; they can be abstract, or literal, or conceptual, or metaphoric, or several of these things at the same time. And, right now, my adventure didn’t have a theme – it was just a bunch of stuff that was going to happen.

I tried thinking of one. In fact, I thought of about half-a-dozen – none of which really fitted. To clarify and refine my thoughts, and give my subconscious something to chew over, I took another look at what I did know about those personal life incidents. I noticed that one event was a character attending an autopsy. That seemed to connect with the Murder Mystery angle. Thirty seconds more thought gave me a theme that perfectly fitted based around the synchronicity of these two unrelated events. Another thirty seconds showed me how each of the other planned incidents (and several that were empty spaces waiting to be filled) could be an expression of that theme.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the theme was; it reveals entirely too much about the adventure. But it finalized the choice of title (to something that wasn’t even on the list of possibilities that I had created), and gave me the nature of the Incident. It also made that incident rather more important in the context of the campaign.

Character “Real Life” I

The theme gave me about 75% of the particulars of these incidents – what they were, why they were happening, and so on. A number of minor plot threads would progress. In most of these cases, they were things that the players had said they wanted their characters to do or learn, in others they were outgrowths of that activity. Once I had the theme, I really did just dive in and start writing.

The events in this phase were tagged with the unofficial names “Premonition”, “Showman”, “Industrial Relations”, “Self-Image”, and “Fitness”. These are all of the variety, “what were you doing when the incident started?” Player involvement is minimal and primarily consists of “these is what you are doing and a reminder of what’s been on your mind lately” so that players can decide what their character’s head-space is like at the moment. What’s their mood? Their emotional state? The primary purpose is to enable the players to decide how their characters will react to “The Incident” when it begins, given this context.

The Incident

A recurring subplot that started in the last adventure or two was that magic had gone wild. When a mage cast a spell, they suffered a compulsion to exhaust their mana reserves (which power spells in this game system) and as much more as the mage can suck in from the surrounding environment, dumping it all into the spell that they were casting, which is horrendously over-powered as a result. A “flare” spell sucked the PC mage dry, was visible over half the North American continent, and blinded the pilots of three aircraft coming in to land who were too close to the spell (and could have been much worse).It’s important to note that I know why this is happening, but the players (and characters) do not.

In the course of “The Monster Makers,” an NPC who claims to be a mage (a Voodoo Priest, to be more precise) made a discovery that only spells which affected the world around the mage were subject to this problem, and passed the information on to the PCs. So long as the spell only affected the mage, it would work just fine.

I had more particulars about the nature of this effect to be revealed to the players as circumstances warranted. The Incident, given the shape it assumed by making it relevant to the Theme and the title, became the perfect vehicle for providing some of that information. But it also presented the next roadblock in writing the adventure – because I needed to come up with a unique and original fantasy world as background to the characters at the heart of the Incident, as the cold case that one was pursuing suddenly spontaneously combusted.

That took a day or two, but when it was done, writing was again straightforward. Everything to this point was then collectively labeled as Part I of the adventure, and given the title “Fangs Of The Dragon”.

Real Life of the characters II

The ultimate effect of The Incident will be minor – one character will regain some lost confidence, and his teammates will regain some confidence in his abilities to participate in situations when they develop. The game universe will expand a little to contain that new fantasy world, and they will gain an ally – but one with problems of his own, so ‘don’t expect much benefit in the short-term’. That expansion is not an unalloyed blessing; it also opens a new vector for future team problems to arise. In general terms, though, it can largely be characterized as edging the day-to-day lives of the team back towards normality, and getting the adventure started with a bang – assuming the PCs don’t make a meal of The Incident, of course.

But that leads into the first major roleplaying section of the adventure, as life settles down to something resembling normality for a while and the characters go about living their ordinary lives. This is reflected in the title for this part of the adventure: “Business As Usual”.

There are several ongoing subplots that progress in this phase. Characters get to spend time doing the things their players have said they want to do, there’s some cultural reference for them to play with, and some opportunities for roleplaying.

