Well, Nephew. Perhaps after reading my latest adventure, you’ll begin to believe me that the dungeons are more than simply constructs doodled onto the paper of our world by all-seeing gods who play games with dice and men’s lives. I’ve been to a dungeon that was created by the hands of men and, this time, I have a witness to prove it.
A while back, I got the idea in my head that I would write a stripped down dungeon bashing RPG system and run a game using it. I first thought about basing it on an adapted version of Jeff Dee’s TWERPS system; this was after I had unpacked some of my gaming stuff and found all of the TWERPS books I’ve been carrying around and wanted something simple to run. I soon decided TWERPS wasn’t really the system for me because I’m kind of burned out on d20-based systems, even d20/2 variations.
So I started looking at other dice mechanics and decided what I really wanted was not just a old school dungeon crawler, but something with an insane dice mechanic. And then it hit me – Yahtzee, aka Yacht, aka Generala.
Thus was born GENERALA, the diciest game on earth. Although I’ve run three games using it now, I have yet to create a bestiary. If anyone is interested in playing, I’ll dig up my notes on the monsters I used and post them.
Matt Jackson posted a little contest on G+ to flesh out one of his maps into an adventure. Despite my best efforts, I got inspired.
Nephew, I received your last letter and must admit that your defense of Dungeon Land dogma is most distubring to me, as I believed you, among all my relatives, to be the most open minded and willing to consider the possibilities. Common wisdom states that dungeons spring forth from the land wholly formed and ready for exploration by adventurers, but surely The Wizard’s Sleeve is the best evidence I’ve presented so far that this is not the case. How could a structure so obviously artificial in form be a randomly generated by nature?
I stand by my belief that dungeons are not the result of the gods doodling shapes and crosshatches on pieces of paper. There is a human element to their design and your rejection of this notion has only inspired me on to greater heights of evidence to save you from ignorance. To that end, I have put Ferguson to task to find me an actual inhabited dungeon. He repeated the doggerel about dungeons appearing only as adventurers need them, but when pressed admitted that he knew of a dungeon that was located directly under an inhabited city and even incorporated parts of the city’s construction into its matrix.
Nephew, if I’d ever convinced myself that I could take on the professional adventuring life myself, the events of the past two weeks would have convinced me of my error. However, if I had to suffer to get here, then the reward was all the sweeter.
Ferguson has taken me to an ancient dungeon, one that dates into antiquity and beyond, to perhaps the early origins of Dungeon Land. And here I have found conclusive proof of the hand of man in the creation of a dungeon.
Although Ferguson still disagrees.
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A few sessions ago, I handed out a questionnaire to my group to help me define what my players were expecting from this campaign. I’d already thrown the idea out to them with my pitch summary (“It’s Gangster Squad meets Harry Potter“) and knew they liked my ideas so far. I gave it some time to settle in, then gave them the template questionnaire so I could gauge their expectations of the game.
I wasn’t surprised that all of my players rated Adventure as the element that they’d most like to see – after all this is a roleplaying game – but I was a bit surprised that Recurring Characters ranked #2 and Combat was #4. Our last long-term campaign had a lot of recurring themes and characters, but only to give me a sense of permanency when I was writing the next adventure in that universe. Having people and places show up more than once made it easier for me to write each game because I could build on what had already happened. I’m surprised that the players identified with it.
Anyway, here’s the compiled results of the questionnaire. I’ll be using it as the campaign template when writing up adventures.
I’m currently writing the American Auror campaign plots and I’m structuring it using a method I’ve used in the past to write long campaigns which I call The Double-Tap. I’m not going to take you through the plot build-up of American Auror, but I’ll walk you through another campaign where I’ve used the double-tap to great affect so you can see how it works.
Let me start by saying that I don’t plot my campaigns game-by-game. I write out the major events of the over-arching story, then write each week’s game in the week leading up to game night, deciding then how much of the overall plot will be revealed. So this won’t be another boring breakdown of pacing or combat vs. dialog or any of that overthinking nonsense. This is simply a method to flesh out the over-all storyline of the campaign around which you’ll set your individual games.
What is the Double-Tap
Simply, the double-tap is hitting the players twice, in quick succession, with two huge reveals. Rarely are these reveals back-to-back in the same play session, but they do come back-to-back in terms of the overall story.
