The Creator

A lot of designers like to weave a bit of a moral into their scenarios. I'm not going to tell anyone not to do this, as I think the intent is good, even if the results are often quite poor. However, I will warn you to be very, very careful, as even the best designers are capable of screwing it up quite badly. When done right, this can add an extra dimension to a scenario - you aren't just playing light entertainment, there's something much deeper to it. When done badly, you'll get reviews complaining about Big Important Ideas and that the scenario has a Point To Make. No one enjoys a lecture. The most obvious example is The Valley of Dying Things. This scenario's theme can be summed up very simply - "Pollution is bad". Pollution is turned into some sort of cheesy villain. It has no motives or reason to exist in this game - I mean, it's just called 'waste'. It comes from a magical school, which apparently spent a large portion of time creating this deadly non-descript sludge. Why? No idea. What kind of bizarre magical procedure produced this stuff? No idea. What was so important that they decided it was worth the risk? No idea. We are told "pollution is bad" - but we're never told why it exists. If you're going to address an issue, you need to address it properly and fully. Throwing in a moral without exploring the issue properly is asking for trouble. Now, VoDT is hardly the worst offender in these cases. The scenario Bandits is a thinly-veiled lecture on the evils of Capitalism. The hero is called Karl Marx, and Capitalism (embodied in Mayor Pinochet) is portrayed as an incredibly greedy, evil entity. The characters are simply caricatures, espousing their various ideologies - the good of all (Communism) as opposed to intense self-interest and greed, greed, greed (Capitalism). It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer in a bowl of soup. I firmly believe that as a designer and storyteller, you should never villify any point of view. Don't paint your baddies big and black - try to see them as they see themselves. No one believes they are evil. People who work at power plants don't see themselves as environmental vandals - they are providing a much-needed service to the community. Those who admire the principles of capitalism don't see themselves as greedy, grasping overlords - they believe in rewarding hard work and innovation. Even Hitler believed he was purifying the human race. A scenario that does it right: Nephil's Gambit. Central to this game is the character Commander Groul. He's charismatic, intensely intelligent, resourceful, and brave. He's a hero. He also has no scruples whatsoever. Commander Groul believes that the end justifies the means, whatever those means may be. He engineers a war for himself to win, so he can win favour and take power. Your adversary is not a cackling, black-robed, evil-loving wizard away in a dark tower - he's the hero of your country. Nephil's Gambit doesn't hit you over the head with "The end does not justify the means". Instead, it takes Groul's point of view to it's natural conclusion, weaves a masterful story, and lets you decide for yourself. Do you follow Groul, or stand against him? Don't TELL the player something is bad - let him see and learn for himself. No one will be convinced by an editorial comment from the designer. If you want your scenario to be deep and meaningful, you need to create a story and characters with depth and meaning - not just buzzwords. In summary: 1) Making a point can be a good thing. 2) Done poorly, it can be a bad thing. 3) Making a point does not work when the scenario doesn't explore the issue properly. 4) You can't explore an issue properly with a one-sided argument.

I think I'll just add "You are free to break any and all of these rules once you understand why they exist."

That sounds very much like AC2. Yeah, you're right. All generalizations are bad, including this one.

It... sorta does. But really, the insanity aspect wasn't the good bit. Yeah, I really should have included an example. I'll fix that. EDIT: Possibly I should amend that to "Insanity is bad except in comedies"?

