This series has been predicated on the belief that the real difference between game prep and a lack of game prep could be summarized as felicity of style: better-presented maps and illustrations, better thought-out plans, better characterization of NPCs, better depiction of that characterization, and more stylish Narrative, and has aimed at presenting a masterclass in the last of these. It doesn’t focus on actually stringing words together, or the artistry of literary or verbal communications; the subject has been the writing process itself.

More stylish narrative means creating concise, communicative, and flavorful words to create a whole greater than the sum of their parts that is nevertheless more easily assimilated because of the brevity. It is narrative that flows naturally instead of being disjointed and fragmented.

The process described is not quick, and assumes unlimited time is available for revision and polishing, however unrealistic that assumption may be. Efficiency is, however, always a consideration and the technique eliminates as much wasted time as possible.

Even if some of the more time-consuming steps are skipped, short-cutted, or combined with other steps, you can get 90% of the result for about 10% of the time. The secret to doing so is knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, knowing the entire process, and where those strengths and weaknesses will impact on the process. You can target the areas for effort that will give you the biggest gains while skipping or skimping on those that play to your strengths. And it’s always great to have an awareness of the whole process on tap to be called upon when the result really matters.

In part 4, I examined the impact on an RPG of employing better narrative, and found that the gains were a many-fold return on the time investment. I also looked at the practicalities of learning to create better narrative that people should take into account – in particular, the short-term pain that may cause them to abandon their efforts prematurely because “it’s not working”.

This time around, I aim to focus on the ultimate test of creating good narrative – improvising – before wrapping up the series.

The ability to improv

It’s one thing to be able to create an improvised adventure and quite another to deliver it effectively, living by your wits and ability to respond. All your worst vices as a GM are sure to crawl out of the woodwork when you try – simple plots can become hideously over-complicated, for example, or villains can become over-the-top shams of clichéd characterization.

Past articles here at Campaign Mastery have looked at how to create an improvised adventure, how to get yourself out of trouble when improvising, how to generate characters on-the-fly, and so on, but haven’t looked all that closely at the implementation of those adventures.

If you take out the creation and roleplaying of NPCs, the creation of a plotline, and adjudicating of PC actions, there isn’t a whole lot to GMing left aside from narrative creation and delivery: what’s happening, where, and what it all looks like to the PCs. So the ability to improv narrative is the heart of implementing an improvised adventure.

The process used for creating great narrative can be easily modified to this particular application, but before I get into that, I have some general advice to offer.

Think it through

Guarding against those GMing vices is best achieved by always having a reason for what you do at each step of running an improv adventure. Before you begin a new scene, work out what that scene is to achieve in terms of the overall plotline you’ve come up with, and at least take a moment to decide whether things should be getting better, getting worse, getting more dramatic, getting more emotional, or winding up for a finish. This is a rough method of creating both a metagame context for the scene and implementing an emotional progression within the overall adventure; both of these things should shape the narrative that you deliver. Don’t agonize over things, but do take a handful of seconds to think about things overall.

Think ahead

Having decided why the scene should happen, in the context of the overall adventure, and what its tone should be, the next thing to do is to take a moment – and you only need a second or three – to think about where this scene should go, and how it will connect to the scene that will probably follow this one.

You might think that this is completely up to the players, but that’s not actually the case – they will respond to the cues you offer them, or they will do something completely unrelated to the adventure you had in mind. If you mention an NPC or a location, they will want to know more about it. If you hint that answers to at least some of their questions may be found at a given place, they will at least contemplate going to that place. If you always know why an NPC is doing whatever it is that they are doing in the scene, whether that’s offering a roman legionnaire’s salute to one of the PCs and addressing him as Emperor in Latin, or tearing up the sidewalk, you will also know how they will respond to whatever the characters do, or at least, how they will want to respond.

Polish as you go, not in advance

When improvising an adventure, you have to “live in the now” more than when delivering one that you’ve prepped for in advance. If you think of a wonderful piece of phrasing that you don’t need yet, or a clever twist for later in the adventure, your mind is not where it needs to be – forget it until the time comes, and if you remember it then, great. You do need to keep one eye on the bigger picture, but that’s what the preceding suggestions are for. Improv adventures require greater focus on the here-and-now and less on how it’s all going to fit together.

