Never Run Out Of Dungeon...

I draw these on the backs of index cards. I've got like 20 of them so far.

Each one has 4 exits on the outer edge so I can just line up another random card if the players walk off.

They're good for when the party goes past what you've got planned--I stole a lot of these ideas from Undermountain.

The Riveting Horror of Christopher Allen, Shannon Appelcline and Skotos Tech, Part 3 (+ JOESKY TAX)

Wandered over to RPGnet to look at Carcosa threads today and...

Really? Still?

It's months later you're still taking these peoples' money, RPGnet?

Three months later?

Christopher Allen, Shannon Appelcline, and everyone at Skotos Tech and RPGnet--take a long look at what you're doing over there.
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Here's a weird thing I noticed while trying to write this: go to Google and search "dndwithpornstars" and "warlords of vornheim" (or "Jack Vance" or anything else in the title of one of my posts).

Now Google "dndwithpornstars" and "Open Letter To Shannon Appelcline and Christopher Allen At Skotos" or just "Shannon Appelcline" or "christopher allen". I don't get many links and the links I do get don't lead to the actual post.

That's weird, right? That's the only time that's ever happened.
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JOESKY TAX:

Halloween Pictures (Trigger Warning: Real Life)

Steve, (who plays Bill--human fighter, level 1) took most of these...

They went Human Barbarian/Human Barbarian because it was easier than half-elf thief wearing pig's head for a hat/tiefling cleric but they have high hopes for next year 

(Seconds after Mandy kissed Connie everyone got offended at their behavior and unreasonable armor and left, of course)

As for me...

I always say I'm gonna do this every year and never do,.

Of course it's LA so with all the special effects people running around who start their costumes in March, you can't compete

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Fish Helmets, Lamprey Men, Economics, etc

• Scrap Princess (of this here blog) trawls the web digging up exotica including coconut fibre armor. "The warrior holds a three-pronged weapon (taumangaria) edged with shark's teeth. He may also have worn undergarments, a porcupine fish helmet and ray skin cuirass on top"
• Likewise Scrap tracked down these terrifying pictures of atom bomb tests that look like Gordon Terry paintings
• 
• WOOO, extra dots!
• This 100 Forbidden Castles is pretty good "73 A naive wizard dwells here being seduced to evil by devils, witches and gold
  74 Lamprey men fort with captured villagers feeding on poor victims slowly like cattle"
• Likewise I'll be cutting and pasting the latest batch of Dungeon Dozen tables
• This Gary Chalk interview illustrates how things should work: " They had repeatedly threatened to sue me for plagiarism over the dungeon planner pads and the floorplans, but had never really been able to make it stick. I told them that if they gave me a job, they wouldn’t have to keep trying to sue me and I could even invent products for them. They thought this over and gave a job they called Games Development Manager!"
• Middenmurk heaved itself forward again a few days ago, casually shredding the usually-so-robust boundary between poetry and gaming aid.
• Have liked Sarah Horrocks' art for a while and I like what she has to say about The Counselor too. Not RPGish but lots of blatant thought-provocation about comics, writing, art and much else that is RPG-adjacent.
• When was the last time you heard an RPG podcast that was not annoying? Ta-daa! That's from Shiro of the RPG corner blog.
• And Noisms is doing that thing where he sheds light on how RPGs work using knowledge gleaned from things other than how Buffy and/or other RPGs work 

So there you go.
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12 Situations in 12 Pictures

I collect these and stick them in my notebook--I look for ones that convey a relatively large amount of information in one picture--easy for a GM to take in mid-session and easy to imagine any group of PCs running into.

Like for example the first one gives you a wizard who is: evil,  in the middle of an incantation, holding something important, possessed of an impressive collection of alchemical glassware (one piece of which is broken), surrounded by webs and accompanied by rats.

Half of these are from Mike Mignola & Howard Chaykin's Fafhrd & Mouser adaptations.

Roll D12

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

If you've got any pictures that get a lot of gameable details across all at once, put them in the comments. I suspect Conan comics and covers would be rich vein, and some of Kirby's double-page spreads from The Demon .

Free Weird Space Magic

Hereticwerks Space Age Sorcery dealie has some decent adventure fuel in it.

also: weird nipples

Brazen Mien
Spell Level: Magic User 4th
Range: Caster
Duration: Permanent until dispelledCan only be cast once in a lifetime. Requires a blessed cauldron filled with magically molten brass. It is pref- fered that the brass come from desecrated holy objects and stolen altar pieces. At the astrologically-appropriate moment, as determined by the caster according to their own ingenium, the mage recites a blasphe- mous chant then plunges their head into the cauldron. Should they survive the unholy ordeal, their face and most of the flesh on their head is replaced with a grotesque mask of brass. They gain 1d6 new senses over and above the free use of Detect Magic and See Invis- ible as permanent abilities. Unfortunately they lose the ability to speak, unless they use magical Ventriloquism or other such means. 