Again, I can’t do much in the way of being specific. But I can offer the following summaries of the events, secure in the knowledge that they won’t tell the players anything I don’t want them to know in advance:

• Scene 1, “Prussian Blues” advances one character’s social life, enhances the game world, and gives progress in a subplot of that character’s.
• Scene 2, “Puppet To The Red Tape” is all about the responsibilities of leadership and the personality of one of the PCs, and the price that has to be paid for the privilege. An ongoing theme for the character involved, this continues exploring those key themes of the character and is more about establishing precedents and connections with other plotlines.
• Scene 3, “A Taste Of Not-Quite Home” permits another PC to touch base with his cultural roots, and marks a distinct change of pace compared to recent subplots for the character. But it also advances an ongoing plotline focusing on that character, and gives two characters the opportunity to advance in hobbies that the players have respectively selected for their characters, enlarging on that personal development subplot, and develops the interaction between the two.
• Scene 4, “The Holiday is over” gives a character who didn’t get much of a chance to roleplay in this part of the plot the opportunity to do so, and also edges circumstances back to “Business as usual” while enlarging on the consequences of the recent divergence from routine. This develops a PC-NPC relationship and progresses the history of the world beyond the PCs.
• Scene 5, “Muffin Routine” establishes a new subplot within this campaign for a PC, provides some additional color and verisimilitude for the game world, introduces a new NPC, and advances the relationship between that PC and another NPC while furthering a subplot focusing on that NPC. Furthermore, it touches on the relationship that has developed “off-camera” between two of the major NPCs for the first time in the campaign, signposting a further evolution in the game world around the PCs.
  

  That’s an important tip, actually: NPC subplots only matter to the extent that they impact on a PC at the time. If there is no such impact, they can be hand-waved until the next time a PC interacts with that NPC. Which means that if there is an important plot development in the life of an NPC, you need to find some way to have it impact on a PC. You can even generalize this further: NPCs only matter within the game to the extent that they interact with PCs. PCs can have solo encounters and plot developments; while NPCs can also have these, actual play of them should be handwaved until the next interaction of NPC and PC.

• Scene 6, “A different perspective/Anatomy lesson” contains two beats for a particular PC. The first is a continued exploration of the character’s non-human perspective yielding an unusual theory about the observed behavior of humanity, and the second permits the character to learn something she needs to understand in order to achieve a personal development that the player has decided he wants the character to have. It also introduces a new NPC and gives the player of the PC a chance to do some roleplaying.”
• Scene 7, “Koffee Klatch” advances the social life of another PC, adds a circle of new NPCs to that social life, and touches on the a consequence of the abnormalities of his physical condition that I doubt the player, or the creator of the character, ever thought of. It also teases a future plotline, and advances a subplot belonging to another PC, which should heighten the sense that this subplot will soon be resolved – a “cold case” that has been troubling the PC who is attached to it for some time, and which occasionally spills over onto the rest of the characters. I guess you could say that it actually teases two future plotlines in the same scene.
• Scene 8, “Fourth corner of the triangle” builds on an NPC-PC relationship that has become a focus lately, adds to the NPCs value to the team, and builds on the ongoing subplot that was the non-immediate relevance of The Incident, further pushing the campaign toward a sense of “getting back to normal”. Depending on how it goes, it could also introduce a new relationship between two PCs and offer three of the four Players a roleplaying opportunity.

These all flowed from the keyboard without pause, except briefly when I tweaked the order of presentation to spread the spotlight around a little more and give a nicer flow from one item to another. Each assumes that the other players are in earshot. And seven of these eight scenes relate in some way to the overall theme and title of the adventure, while the eighth provides a partial foundation for the main plot of the adventure, and so is also indirectly linked to the theme.

The Mystery

That all leads into the major plot of the adventure, a murder mystery of very outré nature. I can’t give any details at all without ruining the adventure for the players, so let’s talk a little in more general terms.

Mysteries are easy to create – all you need do is have something happen, or reveal that something has happened, with no obvious explanation.

Good Mysteries with predetermined solutions are even easier in fiction because the author has a privileged position – he knows what actually happened and why that solution to the mystery is hidden. It’s then simply a matter of leading the investigators one step at a time until the other improbable explanations are eliminated and the truth stands revealed in some suitably dramatic fashion.

