Adventure Design

Before we get started, here’s a link to Part 1 in case you missed it. There is an idea that rules-lite games don’t require adventures and scenarios the way crunchier games do. I think this is an idea shared mostly by younger gamers, because modern games that use Powered by the Apocalypse designs generally encourage the GM to build things improvisationally with players.

I myself had the wrong idea for a while, because the Random Event generation in Maid RPG more-or-less turns GM prep into an optional thing. The first time I read Risus, I was a bit confused. I thought to myself, Ok, so this is a simple game, often lauded as a great game for short-notice one-shots. But what exactly do you do? S. John Ross says the following on page 39 of the Risus Companion:

“Adventure design haunts many a Risus GM. A talent for improv, an ear for dialect, and a willingness to ignore even the brain-dead rules of Risus in the name of a good time can carry you far, but there’s no substitute for actually having something in mind for the players to do when they show up with bags of chips, bags of dice, and expectant grins.“

This obviously applies to Ghostbusters as well, since Ghostbusters is almost retroactively an un-generic version of Risus. Many GMs have shared stories of creating hauntings at the very last minute involving real locations in their hometowns, something the original versions of the game encouraged players to do, but since I don’t even live in the same country as my players anymore I can’t rely on old stand-bys like that.

There are a bunch of Ghostbusters adventures out there; there are the aforementioned ones from the core rulebooks, but also longer scenarios that were released separately. I’ll discuss these later when talking about the larger Ghostbusters franchise. For now I’m going to talk about adventure design resources.

Possibly the most influential [to me] thing I’ve ever read about adventure design is Theory 101: The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast by M. Joseph Young. The TL;DR is that the piece explains why “The GM writes the story and the players decide what the characters do” is something that makes no sense.

The piece isn’t perfect; while “illusionism” and “participationism” are obviously bad, “trailblazing” just sounds like a description of using a module [perhaps one that isn’t open ended], and “bass playing”, the “good” one, can only happen with a game where the players can guide the story in a certain, story-game-y way. Which makes sense, because this piece came out of the Forge sphere; when reading a lot of Forge theory one must be able to trust their own instincts to separate the good ideas from the more dogmatic stuff.

In my superhero RPGs piece that I wrote recently I talked about how game mechanics should guide players into certain genre-appropriate behaviors. Essentially I believe that there can be a lot of overlap between trailblazing and bass playing, and it helps when the game helps; the Ghost Die is always an active presence in Ghostbusters. But I feel like I’m starting to get off-topic here.

My issue with the use of a module being framed as a variant of participationism is that it’s possible for an adventure to be designed in a way that’s open-ended, where the players get to decide how things progress. Obviously there will be goals in any given adventure that guide players in a certain way, but the players know they’re playing a game. That doesn’t preclude them from deciding how to tackle those goals, and it doesn’t mean the GM has to lie to their players in certain ways.

A lot of the most celebrated D&D modules, such as Keep on the Borderlands and Vault of the Drow more-or-less present a location and a bunch of hooks to players and then just let them wander around. Robin Laws called these¹ “unstructured adventures” on page 17 of his book Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. It’s not a style of scenario that works for most other games, though, because most games don’t really work or make sense with this kind of sandbox approach.

After all, Ghostbusters respond to calls; they usually don’t do things unprovoked.

The best resources on adventure design focus on goals and complications more so than plot, which in the context of adventure design is generally a misguided idea altogether. It’s easy enough to bake themes and other ideas into an adventure, but a story / plot is a recipe for railroading.

These are great resources I’ve found for designing adventures. I’m going to list these in tiers from most actionable to least actionable [actionability is determined by how quickly a useable end result can be created with the resource]:

Most Actionable:

• The Risus Companion and The Big List of RPG Plots by S. John Ross

• The Adventure Funnel by Dr Rotwang

Actionable:

• Spirit of the Century by Robert Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera

Least Actionable:

• Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering by Robin Laws

• The Conflict Web by Bankuei

• Don’t Prep Plots, Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, Using Revelation Lists, and Prepping Scenario Timelines by Justin Alexander²

Let me quickly summarize what each of these resources teaches:

Risus Companion: Create a list of tasks likely to happen while working towards a goal and plan complications for each task. The book also has a random adventure generator and a list of “thrills” to think about including in an adventure [e.g. opportunities to turn enemies into friends, opportunities to eavesdrop]. A word of warning: everything I’ve described takes up only 11 pages of the Companion, but the whole book is worth it if you enjoy Risus.

The Adventure Funnel: Create a goal, create obstacles, create details . . . that’s basically it. What’s interesting is that Dr Rotwang says the funnel was inspired by Laws’s book, but the specific advice here is very similar to the advice from the Risus Companion. I’m not trying to imply plagiarism, but rather that there are a lot of similarities to be found in the best adventure-writing advice.

The Big List of RPG Plots: Exactly what it says it is; a list of basic, highly generic and gameable premises for adventures. It’s better than similar RPG plot lists adapted from more literary sources. A good place to start if you don’t have any ideas.

