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So the month is over, ending with the Bang of New Year’s Fireworks, and the Blog Carnival has migrated to the care and attention Nils over at Enderra – best of luck, Nils!

Every time you propose a topic for one of these, you have to worry that it will not inspire others; that it may be too narrow, or too broad, or simply not resonate with your fellow bloggers. Until the entries actually start rolling in, you never really know how well your theme will actually be received.

In general, I found that “With A Twist” was a much harder topic than I was expecting it to be, and I think others discovered the same thing. at least to begin with. Once a necessary shift in mindset occurred, however, the floodgates opened; what was intended to be two entries from Campaign Mastery became three, then four, then five, until most of the month was spent poking into different aspects of the theme. At the same time, after a slightly slow start, submissions from other participants began to trickle in, gradually accumulating to a far more impressive total than I expected at the beginning.

My final obligation as the outgoing host is to compile a roundup of the submissions, and there were some interesting and diverse ones. Thanks to everyone who participated! I’ve classified these under some general headings to help make it easier to find what you may be looking for. The Order of categories might seem strange, but there’s method in my madness…

Surprise [Theory & Mechanics]

  • Campaign Mastery: The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You: I kicked off the carnival in advance with this item. Past practice has been to create an anchor post to which participants can link, and to use it to discuss and explore the theme in terms of what participants could write about, but because I was beginning to discover how tricky the topic could be, I was having trouble coming up with ideas, and because this was appearing prior to the actual commencement of the month, I decided to lead off with an actual article, looking at what people actually experienced when surprised and how various game mechanics could be tweaked to more accurately represent the phenomenon.

Plot Twist Theory

  • Campaign Mastery: Pretzel Thinking – 11 types of Plot Twist for RPGs, Part 1: The first “Official” post of the Carnival. Originally, this was intended to be a straightforward article about how to use the different types of Plot Twist. It came as something of a shock to discover that for one reason or another, none of the established literary plot twist techniques would actually work in an RPG; I had to devise entirely new ones (based on experience in actually using plot twists in my adventures, of course). The resulting article quickly grew too large to be housed in a single piece.

    One minor point: Some people seem under the impression that the three twist types examined in detail in Part One were the ones that I considered the most important. Not so – they just happened to be the first three that I listed!

  • John, of Red Dice Diaries then offered With A Twist, in which he expands on the thoughts contained in “Pretzel Thinking”, anticipating the second part of my article with some thoughts of his own. Unfortunately, when I visited the page just now, he was having some layout problems; hopefully they will be fixed by the time you look in on what he’s had to say, it’s worth reading.
  • Back at Campaign Mastery, I followed up part 1 of the two-part article on plot twists with Let’s Twist Again – Eleven types of Plot Twist for RPGs pt 2, in which I discuss the remaining types of plot twist that I came up with in response to the problem identified in Part one of the article.
  • The Gaming Blog Of General Tangent, in RPG Blog Carnival December 2014 – With A Twist, discusses plot twists in general, and has some sage advice about when to use them and avoiding over-use. A plot twist should be unpredictable; it’s self-defeating if the players are expecting one in every adventure! I think it would be possible to actually craft the adventure The General describes at the end of his article by having the glitch be only partial, so that the adventure still qualifies for the label on “the tin” – but the path takes some very strange byways. You have to rescue the princess from the dragon so that you get the codes to shut down the tractor beams on the death star before you can walk the dog for the vampire heiress (avoiding the ninja assassins) because only its’ super-delicate sense of smell can discover the suburban drugs lab in which Professor Heinous is building the Negabomb which threatens to wipe out the Dwarfish Kingdom before George Washington can cross the Delaware… none of which will make any sense until you read his contribution to the Carnival to obtain some context!
  • I have another entry within this round-up category from Campaign Mastery. There’s Something About Christmas looks at why some plots and plot twists are more effective, or carry extra impact or baggage, at this particular time of year, providing twists on the usual seasonal plotline.

