Plans & Changes

It’s strange how perceptions and plans can change as a project proceeds. This is the third in my series of articles about Prologues (spelt ‘Prologs’ in the US, and in the rest of this text) – but when I started, this was intended to be one single article, something relatively quick that I could toss off despite seasonal interruptions. When I started actually writing it, it was quickly split in two – a first part looking at prologs in general and in a more abstract way, then the second part dealing with the specifics of different approaches. The intent was to describe each in a paragraph and move on to the next, and if I had stuck to that plan, the original intent would have been executed. You can judge from the presence of a part three that I did not!

Instead, I found myself going into each prolog type in greater depth, aided by a recurring checklist that made sure I didn’t miss anything.

Now, looking back on it, it feels like this was always going to be a three-part series. It just “feels” right that way, as though anything less would not have contained the depth that readers have come to expect from Campaign Mastery when we tackle a subject.

In it’s own way, GMs frequently have a similar experience whenever we run an adventure. It is rare and noteworthy for events to unfold anything like the way we expected before we started, and that’s true no matter how thorough our plans are. And hopefully, at the end, it all looks like it was always intended to unfold the way it did – complete with death-defying cliffhangers, desperate situations, moments when all hope seemed lost, and inspired moves creating sudden changes of fortune.

Nevertheless, you don’t have to look too deeply below the surface to find the remnants of the intermediate plan, when this part and the last were intended to be one. In particular, this article will presume that you have read the last one, and will often refer back to the content of part 2.

And, when you get to the end of the detailed descriptions of prolog types, you’ll find what might almost be considered the seeds of a potential part four – a topic or two that were better addressed after the long list of specifics were complete, and some afterthoughts.

It’s a substantial work order that won’t fulfill itself – so I’ll stop dithering and get on with it!

9. Omniscient Alarms

You might think that I’ve already dealt with this type of prolog in type 2, “Aftermaths”. Everything stated there applies to this category, 100%. But, with some sort of alarm being sounded by an Omniscient Entity of some sort, there are a couple of implications and requirements that are unique. An “aftermath” can be nothing more than someone’s subconscious working overtime – an actual Omniscient Alarm is a horse of entirely different color.

First, the situation has to warrant such an Entity’s involvement. That in itself can be problematic; you have to avoid it being an anticlimax. In effect, an Omniscient Alarm ratchets the hype up to 11, and the situation itself has to live up to it.

At the same time, you have to explain why the PCs have never heard from this Entity before. The simplest such answer is that this is a greater threat than anything they’ve had to deal with previously. Others include the PCs having finally earned the trust and respect of the Entity with their past successes; the Entity having made some sort of mistake in dealing with the situation that has made it a lot worse, and that he is trying to undo; or even being temporarily out from under the thumb of a strict supervisor who is non-interventionist.

You also need to have an answer to the question of whether or not the Entity will intervene again in the future, in the event of other imminent disasters of similar magnitude – and if not, why not.

Another problem to avoid is the potential for every “ordinary” crisis that follows being an anticlimax. All this makes for a delicate balancing act.

Second, there’s the very existence of the Entity. Nature abhors the singular example – where there’s one, there are usually many. Why have none of the others made their presence felt in the campaign before now? Who are the others, anyway? Where do the Entities come from, what’s their story? The mere existence of the Entities can threaten to rewrite your entire Cosmology – unless they were “baked in” from the very beginning.

The Bottled Adventure

    “…I am strictly forbidden from interfering. My superiors judge that the situation will resolve itself to their advantage, never mind how much suffering must be endured en route to that resolution. I think they are overconfident and have been seduced by the potential gains. They maintain strict scrutiny of every agent they assess as potentially capable of direct interference in the situation. A rare and temporary coincidental cosmic phenomenon that may never be repeated has created a window between our worlds, and through that, I found you, and now I beg for your assistance. Help us, please, before it is too late!”

Notice how neatly this answers every one of the potential problems listed earlier. First, this becomes an isolated one-off event. Second, it removes the Entity and their entire existence from the usual campaign reality. Third, the actual problem to be faced could be relatively minor, but because the usual remedial actions are not available for “political” reasons, outside intervention is needed – so no threat of anticlimax.

If you are running, say, a cyberpunk campaign, and discover this really great D&D adventure and think it would be fun to put your players through a change of pace, this is the perfect vehicle. Or vice-versa! (The usual game-balance caveats apply, and you might need to think about the transfer of rewards).

Or you could restrict yourself to the usual milieu and simply remove this adventure in time and/or space from the usual campaign – so far away in one or both that events might as well be taking place in a parallel universe. Speaking of which, I’ve run this exact riff a time or two from parallel universes, which is somewhere in between the other solutions.

And, at least once, I’ve had the entity appealing for help turn out to be the villain, attempting to manipulate a situation covertly for his own benefit – and virtually everything said in that opening spiel turning out to be a pack of lies….

Omniscient Alarms either signal something out of the ordinary, or an escalation of intensity within the existing campaign. In the latter case, they signal a watershed moment, a point of transition between phases of the Campaign. This can create its own problems – what if the Players like the way things already were, better? The only satisfactory answer that I’ve found is not to hide the intention to transition the campaign between multiple phases from the players, and to significantly build up a sense of change being inevitable.

