Adventure Crucible: Building Stronger Scenarios for any RPG is a Kraken chapbook by Robin D Laws.
Physically, Adventure Crucible is a 52-page A5 booklet with very thin covers. (I’m keeping mine in its plastic cover.)
Adventure Crucible concentrates on “trad” RPGs – it excludes “story games” (which in this case seems to mean anything that isn’t trad). But that’s okay; it keeps the book focused.
Adventure Crucible looks at five common RPG scenario structures: the Dungeon, the Mystery, the Chain of Fights, Survival and Intrigue. (Two others, Picaresque and Drama are lightly touched on.) I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even realised there were so many different scenario structures – but that’s probably because, for me, some of them are almost indistinguishable from each other.
Obstacles
But before we get to that, one key element of the book is the obstacle, which is broken down as follows:
Dilemma: The expression of the obstacle
Choices: The choices the players are presented with.
Consequences: The consequences of those choices.
Rooting interest: Why the players should care. (“Rooting interest” doesn’t feel like a helpful name to me.)
All RPG scenarios have obstacles with choices and consequences, and Adventure Crucible recommends that scenario designers ensure their obstacles offer meaningful choices with consequences that the players care about. Well, yes.
Scenario structures
So, the scenario structures. Below, I go into the basic structures in more detail. They can, of course, be mashed together (and often are, as a dungeon becomes more compelling when mixed with a mystery).
Dungeons
In dungeon scenarios, the characters explore a discrete physical space; obstacles are monsters, traps and physical hazards.
And I’ll be honest, I can’t imagine anything worse. I’m not a big fan of dungeon-crawling board games, but at least they have the decency to be a board game.
Tellingly, Laws opens this section with “People who tire of the Dungeon format can tire of it hard.” I don’t ever remember actually liking the format. For me, dungeons lack one of my three key pleasures of roleplaying: a plot.
Chain of Fights
In a chain of fights, characters fight a series of enemies (the obstacles). For me, there’s such an overlap between this and Dungeons that it hadn’t occurred to me that they might be different. (But then, I’ve never felt the need to run Feng Shui.)
As far as I can tell, the main difference between the dungeon and a chain of fights is that in the latter, each fight contains a clue leading to the next one. (Rather than just going into the next room, as in a dungeon.) At least chain of fights does have a plot, which is a step up from a dungeon.
Survival
In a survival scenario, the characters encounter dangers while defending something or someone, which is kind of a backwards chain of dights. Obstacles include getting whatever it is the group needs to survive.
I don’t have much to say about dungeons, chain of fights, or survival structures because I don’t find them interesting to play. They’re basically adventures about combat, and if I wanted to do that, I’d play a miniatures war game. (And I don’t enjoy miniatures games either…)
Mysteries
In mysteries, the characters investigate something.
My favourite type of RPG scenario activity is the mystery. That’s probably because Call of Cthulhu was one of my early RPGs, and Cthulhu is all about the investigation. I also create a lot of scenarios, and as an author, I find mysteries the most satisfying type of scenario to create.
Obstacles are finding clues and, in a horror game, mental distress from experiencing the supernatural.
Adventure Crucible spends longer on mysteries than any other type of scenario structure, claiming that they are the hardest to write. That’s probably true, and I’m currently wrestling with an investigative scenario that seems to be causing more problems than it really should. They certainly seem to have more moving parts than other types of structures. For example:
- You need a villain with a plan. Adventure Crucible notes that players (and GMs running the scenario) expect the bad guy’s plan to make sense – which isn’t always as easy as it sounds.
- You need to know what they want, and what they are planning to do if the PCs don’t get involved. (So a countdown clock or timetable.)
- You need to know what the antagonist has done so far, so you can seed clues for the PCs.
- And depending on how you write your adventure, you need locations and NPCs where clues may be revealed. (The book doesn’t really mention this, but clues don’t have to be fixed in any one location. A clue can pop up anywhere.)
The climax or resolution of an investigation can often be the trickiest section to write and run. Mysteries don’t always suit a pitched battle as a finale – PCs who are good at investigating aren’t necessarily going to be strong in combat. And if you want your villain to react to the PC’s actions, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where and when the resolution takes place.
Intrigues
In an intrigue, the characters vie for influence and power. Obstacles are getting favours or stuff from other characters, usually at a cost.
Games of Amber and Vampire are described as intrigues – along with something described as “Gloranthan Freeforms.” But I’m not sure how many freeforms (Gloranthan or otherwise) Robin Laws has played, because while I would agree that some are intrigues, many are not.
I don’t really know how to write a pure intrigue scenario (unless we are talking about freeforms, in which case I’ve written a book about that), and I’m not sure Adventure Crucible explains it properly. I happily add factions and hidden agendas to characters to create an element of intrigue, but that’s often overlaid onto a mystery (see my Perfect Organism scenario for ALIEN).
Picareseque and Drama
Two more adventure structures are mentioned in Adventure Crucible but are only lightly covered:
Picaresque, in which the characters amble around and cause trouble. (Sounds like sandbox murder hobo-ing to me. Also not my style.)
Drama, which appears to be an excuse to cram a reference to Hillfolk into the book. I’m not sure you can write a scenario for Hillfolk, as it's so player-driven.
As an aside, when I look at what I like in roleplaying games and the scenario structures presented in Adventure Crucible, I seem very limited in my enjoyment of what makes a good game. But that’s because I think most scenarios (especially one-shots) are mysteries: there’s usually something going on, a plot of some sort.
And because I find combat dull, that rules out the first three structures.
Building stronger scenarios
So has Adventure Crucible helped me build a stronger scenario? I’m not sure it has, but it’s made me reflect on some scenarios that didn’t really work and why that might have been.
Where I have struggled to engage with scenarios (and this isn’t always me running them) is often where the core activity isn’t clear. If you’ve heard Robin D Laws speak, you’re probably familiar with the term “core activity” – it’s what players do in the game: “You are X, who do Y”.
When that’s not clear, scenarios can stumble.
For example, I once played in a very short Star Wars game that didn’t make it past the first session. I can’t remember what characters we created, but they weren’t the usual Star Wars characters – they weren’t rebels or bounty hunters. Our core activity was never defined, and the game collapsed when we didn’t react the way the GM expected us to. While we really could have used a proper session zero, the lack of a core activity for Star Wars didn’t help.
Some games don’t have a single core activity (RuneQuest, Traveller), making things more complicated. For example, I don’t really know what a typical Traveller adventure is. (Unlike a typical Call of Cthulhu or Liminal investigation, which I can easily imagine.)
Other London
In terms of Other London, so far, my scenarios have all been mysteries with a hint of intrigue. (Faction power plays are happening in the background – the PCs focus on the mystery.)
One reason faction splatbooks aren’t on the horizon is that I’m not sure what the core activity of other factions would be.
For Desk 17 it’s clear: you are police detectives investigating supernatural crimes.
But for a fae court? Or a vampire gang? Or the Custodians of the Echo? I’m not sure, and until I can figure that out the fae, the vampires, and everyone else are staying as NPCs.
Overall
So overall, while I’m not sure it’s made my scenario writing any stronger, I found plenty of food for thought in Adventure Crucible.
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