The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast recently did an episode about scenario structure for Call of Cthulhu. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the episode (and I recommend the podcast in general – it’s really excellent!), but I wanted to have notes to refer to later; I’m currently working on the Storytelling Collective’s “Publish Your First Scenario” exercise, and the ideas in this podcast are extremely useful.

This is a set of notes on the episode, not a transcript, so I do recommend you listen yourself. What I’ve captured here is an outline of what was said, in a form that should be useful for a quick refresher on the concepts.

What is a scenario structure?

• How related information is presented for use by the Keeper in playing a module

• Goal is to make the presentation both as efficient and as user friendly as possible
  • Example: introducing NPCs in a scenario
    • Chaosium house style is NPC description and picture up front, stats at the end
    • Other publishers might have everything in the same place as the character is introduced
  • You probably won’t use only one way of organizing the information and presenting the situation
  • But one particular way will probably dominate
• Questions you need to ask yourself as you’re assembling your information
  • How is it structured when the players play it?
    • Do the event occur in a fixed order?
    • Or are they flexible?
    • Are they tied to a location, or are they relationship-based?

The Linear Series – “On Rails” design

A set of fixed encounters in a particular order

• Has occasionally gotten a bad rap
• It can be very good for certain setups
  • Get from point A to point B, with events along the way
  • Assumes a fairly straightforward path: a single road, a train/boat/airplane ride\
    • Events are added to make that one way more interesting
    • Gives the players something to interact with along the way
    • Allows them to pick up more information, clues, impressions, or needed paraphernalia
    • Alternatively, a logical path or fixed set of events in a more unconstrained geography
      • A clues B, B clues C, …
    • Another option is a linear set of sandboxes
      • Example: Masks of Nyarlahothep
        • Investigators move between a series of locations
        • Each location is a sandbox, but is generally completed before moving on
        • I.e., Paris, then Peru, then London, not part of Peru, then Paris, then back to Peru, etc.
  • An “on rails” design is very different from “railroading” the players!
    • Railroading implies lack of player choice
      • bad: things will happen in this way, nothing the player can do will affect it
        • E.g., NPC must escape, so she does, despite being riddled with bullets and blown up with a grenade
        • Makes the players feel that they have no agency, and they might as well just sit back and not do anything
        • The Keeper should never have to negate or deny actions to maintain the forward flow
      • better: a event that happens in a particular way, with flexibility, that no matter how it comes out, still guides the players to a big set-piece encounter or event
    • Structuring this way can make things easier for a less experienced Keeper
      • As long as the players have complete freedom of choice within a scene, it’s fine
      • A set of things can happen in order as long as the players have some ability to affect them
      • The more options they have in a scene, the more enjoyable it is to play and to GM

The Dungeon – Constraint by geography

A map and locations within it, and there are specific ways to move between locations

• The Haunting, from the 7th edition quickstart rules, is a dungeon once you get to the house

  • 1st part is free-form, during the investigation prior to going to the house
  • 2nd part is one location, the Corbett house
  • There are things you can do in each room, all building toward one location
  • The connections between rooms are fixed
• Uncle Timothy’s Will
  • Description of each room
  • Something to do or obstacles to pass in each room to obtain clues or things you might need
  • You can go out in the grounds and things happen there, so less restricted than The Haunting
  • There’s no fixed order in which you have to do things
  • There are different encounters as time progresses
• “Amongst the Ancient Trees” in the 7th Ed. Keeper’s Handbook
  • Splits the difference between a pure dungeon and an pure sandbox
  • The different clearings are places where different things happen
  • Players can choose one of many different paths through, possibly bypassing some places altogether
• Different from a sandbox in that you’re building toward one location where the climax will happen
  • Object is to get the investigators to that location for the big showdown

Sandbox – Unconstrained set of locations and events

Branching set of possibilities based of player actions

• Typically has lots of different locations
• No fixed order of events
  • All depends on what players choose to do first
  • May change what happens at other locations later
  • Not all of the events may happen
  • Investigators chose their route through the possible spatial/temporal locations
• Generally have many different possible outcomes
  • More fun because they have more replayability
  • Keeper needs to be a little more experienced and ready to improvise in response to player actions
• Number 22 from the Blasphemous Tome issue 5 [note: added by me as an example]
  • There’s a setup and a few events that will happen in a particular order
  • There are locations that have to be discovered
    • May happen through exploration, or NPC prompting
  • Antagonist is non-human but intelligent, and may or may not have raised the stakes through its actions
  • Investigator actions will determine reactions and final outcome of events
• D&D has “wilderness adventures” that are sandboxy
  • CoC difference is that the full sandbox is more geographically constrained
    • One particular city/town/place
    • A number of locations, relatively easy to travel between

Geographic Sandbox – True open world game

Unconstrained hexmap – who knows what’s out there?

