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A Narrative Evolution Of Reality

I construct very detailed plotlines for most of my campaigns. There are:

• Primary Campaign-Level Plotlines that permanently shape or reshape the context within which all the individual adventures take place. Usually consist of tent-pole Events and paradigm shifts within adventures, and are often describable as the outcome of a string of adventures, and some adventures are all about the primary campaign-level plotline. Ultimately, these are the campaign, at least as the GM will later summarize it, everything else is window dressing and interaction and filler. Some or all primary campaign-level plotlines will not resolve until the end of the campaign. Lots of the rest of the campaign does nothing but build up to these moments.
• Lesser Campaign-Level Plotlines that are designed to play out in the form of subplots and situations within multiple adventures that, if placed back-to-back in a narrative format, would tell a single story. These are often turning points for characters and the triggers for primary campaign-level plot developments. These often have a more personal, single-PC focus, though some can affect the whole party.
• Minor Campaign-Level Subplots that are more restricted in immediate scope, more transitory, and generally less significant in the short term, but which are capable of a longer-term impact that is significant, played out a little at a time over multiple adventures. These may be character turning points, but are generally more akin to experiences that deliver the character, a little sadder, wiser, more battered and bruised, but otherwise unchanged, out the other side. Sometimes described in a derogatory way as “color encounters”, these are more about the PC displaying personality as it is than about changing that personality.
• Campaign-Level Contextual Flows that define the relationships between adventures in any way not explicitly deriving from a Primary Campaign-level plotline. For example, adventure #7 might introduce a villain, adventure #9 might provide more information about that villain but that is not its primary focus, and adventure #14 is about a crisis precipitated by that villain. Adventure #10 might foreshadow that crisis with no apparent connection to the villain that will ultimately be responsible for it. In the other adventures, the villain is simply a presence lurking in the background with no involvement deriving from the GM’s plans – the villain might still be dragged into a plotline by the players!
• Adventure-Level Plotlines are the units which, in total, comprise the campaign. While the campaign plan might call for a lot of random stuff to “just happen” as set-up for other campaign events in the future, that isn’t particularly satisfying; adding a plotline that can be taken to a resolution provides a framing device which can contain everything else. Adventures consist of acts and acts consist of scenes and encounters and narrative and decision points.
• Adventure-Level Subplots are vignettes within an adventure that are unrelated to the plot of the adventure, or have an indirect relationship at best, but which define context for the immediate status of one or more PCs during the commencement of a more significant phase within the adventure or act. These vignettes may be wholly self-contained scenes, or may join together to form a broader narrative that is nevertheless resolved by the end of the adventure or act.
• Significant Scenes and Encounters are scenes or encounters that relate to higher-order plot structures – they advance an adventure plotline or a campaign-level plot or subplot. These are the “important moments” within an adventure, though they may not appear all that important at the time.
• Passing Scenes and Encounters are scenes or encounters that do NOT relate directly to higher-order plot structures. As such, they advance minor campaign-level plotlines, adventure-level subplots, or provide campaign-level contextual flow.

Connecting Threads

On top of all that, there are connecting threads that bind all of this together. The most obvious are the ongoing personal histories of each of the PCs, but there are also ongoing threads connecting the histories of significant NPCs and sometimes progressive changes to social, technological, political, economic, military, medical, or scientific developments, or natural (and sometimes unnatural) phenomena.

Schematic Of An Adventure’s Contents

Now, I’m not suggesting that every adventure will contain something from every one of this multitude of layers. But most will have most of them, and the absence of something is almost always for a plot reason – catapulting the players directly into an action sequence for pacing purposes, for example.

In broad swathes of color, this depicts three complete adventures – four campaign-level layers, and four adventure-level layers. The campaign-level elements persist from one adventure to the next, but there is some form of separation that makes one adventure distinct from the next, something that provides internal cohesion, binding the adventure-level elements together.

This separates the eight layers and displays their internal structure as it might be used to graphically represent the content of a specific adventure.

• In black at the top are the Primary Campaign-Level Plotlines. There are 7 such plotlines represented; 5 are simply ongoing, two have events within this adventure.
• The Purple represents Lesser Campaign-Level Plotlines. There are four of these, which generally implies that there are four PCs. While it’s not always going to be the case, all four have significant developments within this adventure, but none reach a resolution.
• In Red are Minor Campaign-Level Subplots. Again, there are four strings of these, one for each PC. Note that some subplots affect two or more PCs. You might also observe that with each successive layer, the number of scenes contributed to the adventure tends to increase.
• The fourth layer, in yellow and gold, consists of all the connecting threads that tie the plot elements of the first three rows together, represented symbolically here because they have already been shown on the different layers from which they derive.
• The fifth layer is the adventure, this one in four acts. I’ll get back to it in a moment.
• The sixth layer (colored aqua) depicts Adventure-Level Subplots – this one shows six subplots that are entirely confined to this adventure. Several interconnect at various points, as you would expect when exploring the personal lives of four individuals who both “work” and “play” together most of the time. Note that there are four subplots to start with (one per PC) and three resolutions, one affecting two PCs, and that the trend toward an increased presence within the successive layers continues.
• The seventh layer, in an intermediate blue, contains Significant Scenes and Encounters – in other words, framing devices that tie everything from rows 1-3 together into specific sequences of game play within the adventure.
• The final layer, in a deeper shade of blue, might seem to be the least important by virtue of the absence of internal structure. That isn’t the case; this represents Passing Scenes and Encounters, the events that happen whenever something from the seventh layer isn’t taking place.
• Which brings me back to the adventure layer, on which I have compiled all these components. You can see this most clearly by comparing the isolated elements from the first three layers, the campaign-level events, with the content shown in layer 4. Once you have done so, it becomes easier to see layer 7 creating blocks of play, and the role of layer 4; and, once you can see all those elements for what they are, the pattern of subplots from layer 6 become visible. Even layer 8 is shown as part of the adventure, in the form of the dark blue stripes that are everywhere that layer 7 isn’t.