Problems arise when the author is forced to induce incompetence on the part of an investigator in order to explain why they didn’t solve the puzzle right away, or makes the mystery so impenetrable that a dues-ex-machina is required to solve the puzzle – something that always leaves the reader feeling cheated, or when there is a flaw in the author’s logic.

One of the most obvious techniques for plotting such mysteries is to start with the solution, consider what the criminal can and would do to cover it up, and then ask “what does the investigator need to know in order to determine the culprit and solve the mystery?” – then work backwards determining how and from whom the investigator gets that information until you get to the initial condition of confusion before any investigation has begun. Then you actually write the narrative from front to back, guided by this outline.

Things elevate exponentially in difficulty when you’re talking about an RPG, for three reasons:

1. The GM doesn’t know what questions the PCs will ask.
2. The author has to ensure that the investigator is competent, as explained earlier. The GM has no control over the competence and deductive abilities of the players.
3. While a strongly linear plot can work for a novelist, players and PCs can’t be controlled by the GM.

Getting around these problems largely means providing several different ways for the PCs to get the information they need, and simplifying the mystery to the point where the GM can be sure that the players will be able to solve it without relying on ultimately-unsatisfactory die rolls to do so. But every such compromise weakens the mystery and the entertainment value that can derive from it.

A long time ago, I offered several “GM’s cheats” for creating successful mysteries in RPGs, and the heart of them all is the GM being as ignorant of what really happened and who is responsible, and operating under the theory that if the investigation continually advances in some way, it will eventually reach a destination. That article has been a very popular one, and is often mentioned on other blogs as the state-of-the-art in creating mysteries for RPGs, which is very gratifying.

The Problem

For various reasons, those techniques simply wouldn’t work in this case. So I had to do an old-fashioned mystery while avoiding the pitfalls listed above. On top of that, one of the PCs is a telepath; I had to frame the mystery in such a way that it followed the rules of “fairness” of a mystery while ensuring that an inadvertent mind-scan wouldn’t upend the apple-cart.

At first, I had no idea how to achieve this second requirement, so I simply ignored it for the moment and assumed that a solution would present itself in time.

The Process

I started by outlining how the mystery would come to the PCs attention, and what the actual mystery was going to be. That gave me several obvious leads that I could reasonably assume the PCs would follow during the investigation phase. It also set up a number of roadblocks and hurdles that would have to be overcome by the PCs in the course of the investigation, and introduced a number of NPCs who would figure into the discovery of what the mystery was. Finally, I was able to introduce an entirely-reasonable-in-context constraint that would prevent the players from getting too creative in their approach or taking too many shortcuts.

Along the way, I also decided on a title for this part of the adventure, one that was tantalizing and appropriate but that didn’t give anything away: “Body of Confusion”.

It was important to ensure that none of those obvious leads could lead immediately to the solution to the mystery, but each one would have to advance the investigation process in some way. So, having written the narrative of the introduction of the mystery, I turned my attention to those obvious leads. For each, I asked “what might be learned that would move the PCs closer to the solution to the mystery? I was also able to throw in a red herring or two and ensure that the herring nature became obvious in due course, and ensure that there was enough going on in each stage that each PC would get a fair share of the spotlight. Finally, I made sure that the featured NPCs never did anything that did not involve at least one PC – following the same maxim as outlined in the sidebar box above.

At this point, I was forced to make assumptions based on the abilities and personalities of the PCs in terms of who would do what. Those assumptions let me write the narrative for each of the initial stages of the investigation, populating it with interesting and colorful characters. At the same time, I made sure that if my assumptions were incorrect, that the critical information would still be learned; the encounters might not have the same impact under those circumstances, because I was pitching the roleplay as much at the players as to the PCs that they controlled, but they would still be interesting enough.

So long as each of these leads either dead-ended or produced a new line of investigation as to what had really happened, i,e, advanced the plot, that was all I needed from them. I would then repeat the process for the resultant next batch of leads, incorporating challenges for the players to overcome and ensuring that failure was always an option, and would not derange the overall plotline.

The combination is a situation in which the overall plot can be shaped and directed, while still leaving room for the players to make their own decisions.