    “Life was a game, a lark. I could fall into one escapade after another and climb back out smelling like a rose because I didn’t take life seriously. Suddenly, there are consequences, things matter, there are people suffering and some I care about could be hurt or killed if I mess up.”
    “That’s what happens in wars.”
    “It’s cramping my style.”

This approach gives the GM license to experiment, to be a little different, to try something out and see if the players like it, without hanging the future of the entire campaign on the outcome.

It should go without saying that the subject of the Alarm should be strictly related to the main content of the adventure. It might seem reasonable, and even realistic, for more advance warning to be given, achieved by having the Alarm relate to a future adventure and not the immediate one. That can work, but it can also cause the whole thing to fall flat. It needs to be delicately handled or the result can’t help but be an anticlimax. The greater the separation in real time, the greater the risks that have to be managed.

10. Metaphors and Allegories

Something I’ve found over the years is that you can but commentary into a prolog that simply wouldn’t fit within the main adventure – like employing metaphors and allegories to shed a different perspective on the current situation, or on the adventure that is to follow. This works very well when you have taken a very abstract concept and translated it into some new context. For example, one adventure had the PCs confronting and exposing corruption within the in-game government of the day. The prolog depicted a patient on his sickbed as his system attempted to fight off a spreading cancer. I flashed back to this prolog in brief snippets throughout the adventure – when the PCs made progress, the patient rallied; when the PCs encountered setbacks, the patient went downhill. The metaphor was making a point about the way corruption spreads, one that would have either been boring as a lecture, or mentioned once and forgotten if brief enough not to be too dull. At the end of the adventure, with the PCs successful, the patient was discharged, in full remission – just as another patient was wheeled into the hospital room suffering from the same illness. Flash to two men, somewhere, shaking hands. Curtain. I didn’t need to elaborate further – it was a clear signal that the PCs may have excised one corrupt group, but corruption itself was beyond them as an enemy, a fact of life.

Handled the wrong way, this could have ended the entire day’s play on a depressing down-note. Because of the way I had set up and referenced the metaphor, the words spoken by the doctor to his (recovered) patient conveyed an entirely different message: “We are all mortal, so I fight death on a daily basis. I’ve learned to enjoy the small victories. Congratulations, and try not to die anytime soon, okay?” Those last two sentences might just as well have been said direct to the PCs and to the players.

An allegory is a poem, picture, play, etc, in which the overt meaning of characters and/or events symbolizes a moral or spiritual meaning. A metaphor is a figure of speech or narrative in which a word or phrase is applied to a person or situation in a non-literal sense in order to symbolize a quality or trait of the person or situation, EG “Brave as a Lion”. A given passage of text can be either, both, or neither. The reference can be standalone, or – as in the example – a touchstone. It can have a relevance that might only be recognized in hindsight, or it can shape perceptions from the moment it is related.

Simply relating the adventure title can be the entirety of the prolog, when that title has multiple meanings. That’s something I do a lot in my Superhero campaign – the current adventure is entitled “A Tangled Web” and it has already had three separate meanings within the adventure. The previous one was “Figures In Black” and that also referred to multiple different figures all wearing black and causing various developments within the campaign or the adventure, and also to some important numbers on a printed page. You get the idea.

There is an obvious need for the prolog to relate to the Main Content – that’s the whole point of this type of prolog. Which means that if you are making a point about a different perspective on the situation the PCs have found themselves in, the main adventure has to reference and progress that situation, it can’t just leave the status quo unchanged.

Outside of the dangers of being too obvious and heavy-handed, or too deep and subtle, there aren’t a lot of risks involved – so if you are careful to adhere to the principle of meaning being applied within the current adventure (and preferably, that day’s play), there aren’t a lot of other restrictions on this type of beginning to worry about.

11. A Glimpse Of The Past

This comes in two – no, three – sub-types:

• Reminders Of Past Events;
• Delivery of new information that PCs “already know” but the players don’t;
• Delivery of out-of-character information that neither the PCs nor Players know.

So distinctive are these that they really need to be addressed separately.

11.1 Remembering Yesterday

I need to ensure that readers distinguish this type of beginning from type 17, “Where We Left Off”. That can follow the main prolog, but this type refers to something so long ago that the GM felt the players needed to be reminded of it. This is especially true if one or more of the PCs weren’t with the party back then. Importantly, any space used by a status report should be taken out of the space allocation to the prolog overall. If you’ve got a page and a half, it’s reasonable for one-and-a-quarter to be devoted to the incident being remembered and 1/4 of a page to a very brief snapshot of the current situation. The players will be looking for the relevance of the prolog to the adventure, and an excessively-lengthy recap of the current situation can only frustrate them.

Obviously, there should be some connection between the incident being remembered and the current adventure, and that relevance should be made clear before the end of the first day’s play. I find that this relevance makes a great cliffhanger ending.

There is a noteworthy benefit to placing this sort of flashback sequence in a prolog – it means that you don’t have to interrupt the action with the recap when relevance makes itself known. In other words, this type of prolog is used for the effect that it has on the structure and pacing of the main adventure.