Spirit of the Century: Contains advice for creating one-shots for “pickup games” on short notice. The book includes three methods, but one of them assumes you already know who the PCs are, so that method is less useful for writing a scenario anyone could use. The other two contain advice relating to giving NPCs motivations, introducing twists, etc. The book encourages a GM to use multiple methods at the same time to create deeper scenarios. This advice is applicable to almost any genre, even if the assumed setting is pulp.

The Conflict Web: A method for creating character webs. This is not a useful tool on its own, but if you’re creating something with factions and complex NPC motivations it’s a great tool. The advice here would be especially useful when used alongside The Dynamic Pickup Game from Spirit of the Century.

Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering: It’s difficult to sum up this resource in a concise way because of how much information it contains in relative terms, but basically it outlines different plot shapes and presents advice on planning them and how to tailor campaigns to player groups.

Alexandrian Stuff: Don’t Prep Plots talks about creating situations, which is both simpler than creating a plot and also less railroad-y. Three Clue Rule essentially states that a GM needs to provide at least three clues for any mystery players are expected to solve. Node-Based Scenario Design talks about creating multiple different locations [nodes] that each have their own clues that lead to different nodes for making non-linear adventures. Using Revelation Lists talks about a way to organize node information without using overly complex diagrams. Prepping Scenario Timelines discusses creating a timeline of what NPCs will do if the players don’t do anything.

“Situation” based design might seem like a modern response to story-game theorist types, and it might seem like old adventures were shots in the dark that sometimes were accidentally good due to a lack of theory. This isn’t entirely true. Take a look at reviews of Dragonlance modules contemporaneous to their releases, and you’ll find the railroad-y nature of the modules and lack of open ended design being criticized; the “Dragonlance killed D&D adventure design” sentiment is not an invention of the modern OSR movement.

The 1990 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacombs Guide, written by Jennell Jaquays and Williams W. Conners, and edited by Warren Spector, talks about “linear”, “open”, and “matrix” campaigns³, and so once again, modules like Caverns of Thracia and games like Deus Ex were not created to allow for a lot of player choice by accident.

At this point you probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of scenario philosophies I find appealing, but here are my thoughts summarized:

• The opening moments of an adventure can be fairly railroad-y and push players on a certain path; there are certain things that sometimes just have to happen in order to get things started.
• Once the players reach a certain point they should be able to tackle any objectives in an extremely open-ended way.
  • The scenario should make as few assumptions about how players will act as possible / plan for multiple different contingencies.
  • The scenario should present players with situations, not a plot.
• If players are trying to accomplish a specific task the adventure may logically end in very similar ways no matter what happens, but the ending shouldn’t be some kind of concrete thing that the module describes concluding in one single way.

To put things another way, I am a writer. If I wanted to write something with a coherent narrative baked into it I would write a book. If I’m writing an adventure it’s because I want to give my players some toys and see what they do with them.

Ghostbusters Stuff

When writing a Ghostbusters adventure it’s obviously a good idea to think about what has happened in Ghostbusters media before, as a basis for creating something new. In the past 40 years a lot of weird things have happened in Ghostbusters media, and so there are a lot of places to take things.

The first movie immediately gets away from the “people who bust ghosts” premise by having the ultimate antagonist of the film, Gozer, be a Sumarian Goddess whose presence makes ghosts more active rather than an actual ghost themself. This is the keystone of the entire franchise, and so naturally things get even more creative from here.

In the classic Real Ghostbusters episode The Boogieman Cometh the Ghostbusters fight The Boogieman, which sounds normal, except The Boogieman is apparently some kind of malevolent creature and not an actual ghost. Random monsters just exist in the Ghostbusters universe.

In Extreme Ghostbusters most of the enemies faced by the new team are ghosts, but there is almost always some kind of complication that prevents them from being captured normally. A particularly silly example of this is the episode In Your Dreams, where the enemies are these non-ectoplasmic entities that technically aren’t ghosts until they congeal a certain way, which makes no sense. If that episode were turned into a one-shot scenario, it would be a shitty scenario. [Extreme Ghostbusters is a great show on the whole.]

There’s also an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters, Casting the Runes, where the team goes into a fire-and-brimstone dimension and basically ghost-busts Satan; it’s incredible what the writers of this show got away with.

The West End Game modules get the most crazy. Hot Rods of the Gods is about alien teenagers who enjoy driving flying cars into buildings. Scared Stiffs is about ghosts asking the Ghostbusters to help them avert an alien scheme to steal Earth’s ghosts. Some of the other modules, like Ghost Toasties, are much more in-line with stuff that happened in the first film, but it’s wild WEG released two consecutive modules about aliens.

I’d like to quickly defend some of the weirder things that appear in the WEG books; it’s clear that the adults who were hired to work on the manuals and modules saw Ghostbusters and thought to themselves “Oh, lame B-movies and comicbook schlock; got it”. Children of the 80s [as well as younger fans] are baffled by adventure hooks involving aliens and such, because they grew up with the cartoons that hewed closer to the “people who catch ghosts” premise. But it’s easy to understand why the children of the 60s who grew up watching MST3K fodder would see Ghostbusters and get adventure ideas that sound very off-premise.