Body of Confusion

So far, then, “Body of confusion” contained the following scenes:

1. “Prologue: State Of Mind” – links the beginning of the adventure to the previous part by doing the same thing as the events did in “Real Life of the characters I”, establishing circumstances that permit the players to determine the PCs state of mind when the main events start.
2. Mystery:
   • “Scene Of The Crime” – gets the PCs to the scene of the crime and introduces the person who’s going to drop the mystery into the PCs laps.
   • “Hall Monitor” – introduces an NPC who will complicate and restrict the PCs freedom to take investigative shortcuts and gives him a motivation that the PCs would support, making their cooperation with the restrictions more likely. Also lays the foundations for the mystery.
   • “Discovery of the crime” – tells the PCs how the crime came to be discovered and introduces the NPCs who made the discovery and called in Law-enforcement.
   • “Preliminary Investigation” – tells the PCs what the police discovered in their investigation of the crime scene, completing the particulars of the mystery, introduces an ally in the investigation, describes the source of the road-blocks and shows that the PCs have a better chance of going around them than the police do, which in turn explains why the problem is being handed to them.
   • “Formalities” – sets the PCs involvement in motion and directs the clues to the PCs attention.
3. Investigation, Wave 1 [note that the PC who featured strongly in “The Incident” does not feature in this phase):
   • “Zuber” – follows obvious lead #1 and introduces a colorful NPC who should be lots of fun for a PC to roleplay with.
   • “Case File” – follows obvious lead #2 and delivers a number of specifics about the case that the PCs didn’t have, opening a second generation of leads to investigate, and permitting roleplay for a second PC.
   • “Arrangements” – makes arrangements for investigation of obvious lead #3 while giving a third PC the chance to roleplay and reintroducing an NPC from earlier in the adventure. This plays on a piece of serendipity that would have been impossible for me as a GM to predict, since it ties a pre-adventure decision by a player to this plot.
4. Investigation, Wave 2:
   • “Research” – follows up a lead from “Case File”.
   • “Assignments” – identifies a second wave of investigation results and almost-certainly puts an NPC in charge of this part of the investigation. He spells out certain facts that he needs and details the PCs to obtain them, assigning the problems logically according to personalities, positions, and abilities.
   • “General Motors” – two PCs attempt to carry out their assignment, encounter a road-block, get to roleplay and to find a solution to the roadblock which will lead to a subsequent scene.
   • “Council” – another PC attempts to carry out her assignment, encounter a road block, get to roleplay and a solution is hinted at which will lead to a subsequent scene.
   • “Picture of trouble” – fourth PC carries out the first part of his assignment, encounters a major roadblock that is built into the campaign background, gets to roleplay.
5. Investigation, Wave 3:
   • “Collector” – follow-up scene to “General Motors” in which the PCs from that scene implement their solution to the roadblock only to encounter another one with three possible solutions offered to them (or they could devise a fourth). They get to roleplay and may interact with another PC in the course of it.

… and that’s where I encountered a major road-block of my own. I needed to find a solution to the inherent problem mentioned in “Picture Of Trouble” or be left with a plot hole the size of Jupiter. Everything to this point had simply flowed, requiring little or no pause, but this was going to require careful thought.

I could contrive a one-off solution – the latest in a series of such solutions to this particular restriction – or I could implement a permanent solution that removed or revised one of the fundamental tenets of the campaign.

Significance

So far, this entire adventure had contained little of lasting significance in terms of the overall campaign. A number of subplots had inched forwards, and there were the long-term consequences of The Incident, but the dominant part of the campaign, the mystery, held no major repercussions for the campaign; it was a standalone adventure. This was an opportunity to change that and make this another milestone in the campaign. This is something that I’m always keen to do when significance doesn’t automatically attach to the plot, but there were good reasons for the presence of the restriction that created the problem in “Picture Of Trouble”.

The alternative was to revise part of the adventure, significantly reducing the involvement of the PC who was at the heart of the situation in the adventure, and significantly shortcutting the adventure. And, since I still had no clear path forward after the follow-ups to “Collector” and “Council”. that also held a certain level of appeal, because the “Investigation” phase was already larger than I had originally expected.