It is possible to get bogged down in side issues as the players waltz down memory lane, or (worse) challenge your “official” record of the story. In the interests of keeping the past relevant to the campaign, I indulge the first (to a reasonable extent) but come down hard on the second: “From time to time, plot holes are discovered that went unnoticed at the time, and past events have to be retrofitted to close them,” is my usual line – without elaborating further. My players accept this line of argument at least most of the time (it helps that they’ve found themselves demonstrably wrong on a few of these disputed cases). Of course, if you ARE wrong, make your mea culpas and start work on salvaging your current adventure!

11.2 Background Info-dump, Personal

In some of these cases, the guidelines for length presented in Part 1 are just that – a guideline, to be ignored if the probative value is high enough. In others, they are strict doctrines that need to be observed very tightly. Background Info-dumps manage to be both at the same time. In the case of personal background info-dumps, you can be a little more casual; in the case of ex-cathedra info-dumps (see 11.3 below), they are rigid controls that must be strictly observed.

The biggest danger with a personal info-dump is that you are, inherently, focused on just one PC, who will be hanging on your every word (one way or another). The rest may find it moderately interesting or openly boring. The less this is a factor, the more latitude you have – but beware of outwearing your welcome.

A secondary danger is that you may be messing with a PCs’ canon. Some players enjoy the GM adding to their character backgrounds, in the process integrating the characters more tightly with the campaign world – they get richer characters and a “personal stake” in the day’s adventuring. Others detest it. I have had one player tell me, “if there’s something my character knows and I don’t, tell me when I roll and not before!”

Others simply need more time to digest information than the immediacy of the gaming table. Background info-dumps for such players are best delivered by email, or in writing, in advance of the day’s play – with a reminder or synopsized recap as the prolog. And be prepared for the player to say “I didn’t have time to read it.” Handle such situations delicately – the reasons may be legitimate – but make it clear, without being offensive, that the player is inconveniencing everyone else at the table. But only make a fuss if they actually are inconveniencing everyone. Otherwise – “No problem, I’ll be focusing on the others for a while anyway, so you can read it now.”

It’s preferable to avoid giving permission for the players to just ignore something you’ve sent them.

Of course, not all background info-dumps, even of the personal variety, involve a character’s personal background to any significant level. “Back when Pangram was a student, he took a course in classical Dwarfish architecture (it says so, on his character sheet). His lecturer on the subject was Kalzar Briteblade the thirteenth. Pangram loved the subject, but Kalzar could make his own execution sound boring. Despite this, he soaked up as much as he could about [characteristic element one] and [characteristic element two], and learned [important fact #1].” The GM knows that “important fact #1” will be directly relevant to the day’s adventuring, something that the character would know because of what he has on his character sheet and has encapsulated it in an anecdote. The player knows that the GM has a reason for doing so, because it won’t have happened by accident, but doesn’t know if it’s the factoid or the lecturer from his past, or both, that will be significant. (Of course, the term “important” is a relative one!)

11.3 Background Info-dump, Ex-cathedra

One of the metaphors often used to describe the players of an RPG is that of an audience in participatory theater. This is an appropriate choice because each player has no idea what the other players will say or do next, they can only watch and react in character. There are times when it is more useful than others. This is one of those times.

This is a technique that you often see used in TV episodes and even movies. Somehow, it is more notable in the former than the latter, probably because a TV show is less expected to have the scope of a movie. RPG adventures are something of a cross between the two – they can have scope even greater than a movie, and yet their structures are more akin to those of a TV show – and that includes this kind of prolog being unusual.

And the reason is because the players are reduced to being an audience while the GM orates. And they won’t – and shouldn’t – sit still for that for very long.

Yet, there are times when this is utterly necessary. If the GM has planned perfectly, then he provided the relevant information in the campaign background, and only needs to recap it. But most of the time, this is information that wasn’t even thought of at that time, and that needs to be provided to the players now. It might even be information that the PCs have spent some time ferreting out in-game, and that therefore could not have been provided to the players any sooner.

Length is the enemy here – and the natural enemy of length constraints are felicity of style. If the narrative is coming from am NPC, there is a natural desire to present it in-character – but that ultimately means padding it with characterization.

If you go over permissible length, there are two (similar) solutions.

You can break the narrative up and present these in (relatively) brief snippets in the course of the adventure, a series of flashbacks that get to the point just as the information becomes essential. If you adopt this approach, I recommend snippets of no more than half the maximum length indicated for a prolog, and preferably only 1/3. This is choice one.

But what if the information is critical immediately? Then your only choice is the synopsis, in which detail and content is sacrificed to character style – and ends with the NPC saying something to the effect of, “I can tell you where to find more information about any of these events, but that’s the gist of it.” That puts the onus back onto the players, plants a delay in the manifestation of the criticality into the plotline, provides a measure of interactivity in what would otherwise be stale narrative – but the GM had better have done the prep necessary: Where is the information, How Far Away is that, Who has it, in what Form is it kept, and What will the PCs have to Do to get access to it? And how accurate and up-to-date is this information?