Below I list some of the many illnesses that plague Blades scenarios. Keep a vigilant eye out, so you may spot symptoms in your own work before it's too late. 1: Stupid Party Syndrome Scenarios affected by this condition force the party to do something really dumb simply to advance the plot. For example, in Echoes: Assault you have to attack a friendly fortress to complete the scenario, despite the fact that this is about the most illogical thing you could do. 2: Scooby Doo's Disease At the end of the scenario, everything slots together and someone explains everything that has gone on before, just like at the end of a Scooby Doo episode. This is usually followed by the big final fight. Look at Tatterdemalion for an example - this happens at the end of two of the three paths. 3: Verbal Diarrhea This very common ailment will cause characters - usually villains - to spontaneously spew exposition, usually for unreasonably protracted periods. See Spears. 4: The Plague Occasionally a scenario will suffer from body image issues and do it's very best to look exactly like Exile/Avernum 3. A very common symptom is monster plagues. See Wreck of the Slug. 5: Monty Haul Gut Simply put, this comes from way too much rich food, weapons, gems, etc. See nearly anything by Brave Sir Robin. 6: Delusions of Grandeur If you're making a scenario with the unregistered version and think it's so good that Spiderweb will give you a free registration for it and it might even win the contest, because it's really original and has custom monsters, and you have a big final showdown with Rentar-Inhro... you are already a victim. 7: Knocker's Migrane Players get severe headaches from repeatedly banging their heads against walls looking for secret passages. Spare them the pain - keep all your doors visible. Alternatively, play Quintessence and get a dose of your own medicine. 8: Weapon Envy Some designers just can't get it into their heads that size isn't everything. They automatically assume that bigger is always better, especially in relation to fights and weapons. Doom Moon II is a product of such thinking. 9: Insanity Pure and simple. If there is an insane character anywhere in your scenario, amputate him. It would have helped The Draining. 10: Linda's Condition If you are ever, ever tempted to insert a character controlled by demons, or who turns out to be a demon, or who has a fascination with demons, go lie down till the feeling passes. See (suprise, suprise) the Demon Island scenarios. "Deceased" is the future tense of "Diseased". Just thought you should know that. Please keep in mind that you are free to break any and all of these rules once you know why they exist. ************ Improvements?

I'm with TM here. Why are windows beta-testers disallowed while people who already have the editor and have made scenarios with it are not? I would probably test if it didn't mean I'd forfeit my chances in the contest. And I'm sure you'd find my input valuable, as I'm probably one of the top 5 BoE designers around at the moment.

Okay, here goes. In Deadly Goblins, the story beat is "The goblins set a trap for you, and you escape". It's at this point that you realise they are targeting you. The sequence is: while wandering around in the forest, a couple of goblins shoot arrows at you. You chase them, but they run and disappear out of sight. Following them, you find a farmhouse. You go inside to see if they're there. The door closes behind you and is magically locked. A few moments later, the wall is set on fire. You try to find a way out, and stumble into the master bedroom. The goblin wizard teleports in, summons a nasty monster, and teleports out. You kill it, and find a key in dresser. Taking it, you run back the way you came. The fire has spread a long way by now, and you have to find a way through it. You come to the storerooms, which you unlock with your key. There's a weak wall in one of them. A way out! You smash it, and are about to escape when that goblin wizard throws up a magic barrier to block you! You search around through the storerooms, the flames coming ever closer. You find a piercing crystal, destroy the barrier, and make your way out just in time! You collapse on the cool grass, panting and sweating as the house burns down behind you. That's a sequence. Could have been much shorter, but where would the fun be in that? In terms of sequences that have little story, you could probably quote the first half of Echoes: Assault. There's a large chunk where all you're doing is trying to escape, but there's a bunch of sequences with fireballs thrown about, garbage chutes dived into and so on. They don't have much story to them, but they're fun and interesting. Note: Baldur's Gate is a terrible place to look for sequences.

Dungeons can have lots of story. Sequences can have almost no story. Sequences have a lot of events, but they may not have anything to do with the main story. Generally, I make one sequence/dungeon for each story beat. So I have the exact same amount of story in each. Of course, it's probably pretty hard to understand what I'm talking about if you've never played a sequence-based scenario. JV's tend to go pretty heavy on dungeons.

If you want to see how I'd handle it, you could just play some of my existing scenarios. You'd have to get BoE, but it's worth it. Just have a look at the Solid Adventures list.

Sorry, that was another of your hard-to-understand posts. I'm not necessarily saying the time limit doesn't work at all in Za-Khazi, I'm saying it could have worked way better.

