Recipe for Adventure
Hey, game masters, ever wonder what the heck you're going to run next game? Sometimes a little research can make it all come together. For what it's worth, he're how I made my last adventure.
Start with an Idea and an Internet Search
Throw your idea into a search engine and see what comes up. Or just jump right to Wikipedia and start your search there.
My idea: Nicolas Flamel, alchemist. I knew he was a big name in alchemy and used in a number of fictional works (Harry Potter for one). Wikipeida tells me more.
I find that according to legend he A: Discovered the Philospher's Stone and B: Found the secret to eternal life. What's not to like about that?
There's a bit about his gravestone and where he was buried in Paris. More research finds that the graveyards of Paris were all dug up and the bones of SIX MILLION PEOPLE put into catacombs, really old limestone mines that undermine the city of Paris.
Now, if you live in Paris, this is old news to you, but to me it's the best thing ever. After inhaling the very great Wikipedia article on the Catacombs of Paris, I search for "Catacombs of Paris Movies" because why not? And I find As Above, So Below. I love movies, so I rent it (Amazon Prime) watch it, and take notes for the adventure.
- Giant walls made of bones and skulls
- Unlit, but still hot candles that show someone is down in the catacombs
- Women in white robes and face paint singing
- Crawling over bones
- "To Get Out Go Down" said by an out of touch person that the characters knew years ago
- Growing fear
- Dead end except for brackish water that can be swum through to reach hidden chambers
- The undecayed corpse of a crusader knight
- Collapsing passages
- Having to move, and the only way forward is also down
- Entrances that vanish
- Panic in the dark
And so on. I filled up every square centimeter of a page while watching. I would pause the movie to jot down a note. I used maybe 1/5 of my notes, but it was great to make all of them. The movie helped me improv the adventure in the catacombs.
My game isn't set in the modern day like As Above, So Below was, but so much translated to my 1895 setting (play testing the Yellow King RPG). If I was running D&D or 13th Age or a Cthulhu game, almost all would still work. I'm not saying the movie is the best horror movie ever (there are serious flaws), but it is so damned stealable for great catacomb crawling adventures. Plus Perdita Weeks and the rest of the cast do a great job, and I found it watchable.
Watching movies as game prep!
Putting it Together
I used a player's backstory (I think my sister is a werewolf) as the hook, and had the sister connected with an NPC, Pascal Saccard, who vanished into the catacombs after reading "The King in Yellow" and researching Nicolas Flamel.
I had a number of scenes straight from the movie, including having the players find Pascal in an unreachable space. I played him as remote and haunted. He would answer yes or no questions with a nod or head shake, then stare at the limestone wall. He told them to "go out you must go down."
I needed Flamel in the catacombs, and hey, he "found eternal life," so of course he's a vampire.
I ran through the game system's mental hazards and listed those I thought we'd hit: looking at / reading the King in Yellow, seeing things that can't be like the passageway they just crawled out of vanishing without a trace, and so on. I looked up what I could do with a cave in, and made notes so I could find it in play.
Actual Play
In play, the cave-in was more fun because despite me making the roll harder for the people in the back, the one in the middle failed, so the freaked out person in the back crawled screaming over the middle PC, shoving his face down into the bones while the roof caved in.
Cave-ins, underwater swimming in the dark, odd visions, and worse took a toll. By the time they confronted the crusader corpse, they were pretty depleted in fine horror movie fashion. The meeting with the vampiric Nicolas Flamel gave them the clue they needed for the next game. He doesn't like the Yellow King any more than they do, so he advised they track down all the copies of the play and destroy them.
A good time was had by all.
Piggybacking Part II
Before we steal Piggybacking from GUMSHOE, check out how it works there in Piggybacking Part I.
The Noisy Cleric Problem
The problem piggybacking solves can be found in all sorts of roleplaying games with all sorts of skills, but the example that comes to mind is sneaking into a castle in a fantasy game like Dungeons and Dragons. In fantasy books and movies, the heroes sneaking into places is a staple of the genre. In D&D games, sneaking is left to the rogue and the ranger for scouting. Once the GM tells the entire table to roll dice to see if they sneak into the castle, somebody always misses, and the exciting infiltration turns into a frontal assault.
