The Story Guide
From TSOY
Contents |
Designing an adventure
Adventure design is not a hard process. No one should ever be afraid of being the Story Guide. You are not responsible for telling the entire story or anything, so don't worry about that. Imagine being the Story Guide, and designing an adventure like this. You meet up with your players and get to know their characters. You find out what they're all about and what makes them tick. Then you sit down and say, "I'd like to see an adventure about these people and their issues, and I'd like to see a few things in it: an evil sorcerer, a misguided maiden, and a knife fight under a waterfall. Go!"
Know your characters
The most important part of adventure design is knowing the characters. The adventure will, of course, be about them. Keys, Secrets, and abilities are chosen by the players so they can find their characters in scenes where these things are useful. Read the character sheets. Better yet, keep a copy of them so you can use them during game preparation. Organize the characters somehow. I take out a sheet of paper and write down the character's names on it, each in a separate corner. I write down all their Keys around them, and the Secrets they use the most and their best abilities.
Then take these notes and think of how this bits o' character can work into an adventure. You don't have to hit everything, but hit at least one Key and one other thing per character. Make up some non-player characters that hit these things. Your adventure is pretty much written at this point.
Know your players
These people are probably your friends. If not, you're in trouble.
What do your friends like? Does one of them prefer stories with bloody combat, guts a-sprayin' everywhere? Maybe you should throw some of that in. Does one like reversing gender roles? Put in a prince in distress.
Here's something I like to do, but it's touchy. Think about what your friends are currently going through. People dig stories they can identify with. Is one of them going through a break-up? Have the status of her character's love interest change, or if she doesn't have one, introduce one. It doesn't matter whether the change is for good or bad - he'll grab on and take care of that. Does another have issues with her boss? Introduce an authoritative non-player character. That player will take care of how her character reacts. In all these reflections of real life, do not plan a resolution. That is totally and completely not the job of the Story Guide. The players will find a resolution. Your job is to insert conflict that they can identify with.
Know thyself
What do you like in a story? Put some in. You're the Story Guide, after all.
Key Scenes
Now you get to apply all that work above to the game. Take your big list of ideas, and turn them into Key Scenes.
The main experience engines in The Shadow of Yesterday are Keys, allowing players to decide exactly what sort of experiences in play they are most interested in. The Story Guide is just as much of a player, though, and so she controls a secondary experience engine: Key Scenes. Key Scenes are similar to some fantasy RPG experience systems in that they are particular junctures in the play session that the Story Guide has decided beforehand are worth experience to the characters: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is one game that uses this. These are not particular outcomes, though. "Saving the princess," "killing or thwarting the evil overlord," and "taming the wild beast" are not good examples of Key Scenes. Key Scenes should be tense, have multiple outcomes, and force players to make a decision for their characters. (In this, they are like Bangs from Ron Edwards' Sorcerer.)
"Discovering the princess is trapped in a high tower," "meeting the overlord," and "confronting the wild beast" are good Key Scenes, as each can result in multiple outcomes and do not put restrictions on what the player decision is for her character. Key Scenes do not have to tie into any particular overarching plot or story-line; they can be light and humorous, or grim and serious.
Whenever a character is present in a Key Scene, she earns one to three experience points, as determined beforehand by the Story Guide. These experience points are given as soon as the scene is over.
Designing SGCs
Interesting Story Guide characters (SGCs) are the cornerstone of a good adventure. In their interactions with the players' characters, they provide a mirror to reflect action and values. Before figuring out their mechanics, you should figure out their motivations and general reactions. This is easier than you might think: depending on the importance of their character to the story, you should be able to sum this up in one to three sentences.
Of extreme importance is a name for the character: first impressions are, as it's said, lasting. I recommend making a list of common and uncommon names for the culture that your game is currently set in and having that by your side as a Story Guide. Pick names for your most important SGCs ahead of time; throwaway SGCs can have a name picked on the fly from the list.
Beasts
Beasts are the easiest SGCs of all to write up. Instead of having the normal gamut of abilities, they should have just these few.