When it comes to making a scenario, what is that you actually make it out of? What are the bricks that make the wall, the things that the player spends 90% of his time and effort on? In a "traditional" scenario, it's the dungeon. The player wanders through these places, usually doing a lot of fighting or solving the odd puzzle, and eventually finds or does something that allows him to advance in the scenario. However, the advent of the "modern" scenario has brought the sequence into focus as an equally important building block. Where a dungeon is essentially a place for the party to explore, the sequence is a chain of events that the party participates in. It's important to note that "traditional" and "modern" here do not necessarily mean that one design style is better than the other, nor that "traditional" scenarios are old hat. Shyguy's well-received Adventurer's Club series is much more recent than many "modern" scenarios, and are still primarily dungeon-based "traditional" adventures. I use the terms simply to differentiate in style. Dungeons, and scenarios that rely heavily on them, are primarily player-driven. They sit there, waiting for the party to come and try to conquer them. Everything in a dungeon is linked by location. A dungeon is usually one place where you can find many different things, and where many different things can happen. Sequences are primarily event-driven. While the party may have a large role in the unfolding events, this isn't necessary. Once the scenario reaches a certain point, things start happening, whether the player is ready or not. Sequences are not bound by location - they can happen within a town, over several dungeons, within the mind of a character, or even on several different continents. They are, however, bound by subject. Everything that happens must be related to everything else - while in a dungeon the player can encounter a large number of completely different things - they only have to be physically near each other. When you find a ruined castle full of undead and have to kill the vampire that leads them, that's a dungeon. When you get to the vampire and he leads you on a merry chase through the crumbling ramparts, that's a sequence. While both dungeons and sequences need to be a part of the central story and be justified by it, both also go beyond that. They are meant to be enjoyable in of themselves, and usually go much longer than they need to in order to convey the story beat in question. If the story is the skeleton of a scenario, the dungeons and sequences are the meat. They need to be fairly substantial, and they need to be tasty. How do you make them good? This is a huge question I could never hope to answer completely, no matter how many articles I wrote on the subject. The best advice I can give is to make sure they are fun, and make sure they fit well within the scenario. If all of your dungeons and sequences do this, you can't go far wrong. Which is better to use? Who knows? To a large degree it comes down to individual preference. Terror's Martyr's scenarios are usually made exclusively from sequences, while Brett Bixler tends to rely heavily on dungeons. In Falling Stars, the assault on the Big Bad is done through a long, tough dungeon gauntlet. In Spears (slith side in particular), it's done as a long sequence. Both scenarios are highly regarded. Of course, no one says you can't use both. Spears uses mostly sequences in the main plotline, while side quests and subplots are built with dungeons. In my scenario Revenge, I used dungeons in the real world and sequences in the dream world. So ultimately, like so many things, it's all up to you. Whatever you would most enjoy to play is probably the best choice. -------------------- Not exactly about dungeon-making, I know, but once I started thinking about it, this is what I got.

Thanks for your post, Vent. You made your point nice and clearly. I understand your position much better now. It's my position that "Save a beseiged fort before it's too late" is a much more interesting concept than "Find your way through a wild area" and therefore should take precedence over it. If you're going to make a scenario about finding your way through a wild area, I think you should focus on that properly. For example, you get stuck behind enemy lines, and have to find a way back! The "time limit" concept and the "Find your way" concept cancel out each other's effectiveness. ONE concept should be chosen as the No. 1 focus of the scenario. Others can be included, and usually they SHOULD be included, but the pecking order should be clear. Two concepts fighting for the No. 1 spot means that the strength of both is diminished. In a real "run" scenario, the fun of exploration is completely unnecessary. It is replaced by the urgency of the situation. The way forward should always be clear, or the urgency will wither and die. The question and conflict is not "What do I do?" or "Where do I go?", it's "How do I do it?" When giants (or Nephilim or whatever, I don't care) block your way, the question is "Do I burn wands that will be needed later, or do I save them and maybe not get there in time?". In this situation, I would allow a temporary lack of direction if the player decides to save the wands, but only because he chose it. The knowledge that he chose to waste time would keep the urgency up.

Vent - Double posting is generally frowned on. I'll let you off since both posts were quite substantial, but please don't do it again. Also, I have difficulty understanding many of your points because of your poor grammar. I'm assuming that English isn't your native language, but it still makes it hard to discuss things. Especially abstract principles of scenario design philosophy. My point is simply that ZKR, as it stands, kills all feeling of urgency by forcing you to follow an exploration style of gameplay. The premise centers on the urgency of the situation and I proposed what I would do to make the scenario much more urgent and involving. That said, cutting deals with Morog is far from the worst thing about the scenario. On the other hand, going through the unicorn subplot is a real pace killer. For the record, I haven't even played ZKR in BoA yet, since I'm on windows.

