Image by Victoria Borodinova from Pixabay. Cropped (to make the image larger on the web-page), contrast enhanced and saturation enhanced (though the original hardly needed it) by Mike.

A slightly shorter article than usual, this time around, because my available writing time has been compromised by some medical tests ordered by my cardiologist.

I’ve had to squeeze in as much writing as possible in advance – so this article was written on Sunday, biting into my weekend to find the necessary time.

(Update, for the record: Preliminary report is “no red flags”. Full report pushed back to later January, with the promise that the Cardiologist would call me in sooner if there was anything needing urgent attention. In short, routine, and no cause for alarm.)

Okay, on with the show….

Some plots sneak up behind PCs and mug them. Before they know it, they are mired in the narrative and in it up to their eyebrows.

Other plots are more like roadblocks, standing in the middle of the road and insisting, “you shall not pass”. Anything that obviously poses a direct threat to the PCs and/or any ambitions they might hold qualifies.

But those aren’t the only approaches that you can take. If those are the only colors on your palette, I’m about to expand your world – a little.

The Falling Dominoes

The simplest way of getting the PCs into an adventure is to make it a logical consequence of an adventure that they have already had. Embedding what might at the time seem to be nothing more than a casual encounter into that early adventure, but which is actually the first part of the adventure hook to a future plotline works very well in a number of ways. For example, along the way the PCs have what appears to be a wandering monster encounter like any other, at the end of which, they find themselves in possession of a slightly ornate key that glows faintly with a magical signature when they cast Detect Magic..

A key is one of the hardest plot hooks to ignore. It’s right up there with the Cryptic Message, and the Mistaken Identity. Right away, it demands an answer to the questions “what does it unlock?” and “how did it come to be where we found it?” and “What is the magic?”

These questions will gnaw away at the players, especially since it’s far more the expected thing that they will be resolved quickly. But, instead of doing that, the GM teases the players with hints:

• the PCs encounter a work of some sort by one of the greatest mages ever to have lived, someone who never cast a standard, by-the-book, spell – and recognize the signature as matching that of the key.
• a professional pickpocket attempts to steal the key, only to be caught red-handed by the PCs. Taken into custody and found guilty at what passes for a trial in these parts, he is offered a deal but refuses to take it, preferring to lose both his hands than give up the name of his buyer.
• a collector of unique magical works intercepts the PCs to say that rumor has it that they have a curious key; he offers 2,000gp for it, and (if rebuffed) will increase his offer to 5,000, and not a penny more…

Sure, the PCs might have taken that last offer at one point – but all of the prior encounters have built up the significance and potential value of the key in their minds. They would be pretty sure that 2,000 was very much a low-ball offer, and the speed with which it was increased to 5,000 pretty much confirms it. Barely without noticing it, they have swallowed the hook of the adventure.

And if they do decide to sell? A day later, the purchaser is found, incinerated by a red dragon, the key still in his possession. It could just be a coincidence, but…

The Multi-vector Adventure

A fourth approach is to lay out multiple plot hooks at the start of an adventure and let the players select the one that appeals to them – not knowing that all these plot hooks lead to the same adventure from different directions. If you’re subtle about it, and don’t give the game away, you can get away with this for years.

But there is a problem: while it preserves the appearance of player independence, it is in reality a magician’s force. It doesn’t actually matter which the PCs choose, they remain on the GM’s railroad tracks.

This can be acceptable if there are bail-out points built into the adventure, points at which the PCs can depart from those tracks if they wish; choosing not to do so is voluntarily committing to the next part of the adventure. But it shouldn’t be like that all the time; save this technique for critical parts of the plot that the players have already signaled an interest in.

There is also the problem that the players might choose answer (d), none-of-the-above, and refuse to take any of the GM’s plot hooks, preferring to do something else instead. The need to have some sort of adventure take place (you CAN’T let the campaign get boring) often leads GMs to complicate their world with lots of half-baked and off-the-top-of-their-head creations and plotlines that rapidly spiral out of control. This can even be a campaign-killer.

If there is any risk whatsoever of the PCs refusing the plot hooks, you should always have at least the outlines of an adventure that they can stumble into the middle of, just by being at place X. Even if the whole adventure has to improvised on the basis of those notes, that’s still better than having total freedom with which to mess things up.

To Every Vector, A Tale

But here’s an alternative that might have appeal: Never introduce an NPC or a location without having a future plotline associated with them. Whenever the PCs are in the vicinity, that plotline can be activated. This can be minor, recurring, persistent little subplots, such as the Mayor who wants one of the PCs to marry his incredibly-ugly daughter, or the Official who has chosen one of the PCs to become his successor (a position the PC has no interest in accepting). It might be a legitimate romantic interest, but one with many obstacles standing between the PC and wedded bliss.

