The Braiding Of Plot Threads

Organization Matters.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay, rotated by Mike
Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November.
That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that my co-GM and I had been working on.
More directly, though, it’s inspired by the technique employed in last Saturday’s successful reboot of the Warcry campaign. This reboot adventure had to accomplish a lot, some of it easy but a lot of it quite difficult:
- Dust off and reintroduce the campaign, which hadn’t been played since 2012 (see Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff for the reason for the inactivity).
- Introduce two new PCs and connect them with the protagonist PC
- Write out two old PCs with a heroic sendoff
- Apply a layer of fuzziness to all background material deriving from the backstories of those old PCs
- Apply a second layer of fuzziness to many established building blocks of the game universe
- Update that game universe to make it consistent with what had been uncovered in the Zenith-3 campaign
- Expand on the game universe and it’s meta-dynamics
- Ensure that all PCs, both old and new, were critical to the outcome
- Challenge all PCs according to their abilities
- Have the adventure be consistent with the established, fairly freewheeling, style of the campaign
- Make it fun for all three players.
All that in a single afternoon’s play.
My solution was to have the protagonist experiencing multiple time tracks, one in which the universe was facing an existential threat, and one where that threat had been resolved, but with an unstable solution. Once the protagonist became aware of the threat and it’s scale and scope, his goal was to identify a more stable solution, establishing the time-line with the new PCs as the new “reality”, replacing the one which contained the old PCs – and have this enterprise suddenly seemed doomed to failure until those old PCs (once again) pulled a rabbit out of their (metaphoric) hats, achieving victory through their self-sacrifice.
Writing this adventure required a new structure, one not entirely dissimilar to that described in the earlier posts, but also required a new adventure format to make it practical. And, in the course of that writing, I discovered that the format used when writing an adventure could – in at least some cases – be just as profound in its effects on the adventure content as the structure.
Today’s article explores what I learned, extrapolates on the resulting techniques, and adds a quartet of applications that use this format as a tool.
The Basic Structure
I want to start this discussion with the simplest possible model and add refinements and complications from that starting point, rather than plunging headlong into the harder stuff.
The basic structure is this:
Two columns, and multiple rows. Each cell contains enough game prep material to advance the plotline or plotlines, and then comes to an end. Each column represents a single plot thread.
This enables the GM to balance the attention and spotlight focus between the two plotlines. Events in column 2 can be occurring simultaneous with those in column 1, or sequentially, or with an overlap, or even with a gap, though the latter should be rare and consist of hand-waving delays and travel between significant plot points..
This was the exact format that I used for the Warcry adventure, which was unusual in that the protagonist was experiencing both columns’ action sequentially, even though they were occurring in distinctly different places and circumstances.
- First, row one has one large paragraph in column 1 and two medium paragraphs in column 2.
- Row two has an even larger paragraph in column 1 and a medium paragraph in column 2. This indicates that the initial focus of the adventure is plot thread 1, labeled Reality 1, which is appropriate because it starts from the point of what was prior to the rebooting.
- The third row has a single line plus a small paragraph in column one and a paragraph of similar size in column 2. The equality is significant.
- The fourth and final row on this page has a medium paragraph in column 1 and a paragraph of similar size plus a smaller one in column 2, reflecting a shift in focus as the significance of the new reality starts to become apparent.
- To avoid cells that span two pages, additional empty lines have been added to the bottom of column 2, row 4.
Flow
In writing this adventure, I found myself compelled to pay far closer attention to the transitions and flow between the two plot sequences. I could rough-draft each plotline in full, but needed to tweak the resulting outlines significantly.
For example, in plot thread one, there was a substantial amount of exposition to get through – time in which the protagonist was the only PC with a player present. My first draft had this as a fairly monolithic block of prepared text, but it became instantly apparent that this would not fly; I needed to continually intercut away from that monolithic block of text to action focusing on the other PCs present, and that action had to be plot-significant, too.
I started with a relatively trivial encounter that was designed to let the new PCs show off some of what they could do. But, once enough of the exposition had been presented, that encounter was usurped by an illustration of what the exposition was describing. The threat went from something being discussed to front-and-center and in-your-face.
