The Story So Far

Quick Update: as of this morning, we’ve had over 200 downloads of our Seven Quillcrows one sheet adventure for Savage Worlds, and nearly as many for the accompanying Archetypes. Thanks so much to everyone who’s taken interest! Let us know what you think of the adventure. We’d love to hear from you!

Character Intro Minigames

I keep thinking about the Deadlands Classic game I played a couple weekends ago. Specifically, I love the way our GM got us into the adventure proper.

“You find yourselves on a train headed north to St. Paul, Minnesota. In a few days, you will all get off a different train in the town of Pasco, Washington. How did you all decide to get on that train together in St. Paul?”

Ansel, our GM, dealt two cards out to every player. The instructions were simple: counting down in initiative order, add two sentences to the story of what happened in St. Paul every time one of your cards comes up. The first submission in our game amounted to “There I was at the market, lining up for the meat raffle. I turned, and noticed an old acquaintance walking toward me.” After 15-20 minutes, we five players had at least 10 sentences’ worth of material to draw upon (in reality, we all contributed a lot more than 4 sentences each). And this was before we ever really started our game!

First sessions are notorious for being full of awkward character introductions. How many times has the justification for two PCs joining forces amounted to “I walk over to this random guy sitting at the bar and oh wouldn’t you know it he’s an adventurer too”? Friendships have started under stranger circumstances, I’m sure, but its not the most dramatically satisfying beginning to a campaign. Ansel presented a simple, robust mechanic to give the players something to talk about in those awkward early moments. What a treasure!

Of Po-tay-toes and Po-tah-toes

Dealing cards for initiative is pretty unique to Savage Worlds. This “story so far” mechanic would be a seamless add to any session in the system, but most systems don’t presume the GM has a standard card deck on hand. Even in Savage Worlds, mechanics like Interludes and Narrative Missions–both stripped-down mechanics to relate a nonessential story–could replace this mechanic to accomplish the same effect. How can we adapt this mechanic to other systems?

The easy answer for most systems is: however you track initiative. This is strictly a storytelling mechanic, so there’s no need to consider the rules mechanics beyond “when am I supposed to contribute?”

But let’s say you want this to be more than a storytelling experience. Take a page from the Narrative Missions mechanic for Savage Worlds’ Weird War I setting. Determine initiative order, then each player gets to take a single action on their turn. It could be something like “I start a bar fight,” in which case you’d make a single attack roll to see how well you did in the course of the fight. Success or failure both complicate the action in interesting ways, and that complexity helps other players find bits they can get excited about building upon. If success is not presumed, it could end up that your intrepid adventurers start off their campaign on the bitter notes of defeat! Nothing like a hurdle to overcome on the way to destiny.

Thanks again to Ansel for introducing a simple mechanic with such potential for complexity that it smacked me right across the face. Great work!

Check back this Thursday for yet another new map from Zap’s Atlas. And be sure to check out DriveThru RPG to pick up last week’s map: Forest Ravine. It’s Pay What You Want, and yes… that could mean free!