So, the PCs enter a tavern to seek shelter for the night. There are three people in the tavern already – a drunken and somewhat depressed dwarf, a human who does his best to hide his face and keep to the shadows, and a local businessman who is pleading with the bartender, “But you must know someone, John?”

Each of these transients represents an entirely different plotline, and if the PCs choose, they can pick up on any of them – or brush it off. Plus, there’s a plotline for the Barman, and a plotline for if they don’t pick any of these and are simply present at the Inn when the location becomes involved in a plotline.

Make sure that each of these will require the full attention of the entire party, and make them choose. Insist that these choices be discussed in character; any Metagaming will result in a fine of XP. And sit back and wait for the PCs to come to the adventure.

If all the adventures have been prepared to the same extent, it’s no skin off the GM’s nose which one the players choose. That extent: enough to get through the first day’s play and some notes on what the rest of the adventure will look like.

And note that you don’t have to pull the trigger on a plotline just because the PCs are interacting with a person or place; you can hold back until the time is right, or you need something in a hurry, if the NPC or location is a recurring element. You can even have a secondary plotline designed to do nothing more than make make these campaign elements recurring ones.

• A place that gives a fair price for their booty.
• A place to stay that is comfortable and reasonably secure in a city that they will have to visit regularly.
• An NPC who assists the party for their mutual benefit.
• A bad penny.
• An NPC who shows up regularly to humiliate the party in some fashion – a darts champion, or poker player, or whatever.

The list is (almost) endless.

You can even have plot hooks that dangle repeatedly but which will not amount to anything – yet – because you haven’t figured out what the plot will be. Someone who seems to be following the party every now and then. The same suspiciously-similar item for sale in several town fairs and marketplaces. The same distinctively-colored bird that gets seen overhead a few hours before a wilderness encounter. Things that you can have fun teasing the players with, that will have to eventually have some sort of payoff – but, for now, are just bits of random life within the campaign.

This tiny image cannot adequately express the beauty of the original image – so click the artist’s link and see for yourself! Image by Sarah Richter from Pixabay

Many Streams, One River

Some adventures can be considered an inevitable consequence of success, which is to say they will automatically be triggered by the GM when (a) the PCs achieve a particular standard of success, and (b) have time on their hands. Once both conditions are met, the adventure will come to them, whether they like it or not.

It doesn’t matter what adventures the party have had to get to this point; the new adventure occurs simply because the players have done something. Because of this, I refer to adventures with this structure as “Many Streams, One River” plots.

There can be a number of these, but they should always be less than the number of “streams” within the campaign, by some margin. Otherwise, these “master plots” can become the dominant factor within the campaign.

Image by Janos Perian from Pixabay. Janos only has 25 images uploaded at the moment, but if they are all of this quality, this probably won’t be the last time I put one on display. Cropped to show off more of the 3D image.

The Heroic Advantage

Some genres have a natural advantage, in that the PCs know that they are playing Heroes and have an obligation built into their construction and backgrounds to deal with whatever menaces and villains present themselves.

It doesn’t matter what the plot hook is, the PCs are obligated to swallow it.

This makes life very easy for the GM in some respects, but it also makes it much harder in others. There are singular dangers to the campaign that must be dealt with – when invoking The Heroic Advantage.

“Not What We Signed Up For”

It’s absolutely essential that the GM be explicit about the Heroic expectations that he is placing before the PCs in advance.

“You will be playing an Elite Force assembled by the Elven Council to deal with an ominous threat that some Elves have foreseen in visions. You are the 12th such elite force to have been created; on previous occasions, the time of danger came and went without incident. Afterward, some of the previous groups disassembled and went their individual ways; some remained together and dealt with such lesser threats as presented themselves, in the process gaining fame and occasionally fortune.” is unequivocal in its demands, and expects characters to be designed to match.

It’s necessary for the GM to follow through on these expectations, too. If you were gathering such an elite force, you would give them the best training, the best equipment, and so on, that you possibly could. The training is theirs forever, they might or might not have to give the equipment back. Those summoned to form such a group might be one-part prophetic guidance, one part logic, one part politics, and one part sheer talent in the choice. “We have to have a Dwarf, they will only get in the way, otherwise”. “[X] is the best in a generation at [Y], she must be included!” “They must have a Cleric for spiritual guidance, and the only one that the other faiths will listen to is a cleric of [Deity!]” – and so on.