This not only made the action more dramatic, it lent weight and substance to the dry recitation of prepared dialogue.
Participants
Structuring the adventure in this way made a relatively trivial task – that of making sure that every participating character had something to be doing at any given point (even if that were simply waiting around or roleplaying) by subdividing the progress even more than would be the case in a normal act / chapter / scene structure.
While that was relatively trivial in this case, I could immediately see that in other campaigns, this could be a significant advantage. In the Zenith-3 campaign, for example, there are occasions when all four PCs and two central NPCs have plotlines of their own running, and these frequently intersect. On top of that, while it doesn’t happen frequently, there can be interactions with another 20 or 30 NPCs – some recurring, some occasional, and some transient. There’s little more inconvenient than discovering in the heat of play that an NPC was simply hand-waved out of existence in between significant contributions; it’s corrosive on a sense of realism. What they are doing might never actually be shown “on camera” within the adventure, but having some sort of checklist that shows them doing something means that you’re prepared if a PC goes looking for them, or simply asks what they have been up to.
Mismatched Participant Numbers
Of course, there is absolutely no need to have a column for each character. The basic model already divides the plot by plot thread, and intertwines those plot threads – not by participating PC. Naturally, you can have combinations and groups of PCs within a single plot thread – it doesn’t have to be single-character plots.
It doesn’t take a lot of rumination to see that the participation rosters don’t have to be fixed, either. One character can start of participating in plot thread one, then get distracted by plot thread two, while someone from plot thread two may or may not take their place in plot thread one.
The subdivision of events into relatively small slices means that all you really need to do is make sure that each significant character is name-checked in each row to make sure that the spotlight is being shared reasonably evenly.
Content
That is also dependent on the amount of content that you place in each cell. Based on both my experience with the Warcry adventure, with similar structures in the Zenith-3 campaign, and the recent adventure structuring in the Adventurer’s Club, I would aim for 2-4 cells per ‘page’. That usually translates to 1-3 paragraphs per cell.
It’s necessary to convert conversation into ‘paragraphs’ because you need to allow for replies by the PC(s). The assumption I make is that they will be roughly as long-winded as the NPCs with their canned dialogue – sometimes more, sometimes less, but that’s a good starting point. I can then tweak that estimate based on the loquaciousness of the player – PC combination and the situation.
Characters / Players who are outside their comfort zone, in particular, will either respond by padding their vocal contributions or by becoming more curt.
Be aware, too, of how quickly things will proceed if the player chooses to “roll-play” instead of “role-playing” – if the players are any good (mine are) this will usually indicate either unfamiliarity with the game mechanics or a subject / situation in which their PC has greater expertise than the player does.
For example, one PC in the Zenith-3 campaign has been taking painting lessons, starting with still-lifes and progressing to live models. I know more than enough on the topic to improv detailed dialogue and narrative regarding any given image or subject, but the player of the PC in question is not only relatively unfamiliar with it, he has no particular interest in the subject. As a result, he frequently resorts to roll-playing and relies on me to ‘translate’ the results into something that both sounds as competent as the character is, but that also makes sense to him as a player.
Another PC in that campaign has been getting into woodcarving, under the tutelage of a master craftsman. I know relatively little about the subject, but the player knows even less. But I’m good at pretending to knowledge that I don’t have (see The Expert In Everything), so with a bit of research and prep, I can make the player feel like he is successfully simulating the expertise that his character is acquiring.
Below is a screen capture of the Warcry adventure (shrunken sufficiently to show an entire page). Although black borders were used in the original, I’ve rendered these in red to make them more visible.
There are a number of points to highlight in this representation.
The narrative flow within the resulting page looks like this:
You deal fully with the contents of a cell and then move on to the cell alongside it. When you get to the end of the row, you return attention to the next cell of column 1. It therefore doesn’t matter how many columns you have, i.e. how many plot threads you are tying together.
It is also worth noting that overall, the spotlight is shared roughly equally between the two plot threads, as signified by the amount of text in each column.
Complications
As soon as you start wanting to check for balanced participation, and making sure that you don’t have the one character in two places at once, and that a given cell has been given its final narrative ‘polish’, and any number of other such considerations, you start complicating the structure.