Quote: Originally written by spy.there: I agree, that ZKR is kind of complicated, when you play it the first time. What's complicated about it? There's a start point and an end point and a bunch of arbitary hurdles in between. Quote: But, you got 14 days for the run, and once you learned to decide between important quests and surplus fights - e.g. you do need the poppy-charm from Moron - you have enough time, to save Fort Cavalier. Of course you have enough time (though I thought it was 21 days - did he change it for BoA?). Too much time, if you ask me. Quote: There are always time-reminder dialogue boxes and warnings, when you enter a dead end. So it's hurdles with a fairly intangible time limit. You're still thinking about the hurdles, not the finish line. Quote: The scenario would lose a lot, when it would be shorter. It would gain a heck of a lot more. Drive. Purpose. Excitement. Originality. That's gotta outweigh a bunch of so-so dungeons. Quote: I appreciate the so called fillers, they allow you, to play it several times and to discover different ways to fulfil the main question. The only thing, I dislike: you can't go back to follow the side quests after passing Koth's place ... So you like exploration scenarios. But why dress up an exploration scenario as a race against time? If the wheeling and dealing is what appeals to you, wouldn't it be better to play a scenario that was meant to be about that? Quote: So ZKR makes you run - more than once. It didn't for me. I certainly wasn't interested in playing it again.

I think it might be a good idea to change the focus of the article from knowing where to go next to knowing how to reach the next story beat. In Spears, I might know to go to a certain town... but the story doesn't advance until I find a secret passage in the lower level. That can be a serious pain. Your article seems to largely concern finding your way outdoors - an issue for AC3 or AtG, sure, but there's a lot more to direction than that. But basically we're saying the same thing - each event should naturally lead the party to the next. If there's a period where the party is left wandering, that wandering should naturally lead to the next event. And so on. Yeah, I'm being pedantic.

A couple of good articles on dungeon design already exist at the Designer's Forum. Dungeon Design, by Alcritas The Evolving Role of Dungeons, by Drizzt Custom graphics - I think Tim Farland had a guide to making custom graphics, but it's probably gone now. Atmosphere - Tough one! It's a somewhat intangible thing, could be pretty hard to nail down in an article. I may give it a shot, though.

I define filler as a quest/mission that is mandatory to go through but unrelated to the plot or central concept. It's completely fine to have non-essential things that are unrelated, like NPCs, side quests and whatnot. Usually this is a good thing.

Sounds kinda like that bit in The Forsaken.

As you've all probably noticed, Drakefyre and I are locked in an article war. I'm one ahead of him at the moment. But hey, while we're churning them out, we might as well help out as much as possible. If there's some aspect of design you'd like to see illuminated, post here and one of us will be onto it and typing up an article before you can say "pack of ravenous wolves". Also, it might be interesting to see what everyone's favourite articles are so far.

Got a killer idea for a scenario? One of those ones that sets the imagination churning? One that makes people unable to wait to play it? Great! Now, don't mess it up. The most obvious way to get it wrong is to fail to deliver what's promised. A Small Rebellion is a very good scenario - we get promised a dilemma, and that's exactly what we get. There is no clear "right choice". Every character we meet makes us lean one way or the other, and so does every event we take part in. Right up to the point where we are forced to choose, we may not have decided where our loyalties lie. That's a dilemma, and that makes for a great scenario. Compare this to The Za-Khazi Run. It's a great concept - Rush to deliver aid to a besieged fort before it's too late. However, that isn't what we get when we play the scenario. We expect to hurry (after all, the word Run is in the title) - and the scenario forces us to wander and explore. We expect a scenario about saving a beseiged fort - and we get a scenario about wheeling and dealing with sliths, liches and dragons. The only times we think about our actual mission and the cargo we carry are at the very start of the scenario and at the very end. The rest of the scenario could be lifted out and placed in the middle of Avernum 1 and no one would know the difference. This is somewhat related to my article on Filler, by the way. Because as it stands, Za-Khazi Run is mostly made of filler. What would I do if I was making Za-Khazi Run? I would stop drawing focus and go back to that exciting concept. Forget all the distracting subplots with giants and unicorns, I'd make our core story - the run to Fort Cavalier - the star of the scenario. I would force the player to think at every turn "How do I save Fort Cavalier?" instead of making him think "How do I cut a deal with Morog?". First off, the scenario should be shorter. It's just too big to maintain the kind of intensity that it needs to work properly. Secondly, I'd give the party a few companions. These guys can constantly remind you of your mission and give an opportunity for division within the group. Finally, I'd make that time limit much tighter - if you're gonna make me run, make me RUN! The conflicts should remind us of the main story, not distract us from it. Say there's a big bunch of giants blocking our way. We can't beat them in open combat. Our companions speak up. We could try to find a way around them... but that will waste time. Or we could use some of the wands to smash through them... but they need these wands at Cavalier. You have to decide, which is the best way to save the Fort? Further on, there are some people in trouble. You're in a hurry. Do you leave them to die and save the Fort, or rescue them and risk letting many more die? Then, maybe one of your companions thinks you're not going fast enough, and that one person alone could get there much faster. You refuse, and he steals the wands and runs ahead. But then he gets killed and the wands are taken. You have to find them again before it's too late! That is a scenario that I would want to play - a scenario with an exciting premise and that doesn't draw focus from that premise.