- Power (Vigor)
- This is the animal's strength and ferocity. Even animals, such as a tame buffalo, that do not normally attack people may have a high Power, as they'd whip some tail if provoked. This is used to attack other characters and smash things.
- Prowess (Instinct)
- This is the animal's quickness and control. It is used to dodge blows, run away, and be fast like a rabbit.
- Senses (Instinct)
- This is self-explanatory: it is the animal's ability to notice its surroundings.
- Brain (Reason)
- This is a measure of the animal's intelligence and will, and is used like Reason. While it may be a hinderance to domestication, it is also used for a domesticated animal to understand commands.
Beasts should have few, if any, points in their pools. One or two points in Instinct makes them a much more formidable foe, and one or two points in Vigor makes them devastating. No points should be in Reason unless the animal has very special properties. An animal may have one or two Secrets to represent special abilities that it has, such as goring horns, or a prehensile tail. You can remove the cost from these Secrets if the ability is built in to the animal.
Punks, pogues, and peeps
With people, abilities can be built as you need them. If this SGC has any real importance to the story, you'll need a name. After that, just assign abilities as you need them. With a small scale, it should be easy to decide if someone's a Unskilled or a Master or anything in between. Write down the ability and rank and make sure to keep that consistent. If you're making up someone on the fly, they have no pools. If you decide to give them a Secret, they can only use it once in a scene.
If you have a major SGC that you're building before play, design that character as normal. However, their pools should be halved, as they do not have the chances to spend them that the players' characters do.
Running an adventure
Running an adventure in The Shadow of Yesterday is, more than anything, about timing. Your first adventure with a group of characters will be a lot of you injecting content: you'll definitely have to start the first scene. Do like I said above: take a look at these characters, especially their Keys. Where would they be? Make up a few options and give them to the player: "So, where do you think Mr. Senkowski would be on an average morning? At the bar, or maybe a cathouse?"
Once the ball's rolling, you need to sit back and watch. Wait for pauses in the game, moments where the players don't really know where to take things. Then make something exciting happen to one of their characters. They'll react, and you can sit back again.
If the players take stuff in a direction you didn't expect, be agile. Rewrite your concepts on the fly to fit in the direction the game's moving. Remember this: nothing in the game exists until a player character interacts with it. It's easy to fall into the trap that you've made up this great location and, by gum, it's part of the game. Don't do that: the only things that exist in the game are the ones that come up in play. Until then, everything and everyone else is in a state of possibility.
Giving out experience points
As a Story Guide, you are responsible for binding the game together into an enjoyable narrative. You may be considered responsible by the players for their experience points and advancement. They are, of course, as wrong as they can be. When you see a player have her character act in a way that should earn her experience from a Key, feel free to announce that out loud. Feel just as free not to: that character is that player's creation, and she should well be playing attention to what's going on, and be invested in her character's advancement.
With the exception of Key Scenes, which you are responsible for, an ideal flow of experience point giving should go like this:
- Jack, a player: My character, Willis, leaps forward, his ratkin legs kicking to land in front of the sword-blow coming down on Jeph. (rolls) Success! Hey, that hits one of my Keys. 2 experience, right?
- Jennifer, the Story Guide: A-yup.
The Standard Advance
Before a campaign begins, the Story Guide and players need to decide how long they want the game to be, and how fast they want characters to advance. Each group, and each story, can work differently in these respects, and so The Shadow of Yesterday can be easily changed to accommodate this.
The standard advance, how many experience points it costs to buy an advance for a character, is normally set at 5 XP. This will accommodate a style of play where your character will gain one to three advances at every session, normally, which is pretty quick compared to most RPGs. If this is too fast for you, I suggest moving this standard advance up in increments of 5 XP to change play speed. Set at 10 XP, characters will earn an advance every session or two; set at 15 XP, characters will earn, on average, an advance over two to three sessions; and set at 20 XP, characters will earn an advance every three or four sessions. It is not recommended to set the standard advance higher than 20 XP.