Fortunately, it’s not all that hard to tweak the text formatting to take a lot of the sting out of these activities.
One technique to consider is highlighting any character names each time they appear – which makes it easy to scan a row and pick out anyone who’s missing, or who is appearing when they shouldn’t.
A refinement would be to use a different highlight color for significant NPCs (I consider any NPC who might participate in a conversation with a PC to be ‘significant’ in that scene, whether they do or not).
You could go even further and color-code enemies, allies, and neutrals differently, or to recognize some other significant affiliation. But it doesn’t take too much of this to create so much color that the text visually ‘drowns’ in it, and the benefits of such highlighting are lost.
It’s often useful to create a little space to one side of the columns, like the example above. You can then use a diagonal slash in red to check off one requirement, and a diagonal slash the other way to check off another. You can add a tick or a circle in black or blue to indicate that there is a relevant illustration / map / diagram NEEDED – or that one has been sourced and prepared.
Yes, you could use a separate column for each of these purposes, but that would then require headings so that you knew what each one represented, and the results quickly become counterproductive. A single cell which can be used in several different ways is not only easier to use in and of itself, but also forces a minimalist approach to the whole checklist question. While that can be constraining, it’s usually beneficial in the long run.
Switches & Segues
You don’t have to work very long on a structure of this kind to realize that how you switch from one plot thread – one narrative – to another is a whole new challenge. In general, these segues should become shorter – go into detail at first to establish the principle and who is where and doing what, and then assume that players will remember this the next time you turn your attention back to them.
But there is another kind of switch that’s worth highlighting: specific characters can migrate from one plot thread to another. Focusing attention on them makes them a natural vehicle for the segue that helps to keep them fresh, dynamic and interesting.
For example, contemplate the following:
Column 1 |
Column 2 |
Column 3 |
Column 4 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
A+B |
|
C |
D |
B |
A |
|
C+D |
|
D+A |
A+C |
B |
If A, B, C, and D are four different PCs, this illustrates how plot threads can be left dangling while players are being distracted by developments in another plot thread. If you end up with the same total number of occupied cells in all columns, the focus is roughly equally distributed between the four. Notice, also, the bottom row of the example, which uses A as a bridge between plot threads 2 and 3. This generally means on the next row (or the one after at the latest), A should not appear at all, so as to ensure equitable distribution of the spotlight.
This shows just how complex a narrative structure you can weave using a table to contain and structure that narrative.
A Variant Structure
It’s also possible to encode a plot structure with one character per column. This enables an additional column to be used to encode a reference to a particular plotline or plot development (I’ve illustrated this sort of thing any number of times here at Campaign Mastery, see the plot thread that occupies the last 1/3 of The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure, for example.
This can encompass all the problems described below in the “Four Or More Threads” section if you have more than 3 PCs to track, so it’s a lot more complicated in many ways, but it can still be a useful planning tool.
Three Threads
That’s getting a little ahead of ourselves; if it weren’t for the possibility of there being only 2 or 3 feature characters to track, I would not have mentioned the variant structure until later in the article.
So let’s take a step back and look at the somewhat simpler structure that is a Three-plot-thread braiding:
The basic structure of the three-ply braid looks, somewhat predictably, like this:
– three central columns (one for each plot thread) and two small ones on either side of the page for tracking whatever it is that you feel the need to track.
Within this basic structure, you have all the options and tools previously described available to you, plus a few that I have yet to get to.
Why Use A Three-Thread Model?
Let’s say that you have one significant plot thread, and two smaller ones that between them are equal to the significant plot thread. That would be one valid reason for using a three-thread model.
Presumably, one of those then leads into the main plot, which brings all the PCs together on the one problem – which may constitute a fourth plot thread.
There are other possible reasons, but they are all variations on this theme. For example, I once ran an adventure sequence in which one PC was driving the action while the others were kept hopping dealing with the fallout of those actions.
If you have six PCs, you can group them into two trios or three pairs – so having the three plot-thread model up your sleeve gives you a lot of flexibility.