As a rule of thumb, be careful if the Quest you are handing the PCs will take more than a single game session to resolve – the first “chapters” will be lost and forgotten by the time they get to the end. There are ways of combating this problem – giving players a hard copy or electronic version of the accumulated narrative at the end of each day’s play, for example, gives the players a chance to refresh their recollections before play resumes – but they won’t happen by accident, either. It’s often helpful to party planning (and hence to GM planning) if you have a cheat sheet prepared, too, outlining the synopsis with the answers to these questions.

Sources include Scholars, Wizards, Priests, Talking Books, Inscriptions, Artworks, Museums, Curators, Diaries, Statues, Bards, Folk Songs, Elves (long-lived), Dwarves (ditto in some campaigns), Folklore, Thief’s Guilds, Dungeons…. you get the idea. 1/3 should be willing to help upon request, 1/3 will be easily persuaded, and 1/3 will be more difficult.

Most of these sources will require travel, even if it’s only ducking around the corner to the Temple Of Sassifras The Cat. Don’t hand-wave these trips completely – this is your chance to throw some variety into the mix. And work hard to maintain the impression of a ticking clock, with the hands moving with every piece of intelligence gathered.

Whether it’s what you intended or not, the length of background information to be imparted has made this your adventure. Proceed on that basis.

12. A Glimpse Of The Future

Obviously related to the Aftermath type of beginning, this differs from both that and from various other forms of beginning in its emotional content. Often a daydream, it functions as an emotional input into the way a character is roleplayed. You can use this as a vehicle for a more complex narrative, and restore an element of interactivity at the same time – see the write-up of “If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis” for an example. Each dream sequence started with just such an emotional input, based on things the player whose PC was concerned had said in past play.

Glimpses of the future are generally meant to be extrapolations of current trends and personal wishes on the part of the character experiencing them, and are usually positive for the most part. They are not warnings, they are not prophecies, and they aren’t Aftermaths. They may be presented as dream sequences.

It is often useful to take advantage of this break from reality by having the character begin the adventure in a place and situation without knowing how they got there, awakening from a dream-state of some sort. Gradually, memories of how they got there can then reassert themselves, intermixed with, and wrapped around, interaction segments plus segments involving the other PCs (so that everyone gets their share of the spotlight). Those other PCs should probably become aware that the PC who had been dreaming is missing – unless they aren’t, and the “missing” PC is being run as an NPC. If you think the player is up to it, you can even have them run the “NPC” version of themselves.

Aside from the usual pitfalls of starting the story in the middle, which only apply when your objective is as described in the previous paragraph, this is a fairly safe way to begin, or so it seems. In reality, many players find that the GM dictating their dreams of a perfect future is cutting too close to the bone. I have stepped around that problem somewhat by discussing the question “What is [Character Name]’s vision of their perfect future life?” in advance – but this necessarily means showing your hand pulling the strings.

There are a few ways around this problem, but they tend not to stand up to repeated use. The simplest answer is simply to put the player on the spot – “You are dreaming that you are living your perfect future. Describe it…”

13. Prophecy

A prophecy is generally intentionally vague and capable of sustaining multiple interpretations. Offering a prophecy at the beginning of an adventure presents a host of potential difficulties. The introduction to part 1 of this series, and the inspiration behind it all, talks about how this enables prophecies to be used by the GM to screw the players over (while remaining scrupulously fair). Other players detest prophecies because they perceive them as an invitation to the GM to railroad the plot. I’ve written a couple of articles on prophecies here at Campaign Mastery, one of which – The Perils Of Prophecy: Avoiding the Plot Locomotive – deals with this problem in detail (Readers have also suggested other techniques in the comments section, so don’t skip those).

Prophecies can be equally problematic for the GM. Not only can they cause various forms of player dissatisfaction, they can trigger accusations of bias (when there is none), or provide a target that the GM feels he has to live up to. When I decided in my superhero campaign that Ragnarok was going to happen, it took another 18 years before I had all the building blocks in place for that event. Yes, it was suitably epic, and suitably cataclysmic, and demanded feats of incredible heroism on the part of the PCs and their allies, but even so… In the campaign at the moment, I am currently building up towards Ragnarok II, and hoping that it, too, will live up to the hype. So far, I’ve spent eight years on the build-up – with another 7 or so to go. Where now at the point where events occasionally reveal big pieces of the circumstances – revelations that will become more frequent (and progressively smaller) as the campaign unfolds. With a plot twist or two thrown into the mix along the way.

No matter how you slice it, Prophecies can be a LOT of work, to little reward. In the best-case scenario, they can also be a rich resource and the foundation of a great adventure.

I think a lot of the problem is that players tend to view prophecies as black-and-white good-or-bad, even after they have set aside any animus from the causes described earlier. Which is to say, they have to decide whether or not to support or even actively try and bring about the prophecy, or fight against it with everything that they’ve got, even to the point of suicidal charges. This betrays a lack of trust in the GM, an assumption that the GM is out to screw the players over – and ensures that there will be unhappy feelings on both sides of the GM screen.

The more experience players have with you as a fair GM, the less inclined they will be to make the erroneous assumptions at the heart of this confrontation. For that reason, I recommend against using Prophecies early in a campaign with new players. Prophecies can be as touchy as nitroglycerin – throw them around with care until you know what you are doing!