Adventure Planning

I track layers one and two in a master plan, which is incredibly complicated to explain – I’ve gone into it in detail on a couple of occasions here at campaign mastery. That master plan also contains incomplete and brief hints as to the content of layers 3 and 6 for individual adventures – this might be the name of an adversary or encounter, for example. They use a code to connect to a very long list of adventure developments synopsized into a single line, which in turn point to a more substantial treatment that is used as a guideline. The synopsis is gospel, because it describes how this piece of the campaign-level plot ties into the others to tell a broader story (broader than any one adventure); the more substantial treatment (which was used to generate the synopsis in the first place) can be varied to better fit into the adventure or to tell a more interesting/exciting/thrilling story.

I have multiple sources that are used to derive the layer 6 content – player wishes, some random tables that I put together, the thematic content of the adventure, logical developments following other recent events that are not otherwise catered for, and inspiration during the writing process.

Sometimes, to protect the integrity of the adventure, campaign-level material that was not originally intended for this adventure has to be brought forward – that happened with the whole “rogue behemoth” plot sequence a few adventures ago, because Behemoth was the logical solution to a plot hole that I hadn’t anticipated. Which meant finding out what he had been up to lately…

In a nutshell, I have a broad outline and a number of “mandatory” drop-in scenes to “seed” into the adventure.

Detailed Planning

Converting that into an adventure means outlining the adventure in successive iterations – acts, then scenes, then scene content – encounters and locations and narrative and so on, generating props and reference materials, etc.

At each point, I’m looking at nothing more than a bullet point and a few words – a line or less. This is a work order, nothing is finished.

Adventure Writing

When I start running a new adventure, I generally have two sessions worth of material written. In between each game session, I try to write another full session’s worth of material, but don’t stress if I come up short, or if the players get through more material in a given game session than I expected. As a result, by about midway in a four-plus game-session adventure, I have only half a game-session in reserve, or less; and from the end of session three of a five-session adventure, each day’s play consumes all of the prepared material and sometimes a little more.

This might seem like I am not allocating enough prep time to the campaign, but that’s not the case. You see, the start of adventures tend to be relatively fixed, but as the adventure proceeds, player decisions and choices tend to accumulate and can steer an adventure in entirely unexpected directions.

Allocating my game prep in this way not only makes my adventures more responsive to players choices and actions, it gives me more time to get ahead of the curve on the next adventure.

As a general rule of thumb, using 12-point type, players in my Zenith-3 campaign will generally get through about 14 pages of material per game session. With two more players in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, less one serving as co-GM, we generally only get through 7-10 pages of 12-point material. Though there are times in both campaigns where 1 line can consume a significant fraction of a game session – “combat ensues”, for example!

In Actual Play

So, it’s the big day. It’s time to put into practice all the planning, and implement the plotline that you have crafted. And you know I never stray from the prepared material, no matter what, right? Where did that hollow echo suddenly come from?

Of course I diverge from that material. Players – pardon me, characters – make decisions. Dice get rolled. Some character interactions are so much fun that they get extemporaneously expanded; others are not as entertaining as expected and get curtailed. Players indulge in conspiracy theories and misunderstandings and poor assumptions, and make decisions based on these failings.

Actual play is an anarchic compilation of personal interactions at the game table that superficially resembles what was planned to some degree. Some of that prep will be incorporated verbatim, some of it will be modified on the fly, and some content will be created out of whole cloth.

That might sound like justification for doing no prep at all – simply operating off that list of bullet points, or even less. And that’s exactly how I run the Zener Gate campaign – it’s 99% improv. But I’ve found that the results are often superficial, and hold your campaign hostage to how “good” you are on the day. Doing more substantial prep incorporates depth, gives time to polish narrative and descriptions, gives me multiple opportunities to be on top of my game, and gives me solid material on which to base whatever actually comes out of my mouth on the game day.

To pluck an example from D&D/Pathfinder, my synopsis might say something like “Tavern, reeks of Elvishness, four sullen solitary patrons, barman.” The next line goes on to talk about the barman and how the players can advance the plot by interacting with him – in no greater detail. Now, it’s an old maxim that’s as true of RPGs as it is fiction writing, “show, don’t tell” – which means, in this case, writing a description of the place in such a way, and with appropriate content, that the players might synopsize the description as “The place reeks of Elvishness” – I don’t want to have to employ the phrase, I want to demonstrate that it’s true. I don’t know about you, but coming up with such a description is something that is better done in advance and in careful detail and not off-the-cuff.

So prep is still important; I simply use it as something other than railroad tracks.

Three Sources Of Randomness

The anarchy that I described earlier is an amalgam of three sources of chaos and the consequences of their manifestations at the game table.

• Player Decisions can be thought of as unscripted player-plot interactions.
• Die Rolls can be thought of as unscripted character-plot interactions.
• GM Thought Bubbles are metaphysical chaos manifesting at a macroscopic scale – the equivalent of a butterfly flapping it’s wings somewhere.

One or two instances of such chaos can easily be accommodated. But as they accumulate, the effects multiply, becoming more and more unpredictable:

Combating that chaos is the reason I try to stay “just ahead” of the players in the campaign, instead of miles in front. In effect, I’m rewriting the rest of the adventure to take into account the accumulated chaos and anarchy – and in the process, neutralizing it.

But this article isn’t so much about what I do after the fact; it’s about how I handle that chaos at the game table and what specific prep I do to anticipate it.

Which is a subject that I’ll be addressing in Part 2, “Into All Chaos, A Little Order Must Fall”, next week!