• Still constrained to some extent
• Locations are mapped, but the playerrs may travel in any direction for any distance
  • “Draw maps, leave blank spaces” Dungeon World philosophy
• Players make up their own story as they travel around
• Not hugely different from a dungeon
  • Keeper will have things for them to come across if they travel to them
• No geographic contraints (specific roads/rail lines/paths)
  • Here’s a set of locations
  • How do you choose to go between them?
  • Not “one way from A to B” but “where would you like to go on leaving A?”
• The scenario writer and the Keeper have to impose a structure on things
  • Players depend on the GM to supply what’s important and what’s not
    • E.g., labelled locations are more likely to be interesting and productive places to visit
    • Unnamed road intersections or train stations probably not
    • This is a gradual reveal process, which is uncommon in CoC
• Examples
  • Blackwater Creek
    • Past the first scene there’s no particular order for things to happen or for places to go
    • There are some major set pieces that might be the climax for any given game
    • There’s a situation to investigate, but players can do that as they wish
    • Several possible avenues to explore
• There doesn’t have to necessarily be an overarching plot
  • Because of the structure of the game, CoC sandboxes are more limited
  • There’s content to investigate that leads the investigators to find something out
  • They can then make a choice of how to respond to what they find
• D&D will let you wander off the map into the unknown, and things will still happen (e.g., wandering monsters)
  • CoC tends to not have anything of interest outside of its sandbox
    • E.g., there’s no reason to go to Jersey City during Dead Man’s Stop; you could, but there’s nothing there related to the scenario
• All RPGs are, at the bottom, investigations of something the players don’t know about and must discover
  • Keeper’s job to make both the process of discovery and what is discovered interesting

Web of Intrigue – Abandoning location and time for interaction

Structure entirely dependent on the relationships between the players and the NPCs

• Crimson Letters from the 7th ed. rulebook
  • Interviewing the NPCs, what they know, who they are is the important part
    • Locations are “where can I find this person”
    • Not important in themselves
    • Note that a given NPC may be more or less forthcoming depending on the location [added by me]
      • Finding an NPC at home vs. in a speakeasy or jail
• Figuring out what the story is from what the NPCs tell the players
  • What is truth, what is lies
  • What the pattern is
  • Think Agatha Christie: Poirot interviews the suspects, observes, figures out what has happened, or will happen
• Very different from most scenarios
• Sandboxy, but a social sandbox, not a physical one
  • Go and talk to a given person
  • You may say what you like
  • Interact positively (befriend, woo) or negatively (threaten, beat up)
• Assembling the web of relationships must be done first and is critical to success
  • List of NPCs, their knowledge and secrets, their connections
• No longer a go to the library or newspaper, research, find the clue, go somewhere else, find another…
  • Clues live inside people’s heads, not books!
• Relationship maps are critical to build such a scenario and for the Keeper to be able to play them
  • Almost like dungeon maps, but for social instead of physical connections

The Garden of Forking Paths – A scenario as a set of scenes

A set of possible timelines, with different options forking and possibly rejoining

• Scenario is no longer a single X, then Y, then Z, but a web of possible events and alternate paths
  • What will happen if the investigators do X, or Y, or miss a clue and do nothing?
  • Example: Go talk to X; if they do and do and/or say the right things, they find out something that lets them make a choice about what they do next
    • May trigger another event based on this
  • Clues lead to clues leading to other clues
  • Meanwhile the clock is ticking, and events happen, influenced by what the investigators know/don’t know, have/haven’t done
• Harder for less experienced Keepers to run
  • How long do players take to do things?
    • E.g., timeline would have things happen on day 1, day 2, day 3, but the investigators don’t sleep and don’t eat, pushing forward and doing things before the clock can tick forward
    • Days are easier to handle than hours, but are subject to disruption by players plowing through
• Flowchart it out, with all the branches lined out
  • Do think about the possibility of the schedule getting changed by the players’  choices
  • Scenes that might or might not happen
  • Branches to alternatives; may join back up, may go off to a completely different ending
• Common in Gumshoe scenarios
  • Here’s an optimal route through. but these others are possible