If you have the time, look back over the background to the Zener Gate campaign, which I developed right here in front of everyone (see “Improvising A Campaign: introducing the Zener Gate campaign!“, especially the set-off section in purple at the end of the article, and you will see that PC involvement and engagement is very much demanded and defined by the campaign concept). Right now, it’s reached the point where the PCs have limited communications, access to reference materials through those communications, can carry a reasonable amount of gear, have obtained equipment that will eventually let them gain partial control over their jumps (once they figure out exactly how to work it), have encountered a different Zener Gate team from an alternate timeline that are doing their best to screw everything up (from the PCs point of view), and found that there’s even more complexity to time travel than they thought there was!

It can often be helpful to outline these “menu options” in advance, “character hooks” to guide the construction of the party, first come, first served. “I want to play a tough guy in the front lines of the fight, so I’ll take the Paladin slot from the class list. I like the idea of being a member of an unusual race, so I’ll take that slot on the racial list. An Orcish Paladin might be fun. Finally, why is he part of the team? Being ‘the best of his generation’ could be fun, but there’s room for a lot more roleplay being ‘chosen for political reasons but will come to earn the party’s respect’.

With those choices made, the GM dutifully crosses them off his list of acceptable choices – if necessary, adding them to the list and then crossing them off!

The key with such things is always to have at least one more option (and preferably more) than the number of players, so that each player always has a choice. Whatever’s left at the end is reserved for new PCs if someone else joins, or for NPCs – or can simply be left out to create a ‘gap’ that the PCs will have to fill with sweat and expertise.

In a simplified form, this is how I filled the roster for my Zenith-3 campaign back in 1998. That campaign, with most of those same characters, remains in operation to this day, more than 21 years later. 10-20 years from now, it will be complete – if we all last that long (I’ll be 76 at the top end of that range, and my oldest player, in his eighties!)



Image by silviarita from Pixabay. I almost used this as the main illustration for this article. You can probably see why. Cropped and blur + sharpness applied selectively to focus attention on the image subject.

The Perils Of Similarity

One of the big dangers of such ease is that the GM gets lazy. My players often call it “enemy of the week” syndrome. This is one respect in which the heroic advantage can become a millstone around the GM’s neck if he isn’t careful.

Just because the players “have” to take the bait each time, doesn’t mean that the bait shouldn’t have different flavors and textures. This requirement actually makes it harder to ‘get the characters into an adventure’ than it often is without the Heroic Advantage.

Nor can you assume that the players will ‘take the bait’ in exactly the manner that you have anticipated. They may sniff it, lick it, nibble at it, come at it from an unexpected direction, check it for traps, add seasoning…. you get the point.

Again, laziness is the enemy; in any regular campaign, where the PCs weren’t obligated to swallow the hook, the GM knows that he has to sell the players on his prepared plotlines, has to engage their interest and keep it riveted upon the story. The one unacceptable choice must be to say “Who Cares” or “Nothing we can do” and go home. You have to work just as hard at this with the Heroic Advantage in play, because even then, these options are not off the table.

The Diorama Problem, or, Pulp Without Juice

Another problem is that the plots can all start to look alike to the players. This is another aspect of GM laziness stemming from using the Heroic Advantage as a crutch to your creativity.

I have two different names for this phenomenon, as you can see – which usually means that I haven’t yet found a universal code for the problem.

No matter what your campaign genre, no matter what your campaign concept is, you need variety in the adventures. You need to continually being players to the adventures in ways that they were not expecting, but in ways that maintain the credibility and integrity of the campaign and its structure. Which includes the odd occasion when a completely straightforward adventure is exactly what it seems to be!

The best plot twists are the ones that the players won’t see coming. I have to admit that I overuse plot twists, to the point where players start looking for them and anticipating what they might be (with a roughly one in six rate of being correct).

One way of differentiating between adventures is to place them in different contexts, and the easiest way of doing so is to focus on the personal lives of the PCs on a reasonably regular basis. If those “personal stories” are always evolving, it doesn’t matter quite so much that the rest of the campaign isn’t evolving as quickly. And it means that those stories that DO contain a significant milestone in either the primary adventuring lives of the PCs, or in the campaign Background, are all the more attention-getting when they happen.

And that’s what we want.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay. This image is a cliche when it comes to symbolizing beginnings, so I almost didn’t use it – but then remembered that there’s a REASON it’s a cliche. And it seems to fit this section of the article. Cropped to enhance the landscape aspect and focus attention on the sunrise.

Epic Vs Gritty Vs Heroic Fantasy

All this is true regardless of campaign genre. It’s as applicable to Fantasy Campaigns (even of the Murder Hobo variety) as it is to Pulp or to Superheroes.

But it’s not universally true of all campaign styles.

That’s one reason why it’s important to define the style or tone of a campaign, make sure that the players know it, and appraise everything else in light of the particular style you’ve chosen.