The obvious question to be answered is “why use them at all?” The answer is that when everything works, Prophecies can be great foundations for adventures and even whole campaigns. They can tell the players things that they would have no hope of otherwise discovering, provide clues as to how to mitigate or prevent disaster, spark motivations in characters who would otherwise have a ho-hum reaction to events (regardless of how their players might feel)… they can be a good thing.

Don’t turn away from using prophecies when they are the best plot device for a situation, or when they spark your imagination.

14. A Startling Event

Red Storm Rising starts with a terrorist attack on an oil field in Russia. None of the principle cast of the novel are involved, or even mentioned. But the entire novel flows from that one event.Goldeneye starts with a confrontation between James Bond and a fellow MI6 operative. Both are examples of starting events. The first interacts only indirectly with the protagonists, as the true importance comes to light. The second is an action sequence (see type 1) that leads directly into the rest of the plot.

Putting the ‘triggering event’ into a prolog – whether the PCs are present to witness it or not – can be a great way to parachute the PCs into a plot. Once an event occurs, the time frame before any given person learns of it can be quantified fairly precisely; having pulled the trigger, the players know that the shot is coming and will reach them eventually.

The greatest danger that I have observed stems from players trying to beat that clock, either reacting before there’s anything to react to (and trying to disguise their actions), or manufacturing excuses to go out looking for the information that they have (as players) but don’t have (as characters). Good players won’t subject you to either problem; bad players tend to do anything they can think of to find a shortcut.

15. A Dream Sequence

Once again, this might seem like old ground, already covered. In addition to the many relevant pieces of advice presented both above and in Part 2, there is also my 2014 article, “Dream A Little Dream – using Dreams in RPGs“. So it might seem like there isn’t a lot to say.

One point that I do want to make, however, is that every dream should be signposted in metaphors from the life of the dreamer, that every dream should reflect the attitudes and reality and perceptions of the dreamer, should be an expression of their personality – and I do mean the deeper parts thereof, the ones that don’t often get paraded in public. A good dream sequence is twice as hard to write as a GM as ordinary plot, and may go through many drafts and revisions where the main plotline of the adventure is subject to no revision at all.

Make appropriate allowances and preparations.

16. Food For Thought

This is a type of beginning that is only useful in unusual situations, but when it’s appropriate there’s usually nothing better. In essence, the prolog throws something deep and meaningful at the players, the more compelling the better, permitting the opening plot sequence to be played out with partially-distracted players. Only at the climax of the adventure does a plot twist reveal that the whole adventure has been an exploration of one facet of the original head-scratcher.

For example, you might use “If it is better that 100 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be wrongly convicted, does that not mean that prisons should be abolished?” – then run a plotline revolving around some other sense of the term “confinement”, such as marriage as a means of securing a peace treaty between warring groups.

The largest potential pitfall is that such debate often engages players at the human level, and may push personal buttons. It can be difficult to judge whether or not a response is coming from the player or the character that he is controlling. Similarly, players can have trouble discerning your opinions from those expressed by an NPC.

This can be a great way of getting players to dig deeper into the thought processes and opinions of their characters. The only trouble with doing so is that the answers are often unexpected by both players and GM, and will usually be transfigurative for the characterization thereafter; when you have a stable status quo within the party, this risks upsetting the apple-cart. Personally, I’ve usually found that to be a risk worth taking; but I’ve yet to be seriously bitten by fallout, so my opinion may be biased.

17. Where We Left Off

From one of the most obscure types of prolog, we travel to one of the most common. It is almost mandatory to present a recap of the situation at the end of the last session of play, and perhaps some exposition concerning how the party got there.

A lot of GMs have trouble doing these without realizing it because it can be hard finding the right level of compression. Thus, while minor transgressions and lapses can be ignored, trying to hit the length targets described in Part 1 is a good general principle.

Beyond that, the GM should contemplate the intensity and energy levels that he wants the party to bring to the first sequence of play for the day. If you want them to hit the ground running, go for a short recap – one or two paragraphs at most. If you want them thinking about the nuances and meaning of past events, be more fulsome – if absolutely necessary, exceeding the length limits.

If you do have to exceed the length limits by a significant amount, look for a way to make the prolog interactive. An NPC saying to the PCs, “Now let me get this straight,” and then giving the recap with some glaring errors that the PCs are sure to pick up on, punctuated regularly with “Is that right?” or words to that effect. Or have an NPC and a PC arguing over the significance of past events as a means of getting the recap out in the open.

Obviously, you can’t use such tricks all the time – so save them for when you really need them.

18. Nothing At All / Housekeeping

Perhaps the second most common type of beginning is to deal with any pre-game housekeeping – experience, reminders of ongoing conditions like damage and so on – and then get straight into the game. I employed this approach a lot when my campaigns were running every week, because the past was fresh in the players’ minds. The only time there was any sort of recap was when a player had been absent for the previous session.

When three spin-off campaigns came along in 1985 to accompany the main campaign, there was only time to play once a fortnight, and I started learning the hard way how to recap past events. And that brought the subject of prologs into view for the first time. Prior to that, it was “start play where we finished, do housekeeping at signpost moments or when players requested it (because they had gained a level or whatever), then resume play until the real-world clock ended play for the day. Not much finesse needed or employed.