In the double-tap structure, the players are given a problem to solve, a singular goal around which the campaign hinges. As they near the end of that goal you hit them with the first shot – the problem is much worse, much bigger, and has a much larger lead on them than they actually thought. In traditional three act formula, this is known as the climax or second turning point, in Jo-ha-kyū it’s the break, where things suddenly accelerate out of control; the heroes, who until now have trudged through ever complication thrown at them, suddenly find themselves against overwhelming odds against which they cannot prevail and the clock is ticking down even faster. This is standard stuff in adventure stories.
In the double-tap, the characters barely overcome their challenge, are victorious over the villain, and pick up their things to walk off into falling action and denouement – only to find that a bigger, meaner, more evil antagonist has been there the whole time and bam they’re hit with another climax. This is terrible in a book, even worse in a movie, but played right in a gaming campaign and you can create a massive oh shit moment.
What follows are the five steps toward running a double-tap campaign.
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Success, nephew! I have my first proof that dungeons may not be spawned by the Dungeon Land itself for the sole amusement of adventurers!
Now, I know what you’re thinking, one dungeon does not constitute proof of the whole, but nephew! What a dungeon!
Recently, I watched the Gangster Squad trailer and thought, “that looks like a fun setting for an RPG campaign – but what it’s really missing is magic.”
It was a stupid idea, but exactly the kind of stupid idea that could eventually lead to something awesome. Somewhere in the back of my head, the part of my brain that stores silly ideas noticed that the plastic brick that contained my idea for a game based on Harry Potter snapped together with the plastic brick of the Gangster Squad idea and made an airplane. The kind of airplane made up of two bricks snapped together crosswise, sure, but with enough imagination it flies.
The spot at which the round bumps of one brick fit into the backside of the other brick was the idea of secret police. Gangster Squad reminded me of The Untouchables with its FBI agents, and Harry Potter has its aurors, a squad of wizard-busting badasses. It wasn’t a great leap to having an American agency responsible for policing magical crimes in the US and bam, I had a synopsis for my next campaign –
American Auror – the PC’s are aurors working for the magical equivalent of the FBI. They’ll deal with magical organized crime, magical terrorism, and the occasional dark wizard. There will be lots of combat.
I’ve been mulling that over for the last few weeks since I came up with the idea. I floated the synopsis out to my regular group and everyone was pretty enthused about the idea. As we talked about it, I came up with a few ideas and worked up a document for the agency based on some stuff I’d found on the FBI’s website. It gave the players some good ideas for their characters and they started rolling them up before I’d even written a word of plot.
So, since I’ve been asked, here’s that original agency document I created, as well as the campaign template I plan on handing out for the next step of setting design.
This is kind of ranty, so if that’s not your bag you don’t have to read on.
Last night, someone I follow on G+ made a flame bait post about fake geek girls. He prefaced with a girl in a snazzy costume and a snarky comment about how this fake geek girl, with her awesome cyberpunk cosplay, was taking away attention from real geeks who don’t have professionally made costumes.
It was typical fake geek girl flamewar crap, except that girl wasn’t cosplaying cyberpunk, she was wearing cybergoth dance gear. She was a graver.
I pointed this out and the poster got bitchy with me, challenging me on what makes me such an expert on geek culture. In short, he was mad about my derailing his beautiful hate thread, so he pulled out that “You’re not qualified to define geek culture!” card that is so well worn by people with axes to grind, demanding to know what gives me the right to differentiate between cyberpunk and cybergoth. Unfortunately for him, I don’t really give a shit about those kinds of arguments. A musical subculture doesn’t become a geek subculture simply because a geek wants to be inclusive, but if he wants to argue that he’ll have to do it with someone else. I’m not interested in letting him apply more meaning to my comment than was intended just so he could unload whatever moral point it was he was saving to be right about.
So he blocked me. For not arguing with him.
Later, I did realize I had gone into the thread with a chip on my shoulder – because I really do hate the fake geek girl argument. And I hate people who start arguments about fake geek girls. and I hate people who start faux-arguments just so that people who agree with them can jump in and post “Yeah! Me too!”
I started to realize that this was my whole complaint about the fake geek girl thing – it’s a quantum strawman only raised by people using it as a basis to debate other issues.
I started out putting down my thoughts on people who assume all cultures are geek cultures, but I ended up writing more about why I hate the geek girl phenomenon. So here it is.