A couple of things I want to establish right now. 1. Sometimes, a designer adds in some sort of mandatory dungeon or quest that doesn't really have anything to do with the storyline and only exists to make the scenario longer. This is called filler, and this is bad. 2. It's not THAT bad. Sure, try to avoid it, but it's not the biggest crime you can commit by a long shot. Bizarrely, it's short scenarios that tend to suffer most from filler. I'm not sure why, but I'm guessing it's because they don't have enough story. Probably the best example is the Blades of Exile scenario "Burned to the Ground". The basic plot: A logging town is burned down by vengeful forest spirits. Your party comes along to solve the problem. How do you do that? Through one fairly interesting fight with the forest spirits. But as he planned that, I'm sure it struck Wes Lewis (the designer) that this would make for a VERY short and unsatisfying scenario. Nice concept, but how to make it longer? Well, why not throw in a goblin dungeon? And a werewolf subplot? And you have to beat the goblins before you can deal with the werewolf, and you can only take on the forest spirits after you've killed the werewolf - for no reason at all. Now, Burned to the Ground is better than it would have been if it had just had the fight with the forest spirits, and it's still an okay scenario despite being comprised almost entirely of filler - but it's not as good as it could have been. So, what do you do if you NEED to make your scenario longer and don't want to choke it up with filler? I recommend making your villain active. Why have him sit around waiting for your party to come and beat him up? Give him something to do, and automatically your party will have something to do as a reaction to that. These forest spirits burn down the town before you even get there - and then do nothing at all while you go through a bunch of hoops so you can find them and fight them. Why can't they make the trees come alive and attack the town, for example? After you've helped fend them off, you get told to go back to Fort Ganrick and get help - but trees grow up and block the exit. You're trapped. And when you come face to face with the forest spirits, does it have to end there? Perhaps you defeat them, and march off proudly to collect your reward - only to find that the refugees are under attack again. It didn't work. So you have to come to their rescue, and then find the bush that these spirits draw their strength from and destroy it. Now, that is a scenario that would be about the same length as Burned to the Ground, but every mission is related to the central concept and to the main plot. I think that would be a much better scenario. But sometimes you need filler for reasons other than length. Sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - you may find yourself needing it for dramatic purposes. When I made Deadly Goblins, I wanted to spend time building up the menace of the goblins before the party actually encountered them. To do that, I had to make it so the first mission actually had very little to do with the goblins themselves. So I had them go to a hermit wizard who could find the goblins' hideout with his magic. So, yeah, that's filler. I could have made it that everyone already knew where the cave was, but I wanted there to be some expectation for when the goblins actually come into it. But instead of just throwing up something to delay the party for a while, I made sure it was the most entertaining piece of filler I could make. I made this old hermit have a paranoid fear of mushrooms. He has a bunch of traps and barriers to stop any mushrooms from coming to kill him that you have to get past. He has a mushroom torture chamber in the back, and if you search his bookshelves you can find children's books. Because this part of the scenario was connected somewhat loosely to the rest of the scenario, I could do nearly anything I wanted with it. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is the most enjoyable part of the scenario for many people. So there you have it. If you need more length, create more story by giving your villains actions, and if you absolutely need some sort of pause in the story, make it fun and no one will notice.

I design my scenarios one sequence at a time, and then just link those sequences together. I think the farmhouse was the first thing I did in Deadly Goblins. Revenge was a fun experience - loads and loads of individual bits, and I had little idea how well they were going to work together. Then I linked it all up, played through the bug-infested alpha version, and had a blast.

Really low damage, but it slays priests.

I like the Stick of Earthly Pleasure from Nature of Evil.

No one's going to do it, because this scenario will never be finished. LotR scenarios never are.