There are three campaign styles that are sometimes misunderstood or confused, and the differences are critical to the plot approach that you’re using.

EPIC means larger than life. The PCs will become Significant Individuals, perhaps even rivals to the Deities or more, no matter how lowly their beginnings. The adventures they have will contain repercussions that change the entire world around them, in part defining the context for their next adventure.

GRITTY means local adventures, with no guarantee that the PCs will ever be anyone important, no matter how skilled or advanced they become within their professions; there will always be someone better. I some ways, these are easier adventures to write, in others they are much harder – unless you reduce your adherence to verisimilitude to in-name-only along the way. That’s because “Gritty” as a concept is fundamentally at odds with character advancement on the D&D scale. Somewhere along that advancement track is a point at which you have to say, “no more” and end the campaign – though perhaps not the campaign world, new PCs may be just around the corner! Generally, the line of departure is specified by what Wizards and Clerics can do. My experience (which is out of date, I admit) is that multiple fifth-level spells tend to be close to the limit, but that’s just a personal opinion.

HEROIC tries to plant a foot in both camps at the same time. It tends to lack the sweeping change possible guaranteed in an epic campaign, but can be far greater in scope than a Gritty campaign – thereby avoiding the problems associated with being “street level” when you can do too much to impact that street.

Purely as an aside, I think that maybe D&D / Pathfinder made a mistake in maintaining a daily spell allocation. A lot of the problems would be a lot smaller if 4th-6th level spells were weekly, 7th and 8th level spell allocations were per week, and 9th (and above) spells were monthly or even yearly affairs. If you wanted to, you could make these changes progressive and bake them into the spell slots acquired at each level.

In the old days, Mages had to get a lot better at spellcasting because they were useless at anything else. These days, there’s no such excuse – they may be weaker in martial terms than their peers, but it’s a simple matter to enhance their effectiveness in that sphere, and can even make the system more credible.

Food for thought, hmm?

Image by engin akyurt from Pixabay. Perhaps I should have chosen a different metaphore – one with more illustrrative options. As it was, I would have been lost without Engin’s offering.

A Straight Thread With The Occasional Knot

As a general rule, I think of plotlines as extending a straight thread from beginning of campaign to end – with the occasional knot or temporary sidestep that has nothing to do with that straight thread. Except that the “straight line” runs directly through an N-dimensional maze, that’s the essential structure of my Zener Gate campaign.

More complex visions are possible. You may have several straight threads that lead from beginning to end, but that are loose and disconnected from each other for most of their journey, only coming together in the buildup to a big finish. That’s the model for my superhero campaign.

If I look at the Pulp campaign that I co-GM, still another pattern emerges – loops and swirls and spirals instead of a straight line, while all the while each PC has a personal story running that is far more of a straight line.

If I look back over recent adventures, they have been set in 1937, 1938, 1934, 1936, 1935, 1936, and 1936 again – at least in terms of world history as it impacts the storyline. The last “defining moment” in terms of pinning down the internal date was that the Japanese invasion of China has not yet started but Hitler’s command of Germany is well-established. The next one planned is the Berlin Olympics, which haven’t happened yet, in-game. For background, we draw on whatever year is relevant to the plotline, and stitch them together into a coherent world history more in the breach than in the observance. This stuff stays in the background – because the moment that war is declared, certain PCs would be called to duty, and the campaign irrevocably changed. So instead, we will cycle back-and-forth endlessly between 1930 and 1938 or -9 – until we, or the players, are ready for the campaign to end. And yes, when that happens, we do have an “end of an era” adventure in our back pockets.

Image by Peggy Choucair from Pixabay

Is Internal Adventure Structure Relevant?

The answer to this question is both “Yes” and “No”.

“Yes” in that variety of adventure tones are required in any campaign, and that the tone of the introductory hook should either match, or progress to, the tone of the main adventure.

Most GMs and writers know this instinctively; you can have a lull in the action before returning to the tone established, or you can have a rising intensity throughout (with the occasional quiet moment as punctuation), but having an adventure with less energy and vibrancy than it started with creates an anticlimax.

“No” in that these are the only respects in which the internal structure of an adventure makes any real difference to the structure of the “box” that surrounds it and connects it to other adventures and spans in between to form a campaign.

How you link adventures to form a campaign is a difficult art to learn without experience and experimentation. Ultimately, the purpose of these structures are to deliver the PCs (and hence the players) to the “front door” (or the “open window”) of the adventure in the correct mindset to engage in the internal content. Whatever methods you choose and master has to satisfy that requirement. Anything else is window-dressing – nice to have but not necessarily essential. Utilizing a variety of approaches (and mastering them) is just as important as matching the ideal approach for any given adventure. What will you use as bait next next time?