In particular, any new ideas that you have need closer examination before you implement them. One of my flaws as a GM is the bad habit of coming up with a wonderful idea in the middle of an adventure that completely changes that adventure in direction or outcome, and implementing it before thinking it through. Sometimes these plot twists work, other times they explode catastrophically in my face and require delicate emergency surgery on the adventure to prevent the complete derailing of the campaign.

Also in this category are PC mistakes and player misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and erroneous assumptions. As soon as you get the slightest suspicion that any of these have occurred, figure out how and when events will correct the error – and if they won’t do so, and the error threatens to derail the adventure or the campaign, insert a correction. When you are playing off-the-cuff, don’t let that cuff fray without planning a stop at the tailor!

Canned descriptions

When you’re thinking up your improvised adventures, images, scenes, and characters will come to mind. As soon as you are able, jot these down as notes and use them as the basis of descriptions. Two or three minutes so spent at the start of play – and don’t take longer than that – can save you a heap of grief later. Failing to do so is another of my failings as a GM and it does keep biting me, when a character turns up six or twelve months later, or the players go back to a particular location, and I have nothing on which to base the descriptions/action on. I don’t care how memorable or iconic you think the notion is – put it in writing. Make additional notes as you go.

Research in Prep

If you know that you aren’t going to have any prep time to create an adventure at some future point, spend three-to-five minutes before then on a Google image search, or looking up a wikipedia article. Stock some ideas and visual reference in the back of your mind for when the time comes. It’s astonishing how little such activity can be beneficial. You don’t even have to look at the full-sized images, just the thumbnails can be useful.

Iconic depictions as foundation

There are locations that are iconic, that we all know from TV and movies. Using these as a starting point and embellishing or transforming the scene in some way can be a great shortcut to the creative process, and it can also help deliver polished narrative simply because you can visualize the setting more clearly when describing it. Don’t be afraid to employ such trickery when you need it.

But there is a caveat: don’t use iconic places from novels, because your vision or interpretation might be quite different from those of your players. You can be quite clear in your own mind about what you are describing, but they simply can’t “see” it, causing frustration to both. Rely on a visual source.

Alliteration? Ahem! Although…

Some sources argue vehemently against the use of alliteration, and – to be fair – it is easily-abused. As a general rule, it’s best avoided. However, there are times when it can be used by choice for deliberate effect, as was the case in the title of this post. DON’T use it accidentally. DO use it when it benefits your narrative.

A simple process to improv great narration

The process for improvising great narration is surprisingly simple – the heavy lifting has been done in learning how to write that narrative in the first place.

Flow to bullet-points to narrative

The secret trick is to reverse a couple of stages in the literary process, and do the writing aloud. The full-prep approach was bullet-points to visualization to flow to narrative to polished and compressed narrative. The improve technique is to visualize, work out how to flow the narrative, turn the visualization into mental bullet-points, and then recombine them into narrative.

It’s that simple. You go from an overall impression that defines a number of areas for closer description, then uses that impression as the foundation for descriptive elements that fit into that overall impression. The result is often less creative than the full process, but it will be clear and succinct.

Picture it in your mind – what do you see?

I start by identifying one or two key adjectives to describe the overall scene or an iconic image plus original variation to be applied. Examples might be “Futuristic city – domed buildings – made of colored spun glass, delicate and artistic”, or “Operating theater, raised operating table angled downward at the feet, Frankenstein’s lab fittings, half-built mechanical man on the table.”

Entrance and exit

To this visualization I add or identify where the entrances and exits are. It often helps to assume that your visualization is happening from the entrance point, so that it will also be the PC’s point of view of the initial scene – but this can also leave you exposed when they enter the scene and look back in the direction from which they came.

Behind you!