This type of “prolog” gets the players into the game session right away, but brings them in “cold” – there are times when that’s appropriate and useful, and times when it’s not.

The biggest dangers involved are players forgetting something significant. From day one, no-one has a better command of your background material than you do – you’re the one that has sweated bullets over its creation, after all.

Case in point: I’ve been co-GMing the Adventurer’s Club with Blair Ramage for 15 years now, but I still ask him questions about the campaign background when we are co-plotting adventures, and defer to his judgment about genre-related matters. Even though his original creation had nowhere near the robustness that we have built into the current campaign, it remains the seed at the heart of the assemblage.

Compounds And Elixirs

If it’s not obvious by now, it is easy to combine two or more of these beginning types. Because it fitted the in-game situation, I once ran an adventure in which each PC experienced a different beginning type – but that’s an extreme case.

Something that I’ve learned the hard way is that such combinations are risky. While it can be that Part B covers the flaws and problems created by Part A, and vice versa, such perfection is rare. More commonly, you end up with a compound that contains both sets of flaws; and, if you are lucky, both sets of benefits. Sometimes, you can’t even say that you have achieved that much.

There are infinitely more variables involved than I could ever hope to quantify, and the results would be lengthy and extremely dull to read. Consider: the same plot outline becomes two completely different adventures in the hands of two different GMs; even if the GM is the same, past history means that the two adventures would still be different in different campaigns; and even if that weren’t the case, the fact that it is to be experienced by two different parties with different players and different characters with different capabilities and personalities and thought processes means that the resulting adventures would STILL be different in the two campaigns. Now throw in the fact that different pacing and plot structures are enhanced, transformed, or damaged in different ways by different prolog forms, and that these effects are dependent on matters of mood, timing within the campaign, recent past in-game events, and authorial style… By my count, that’s 16 factors with anywhere from three to three hundred possible categories in each. A systematic approach would take a lifetime – by which time the social expectations would have changed, and the results would have limited applicability.

Some practical advice on prolog selection

Instead, what we need is a process for the selection of prologs, and then a willing GM who will do his best to entertain and let the rest take care of itself.

While it is a practice most often honored in the breach, the best time to write a prolog is when you have a clear idea of the plot and its structure, and you should not choose a prolog type until you sit down to write it. That time might be before word one gets written – but most of us have to work with our adventure ideas a bit before reaching that level of confidence. In cases that become more infrequent with experience and familiarity with the players and their characters, it might not be until the main adventure is complete!

Remember that we are interested in the plot as it actually manifests in the adventure, not the preliminary outline that might bear no resemblance to the finished adventure!

So, first question cluster: Is there anything missing from the main plot that a prolog could bring to the table? What form of prolog does that dictate? What are the consequences for the plot? Do the pitfalls that this would introduce completely undermine the adventure?

If one or more forms pass this forensic appraisal, start writing and end the process.

If not, proceed through the second question cluster (looks a lot like the first): Is there a prolog type that would enhance the adventure? What is the value of that enhancement? What are the consequences for the plot? Do the pitfalls that this would introduce completely undermine the adventure?

If one or more forms pass this series of interrogations, start writing and end the process.

If not, we get to the third question cluster: Are there any weaknesses or deficiencies or assumptions that could undermine the adventure proceeding in the most entertaining manner? Can a prolog be used to shore up those potential flaws, enhancing the likelihood of a successful day’s play in terms of entertainment value? What form of prolog does that dictate? What are the consequences for the plot? Do the pitfalls that this would introduce completely undermine the adventure?

If you get past that without choosing a prolog type, the final question is whether or not a recap would be useful – if so, pick a target length and start writing. If you don’t think it’s necessary, given your players, make notes on any housekeeping and consider your adventure ready for play.

Put that way, it doesn’t seem quite so scary, does it?

Separations and Dividers

A further thought that came to me rather late in the process of writing this series. An adventure can have multiple prologs – just apply the same principals, especially regarding length.

You see, if we view adventures as this monolithic structure, complete within themselves, there can only be one prolog – at the start. But if we subdivide the adventure into Acts, we can have one “prolog” per act after the first – think of this as an “extra scene” that has been tacked on.

If you really want to, you can have two prologs at the start of the adventure – one for the overall adventure, and one for the first act.

The level of artistry demanded by this approach is high – any prolog involves taking a risk, being more artistic than is strictly necessitated by a straightforward adventuring approach. But the potentials can be equally high.

What brought this to mind? Remembering an old adventure, from about 20 years ago, in the middle of the first Zenith-3 campaign. It had a structure as follows:

That should look very familiar to anyone who’s been reading this section. What it doesn’t show is that the first prolog was a “Background Info-dump, Ex-cathedra” with no obvious relevance to the current in-game situation; that each of the Act prologues focused on one PC encountering a situation seemingly unrelated to anything else – the main plot or the adventure prolog, until the final act, which began by revealing that the prologs had been exploring the PCs opinions on analogous situations to the original prolog, which in turn was the key to understanding what had been driving the antagonist in the main plot throughout. How the PCs then used that information to resolve the main plotline brought several of the PCs into personal conflict with the group’s actions, a situation hinted at in the epilog, and which became the driver of a subsequent plotline. The greatest difficulty was in keeping the internal relationships of the plot structures a surprise until the plot twist in the fifth prolog.

