Prepping Plots, Part Two: The Rough Outline

Last time on Prepping Plots, we discussed why the enterprising GM might consider a more linear structure for their elfgame campaign. Today, we're going to take those advantages and run with them, prepping out a basic sketch of our campaign. This is a format largely cribbed from Paizo (and though I can't prove it, most likely from James Jacobs), because their adventures and Adventure Paths are the gold standard for structural editing. If you're already using a premade adventure path/module/whatever, that hard work has already been done for you! Congrats! For the rest of us, let's start with

All we need to start is circles. The rest of the owl can be done later.

Throwing In Cool Ideas

The most important thing a GM has to do, even ahead of providing players with stuff to do, is making sure you keep enjoying the game. You're a player, too, and if you're not interested then everything falls apart. So start by just making a list of cool things you like and want in the game. We'll refine it and run things through safety tools later, but right now just take five minutes or so and come up with a list of monsters, environments, etc.

 

A list of some of my favorite things to throw at players.

Define the Heroic Action

The next thing you need to figure out is what an average session of the campaign of the plot is going to look like. Elfgame Campaigns, due in part to their highly serialized nature, benefit from highly episodic play, where each individual session is its own self-contained part of the whole. Even if you end up less episodic, it's still good to think about the kinds of problems players will be dealing with.

Examples might be: 

• The Enterprise finds a new planet, explores it, gets into trouble, but saves the day and continues their mission.
• The heroes encounter a new monster, learn something about it in order to defeat it, and then cook it.
• A patient comes in with a weird problem, a stupid doctor suggests the medicine drug, Doctor House suggests mouse bites, and it works.

Part of the benefit of working within the elfgame framework is that unlike, say, Blades in the Dark or Swords of the Serpentine, you begin with a fairly standard set of verbs and tropes that everyone is going to be familiar with; every character is going to be able to resolve problems through violence, and will likely do so a large amount of times. 

Looking at the list I put together above, we can see that I like militaristic foes and politicking, so an average session of campaigning might involve doing intrigue, rallying defenses, and dealing with things like fortifications and supplies. Those other words can be used to help flavor the setting and scope. (For instance, I like mountains and snowy settings). 

We're not married to anything yet, but we've got a bit of a shape, which we will now hammer out through

Anal Bead Adventure Design

When Paizo released their Adventure Paths in six parts, it was partly a business decision: printing big books is expensive, and softcover chunks of those big books is much cheaper. Part of it also undoubtedly came down to experience writing discrete adventures for Dungeon magazine But you can also see this design within 3.X adventures like the excellent Red Hand of Doom, which has subchapters and subobjectives within the larger adventure. Justin Alexander calls this node-based scenario design, but I'm going to use the term Anal Bead Adventure Design because it's my blog and you can't stop me!

In essence, each bead in the chain is its own self-contained chapter, so you know at least a bit of where you're going in the future without having anything that must happen in order for things to progress.

I should call her

Looking at this, we have a very clear progression from fighting orcs and their beetle friends (with some sort of mystery) to an out-and-out fight against hobgoblins and white dragons, to braving the tomb of a long-dead Worm-That-Walks to stop The Evil (TM) once and for all. Each bit can be relatively self-contained and allows us to have some differences in kind between chapters. 

Now we have ourselves a rough outline that can get our creative juices flowing ahead of any giving session. As random ideas enter your head (NPCs, beats to steal, cool gimmicks for encounters), add them to your google doc and maybe tie them to a bead or two. We now have the ability to foreshadow things (maybe the Worm-That-Walks has a symbol the orcs have branded on them? Maybe the Hobgoblin General was never the same after he left the tomb?), even if we don't know precisely how things will go just yet, preventing us from suffering the worst effects of The Mystery Box. 

Next time, we'll talk a little bit about the rest of those folks at the gaming table: the players! How to write a good Player's Guide, how to integrate their interests, and how to get folks hype for the cool adventures you've sorta vaguely thought about.