So I make sure to spend a moment thinking about what the area behind that point-of-view will look like. “Crumbling Skyscrapers” and “a bank of machines and computers”, respectively, would work for the examples.

One Sentence at a time

With those impressions nailed down, I then create and announce the narrative, one sentence at a time. Once you have the visual in your head, if you avoid getting too specific too soon, you can rattle off your narrative almost as fast as you can think of it. Give a general impression that lists areas PCs might want to focus on and that tells them generally what’s in the room, and then let them either select something for closer inspection or deal with whatever there is within that space to interact with.

Remember to incorporate those little tricks from the literary approach – dynamics and motion and activity – as you go, and don’t neglect the senses other than sight.

Begin with any overall impression

The usual recipe for great narrative still applies. You always start with a general impression (bearing in mind that one may be inherited from preceding narrative)

Necessary information

Follow the general impression with a broad description of anything that players to know about before they can make choices.

Compress and polish as you go

When the same broad description can apply to more than one element within the scene, use it to describe them both at the same time and in the same sentence.

Ending the narrative passage

Again, as usual, end with an interaction trigger – a dialogue prompt, NPC action, or a question to the players – and make sure that you have no such interaction triggers before you get to that point. Skip over something if necessary, saving it until the end of the narrative.

Further improvements

There are all sorts of exercises that you can use to practice your narrative skills. These work for both written and improvised narrative. I use them all when the occasion presents, especially if I know my narrative abilities are going to be challenged in the near future.