But the best answer – and it’s still a variation on the same theme – is that you can dedicate one of the threads to the Villain and his actions / reactions to events. These never get related to the players, they show up as events in the first two plot threads if and when the developments get noticed. What they do is ensure that the Villain and his plot is developing and evolving in response to the PCs and their activities. It’s a planning tool of significant benefit.
Empty Cells
Further refinements are possible by leaving some cells empty. This only works with more than two plot threads, but enables you to sequence those plot threads as desired – this was a key point in the design of “Lucifer Rising”, the plot discussed in the article on plot structure.
A Second Variant
Let’s start with me name-dropping the Kree-Skrull War from the Avengers comic. For those who were comic readers of the time, this was the most epic plotline that had ever appeared in comic form, eclipsing earlier examples from the Fantastic Four (for example, the Inhumans plotline) and DC’s annual team-ups between the Justice League and Justice Society.
The three-thread structure facilitates the planning and construction of such epic plotlines by treating the events befalling one faction as a plot thread. In plot thread one, the supreme command of faction one might initiate a military confrontation with faction two as a distraction from a more subtle plot. A subsequent entry in faction two’s narrative then describes the outcome of the confrontation, while an entry in faction three’s plot sequence (the PCs) makes them aware of the confrontation and hints at it’s true purpose. There would then be a further entry for faction one detailing the success or failure or progress of the true plot.
This technique works whether faction one are Drow and faction 2 elves, or orcs and humans, or whatever the participants are to be. If necessary, coalesce factions into alliances to reduce the number of plot ‘threads’ to three, or at most, four.
Four-or-more Threads
Which brings me to the four-or-more structure.
If you use landscape orientation and a relatively small font, you might conceivably be able to manage four primary columns, but experience tells me that this is going to be touch-and-go.
For perspective on that, here are three views of the front page of the Zenith-3 adventure, The Tangled Web – the first one shows the two-column orientation used for this traditionally-formatted adventure.
The second shows a mock-up of a four-column version: I should mention that I tried formatting (for real) this way and found that because a page was larger than would show on my screen at full-width, I was having to scroll up and down frequently.
Note that the text seems denser, but you actually fit slightly less on a page. Of course, the title graphic could be reduced in size to a single column – gaining almost half a page:
This means that I could not hold the front page up to show the players (helping to set the tone for the adventure) – in fact, the subtitle is all but invisible at this size. And, because we’ve increased the text content about 50%, the already annoying ‘scroll up and down’ problem will be 50% worse, too.
As a rule of thumb, then, four columns and content don’t mix very well, even in landscape mode.
Practical Limitations Of Structure
That requires a modification to the structure of the format. Instead of content going directly into the columns, it needs to be moved, and maybe even formatted in a two-column mode just like my 2-column version of A Tangled Web. This is then linked to the planning section (where information is kept in the four-column / four-thread format) by a simple sequential code.
Unfortunately, my example is going to require a little additional explanation because I made an assumption that I probably shouldn’t have: that the adventure started with an all-four-threads scene and then split into two threads, each of which then bifurcated into four – and that the first three cells are all on page one of the document and this is page two..
That’s why the first entry is numbered four in the example below; it’s probably a more realistic example but also more confusing – but I don’t have time to redo it.
In the top section, we have the scene number and space to write in the PCs who are part of the scene. There is also the usual space for ticks and crosses to signify that work is required / done.
This enables the top section to be used as a planning tool just as was the case with the earlier versions.
The index number then points to the content section. Note that with 11 rows of content, there would only be room for a line or two. Anything more and you have to move scenes 12-15 to the next page – and that can be extremely inconvenient.
Conclusion: it can be done – but it might be more trouble than it’s worth.
Coming Together
Let’s go back to our three-column model. How do you represent it when two plot threads converge into a single situation? This can be expected to happen when the PCs start coming together for the main plot of the adventure, after all, so it’s likely to happen regularly.
The example above demonstrates how to handle this – it’s a simple matter of selecting the cells that have come together and merging the cells. Most software will be able to handle this process. What’s more, if you do this before creating rows below the merge, some software preserves the new structure when additional rows are added (some software doesn’t, though!).