Surprises & The Unexpected

  • Campaign Mastery‘s submission in this category is Gifts In Gaming: Overlooked Seasonal Plot Hooks, which looks at the plot hook potential of the unexpected gift. As a Christmas bonus, I offer a number of idea seeds for memorable characters with opinions on the subject.
  • In a similar vein, Jesse C Cohoon of Fantasy Roleplaying Planes offers, as one of two submissions to the carnival, Good Unexpected Events… And Twists to them to Make them Not as Good, in which he lists six pleasant surprises and multiple ways to use them to cause trouble for your PCs. The architecture of his article reveals a very organized approach to examining the subject which is worth noting and studying in itself; it might initially be a little off-putting as it appears to be a solid block of text, but the formatting of nested lists is a tricky art to master, and the format has the benefit of compressing the content into as small a space as possible, making it easier to see the bigger picture that is inferred by that organized approach. As an experienced blogger, I can tell you that the formatting of his list would have been very tricky, and not something I would have liked to attempt! As might be expected, some of the surprises and twists are familiar, almost clichéd, but some are quite novel; this is the sort of article that you can delve into time after time and extract something new each time. Good Stuff, worth digging for!
  • Jesse’s second article via Fantasy Roleplaying Planes, 12 Reasons Why Someone Might Not Be Dead is more straightforward in format, but was much harder for me to categorize – it could have fitted into three or four separate sections within the roundup! What takes this entry beyond the boundaries of the title are the hints at the consequences of the revelation that rumors of the death were greatly exaggerated. I was reminded on first reading it of the scene in The Hobbit when Bilbo returns from his adventures to find that he has been declared dead, and much of his property given away to relatives, with an auction underway to dispose of the remainder – and how some of his relatives, who lost property they had begun to think of as their own, never did admit acceptance that he wasn’t actually dead. More usefully, perhaps, inspired by this memory, on re-reading the article for this roundup, I thought of an additional entry for the article that’s worth sharing: The person really is dead, and the returnee is actually a fake, assuming the dead person’s identity through convincing subterfuge for their own nefarious purposes…

Tricks and Trickery

  • Creative Mountain Games, offers an entry in their regular column, The Friday Grab Bag, Cursed Sword, an Alternate Reality Artifact, which offers a highly-entertaining tale from the trenches about a magic item that is a play on the old tale of “Be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.” I’d have loved to hear a bit more about the challenges, trials, and tribulations that had to be overcome in the PC’s efforts to undo the changes that had swept over their lives, but even without that, this is a fun read and a great contribution to the Carnival about a type of long-established plot twist (the Twisted Wish) that no-one else mentions.
  • Twisty Turny is another story from real life, this time from James Introcaso at his World Builder Blog, dealing with the introduction of Epic Tier adventures in his D&D 4th Ed Eberron campaign. Along the way, James offers some invaluable advice on keeping your plot twists under wraps until the time is right, and how to make your plot twist yield a strong pay-off. Definitely worth reading once just to enjoy the situation vicariously, and then again to dredge for insights.

Chance

  • Campaign Mastery has an entry in this category, too: Pieces of Ordinary Randomness: Random Techniques Of Chance, which is aimed at beginners and experienced GMs (and players) alike. In three distinct parts, it first offers some basic and advanced properties of die rolls and their results, then looks at how to randomly generate a whole bunch of useful information randomly, and wraps up by looking at the usefulness of each of the different die types that I was aware of (and a couple that were new to me!) I spent almost as long generating the tables and graphs as I did writing the article! I had to excerpt what was going to be a featured sub-section on the mechanics of generating encounter tables because it became too dominant; that is scheduled to appear a week after the publication of this roundup, the soonest I could squeeze it into the schedule.

Game Aids

  • Phil Nicholls, of Tales Of A GM, has offered Reading Around the RPG Blog Carnival: Plot Twist Cards, a detailed review of Paizo’s Plot Twist Cards, which sound like an interesting product that can either be used to take some of the work out of game prep or as play proceeds for those adept at Seat-of-the-pants GMing, aided by the fact that if one result doesn’t seem to fit or to be feasible, you can always draw another card.
  • Fitz, of Moebius Adventures. a long-time supporter of Campaign Mastery and the RPG Community in general, provided perhaps the most surprising entry into the Carnival, by taking the theme, “With A Twist”, and associating it with Dance In RPG via Chubby Checker’s famous song. Read Let’s Do the Twist if you don’t believe me! Or better yet, go and read it because there are lot of great ideas lurking within this light-hearted submission.

Twist Examples

  • From Michael Christensen of Tiny Gork, RPG Blog Carnival Dec 2014 – Twists contains a stroll down memory lane as he recalls the most memorable plot twists of his past games, offering ideas and inspiration a-plenty. A great submission from a Blog Carnival newcomer!
  • At RPG Alchemy, Samuel Van Der Wall has provided a list of 10 Sci-Fi Plot Twists from famous movies and TV shows. Most of these can be adapted to other genres without difficulty if Sci-Fi isn’t your game. There’s also some good general advice in the closing paragraph. I offer an eleventh, original, twist in the comments, inspired by the changing relationships with the Soviet Union during World War II.
  • Finally, my former partner here at Campaign Mastery and longer-term ally & friend, Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips, brings the “Official” blog entries full circle, with Left Hooks: 24 Plot Twist Ideas & Design Patterns, in which he not only looks at 24 Plot Twists, he reverse-engineers them looking for patterns – and finds them. Full of ideas and useful advice, this makes a great entry to close out the Blog Carnival!

Seventeen submissions, all adopting a different slant on the theme, and all worth your time. Sounds like a success to me!


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