Pecuniarise
Spell Level: Cleric 2nd/Magic User 4th
Range: Touch/Close
Duration: 3d6 hours
The caster may add perceived value to a common quantity of something of little or no value, for example the words of a proven liar or a portion of waste material. This value will affect all members of a reasonably sized and reasonably specific group, for example all of the members of an extended family, the politico-managerial class of a mid-sized space station or a swarm of interplanar horrors. 

 ...also, the best spell-name fonts I've seen in a free supplement.

Solution-Driven Adventures

I got 99 problems and they form an interlocking network of pistons in a vast adventure-generating engine 

There are more scripts than business cards in Los Angeles, so finding writing advice so simple that millions of people who will never ever get a movie made will understand it or at least think they do is big business.

Here's a simple one you'll hear on day one in any screenwriting class:

"There are two kinds of scripts: plot-driven and character-driven".

A plot-driven story is one where, essentially, you could replace Batman with Robin (i.e. a character of roughly the same kinds of abilities but a different personality) and the central conflict of the story would remain the same.*

For an example of these words being used by someone who knows what they're talking about, here's Jenette Kahn, ex-publisher of DC Comics:

 In the mid-seventies at DC, most stories were driven by plot not character. We tried to reverse this equation across the board so that our comics dealt more with human complexities than they did with mechanistic ones.

(You can, of course, have both at once. Don't even think of writing a boring comment in my comments extolling the overlooked virtues of having both at once. Sure great, lovely, let's move on...)

Like:

Let's say Norgulon shrinks the population of Zor'Clactica so they're all 2 inches tall and then rules them like a cruel god.

A) If the story is mostly about the hero, Gnastimus Prodd, realizing that, despite his anomie and alienation, all Zor'Clacticans are fundamentally one and, thus inspired, manages to rally the population for an all-out Zerg Swarm assault on Norgulon and defeats him and so grows the Zor'Claacticans back to normal size, that part of the story is what a screenwriter would call Character-Driven.

B) If the story is mostly about the hero, Gnastimus Prodd, realizing that, although there is no antidote to the shrink ray, he can use the shrink ray on Norgulon so that the cruel tyrant is once more the same size as everybody else that part of the story is what a screenwriter would call Plot-Driven. Even though, note, Gnastimus, a character, is still the agent of action.

...and check this:

C) If the story is mostly about life under the heavy fist of Norgulon but then Norgulon is crushed by a random asteroid, that part of the story is what a screenwriter would also call Plot-Driven.

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Now anybody into role-playing games will notice a vast gulf between B and C. In B, a hero solves a problem with one of a set of solutions. In C, fate does, inexorably, with no decision points. In movies this isn't as vast a difference because both asteroids and heroes' skillsets are under the control of the screenwriter--in games, the heroes and the random asteroids are typically under control of different people.

This is one reason this plot-driven/character-driven dichotomy hasn't caught on that much in talking about games--it doesn't quite apply in the same way.

However, the fact that we don't use it much does obscure one thing: a lot of the work people like Vincent B and Luke W are doing over in the more motivation-obsessed indie games is, essentially, trying to find a way for RPGs to make character-driven stories. That is: stories where what happens is all about a problem latent in the characters.

Well, why is that hard? Because most traditional RPGs are set up to be what a screenwriter would ham-fistedly and misleadingly call "Plot Driven".

Because those words suggest railroading or a pre-packaged plot (i.e. they conflate the shrink ray solution and the asteroid), people who want to talk about RPGs need another term.

So: Solution-Driven.

In a Solution-Driven adventure the characters are presented with a problem or (better) a complex set of interlocking problems. Exterior problems.

The conflict and story arise from any set of characters attempting to solve the problems, mostly in a mechanical way.

It's not Character-Driven because you could replace the characters with other characters and there'd still be a conflict (presuming the new characters still crave experience points, gold pieces, basic survival or some other low-common-denominator motivator) though that conflict might take a different form.

It's not a Railroad (or Participationist--which is when you're ok with being railroaded) because in a Situation-Driven adventure if you changed your choices you'd get a different story.

A Solution-Driven story isn't just one where the players are given a pile of problems to solve, it's where they choose problems and different solutions lead to radically different plots.

In a Character-Driven story you change the character and you've changed the story completely. In a Solution-Driven one you change the details of the method of solving the problem and you've changed the story completely.

