For some reason, a lot of movie prologs involve people running. Running from something?
Running to something?
Talking while they’re running?
Sometimes, to change things up, they’ll be running from a vehicle; sometimes both parties will be in vehicles.
Running suggests urgency, and urgency suggests excitement. That might be all that a prolog is there to provide, or it might be icing on the cake.
Image by bdcbethebest from Pixabay

I’ve been re-reading my Knights Of The Dinner Table collection lately, and eventually reached the issue in which Brian discusses just how bad it can be for the players when the GM starts his adventure by putting a prophecy in the heads of the players.

What happens, according to this character in the comics, is that the mere fact of a known prophecy makes players tend to read everything that happens into that prophecy, whether it fits or not. In the process, they are prone to making unwarranted assumptions and speculative interpretations that they treat as fact.

These sources of error leech into the decision-making process where they proceed to warp the judgment of the players, and through them, the PCs.

A prophecy, he believes, is an open hunting license for the GM to let the players screw with themselves.

In the plot, this point is proven right when the Monks that are mentioned in the prophecy turn out to be monkeys who can throw sling-stones with terrifying accuracy and more than a little force. This is a problem because the PCs planned to rest and recuperate and buy food and equipment at the monastery in which they expected to find the Monks.

In “I know what’s happening!” – Confirmation Bias and RPGs, I wrote of the phenomenon of confirmation bias and how it could blind people to even directly-contradictory sources of information. This is quite obviously just another example of that blinkered myopia.

But it got me to thinking: What are all the things that can be stuffed into something called a prolog, i.e. some sort of prelude to the actual adventure, and what is the significance and impact of doing so? In other words, what are all the different ways of starting an adventure? I compiled an extensive list – but we’ll get to that in part 2.

Definition

Perhaps we should start by defining and understanding our terminology. What exactly is a prolog (or, as everywhere but the US usually spells it, Prologue)?

According to the Collins Concise English Dictionary, a prolog is (1) The prefatory lines introducing a play or speech; (2) a preliminary act or event; (3) (in early opera) an introductory scene in which a narrator summarizes the main action of the work; or (4) (in early opera) a brief independent play preceding the opera, especially one in honor of a patron.

Gee, that doesn’t seem all that helpful. In modern fiction, modern film-making, and in RPGs prologs have their place within the narrative structure of a story and none of those seems to be a perfect fit – while, at the same time, all but the first seem at least partially descriptive, but inconclusively so. It’s as though the dictionary were circling around a functional definition – singular – while never quite getting to the point.

Since I wasn’t that impressed with the dictionary meaning’s adequacy, or lack thereof, I put my thinking cap on and came up with my own, far more functional definition:

A foundation (usually provided in a prefatory manner) to establish (1) facts, situations, relationships, or any other context for the events within the main action, or (2) the interpretation or meaning of such events, either literal or symbolic (in which the term ‘symbolic’ includes metaphoric and all similar forms of narrative context).

That’s still a lot to take in, so let’s break it down a little.

A foundation
The prolog is what the main story is built on or around.

(usually provided in a prefatory manner)
Prologs are usually at the start of an adventure but don’t have to be; they can occur anywhere that they have good reason to exist within the narrative.

to establish
This term is especially important because it describes the purpose of prologs within their modern usage – they are to provide the readers (fiction), viewers (movies, plays, etc), or players (rpgs) with information that can’t be justifiably channeled through their characters.

(1) facts, relationships, or any other context for the events within the main action,
This information is for one of two purposes – either to frame a context within which the experiences of the protagonists (fiction, movies, etc) or the PCs should be interpreted;

or (2) the interpretation or meaning of such events, either literal or symbolic.
…or, to reveal hidden meanings or relevance to those events that should be perceived to get maximum entertainment value from the story, but of which the characters participating may not be aware – until it’s too late.

The information to be relayed is one of the major variables to impact on the nature of the prolog. It can be anything from background information that the characters concerned cannot possibly know, to information that their characters can be assumed to have but that the players need to be made aware of so that their choices of action can be appropriately influenced by this knowledge. It might introduce a key character, or reveal a relationship (or advance one if one has been pre-established); it might do nothing more than place the protagonists/PCs within their ‘ordinary’ lives prior to the impact on those lives of extraordinary events.

In other words, in an RPG context, a prolog is a way of giving the players information that their characters either don’t have or that the characters do have and that the players don’t. It’s about creating a more fully-realized world-view of the in-game campaign environment to enhance the adventure in some way.

The manner and nature of that enhancement is a second major variable. It could be anything from providing a philosophic foundation, or relaying a popular moral standpoint, or raising a theological issue, or simply letting characters experience their day-to-day lives before the rug gets pulled out from underfoot. It could offer a counterpoint to the adventure, or an undercurrent to it, or provide an ironic twist, or foreshadow the future in some fashion, either explicitly, implicitly, symbolically, or metaphorically, or in any other way that the GM can think of.