As this (highly abbreviated and abstracted) example shows, prologs – done well – are integral to the overall plot, and in hindsight, this becomes obvious to all.

Prologs as part of the Adventure Template

It’s worth recapitulating a point that I’ve made in other articles that are at best marginally related to this series: if you employ a standard template or structure for your adventures, anything that is not the main adventure can be considered a prolog.

For example, adventures in my Zenith-3 campaign follow a standard structure for the most part:

1. Housekeeping
2. Recap
3. PCs Personal Lives
4. Transition To Main Plot
5. Main Plot
6. (Sometimes) Epilog: Consequences and Impact

It’s items 3 through 6 that are of interest in this context. Each PC has his own plot thread or threads, which experience developments from time to time. Those developments often impact the other PCs, directly or indirectly. On top of that, the local situation of the party manifests in a number of encounters that collectively comprise still more plot threads. And on top of that, anything that the players have indicated that they want to do forms still another series of plot threads, sometimes prominently, sometimes not.

One of these many plot threads becomes the main plot, involving all the characters, usually at the same time, sometimes consecutively, in the 4th part of the adventure. This transition can be casual, accompanied by still more plot developments in the PCs personal lives, or can be abrupt – some singular event that gets everyone’s attention.

The main plot then unfolds, and comes to a conclusion in the 6th section of the template. Because it has generally evolved from the personal lives of one or more of the PCs, there is an added form of engagement to the adventure. This also means that one or more impacts to those personal lives is likely to result; sometimes that is contained within an epilog, sometimes an epilog provides only a prelude, and sometimes the scope and ramifications are substantial enough that one plot thread either transforms into another or frays into two – which may come back together in some other adventure. Either way, this means that there is no epilog.

A similar structure has evolved in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, though plot threads tend to be shorter and more direct in that campaign, and are often started with no idea of where they will end.

In practical terms, this subdivides each act into a number of scenes – typically, some multiple of the number of PCs (ensuring an equal division of spotlight), but this can vary when two or more PCs become entangled in the one mini-plot.

And any one of those scenes can be a prolog to the main plot. It’s just a matter of finding the right segue in, and the right segue out.

Campaign Prologs

“EvilKipper Rob” (link to twitter account) is a miniatures painter, GM, and long-time support of Campaign Mastery through Twitter, and observed (while promoting the previous part of this series) that he “really love[s] doing an initial prologue session with a bunch of high level adventurers with epic gear facing a big bad that can either make a return if killed (vampire/lich style) or can only be banished.”

I responded with “What you’re describing is more of a prologue to a campaign than to an adventure. Which is another subject that I should at least mention in part 3 :)” – which brings me to this penultimate section of the series.

Prologs scale. Just as you can have a prolog to each Act in an adventure structure, in theory you could have one-or-two-line prologs to each scene – or an entire game session as prolog to a campaign.

Another comment talked about getting the players to design their characters as they would be at twentieth level (in D&D terms) as well as first level, then running those high-level characters through a prequel to the campaign (without resolving the situation) before going back in time to those first level characters. The entire campaign was thus about how the PCs went from A to B, and how they found themselves in the situation described in the prequel. This gives the players a road map to the development of their characters, gives the GM a road map to the campaign based on how the PCs want to develop, and gives the entire campaign a foundation.

Me, I’d have a constant worry that the Players might change their minds, based on the adventures that were actually unfolding in the game, and might resent any attempt to forbid it. But if your players can be trusted to stick to their game plan and trust the GM to make it possible (any appearances to the contrary), it could work – very well.

I’ve was trying to imagine a game structure so vast that an entire campaign served as a prequel when I realized that my superhero campaign was the perfect example.

Click the thumbnail for a larger (more legible) image.

I put this “family tree” together to show why.