GUMSHOE Roots
In games like TimeWatch, Nights Black Agents, or Trail of Cthulhu, the whole spend resources to piggyback fits perfectly, since they are all GUMSHOE games. Most of my players have points to spend in Infiltration, but some have zeros. Every general skill is like that. You aren't giving the party something for free, they are spending resources they might need later to succeed now.
Let's look at other systems. I haven't tested these, but I will.
Cypher System Piggybacking
In games like Numenera, Predation, and The Strange, GUMSHOE style piggybacking is easy, since you're already spending the resources of Might, Speed, and Intellect to do anything.
The expert spends from their pool as normal, but the difficulty is harder because they are pulling the rest of the party with them. For a sneak into the castle test, the expert has their difficulty raised (+2 sounds good, +1 for less than 3 followers) and uses Speed. While the expert can use their Edge to lower their costs, the followers can not. They each spend one point, no discount.
If the expert succeeds, everyone sneaks in. Move on with the adventure.
Nothing to Spend Piggybacking
In games as varied as Call of Cthulhu, 13th Age, and Dungeons and Dragons, you don't have resources to spend to sneak into castles or climb up icy cliffs. You've got hit points, and while spending those might make sense in a few cases, usually not. Same with Sanity, Recoveries, or Spell Slots. These games are not about spending resources on skill tests, so it seems wrong to try and force them do that just for piggybacking.
In these games I'd boost the difficulty for the expert (+5 for d20, +25% for Call of Cthulhu), but then I'd require the rest of the party to roll just to assist. And if someone fumbles, well then, we're right back where we started from. That's the cost right there, the more players rolling, the greater the chance of a fumble. :)
Piggybacking, Part I
The other night we dove deep into our penultimate session of the Dracula Dossier. An unseasonable blizzard raged around the PCs as they had to climb up a mountain and down a waterfall. It was one of those roleplaying scenes where half the party had the skills to move the story forward, and half did not. (Athletics and Outdoor Survival in this case.)
This kind of scene happens in any kind of roleplaying game, from d20 fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons and 13th Age, to the Cypher System, to Call of Cthulhu. This is a problem with "niche protection," where everyone has a different set of skills so that everyone can feel special and get their spotlight moments. It can also cause the adventure to stall. When a party tries to infiltrate, but someone is sure to fail their stealth roll--when everyone must impress to get information at a fancy dress ball, but someone is sure to fail a social roll--when the group must climb in a snowstorm, but the hacker and the crime boss are sure to fall to their deaths--what do you do?
(Sometimes letting the crime boss in heels fall off a cliff might be what you want. This post is about when you want everyone to make the climb, but still keep it interesting.)
What do movies and books do? Han Solo and Chewbacca take their queues from Princess Leia when dealing with big-shots. People trapped in Jurassic Park follow the lead of Dr. Grant, dinosaur expert. Sansa escapes from King's Landing by following Littlefinger's plan. Characters without the right skills let the experts lead, but don't leave the scene.
You want the expert PCs get to shine for their skills without stoping the story because some PCs have holes in their character sheets. You let them piggyback.
Piggybacking
This game system (Night's Black Agents) is a GUMSHOE game, and it comes with a piggybacking rule built in.
In GUMSHOE you can spend skill points to add to your d6 die roll. The expert does that, while everyone else spends 1 point. For every follower doesn't have any points to spend, the difficulty of the roll the expert has to make is +2. If the expert succeeds, everyone succeeds.
So the expert rolls the big die, spends a bunch of resources (skill points in Night's Black Agents), and the followers spend some resources for the privilege of tagging along. Great fun!
In our game, we had so many athletics rolls climbing in that blizzard that the spotlight passed between PCs who had tons of points in athletics. They got their spotlight moments, but they didn't have to leave the hacker and the crime boss behind. They also spent pretty much every point of athletics the group had, and there will be no time to refresh before the next game, so they are sweating it. Perfect!
This works great in GUMSHOE, but what about other games? Let's see if we can steal piggybacking.
Next time we'll look at 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, 13th Age, the Cypher System, Call of Cthulhu, and see if we can come up with ways to piggyback in those systems. See Piggybacking, Part II.