13th Age

I'm trying to write an adventure (or actually, several) for a new tabletop RPG campaign that's going to start in a couple of months, and I am struggling.

My issues stem, I think, from how different the new system, 13th Age, is from the game I finished running last week, Monster of the Week. Where MotW is extremely light and relies heavily on improv, 13th Age is much closer to D&D's school of thought, with much more stuff to track moment-to-moment, especially once combat starts. The notes required for an entire arc in MotW feel like they'd barely be sufficient to cover a single scene in 13th Age.

While it should be easy enough to adapt the approach that worked for Monster of the Week into any other roleplaying system, in practice I'm finding it hard not to take things in a rules-heavy direction, with pages and pages of stuff written up.

Monster of the Week's missions - called "mysteries" - are largely self-contained and driven entirely by the players' investigations. The most amount of planning in a mystery is writing the six-point "countdown" of events that would happen without the players' involvement. Each location and character only needs a name and a role to indicate their involvement. I added a personality trait and "what this person knows" to my bystanders - a couple of lines, total, and almost no prepared dialogue.

Compare that to the eleven pages of stuff I've written for the first adventure in 13th Age - and that's not even all of it finished yet! I've got sketches of scenes and characters and places that would be more than enough to run with in Monster of the Week that I feel compelled to flesh out for this game. Monster of the Week's contemporary setting helps, as there's often a common real-world or pop culture reference for what a trailer park or a military base or someone's living room looks like, but a fantasy game demands (it seems) a level of ornate and detailed description that quite frankly I'm not sure my writing skills are up to.

Of course, it could just be a matter of the tools I'm using. Monster of the Week's lightweight setup lent itself perfectly to Trello boards, with columns to group cards for locations, bystanders and the monsters - but there's a separation between roleplay and combat in any initiative-driven that makes it too complex for Trello. Google Docs has been okay for making notes and blocking out the rough timeline for an adventure, but its layout encourages linearity, and I'm concerned it'll be difficult to jump between sections in the heat of a fight.

Hmm. Suddenly, I'm worried that I'm going to end up writing my own system to store everything.

I should get a move on

In my head, I've telling myself it's been "a couple of years" since I started sketching out the bones of this Freeport-spinoff D&D (and now Fate) campaign. I never really gave it much thought, though - apart from the gnawing shame that I still hadn't started it, it didn't seem to matter.

But I just noticed that I have the Freeport book in my Google Drive, with a created date of June 2010. Which turns out to be nearly a month after I originally asked Andy Law if he had a reasonable-resolution digital copy of the map to hand (the physical thing, which I've bought since, was out of stock on Green Ronin's site); turns out I still have the PM on The Society.

Three and a half years is a long time to have been putting this thing off.

Detail oriented

The photo at the top of this post is the map for a tavern I've designed for the Fate game I'm trying to write. I've drawn more than four draft versions of it, and then at least two "final" versions. It's from possibly the earliest planned-out scene in the game, and I'm totally fixated on it.

It's not even a plot-important location (at least, not yet). I'm not planning for there to be any combat in the place. The specific layout of the rooms is of no consequence. But I've redesigned and tweaked it several times.

This happened the last time I tried to run a game, too. I became obsessed with the details, including plenty of stuff that I'm pretty sure the players didn't even notice. To the point that I ended up railroading the adventure really badly; I quickly realised how badly it was developing and packed it in.

The root of this fixation is almost certainly a desperate attempt to retain control over the scenario. I've spent the last couple of years thinking of this story, and the last couple of weeks whipping it into an actual narrative.

The closer it gets to being ready to play, the more I'm realising that my directions for the story are going to be almost-instantly derailed by the players - through no fault of theirs. It's just the way these things go; unlike a videogame, tabletop RPGs support wild experimentation and unorthodox approaches, and having the arbiter in the room to argue with just encourages you to try something different.

Rolled into that with Fate is its idea of "collaborative storytelling" - how are you supposed to plan a long-term campaign if it's also got to support story threads and subplots from the players? I could try to direct the character creation into stuff that helps my established "canon", but that seems to be missing the point.

So I'm fixating on this tavern, telling myself I don't have to run the game until it's perfect. That way, my work can never be rendered obsolete by something as messy and unpredictable and fun as player choice.

World building

For years now, I've been trying to write an RPG setting for an on-again off-again group I've played with since the Realtime Worlds days. We played mostly D&D4e, but since starting up again we've played the start of a Dragon Age campaign and a couple of D&D Next games¹.

I'd been inspired to put this thing of mine together by a map I found online, from a published setting called Freeport. I'd originally envisioned something closer to a Grand Theft Auto mission system than the usual linear(-ish) tabletop quest progression, with the whole thing taking place in one city rather than the far-reaching adventures we'd previously played.

But then Realtime disappeared and we stopped playing for a while, so I put it on the back burner, occasionally having flashes of inspiration about the character and setting I wanted to put together.

The Dragon Age game we played put the idea back in my head, though; and when I found the Fate system, I was hooked on the idea of trying it out. Then last night was the first installment of our new D&D Next game, in a setting written (I believe) by the DM, which has really given me a kick to try and wrangle this thing into a usable state.

It's bloody hard, though - even though I'm building on top of the Freeport lore that already exists, there's a lot about the setting I want to change or just remove entirely. For starters, I want to kick it down the road a few centuries to more of an early-Victorian era rather than the Elizabethan age of pirates. I'm also ripping out magic (almost) entirely.

I'm still not sold on multiple player races; given the diversity of cultures in the real world, Humans alone seem like they should still offer plenty of character options. Though I do like the idea of amphibious Elves, for some reason - I want to split them between freshwater and seawater varities, like river and sea dolphins. And my first ever 4e character was Dragonborn, so I kind of have a soft spot for those.

What sold me on the Fate system is that it's much less roll-reliant than 4e was; I'm a notoriously low roller, and a shift to a mechanic that not only minimises the use of dice but also generally assumes success (with rolls determining the extent to which you succeed or face unforseen consequences) holds a lot of appeal.

There's also a lack of complicated stats to track; you get bonuses to certain skills, you have stunts that allow you to add more bonuses to those skills in certain situations, and you have character Aspects, which are like backstory hooks that can be either beneficial or a hindrance to your character's goals.

It seems a little more roleplay-heavy than the action focus of 4e, but the Dragon Age game got me into my character's head (disturbingly enough) more than any other game we'd played before, so I'm not as terrified by the idea as I used to be.

Still, coming up with an entire world is a daunting task. I'm hoping my enthusiasm for the system will drive me to actually get it together this time. The last game I ran was a 4e campaign that I now realise was a horrible railroading effort, so hopefully the move to a more collaborative system will let me relinquish control a bit.

I'm further in the process than I ever have been before. I have a proper notebook and everything, with colour-coded entries and postits of additional information (and rough NPC work). I have a broad sketch of the story planned out (to a point), and already having a city map to plan around means I don't have to come up with loads of new locations.

The next step is to try and write some actual encounters - figure out how the story starts, how the characters get pulled into it, and who's trying to do what on the NPC side. I'm really keen for it not to be a simple "here is the one big bad guy, go stop him" plot, but I've also got to keep in mind that I've never done anything like this before and maybe I should just start small.

¹ We're hopefully going to cycle between them; the Dragon Age game was really fun, and the arc we've played culminated in my character slaughtering most of a village, two other PCs being killed by the city guards and the fourth party member hunting me through a forest in the dead of night before I managed to kill him (I was left with one hit point).