• Campaign 1 was the Ullar Campaign, a solo campaign for myself to learn the Champions game system (now known as The Hero System) and to develop and test any house rules I felt necessary. It was always intended to be a temporary campaign that would form the background to the real campaign when it started. Set in the 1940s-1950s.
• A week later, I was persuaded to run Side-Campaign 1, shown as S1 here. The initial session was some 20 hours long and came at the end of a week completely without sleep. It’s amazing that it all makes as much sense as it does. Set in the 1960s.
• When Campaign 2 – the “real” campaign – started, Campaign 1 was shut down and that part of the background considered ‘fixed’. Set in the 1970s. Side-Campaign 1 continued intermittently for some time thereafter, in parallel with Campaign 2; it finally closed down for good around the second anniversary of Campaign 2 starting.
• That same anniversary introduced Side Campaign 2, better known as the Project Vanguard campaign. A New Mutants to my X-men – which either means everything to you or nothing, depending on how much Marvel Comics History you know. For the next year, we would have PV in the afternoons and The Champions in the evening. There was an 80% overlap of players, at least at first; that eventually became 100%, and then 80% the other way.
• Another year on, and the PV experiment was going so well as a campaign that Side-campaigns 3 and 4 were introduced simultaneously. Side-campaign 3 was Project Vigilant, a younger group of characters; Side-campaign 4 was a Secret Agents campaign set in the same game world. The pattern of play was now PVt + Agents one week, PV + Champions the following week, plus the occasional binge-Champions session on a public holiday or a Sunday.
• Six months or so after that, from memory, Side-Campaign #5 got started as an occasional and intermittent project. Now known as the Nebula Campaign, named after the character who had dropped out of Campaign 2 due to interpersonal conflicts with each other’s characters and gone her own way.
• The second anniversary of side-Campaign 2 saw the Graduation Exercises, a major crossover between the two campaigns. Starting the next school year, the original idea was that PVt would graduate to PV, and a new group of young kids would be brought in. However, for workload reasons and by mutual choice, Side-campaign 3 was simply wound up, the characters having exhausted a lot of their potential.
• That was followed by the commencement of the Mini-Campaigns. Essentially, each current character from Campaign 2 or Side Campaign 2 was given their own Limited Series (another comic term – think of it as a Mini-series). For the S2 characters, this was to define their life post-graduation, as there was not enough room in the main campaign for all of them (i.e. the players already had characters that they preferred to continue running). The second batch featured the solo careers of those PCs. i think I have the numbers – 5 and 7, respectively – right. The average length of these campaigns was four game sessions, but some ran eight. Even doing them 2 sessions a week, this took some two years of real time, even though all of them were supposedly happening concurrently in game time. This was a deliberate choice to limit the potential for one character showing up in the middle of another character’s solo adventure – they were all busy. In addition, the Agents campaign continued a sporadic existence through this period, as did the Nebula campaign. Both terminated shortly thereafter.
• When the band got back together, to accommodate other GMs and their games, and the players who had made commitments to them, the schedule became double sessions of Champions every second week. Events and consequences from the side campaigns and the Mini-campaigns all fed back into the main plotline, which was the growing imminence of Ragnarok. Buildup toward this event occupied the next two or three years, real-time.
• You’ll notice the shaded section at the bottom of Campaign 2? With about 1 year to go, the players pulled the plug. It was supposed to be temporary, and I continued to make notes and compile ideas, but I got wrapped up in running a major TORG campaign for more than 5 years, at the end of which it was clear that a reboot with fresh players was required. Since that would make zero sense in terms of the ongoing continuity, I chose to write the events in narrative form and start the new campaign, Campaign 3, five years later. That gave me the chance to reset the playing field and restock the campaign with new plot threads.
• Campaign 3 was the first Zenith-3 campaign, now known as the Earth Halo campaign. Although it doesn’t look it, this campaign ran to completion taking about as many real-time years as the original campaign (not counting the interregnum and writing time). This was new players and new characters and everything that had gone before as background. Set in the early 80s.
• About half-way through Campaign-3, one of the PCs began to overshadow the others for many reasons. Rather than simply write the character out altogether, it was decided that a new side-campaign, S6, would be started – also known on these pages as The Warcry Campaign. It came to a halt following the death of one of the players some years back, but plans are underway for restarting it. This was the situation when Campaign Mastery was founded.
• Meanwhile, the Earth-Halo campaign came to an end, and after a short break to complete prep work, Campaign 4 got under way. It’s been running since 2012. This features the same players as Campaign 3 and mostly the same characters. Set in the mid-80s.
• Recently, these same characters were required to create new identities and find ways of using their powers in a new Side-campaign currently being run in place of Campaign-4. In due course, the two will become ongoing, with Campaign 4 dominant and Campaign 4a an occasional change of pace. Don’t you just love in-game politics and spy games?

With so many connections and interconnections and characters going from one campaign to another, and sometimes back again, it’s easy to see why I still consider this all one vast campaign, starting all the way back in 1981. Which means next year will be the 40th anniversary, I’ll have to think of something special….

More importantly in this context, what you get with a campaign as a prequel is a background so rich and vast that there is too much of it for one campaign. To explore it all, you will need (a) LOTS of game sessions; and (b) Several campaigns, often running simultaneously. I don’t know that there is actually a term for that phenomenon – unless you want me to use Epic, or something similar.

One final tip

This series, and this article, is supposed to be about practical advice and real-world experiences. So I thought I should close with some more of that practical advice since my afterthoughts came dangerously close to abstract theory a couple of times along the way.

When you’re thinking about using a prolog, and trying to decide which type to use if any, think of a TV series – preferably a popular drama of some sort. Which one doesn’t much matter – it could be Buffy or Mission Impossible or Star Trek or Nip/Tuck for that matter. Try to match the tone of the episode’s opening scenes AFTER the show’s Main Title sequence with that of your adventure. That makes your prolog the equivalent of a pre-title Teaser. Some shows have them religiously, some have them occasionally. Some omit or delay the main Title sequence altogether so that prolog and first Act are joined continuously.

This takes you a step away from your adventure, permitting you to see the forest for the trees, which can sometimes be difficult. In particular, it lets you “try out” different tonalities of prolog to see how they will fit, permitting the process described earlier to be implemented quickly and objectively.

Prologs are easy to misuse, can have catastrophic consequences for an adventure if mishandled, but can elevate one to new realms of artistry if their full potential is exploited. While there is no substitute for experience, this series should at least give you a running start!