A prolog which contains something scary doing whatever it is that makes them scary can make the scary thing MORE scary than it would otherwise be.
Paradoxically, NOT having a prolog when one would clearly be beneficial to this function can also have the same effect.
Image by Andrea Wierer from Pixabay

Necessity & Function

Some writer’s sites suggest writing a prolog when you are confronted with Writer’s Block and then doing everything you can to eliminate it in revision. Certainly, if you’re the type of writer who redoes everything umpteen times as your form of revision, that might be an answer. But it’s not a philosophy that I agree with.

Another site that I found while researching this article suggested (1) removing any prolog to determine whether or not it was strictly necessary to the story, and then (2) labeling it Chapter 1 to see if it really had to be a prolog. That’s excellent advice if you’re writing a novel – up to 2/3 of readers admit to skipping prologs, after all – but it’s not that helpful when it comes to RPGs. Since we can’t predict what PCs will do, we can’t predict what turns the story will take, and therefore have no way of knowing what will be important to the story and what won’t.

That means that we need a different yardstick to determine the necessity of any prolog that we attach to one of our adventures. Fortunately, the interactivity of RPGs means that it is much harder (but far from impossible) to overuse some literary devices for the conveying of information, such as delivering it through the mouths of NPCs. That means that we can err on the side of exclusion – if there is any doubt that the prolog is necessary, it probably isn’t.

So what makes a prolog necessary?

• Action taking place in an unusual location
• Action taking place in a time remote to that of the main action
• Establishing of a mood or tone that might not be obvious from the first scene of the adventure
• Providing information that the PCs have but their players don’t, that will have to be taken into account during the making of decisions
• Getting players’ heads’ “in the game”
• Placing an adventure into a particular context
• Introducing or enhancing a character that the players either don’t know or don’t know well enough.
• Providing a different perspective that is essential for the in-story decisions of a character to be believable and not random.
• Enhancing the drama of the adventure’s climax by providing a preview shorn of all context.
• Making past events that have been influential on an important NPC more vibrant by presenting them in a time-shifted “now”
• Delivering information that absolutely cannot be provided in any other way.

It is the last of these that is the key to all of them – if there is any other way of delivering the information to the players / PCs except a narrative info-dump, it is probably preferable to use that method and eliminate the prolog.

Necessity, in other words, is a combination of the function that the prolog is to serve within the story and the absence of acceptable alternative delivery methods.

Traits of Prologs

Most prologs consist of narrative delivered by the GM. If there’s a way you can make them interactive with one or more PCs, much of the advice offered by this article needs either to be modified or even disregarded completely, because the context of the prolog will be entirely different. I’ll get to the question of interactivity a little later.

But if there is little-or-no interactivity, it’s all-eyes and all-ears on the GM. And that brings me to the number-one point uncovered by my research, stated time and time again (in different ways, admittedly): Prologs Can Be Boring. Avoiding this problem is critical, for obvious reasons, and the best way of doing so is to make sure that your prolog follows the traits outlined below. Sure, you can break these rules if you know what you’re doing – but even then, think twice about doing so. It’s easy to over-rate your own cleverness.

• Prologs are Short – I know I’ve talked about this already, but it’s so important that it bears repeating, especially since one of the key metrics (fraction of chapter length) is not something that’s available to RPG Adventure writers. Instead, estimate the time required to “play through” the prolog – if it’s more than half-an-hour with PC interaction, the prolog is too long, and if it’s more than ten minutes without such interaction, it’s definitely too long.
• Style and tone should match that of the main plot – unless the contrast is the purpose of the prolog, of course. Note that this doesn’t mean that the opening scenes or even the opening Act have to match the main adventure in tone – it’s an entirely adequate structure to have:
  • A prolog establishing the tone of the main plot
  • An opening act that is completely different in tone and all about how the characters reach the point of experiencing the tone established in the prolog
  • A rest-of-the-adventure that matches the prolog in tone.

  It’s probably not going too far to claim that establishing the dominant tone in the prolog frees the GM from the responsibility of doing so in the first Act.

• Limit the background information to what can be contained within 1/20th of the entirety, by page count, assuming both main text and prolog are written in your usual style. If there is any doubt about that consistency, use a ratio of 1/25th. So, if your adventure is 50 pages long, you can’t afford more than 2 1/2 pages of background at best, 2 pages if there is any danger of that information being more compressed. And if you don’t think that danger exists, use the shorter limit anyway and leave the extra half page as margin. Similarly, if your adventure is 5 pages long, you have a limit of 1/4 of a page for background, falling to 20% if in a different style.
• A prolog must contain a hook to get the players interested, preferably near the start. Note that this does not avoid the necessity of presenting a hook in the opening scenes of the Adventure.

