2023-01-20 Suggesting adventures but not writing them

Listening to 78rpm recordings from the Internet Archive after having survived Unterwaterhockey! Yay me!

I’m trying to write a section with adventure ideas. @Judd has been saying that he would like a setting described using questions. Perhaps this can be done here? Ask leading questions, keeping it open, set expectations and don’t close off open ends. Perhaps it’d be interesting?

@Judd

Here’s what I have under the section “seasonal adventures”. Other sections include “community building”, “love and marriage”, and “misfortune”. I hope there are more. Something about war. Something about the plague. Something about a dancing madness. Something about intolerant madmen coming and poisoning the community with their divisive talking. Things to deal with that aren’t dungeons.

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It’s difficult for players to focus on multi-year projects if they keep getting distracted by “important” work. One way to solve it would be to reduce the distractions. But where is the adventure in that? If the point is an adventure game, the opposite is our goal: multi-year projects manage themselves.

So here’s a classic task: let’s build a castle. You can’t buy a castle, so how are you going to build it? Let there be a non-player manager, a famous Construction-5 castle builder. He makes the plans and spares us the details. What he does is make demands. He tells the players what to do. We need tables to roll up his demands and associated adventure bones.

• Arrange a marriage abroad.* We need more of the marble from foreign lands. Do you know how to get there? Travel there by ship and travel up river? Face pirates, cheating merchants, bandits, find a stowaway and be chased by their enemies. There is no payment for the marble but a promise of marriage for the marble quarry owner. You’re bringing pictures and a negotiator to the table. The negotiator is a difficult person but if you befriend them, you might have a connection to a partner of your own. What kind of partner are you looking for? What about the quarry owner’s family? Will you let yourself fall in love, risk the mission and make a big career ending move – for your heart’s desire?

• Mines.* There’s a problem with the iron mines, the gypsum dig, the coal pit, the freestone cavern. Somebody has to go there, figure what’s wrong and solve it: Maybe it is a werewolf has been killing miners, or dwarves have shown up from below and demanded that the digging stop. Why is that? And what about the robber knight and his mercenaries that promised to return and sack the mining town unless the protection money is paid are you going to do something about it? Perhaps the mine operator has been replaced by a shapechanger who loves to drink fine and eat piglets every day, a dozen eggs and more, with expensive spices from foreign lands, all paid for by the resources of the mine, or so they say. Find out, and decide how much violence you are willing to apply in order to find a solution agreeable to your lord and lady. Have the miners broken into an ancient grave site and seen the dead sorcerers stirring? Calm the miners and have them return to work.

• Quarry*. The quarry is in uproar. Kobolds have been pranking the poor sods, stealing their clothes, filling their tents with spiders, having their meat rot away. Can you find the invisible flying pranksters, these cursed fairies, and can you put and end to their antics? They hate the rackets the hammers are making, the chisels are grating on their ears and the iron saws are turning the milk sour. Can you set the necessary traps? Can you catch them and force those contracts that will banish them for a year and a day, time enough to finish that castle?

• Logging*. The loggers refuse to work. Wild men have been spotted. Giants, they say. Or was it hairy beast men, naked and armed with clubs? The Alder King is sending them, they say. Is it true? Who is the Alder King? Do the spider goblin knights from the deep hills fight for him? Is the troll on his side? Can you stop them all? Can you make your way to the Alder King and take those long stairs leading you to the goblin market? Do you know the rules governing that place?

​#RPG Knives

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Some things that jump out to me:

Questions work well when the referee is asked to decide something about the setting. What kind of opposition are we facing? What kind of mine is it? Where is it? For players: How do we get there?

Also good questions are motivations: Why are we being opposed? For players: How are you going to solve this: Violence? Offering some trade-in, i.e. doing a mission for the opposition? For the referee: What kind of desires might the opposition have that the players could possibly, or at least temporarily, help out with? What are the consequences of the resolution?

There are also more traditional questions in there that I like to imply when I run my campaigns: What kind of character are you? How do you like to solve your problems? How focused are you? Are you willing to sacrifice the mission for some perceived higher good? Are you interested in romance for your character?