Situation – As wide open as possible

Set up an opening situation and a set of characters, and then let the players take it

• Here is a problem. Given who you are, how do you solve it?
• Commonly includes a series of “bangs” – things you can throw at them to push the narrative along
  • Chandler’s Law: When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
• Hardest for newer Keepers not experienced with making things happen when the players are not moving
• Most satisfying for both Keeper and players
  • Far more scope to play characters and make choices based on who they are
• Easiest for one-shots, but can be done for full campaigns
  • A set of pregenerated characters with specific backgrounds and conflicting motivations makes for a great convention game
  • If you’re playing a home game, it may be more fun for everyone to have the players devise the motivations and conflicts themselves
• Keeper has the luxury of taking the conflicts and pushing on the intersections of those hard via events or NPCs
  • Ex. A wants to save the library, B wants to burn it down
    • Add one can of gasoline and matches, A, and B to the library
    • See what happens
  • This kind of setup is common for LARPing
    • Set the agendas
    • Put the investigators in a situation with individual (probably conflicting) goals
    • Let them run wild
  • In Medias Res from The Unspeakable Oath #10 as an example
  • This is just a different kind of sandbox
    • It’s more abstract and there’s absolute freedom of play
    • Investigators can do anything as long as it’s justified by the fiction
  • It’s not really as scary as it seem
    • The players will keep it going as long as you kick things once in a while if they seem to be running down
  • Will be harder for players who are more cautious and less proactive
  • Critical for enough to be supplied to make it easy to keep providing those kicks
    • Depending on how much is supplied, it can be completely amazing…or crash and burn spectacularly
    • It may be hard to figure out how to work through one of these
    • If it’s too open without any direction, it will be difficult

Hybrids – Pick some from here and some from there

Choose parts from each type to build a unique approach

• Realistically, everything already is a hybrid
• Preferences from the crew:
• Matt
  • Prefers to write a replayable scenario with lots of ways for it to go
  • If people can do anything, it’s much more fun for replays
    • The jam band vs. “show up and play our greatest hits in the same order every night”
  • Branching events are really fun – build a tree
    • Set it up with different things in different locations
    • Depending on what they find first, the other locations change
  • Thinks of it in terms of stories
• Scott
  • Likes to vary approaches
  • Preferred types
    • Situation + bangs
      • Run this through playtests several times, then document to formalize the most common things
    • Geo-sandbox and dungeon
      • Simple, direct structures
      • Easy to write up and communicate
    • Thinks of a scenario as a place or time where things might happen, not as a story at all
  • Paul
    • For a one-shot, you need a beginning, a middle, and an end
      • Likes to have an opening scene or establishing event to kick it off
        • Maybe dramatic, maybe gentle, but set the mood
      • Then have branching options of scenes and locations
      • Some set of events that occur (perturbed by investigator actions)
      • Leads to a climactic scene to wrap up
    • Longer campaigns
      • Have a start, but the end may be a long way off
      • Build in some mini-climaxes to prevent a long, dull middle
    • Doesn’t think about structure to start from

Conclusions and opinions [all me, and not The Good Friends]

If you’re looking to build a one-shot scenario, Paul’s “beginning, middle, end” linear approach, the “dungeon”, and the “situation” setups are good to build a smaller, self-contained game meant to take a few hours.

Gauge your players before dropping them into a social sandbox or a situation; if they’re not heavily into role playing, you may have to carry the scenario yourself. A linear or branching scenario with relatively fixed events may be more to their taste, and you can gradually let them get comfortable with these setups and gradually take off the constraints.

Beginning scenario writers may find a hybrid restricted-area geo-sandbox+dungeon structure similar to The Haunting to be the easiest to write and run: a preliminary investigative phase, which can be played fairly freeform, as long as the minimum clues needed are found, followed by a relatively constrained dungeon crawl. (e.g., The Haunting‘s BBEG will pretty much lie in the basement and try to spook the investigators until they challenge him directly.)