There are, in my campaign plan, a number of “free-floating” events that I intended to introduce at some point if the opportunity presented itself, but that weren’t necessary to the campaign plan. After wrestling with the problem for a couple of days, I realized that choosing the more significant change would permit me to integrate a couple of those major campaign background developments, and tie this adventure to a previous one. The choice, then, was between no real significance, or a triple-dose of significance.

The decision was made when further thought showed that this triple-dose of significance reflected an ongoing campaign theme, giving a fourth layer of significance to the whole thing. That combination was too much to resist.

Contrivance

But, in order to pull this off, I needed to contrive some means of getting the PC in question (or possibly all the PCs) to the point of revelation. That could only be done by laying some groundwork earlier in the adventure, a dues-ex-machina that the PCs would have to earn, and adding still another layer of mystery to the overall plot, and still another connection to the adventure theme.

In order to pave over the Plot Hole, I needed a significant scene – by far the largest and most complicated of them, involving all the PCs – somewhere back in “Real Life of the characters II”. This would prominently feature the PC who had no involvement in “Investigation Wave 1”, equalizing the screen time each PC was receiving, a further benefit.

I therefore decided to attach this additional sequence close to the end of “Real Life of the characters II”, i.e. as close to “Investigation Wave I” as possible. The optimum point was the end of Scene 8 of “Business As Usual”, and so “Scene 9: Puzzle Box” was added, about 2 1/4 pages in length, doing nothing but setting up the next scene in “Investigation Wave 3”, “Leapfrog”.

“Puzzle Box”

I have to be very vague about the content of those 2 1/4 pages. Something unexpected happens, which adds to the campaign background and to the PCs base of operations. That leads to an authentication procedure that is fairly rigorous – only the PCs could reasonably be expected to pass it – resulting in a foreshadowing of the significance of a future event and introducing yet another mystery to the overall mix.

Most entertainingly, while the specific events are definitely not “Business as usual”, the broader context of something unexpectedly leaping out of the plot shadows is very definitely “Business as usual” for the PCs. This was the final tick of approval for what I was planning, so far as I was concerned – “Puzzle Box” was an essential part of the adventure, I just hadn’t known it at the time.

The relevance of The Ordinary Lives Of The PCs

At the start of this article, I indicated that this would be illustrative of a number of things discussed in recent articles here at Campaign Mastery. It’s time to haul that relevance out into the open and spotlight it.

It would be entirely possible to write the adventure without the “Ordinary Lives” sequences, hand-waving the character development, and skipping straight to the “good stuff” – The Incident, Puzzle Box, Mystery, Investigation, Complication, Solution. It would also be possible to hand-wave a lot of the roleplay in “Investigation” – “you go to X and learn Y”.

Doing either or both of these things would elevate the significance of Puzzle Box, conferring a disproportionate share of the spotlight to one particular PC, and make the obvious-contrivance levels go off the chart. It would significantly shorten the adventure, making it far more disjointed internally and making the campaign far less contiguous. Since I’m of the opinion that roleplay is a vital ingredient in making an RPG fun, it would also diminish greatly the entertainment value of the adventure as a whole.

In a different campaign, that would not be the case. The style of this campaign is far more Marvel than DC, far more about telling the story of the lives of extraordinary people living in even more extraordinary times. The Ordinary Lives sequences make “Puzzle Box” just one event amongst several, and the high level of detail in those sequences justifies an equally-high level in the main part of the adventure. I am deliberately counterbalancing the outlandish nature of the events and concepts that are central to the superheroic genre with an infusion of “reality” that makes the PCs people, with foibles and flaws and problems, some of which assume larger-than-life significance because of who the PCs are.

Where to from here?

If the following gives the impression that the as-yet unwritten parts of the adventure are now clear in my mind, and need only to be executed, you would be interpreting things correctly. The Puzzle Box Sequence is essential to the “Simulation”, which is critical to the Solution being available for the PCs to discover. “Puzzle Box” broke the creative logjam.