At this point it would be worth talking about some of the GMing advice included in the old Ghostbusters games, specifically pertaining to adventure creation. The original game says something very profound in the chapter Basic Ghostology:

Once your players have some experience with mundane ghosts, you’ll want to move on to more elaborate ones. The simple fact is that many, if not all, ghosts are too powerful, shrewd, or enigmatic to be defeated by the simple application of a proton beam. It isn’t the typical, hum-drum, zap-zap-in-the-trap Ghostbuster house call that’s going to make a good adventure. You’re going to be interested in the bewildering, nigh-invulnerable menaces to Nature, Mankind, and the Almighty Dollar.

Did the writers of Extreme Ghostbusters look at this RPG advice for writing tips? Because as I was saying, almost every episode of that show had complications that prevented ghosts from being caught normally [a radioactive ghost that was strengthened by proton beams, a ghost that would reappear until a wishing well was destroyed, a demon seed that could only be captured after being smothered with oxygen, etc].

The WEG 1E book continues by saying that all ghosts should have goals, and also that the GM should think of new powers for ghosts to keep players on their toes; this is good advice that applies to basically any game with enemy NPCs, but it’s a bit more resonant here because of the “unfinished business” aspect ghosts usually have. The second edition repeats most of this ghost advice, often verbatim. Which only makes sense; the original advice was great, and there wasn’t much elaboration needed.

Both editions have more general advice on writing adventures. The first edition has a lengthy aside titled Plotting the Adventure filled with some notes. Something I was a bit surprised to hear from a 1986 game – you can think of a solution to a given problem, but you should expect players to think of original ways to solve obstacles.

When thinking up an adventure, don’t tie yourself too closely to a single, linear plot. [Adventure] Idea Number Two is a good example; we’ve outlined four possible ways the players might solve the problem. If you decide exactly what the problem is in advance, exactly what the players will encounter, and exactly how the obstacles can be overcome, your players will have little to do. Always expect your players to come up with different ways of doing things – and be willing to adapt to their ideas. – Ghostbusters Operations Manual pg 39

The second edition has very similar advice:

Either way, you have to be prepared to run the adventure according to what the players do – not according to how you envisioned the plot. Your goal here is to have fun (and help your players have fun), not generate a work of art. So if your stars come up with a tactic that leaves you breathless and could not fail to demolish your villain, then grin and go with the flow. – Ghostbusters International pg 85

While the second edition isn’t highly regarded, Aaron Allston’s GMing advice is solid. Allston also wrote Strike Force, an influential book that detailed a superhero campaign he GM’d, which was later cited as an influence by Chad Underkoffler in Zorcerer of Zo. The only problem is that, even if all of Allston’s advice is original and good in itself, unlike the ghostology chapter that’s largely copied over, it’s still very redundant after reading the stuff by Petersen, Willis, and Stafford.

Some of the advice is very simple stuff that’s easy to forget; act scared while roleplaying as a scared NPC, fill locations with “junk” and “bric-a-brac”, make sure even the silliest ghosts are legitimately dangerous in some way, describe bad weather for dramatic effect, etc. This is good stuff to write into an adventure.

Some of the other advice is more interesting, like the assertion that every tabloid is practically an adventure module. Not only did a later WEG Ghostbusters module feature tabloids heavily, but also this reminds me of the role tabloids served in Men in Black.

In the final part, which will be released on May 3rd, I will talk about the adventure I wrote; its various complications, how I utilized different resources, and other related things.

Note from Sabrina TVBand: This is the 1,000th article on Cannibal Halfling Gaming! I asked Seamus and Aaron a few days ago if they had a plan for article 1,000, and they said they hadn’t thought of anything. It seemed for a moment like this piece wasn’t going to be the thousandth published, but it ended up turning out that way! I’m a very new contributor to the site, and so I don’t feel like I deserve the honor. Anyways, I’d like to thank Aaron and Seamus for letting me post my stuff here, and I hope the website lasts for another 1,000 posts [at least]!

1. Not these particular modules, but sandboxes similar to them. ↩︎
2. There was recently an entire controversy about Alexander renaming “Jaquaysing the Dungeon”, a concept he coined in tribute to Jennell Jaquays, to “Xandering the Dungeon”. I won’t get too deep into the entire sordid saga here, but I do get the feeling that he carefully worded his statements about this issue in a way that implied Jaquays requested he do this, when in actuality this never happened. I believe this because his statements were so oddly terse and specific about certain things, in a way that also gave him an out if he were ever challenged. Alexander also had a long and extensive history of deadnaming Jennell Jaquays for stupid and “logical” neo-liberal bullshit reasons. He has apologized to the trans community about the confusion he caused, and I think his apology is good. I’m still hesitant to recommend his work, because of his history, but he hasn’t fucked up since his apology to my knowledge. ↩︎
3. Matrix campaigns, as described by Jaquays, are basically a kind of node or point-based branching path design. Also, don’t read anything into me not including this book in that list I made earlier, because I haven’t had a chance to read it in full yet. ↩︎