Splitting Apart
Similarly, having a plot thread bifurcate into two separate sets of activities or lines of investigation is achieved by merging the cells prior to the bifurcation:
Seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it?
Non-Plotting Applications
If this were nothing more than a way of arranging the text contents that make up your game prep, it would be a curiosity, something to file away for use on the occasional rare occasion, nothing more.
But there’s a lot more that can be done with this approach. I’ve already mentioned the two factions and a force of PCs caught in the middle (using the three column structure) – but there are so many useful things to do with the basic two-column mode that it will shine as a planning and background construction tool on a frequent basis.
I have four – well, three-and-a-half – such applications to throw into your toolkit.
- Siblings: 100%. Maybe 95%.
- Parents: 65%. Aunts & Uncles, ditto – unless the person has never met them, yielding 60% accuracy..
- Grandparents: 60% of 65% = 39%. So more than half of what you think you know about them is wrong. If you’ve met them, +5% to get 44%.
- Great Grandparents: 60% of 39% is 23.4%. And this is the generation when meeting these ancestors starts to become problematic.
- Great-Great-Grandparents 60% of 23.4% is 14.04%. 17 facts in 20 are distorted at best.
- Great-Great-Great-Grandparents: 60% of 14.04 = 8.424%. There might be a single grain of truth in there somewhere.
1: A Tale Of Governments
Almost every government can be described as a contest between two factions – it doesn’t matter if there are democratic processes or if we’re talking alliances in a noble court or merchants / guilds vs authority.
That means that you can use the two-column model to construct a political history, working backwards, and mentioning only events that were politically significant.
Nor do the membership of any given faction have to remain consistent – you can have affiliations and alliances that shift and change in response to political intrigue, just as the Republican Party are both the modern day party and the party of Lincoln, and which freed the slaves, while the Democrats have gone from the party of business (slave-owners) interests to the more progressive of the two parties.
Even the form of government can have changed (and frequently will have done so). Before America was the USA, it was the British Colonies – and a monarchy. Every culture has its revolutions – bloodless at times, bloody more often.
2: Family Legacies
Unless your species has extremely unusual biology, your sentient species will normally have a maternal line and a paternal line. That means that the simple two-column model can be used to track backwards, one story / anecdote at a time, compiling an ancestry with family legends.
Each row can either represent an individual (in which case I suggest color coding for generations) or a generation.
Of course, with every step into the past, the chances of error or distortion increase – but this is better handled as a chance of accuracy or a degree of accuracy, because you can simply divide it by a fixed ratio.
I recommend multiplication by 0.8 for individuals and 0.6 for generations in isolation. But I would probably add 5% for individuals or generations that were personally known by the character compiling this family archive.
….and so on. But this also works tracing forwards – Descendants of the siblings of your grandparents are as well-known as going back two more generations (because there’s a 2-generation gap) – so that’s 14.04%, possibly +5% if you once met your distant cousins.
Of course, you can play around with these numbers as you see fit; this is a starting point.
I have to admit that I like the generational model because it basically means that there’s one family myth or significant figure in each generation, yielding a manageable history – but that’s up to you, and some cultures will be more tightly-knit.

This collage contains an American Football (Simanek, CC0), Mohammed Shami warming up to bowl against England at Edgbaston, in 2018 (Aidan Sammons, CC BY 2.0), an excerpt from a night view of the Sydney Cricket Ground as it often appears during the Big Bash, half of the games of which are night-time (Mathew F, CC BY 2.0), a Mercedes AMG which was the car to beat in the 2023 Bathurst 12-hour race – but this example is from a couple of years ago (jason goulding from Muswellbrook, Australia, CC BY 2.0, and Australian batsman Steve Smith hooking a shot (www.davidmolloyphotography.com, CC BY 2.0), all via Wikimedia Commons. There was also a couple of bicycle races and some swimming, and basketball, and more. Summer in Australia is VERY sports-heavy!
3: Sporting Seasons
Today, according to the morning news, is the day of the Superbowl.
At the same time, there is a cricket test-match and one-day international series underway in India, as the Australian Team attempt to wrestle the subcontinent into sporting submission.