1. Write a novel or short story aloud – Make up a story, telling it out loud as you go. Record it to listen for defects in delivery, especially regarding enunciation and the smooth flow of narrative – no awkward pauses while you think permitted!
2. Read fiction and pay attention – Narrative problems are hardly new, writers have been grappling with them since the time of the Greeks if not longer. The more you read and pay attention to how an author has done it, the more you will soak up the hundreds of little nuances of technique. Robert A. Heinlein is famous for being able to impart context and narrative background while advancing the plot in his short stories, and makes a good starting point. This article/series has shown you what to look for – now go and look for it! (Hint: use a book that you can tolerate but that isn’t one of your favorites, as the technical analysis can sometimes make it harder to enjoy that book in the future. Especially if you find that your favorite writers aren’t as gifted as you thought they were.)
3. Read how-to-write books & websites – There are lots of these out there. A Google search on “how to write fiction” returned 156,000 entries. Another for “better writing” produced 424,000 responses. And those were using the literal phrase to target the most on-topic results. “Better writing” without the literal phrase yielded 719,000,000 results! “How to write fiction” gave 2,706 results at Amazon, while “better writing” gave 26,466 results – and that was restricting the search to the books department. There may well be documentaries and tutorials in the DVDs section as well!
4. Describe Visuals – Find an “action photograph” – you can use if you like – then practice describing the scene as though it were narrative from an RPG. Start with the setting, and end with the activity. The goal is to be as descriptive as possible in as few words as possible. Try describing the photo over the phone to someone else. Start by doing it with the photo in front of you, then practice taking it away after an increasingly-brief look at the image, forcing you to fill in more of the details with your own imagination. And don’t forget to describe the scene around where you, the observer, are, and what’s behind you! You can also record this as suggested in exercise #1, and for the same purpose.
5. Hit the high points – Synopsize a TV show that you have watched for someone else who has not, and who doesn’t watch the show, describing the sets and the action and synopsizing the dialogue from memory. Start with a single scene (from the RPG perspective, not the TV perspective, which may use multiple camera angles, etc). Then move on to everything between two ad breaks. Then a complete half-hour show – picking something unusual that you don’t normally watch, and that has strong visual elements. Work up to a full hour-long show. It’s OK to have just watched it before you start this exercise; it’s about practicing turning visuals that are in your head into visuals in words.
6. Re-imagine settings – Pick a TV show or movie or photo from same, then re-imagine it as being from a completely different style of show, changing the details of the scene and the characters to conform with the new setting. Turn a western town into an underwater community populated by mermen. Turn a Manhattan street into a public thoroughfare on a futuristic space station. Turn – well, you get the idea!
7. Explore Visual shorthands – Pick a photograph or freeze-frame from movie, TV show, or DVD. You have 60 seconds: Sum up what you can see in a single word that is as descriptive as you can possible manage. Then describe a completely different aspect of the same scene with another word. Keep going until you run out of things to describe, or time runs out. Very the time (shorter) occasionally to get practice at selecting the most important components of the scene.
8. Employ Metaphors and Abstractions creatively – Obvious metaphors, abstractions, and the like are often considered to be lazy writing in literary circles. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be useful tools for deciding what to describe. Select an image from one of the usual sources, then try to mentally modify the image so that it reflects a metaphor, saying, or abstraction of your choosing from the point of view of one of the people in the scene or from the point of view of the viewer (if there isn’t anyone in the scene). Some will be much harder than others, so if it doesn’t happen, move on to another one, but give each a serious go.
9. Visual metaphors and cues – A very long time ago, I wrote an article on the subject of for Roleplaying Tips (it appeared in Issue #204 – and RPT is now up to Issue #623. So that’s at least 420 weeks ago. At 52 a year… ) Anyway, while the approach is somewhat outdated compared to what this article has presented, some of the specifics are still both relevant and valid. As was criticized at the time, the technique can be a bit much if over-used but saved for when you need something extra, can still be useful.
10. Practice with DVDs – pause, examine, close your eyes, and describe. There’s not much more to say.
11. Mental Prep – Everyone should have a quick routine that they can use to clear and focus their minds. Specific techniques will vary in effectiveness from individual to individual. Find one and use it before you start, and as many times as you need to while GMing. It will help in every aspect of the craft, including enabling the crafting of better narrative. Once you have something that works for you, learn to use it anytime you are angry or emotionally upset for some real-life real-world benefits.
12. The interpretation Of Notes – Watching a TV show – it could be reality TV or fictional, but game shows are often less effective – take notes as to what is happening. Make sure that you keep up. Stop writing and step away from your writing implement(s) during ad breaks. 24 hours later (the gap is to allow details to be forgotten, extend it if necessary), try to visualize the action from your notes. And 24 hours after that (same reason for the gap) try to insert the action into a completely different setting, modifying what happens accordingly. The first few times you try this, choose a short programme (half hour) and allow yourself to watch it immediately before re-watching it and taking the notes – then gradually wean yourself off this crutch and extend the length of the show – one hour, then 90 minutes (short movies), then full-length movies (about 2 hrs), then long movies.
13. More Hints – Finally, I want to point you to some earlier articles here at Campaign Mastery on locations & location descriptions:
    • Breaking Through Writer’s Block Pt 2: Conceptual, Specific, and Setting Blocks – the section on “Setting Blocks”.
    • The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs – the most directly-relevant of these links.
    • Location, Location, Location – How Do You Choose A Location?
    • People, Places, and Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs
    • Big Is Not Enough: Monuments and Places Of Wonder – (Updated with an additional section in the comments)
    • Vampire’s Creep and other stories: Working With Places
    • Location, Location, Location! – the Roundup and Wrap-up (for now) – many of the above were part of a Blog Carnival hosted by Campaign Mastery, and this article lists all the contributions to that Carnival. Some of the articles by other contributors are directly relevant, use these to find them.

The Keys to the Kingdom Of Literacy

The benefits to being able to turn out strong, concise narrative when you need it are so profound that every GM should invest time in bettering their skills in this area on a regular basis. This article/series – and make no mistake, it was conceived as a single (rather ambitious) article – should give you all the tools you need to start realizing those benefits in your games. The keys to the Kingdom of Literacy are yours! Do with them what you will…

Some real-world headaches have cost me a number of hours over the last couple of days, so I haven’t had time to produce the promised PDFs – yet (I had to have an emergency shopping expedition for a new TV after my old one froze solid – wouldn’t even turn on or off – and this morning, for some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t access Campaign Mastery. Everyone else could get to it, but I couldn’t.

So look for the checklist and compiled a-book in an extra, out-of-continuity post over the next 48 hours.