• I have a couple of minor creative elements to work out that form part of “Leapfrog”.
• I have a couple of scenes already emplaced that need a little further expansion in one case and a lot in the other – Scenes “Research” (listed above) and “Inside Man” (the planned follow-up to “Council”).
• That will be followed by “Ancient”, the planned follow-up to “Leapfrog” and which will resolve the Puzzle Box part of mystery, then “Breaking The Barriers”, which is the major payoff to the “Puzzle Box” – “Leapfrog” – “Ancient” plot thread. That will lead into “Life Of The Streets” and “Moonlighting”, which will connect the “Puzzle Box” sequence back to the main mystery, overcoming the roadblocks in “Council” and “Picture Of Trouble” respectively, and concluding Wave #3 of the investigation.
• Wave #4 will comprise “Prescription”, “Simulation”, “Hope”, and “Missing”.
• “Complication” consists of “Vanished”, “Lost and Found”, “Dead Men Tell Tales”. and “Discovery”.
• “Solution”, “Dash”, “Hunt”, and “Justice” will follow, wrapping up the mystery.
• Finally. “Hobby”, “Zombie”, “Law Of The Jungle”, “Connections” and “Contact” are epilogues and will wrap up the whole adventure.

Lessons

There are many points in the above where the PCs make critical decisions. Despite the linear structure described, there is no certainty of success at any point short of “Solution”. What the PCs decide to do before the investigation even starts will have a material effect on the outcome – in the ideal situation, a criminal’s guilt is proven and another suspect exonerated, accelerating an increase in racial tensions and triggering a wave of racial unrest. A lesser success if possible in which all of the above takes place except that the criminal escapes. And complete failure is equally possible, in which the criminal escapes justice at the expense of another man, also triggering the increase in racial tensions and wave of racial unrest. If the PCs do make a meal of things at some point, there are also ways to salvage the situation.

The biggest lessons from this exercise are to make progress one step at a time, using outlines and brief mnemonics to keep track of the bigger picture, to remember the importance of NPCs, the genre balancing (‘mundanity’ to counterbalance the fantastic), spotlight round-robins, the principles of significance, themes, and titles, and inserting content as a way of empowering you to break through writer’s block.

The adventure is now 33 pages long, full of dialogue and narrative and with barely any mention of game mechanics. By the time it’s finished, that number will probably be closer to 60 than to 50. What resemblance the planned adventure has to what actually transpires remains to be seen; I’m always optimistic, but three times in four (or more) it won’t be the case.

If it were not a mystery, which requires an adventure to swarm with details, and the need to be consistent in prep standards throughout an adventure, I would not be writing to the level of detail that I am. The previous adventure was about as lengthy in playing time and complexity and consumed a ‘mere’ 17 pages. The one before that was 25 pages, and before that, an even more complex situation was detailed in only 10.

Most of the difference is in canned, pre-prepared dialogue. A lesson that I didn’t get to relate in the course of the article is that information should never be related ex cathedra when it can be conveyed by dialogue, i.e. by NPC-PC interaction. Using the old yardstick of a picture being worth a thousand words, I have also saved about 56,000 words of descriptions of people, places and objects by using photographs, digitally altering them as necessary.

When play has finished, I’ll revisit the subject, either in a follow-up article or by appending to this one, and providing the actual adventure for people to compare to what I’ve described herein. Although it wasn’t intended to be such, this has definitely turned into a masterclass on adventure creation, but that is needed to complete the value of it. I guess a lot of the decision between those options rests on how far the players deviate from what I expect them to do.

And no, guys, that’s not a challenge.

Articles referenced in the above text (directly or indirectly);

I have one more post to make before Christmas, and then Campaign Mastery will be taking a week off in terms of substantial content, resuming in the new year. So, the following oldies-but-goodies will give you something to read (or re-read) in the meantime.

• The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs
• The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples
• Blog Carnival November 2016: Ordinary Lives In Paranormal Space and Time
• Blog Carnival November 2016: Ordinary Life in an RPG
• The Beginnings Of Plot
• One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post
• Ask The GMs: “Let’s Split Up.” – “Good Idea, we can do more damage that way!”
• The “Good Names” series
• Top-Down Design, Domino Theory, and Iteration: The Magic Bullets of Creation
• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity
• Refloating The Shipwreck: When Players Make A Mistake
• The “Breaking Through Writer’s Block” series
• Lessons Learned: A change of perspective brings plot rewards
• The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 2
• The “Touchstones Of Unification” series
• The “Secrets Of Stylish Narrative” series
• Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game