And we’ve just had something called the Big Bash, and the Bathurst 12-hour.
Before that, there was a (cricket) test series against South Africa – so there’s been a lot of sport happening lately.
That got me thinking about sporting seasons and how they could always be characterized, no matter what the sport, into a clash between two rivals; there may have been others at the start of the season, but by the end, it always comes down to two rivals.
That always reminds me of the scene in Major League in which Coach Brown says, “I figure it’s gonna take xx more wins to reach the playoffs” – I forget the exact number.
That entire movie is the story of one turbulent season in the life of the Cleveland Indians Major League Baseball team. Which means that – with the benefit of hindsight – an entire season leading up to the grand finale can be written as two simultaneous narratives, one focusing on each of the rivals.
Should it be desirable, you can even work toward a predetermined outcome by telling the story of one team’s season (with their rival-of-the-week being the other narrative thread). This enables you to compile the story one week (game time) at a time until the season reaches its climax.
That also reminds me of the M*A*S*H episode Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, in which Frank wins big by listening to a late-night broadcast of the games and placing bets with the rest of the camp personnel before the games are rebroadcast at a more “Civilized” hour. There was also another episode in which Charles gambles on baseball, convinced that Klinger is an expert, but I couldn’t track down the name of that one ( looked until I ran out of time).
Trying to write this sort of narrative without some organizing structure is a good way to lose track of pertinent details and have the ‘story’ stall if momentum is ever lost.
4: Grand Final Clashes
Just as obviously, a narrative form of a clash between two rivals can be done on a smaller scale, play by play (or the equivalent). To achieve a credible result, there is a minimum standard of knowledge required regarding the sport, I think. The actual process should be fairly obvious by now.
Not A Perfect Solution
Having spent most of this article singing the praises of the table as a tool, it’s time to come crashing back to earth with a dash of reality. Tables are not a perfect solution, mostly because of the software that is used to create them.
Word Processing Software Limitations
These days, the most common tool is a Word Processor. I have Word, but it takes forever to load, so I try to avoid it, instead using LibreOffice for my more complex tasks. I used to use OpenOffice, but it’s high memory demands made it unsuitable for the laptop that is my front-line computer these days (it has barely enough RAM to get by).
All of these implement tables in slightly different ways, and all have their own quirks, which it is necessary to master. For example, for some reason, LibreOffice puts its Table icon-ribbon at the bottom of the screen, where I never remember to look for it; this forces me to scramble around, looking for the controls to do what I want to do, at least until I again rediscover the table ribbon.
Interface & Formatting Inconveniences
Another of the frequent headaches lies in the reversion of text formatting, in whole or in part, when you copy and paste into a new cell with some Word Processors. Others preserve most of the formatting (tabs seem to be a particularly difficult problem in this respect). Again, every implementation has its own idiosyncrasies that have to be mastered.
A Simple Web-page editor?
A simple alternative that may be of use is to use a web-page editor. I still keep a copy of Frontpage Express around from my Win-98 days because it makes it so much easier to lay out a complex table structure. I then sometimes import the saved html into LibreOffice for final tweaks, but know enough html that I do a lot of it directly in my plain-text editor.
There were some things that Netscape’s equivalent to Frontpage did better, but tables weren’t one of them (from memory). When I was first learning, I quite often bounced the one html document from one editor to the other and back.
These days, though, you need to know CSS to make this solution work. I know just enough to get myself into trouble in this department, I’m afraid. If you’re in the same boat, the Word Processors are probably a better bet.
There are things that you can do with a hacksaw that simply can’t be done with a hand saw. The tools that we use can have a significant impact on what we can do with the words that comprise our raw material. While they are not the arbiter or restrictor of plot structures, they can facilitate or hinder.
In particular, some plot structures are far more accessible through the magic of tables in a Word Processor or WYSIWYG HTML editor (WYSIWYG = “What You See Is What You Get”) – the links near the bottom of the page may be of use in choosing your tools for working with tables if you don’t have one already, or don’t like the one you have).
In fact, there are some things that are extremely difficult or annoying to attempt in any other way. And that makes the table-based approach something that every GM should know about.
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