Flirtations with ambiguity can also make for effective prologs. This image shows a clearly dangerous man – but will he be an ally or an enemy?
Posing that question, even without explicitly stating it, can be all you need for an effective prolog.
Image by Vitabello from Pixabay

Prolog vs Preface, Foreword, and Introduction

A lot of people confuse these, because they are all found at the start of a written work. I doubt that this is true of any Campaign Mastery readers, but why take chances?

A Preface is a section of text written from the point of view of the author, to explain the origins, development, legacy, or aims of a story, and often acknowledges contributions by others. Prefaces are more common in non-fiction but are often found in fiction as well. If the GM talks to the players about the development of the adventure, or where he got the idea from, that’s the RPG equivalent of a Preface.

A forward is written by a critic, subject matter expert, or other public figure, who is NOT the author, and usually connects the themes or content to their own experiences, especially their experiences and reactions when reading this work (or some other work by the same author). It’s reasonable to say that if a player offers an opinion or suggestion back in response to the GM’s “Preface”, they are supplying a “Forward” to the day’s play.

An introduction is also written from the point of view of the author and provides additional information to help the reader understand the subject and/or historical or publishing context of the work. Again, if the GM induces a conversation about a particular subject by mentioning it in his preface while having the explicit and slightly duplicitous intent of using that conversation as a vehicle for ensuring that players know information that will be relevant to the adventure, that is an Introduction. This differs from a Prolog, which could be used to convey that information ex-cathedra, in that it (1) takes place at the player-GM level and not an in-game level, i.e. third person and not first-person; and (2) by their nature, conversations are interactive.

Prologs exist to do a job, and if the author is aware of what one can do and what one can’t – or shouldn’t – do, they can utilize them effectively and efficiently.

Miscellaneous Final Thoughts

And that’s where this article should have ended, but my research turned up various additional snippets and advice and factoids that I thought would be of too great a value to leave them out. These are the leftover bits that didn’t fit into the prior discussions – and that makes this section an epilogue, a literary construct that is the polar opposite of a prolog, but that serves exactly the same purpose.

• The best time to write a prolog is after you’ve finished writing the main narrative and find that you have essential information left over – but not so much such information that you can turn it into an entirely separate novel or adventure.
   
• If you absolutely must have a prolog, make sure to use it to generate excitement and interest in the main plot. This is even more important than using it to generate excitement and interest in the prolog, though that should be a secondary objective. Prologs should never put the readers/players to sleep.
   
• The second-best time to write a prolog with the intent of throwing it away is before you start writing anything else. If you adopt this approach, you must identify the blocks of information contained within the prolog as you write it, then actively seek to incorporate delivery systems for those revelations within the main text, crossing out the now-redundant content from the prolog as they do so. Note that it is extremely unsatisfying to most players to have an NPC written in for no other purpose than delivering certain information and for them to be immediately written out after they’ve delivered it. Find a better solution.

  For example, you could write the character out before they deliver the critical information: NPC shows up, badly wounded; before the PCs can make a friend-or-foe assessment, he croaks out the words “must warn… must warn…” and then dies. Searching the body for clues to this mysterious warning, they find a crystal with the key information embedded within it; they have to adapt a scanning electron microscope into a crystal reader, but if they are clever enough to do so, they can retrieve the research that sent this stranger to sound a warning and that got him killed. – Notice that this requires the PCs to do the work, rather than handing them the answers on a silver platter. Of course, most fantasy campaigns don’t have scanning electron microscopes and gadgeteers to fiddle with them; you will need some equivalent data retrieval mechanism.

  Alternatively, you could make the assumption that from the time he delivers his background-data info-dump, the character will stick around to assist the PCs, and model the antagonists accordingly.

  Or you could arrange things so that the PCs send the NPC on a mission, effectively having them write him out for you – though players are contrary creatures and might choose some alternative course of action, so this isn’t all that reliable a choice to make.
   

• Just because it gives players/characters/readers information that they don’t have, that doesn’t make a prolog necessary; there must be at least one pathway through the story/adventure of reasonable probability that defines that information as essential. In other words, the necessity of a prolog derives directly from the necessity of the information being conveyed.
   
• But, if a prologue gives a player information that they otherwise wouldn’t have, you are trusting them to keep player knowledge from influencing character actions and decisions. You know your players better than anyone else – if you trust them to do so, more power to you. If you don’t know them, don’t trust them with a prolog.
   
• Prologues are best served with a dangling plot thread that will be taken up and woven into the main thread of the adventure at a later point but on the same day as the prolog was delivered.
   
• Rules, literary or otherwise, exist for a reason. Don’t break them lightly.
   
• …but, if you have a good reason to do so, break as many rules as you have to, in the service of the number one rule, which was phrased by Wang Chung thusly: “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”. If you live by that one, almost anything can be forgiven.

In closing, let me wish CM’s readers – every one of you, you know who you are – a safe, prosperous, and Happy New Year! Next time, in part 2, the Big List of Adventure Beginning Points….