– Alex 2023-01-20 13:12 UTC

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@miriamrobern made an interesting suggestion:

@miriamrobern

“Who was the masked figure in the bell tower, and why did they know the secret hand signals of the Damned Church?”

This surfaces something interesting: Who are these questions addressed to? Some people running games like to ask the players at table, some rules have places where we’re asking each other questions. We’re making it up as we go. When I am a player, however, the sense of discovery is an important element of my enjoyment. For that to work, I must believe in the independent existence of the fantasy world and therefore anybody making things up at the table is something I prefer to avoid. I don’t want to explore what we made up seconds ago. I just want to ask the referee.

Now, when I’m the referee, I often need to make up stuff. Of course I do. I interpolate the notes, draw conclusions from disparate facts and present a whole world, apparently seamless and ongoing, forever conjuring up new material. But the important part is that I prepare for the game. My conjuration is not arbitrary, and my sessions are short. Between sessions, I prepare again. It’s true: even as a referee I need to believe in the independence existence of the fantasy world. This is why I like rolling up encounters and treasures. The table disintermediates the making up of things and the discovery of things.

So this is what I’d want in my game: These questions guide prep for the referee. Let them daydream, and if they’re in need of inspiration, or if they are trying to have a guide into an unfamiliar dreamland who puts things in ways they wouldn’t have thought of, then people can read this section of the book and get into the mood for some a weird Switzerland-inspired game.

That’s why I would get Yoon-Suin, Quelong, A Thousand Thousand Islands, or any other such material, in any case: To have a guide when dreaming up unfamiliar cultures and landscapes.

@Judd said he thinks the table is asking the events of the game to answer questions. That’s a good point. Play to find out! Some of these questions I see as questions to be answered by playing the game. Are you playing a crooked knight? Let’s play to find out. There there be situations where being crooked is easy and being honest is hard. Let’s see how far you’ll bend the rules for love, for gain.

@Judd

I suspect there might be different kinds of questions, then:

• Questions to guide you through unfamiliar dreamlands. Why are the dwarves undermining the castle? It’s not giant moles, it’s not purple worms, it’s small and skinny dwarves like Alberich and Mime from the Niebelungenlied. This is a guiding question.
• Questions to see answered through play. If Isolt is falling in love with you when you should be escorting her to your king, do you elope with her and prove to be a lover, not a fighter? It’s a question directed at players.
• In a similar vein, players can ask the referee questions: Are there any consequence for me if I kill the baron? How far can I upend the social order in order to abolish serfdom? It’s something that you can announce beforehand, just to make sure were all aware of the questions you want to see answered, but ultimately it’s up to the referee to set up situations that will allow us all to find out.
• The leading questions to put players on the spot are also part of table techniques, of course. I already said that I don’t like exploring what I just made up, but there are some questions that I like to ask. As the party is preparing to climb up to the glacier, I ask: Which character has experience with the mountains? As the party descends the iron ladders down into the hell hole, I ask the player of the dwarf: Does your dwarf have experience with the volcanic underworld? These questions are about the characters and their backgrounds. If the player likes to add these details, they get to entertain us at the table and to enrich our game. We get a glimpse into the past of our fellow characters.
• Questions relating to the outcomes of actions fall into a similar vein of table techniques if we’re not adding details to the world that we’re going to explore but consequences. I might suggest something like a player gets a bad reaction roll and I’ll suggest that offences was taken. I’ll pause for a second. If the player feels like embellishing it or putting their own spin on it, now is the time. I like to think of these as questions of style. How exactly are you succeeding? How exactly are you failing? What exactly did you say? It’s another opportunity for some character exposition.

– Alex 2023-01-20 15:52 UTC

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@miriamrobern added:

@miriamrobern

Sometimes, too, the questions are for yourself after you’ve played a few sessions and you come back to the questions and you go, “well obviously that’s this-and-such because that fits into the story we’ve been telling, not that I would have known that when I wrote this question.”

I like that! The answer that developed can be like a guide to the campaign arc. “We finally discovered who built this great castle! Oh and on the way we learned all the gold came from, and why it was cursed, and who ended up with it, and why the dragon, and and and…

– Alex 2023-01-20 17:25 UTC