Like yesterday me and Stokely chose to get drunk in the middle of an adventure Kirin was running.

My elf, Gorgut the Weasel, got tossed in jail.

Stokely hooked up with a witch who then turned her leg into a tentacle.

Though these could be framed as natural consequences of our characters' respective alcohol problems, the game mechanics frame these problems as external. You gotta roll to get bonus xp--this isn't a Hard Choice--you deal with the problem you get.

Stokely decided to try to charm a goofy local apprentice wizard into Cure Disease-ing her, but he (die roll...) took her to his mom's basement and had some stolen wizard's library book and he was all weird and clueless and she was thinking this wasn't gonna take and there'd be some horrible diceroll in the future so she tricked him and took off with his spellbook.

The spells turned out to be too high-level for anybody in the party to handle, so she asked around about how much it'd cost for a professional--3000gp.

At this point I'm like "Look, don't bail me out of jail--let me go to the arena, let my third level ass fight a giant crab with all the other doomed prisoners. Bet on me: I'll win at insane odds against, I get out of prison, we get enough gold to cure Stokes, all is right in the world."

And, weirdly, that worked.

Point is: all that adventure came from attempts to solve basically mechanical problems ("I've got a monster leg.""I'm in jail.") and player choices, not presumed plots.

So a Solution-Driven adventure is a thing.

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Some other things about Solution-Driven adventures:

In Solution-Driven adventures, the characters are treated like tools to enact solutions.

Characters' personalities affect the style of solution, the atmosphere, and the choice of which problems to solve but that moment of choice is not a drawn out main event, the complexities of the solution are the main event.

Almost all location-based modules are gonna give you Solution-Driven adventures. The location is a problem--it has gold in it, it is guarded in one way or another, there are billions of ways to extract it, some good, some bad. However, not all Solution-Driven adventures are location-based.

For example: murder mysteries can be Solution-Driven adventures. Assuming you can make a suitably complex web of clues and have a suitably wide variety of avenues of inquiry, the way the players choose to solve the problem of discovering and then confronting a culprit can be written in a Solution-Driven way. For example.

Superhero adventures are easy to write as Solution-Driven. There's Dr Doom: he lives in Latveria which is here and he has these powers and he just made an army of cannibal sloth men. Do something about that.

Just because there's one Big Bad doesn't mean it has to be a railroad. Cthulhu can be banished in a thousand ways after a thousand different series' of events. Or he can even win.

When a game company sells you a module, they are selling you a set of problems. The characters that your players bring are tools to find solutions. The story is the interaction of these two parts.

Designing this kind of adventure is, therefore, about designing interesting problems. 

Some systems want to give you different consequences based on the plausibility of your solution (GURPS) and so are all about the problem of concocting the best solution for the situation, some want to give radically different solutions basically equal chances of success (Dread) and so the precise decision is less important than the camera pan across the tension of the act of enacting the chosen solution.

In Dread, breaking the window or dropping the TV on the guy will both work equally well--either way you gotta pull a brick from the Jenga tower--in GURPS, whichever is easier to do is easier to do. Thinking of the best solution is an important drama in GURPS, whereas in Dread the important drama is Will you tip over the Jenga tower after you've picked a solution?

For that reason, I'm not sure I'd go "x,y,z systems are solution-based"--this is more about what a session or adventure is like than what system itself is like.

The very last part of that Jenette Kahn quote up there ends

"...We tried to reverse this equation across the board so that our comics dealt more with human complexities than they did with mechanistic ones. This was a much more modern approach and also a more adult one."

...and begs the question of whether Character-Driven stories really are more grown-up than Solution-Driven ones. They are in the sense that they engage the empathic rather than the inventive imagination. On the other hand, as anyone at DC should know, there's something a little childish about a fear of being childish especially in a game.

Personally I wonder why it is that Character-Driven movies and books interest me very much (or as much as anybody else), but games that seem to want to be Character Driven fall flat for me. I think it may be because the use of characters as pawns by real and interesting and independent players means a layer of character interest is automatic in any game I play and far more subtle than the schematically simple moral and emotional conundra games seem to ask for (Kill the girl in Bioshock? Who cares?) Every good Solution-Driven game asks: Will they cooperate and think and live or will they react and squabble and die like ugly pigs?

Which is the only real human question anyway.





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*Yes, which conflict is central in a given story can be a topic of debate, as can all of the terms, like "character". Like if we decide HAL is a character in 2001 then it's Character-Driven and if HAL isn't then it's Plot-Driven. Despite whatever TED talk you saw, writing isn't an exact science. Or a science.
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