Koibu's Corner: Outlining your adventures practice! Homework attached.

Hey there everybody, it's time for another Koibu's Corner, but this time we're going to be talking about building adventures and how to plan them. We're going to be looking at a simple way to get the grand outline of your plans to give your story some structure and pacing. This is a pretty loose method which is flexible enough that when things change (and they will), you should still be able to modify the story as it comes up. I will be making up a story to show as an example as we go along to help you follow my sometimes scatterbrained process.

To start with, we need to know two plot points: 1) How the story begins. 2) How the story ends. Let's write them down as point 0 and point 1. 

• 0) The players are a band of mercenaries that are meeting for the first time.
• 1) The players defeat an evil dragon and save the day.

This is pretty basic, but that's what we're looking for. Now it's time to think about, very broadly, what the players need to do in order to get from plot point 1 to plot point 2. There's probably a lot of things, but we're looking for the broadest, most general point we can think of that is still measurably achievable. I'm going to say that before they can defeat the dragon, they need to unify and work as a team. So let's add that in as a point half way through.

• 0) The players are a band of mercenaries that are meeting for the first time.
• 1/2) The players unifty into a team.
• 1) The players defeat an evil dragon and save the day.

We've added it at the half way point for now, but its position will change. Now lets look on either side of that point and ask ourselves what needs to be done to go from point 0 to point 1/2, and what needs to be done to go from point 1/2 to point 1? We'll add in these points half way between them. 

• 0) The players are a band of mercenaries that are meeting for the first time.
• 1/4) The players overcome a betrayal by their employer.
• 1/2) The players unifty into a team.
• 3/4) The players learn about the dragon as a threat.
• 1) The players defeat an evil dragon and save the day.

Here we've added a pretty specific point for 1/4, overcoming a betrayal, and a pretty general point for 3/4, learning about a threat. Generally we'll be mixing in details and broad points while we outline and we'll refine these as we go. The next step is to look at these points and see if there are more important steps to achieve between them. In order to overcome betrayal, the players need to be betrayed, so let's add that point. I'm not thinking we need to add any points between 1/4 and 1/2, and those two points might actually be the same thing in the end, so we'll leave them alone for now. Nothing strikes me right now about what needs to happen between 1/2 and 3/4, so we'll look at what happens between 3/4 and 1, which is probably something like "the players gain the power to fight a dragon", so our points now look like this:

• 0) The players are a band of mercenaries that are meeting for the first time.
• 1/8) The players are betrayed by their employer.
• 1/4) The players overcome a betrayal by their employer.
• 1/2) The players unifty into a team.
• 3/4) The players learn about the dragon as a threat.
• 7/8) The players gain the power to fight / defeat a dragon.
• 1) The players defeat an evil dragon and save the day.

Let's keep looking at the early story. It's probably time to start adding in some details here. So how are the PCs betrayed? Let's go with something like, "the PCs accomplish their mission, but unknowingly put themselves on the wrong side of the law in the process and are hunted as outlaws." That's enough detail to make some sense of our story. Let's just change that plot point's wording now.

• ...
• 1/8) the PCs accomplish their mission, but unknowingly put themselves on the wrong side of the law in the process and are hunted as outlaws.
• 1/4) the players overcome their betrayal by their employer.
• ...

How do they overcome their betrayal? Perhaps they find proof that their employer was behind it all and bring it to the law. We'll change point 1/4 to that, but it brings up the idea of this proof, and we need to know what it is. There's got to be some sort of evidence that their employer leaves behind, or hides, or exists somewhere. It's hard to think up evidence of something when we don't know what that thing is, so let's come up with a plot point of what their mission is exactly. It's got to put them on the wrong side of the law, but without the players knowing that it will do that to them. The PCs are mercenaries, so it probably has to do with fighting and killing something. Maybe their employer wants to kill a young noble, so he hires the PCs to be his bodyguard and takes a trip that will put him/her and the PCs in the path of this noble. Pronouns are becoming a problem so lets roll some dice to determine the sex of the employer and the noble. I roll a d6 and have a 1-3 be a female and 4-6 be a male. I rolled a 1 and 3, so their employer is a woman and the noble is a female, so a lady. Our story looks like this now.

• 0) The players are a band of mercenaries that are meeting for the first time.
• 1/16) The PCs are hired as bodyguards to escort their female employer somewhere.
• 1/8) Along the way they run into and kill a noble woman without knowing she is one.
• 3/16) The PCs are hunted by the law for killing the noble woman.
• 1/4) The PCs find evidence their employer's goal was to murder this noble woman and turn her in.
• 1/2) The players unify into a team.
• ...

This is coming along nicely. How exactly does the employer (might want a name now, madam Sophie?) get the PCs to kill the noblewoman? Maybe she's expecting an attack of some sorts and so she's traveling with an escort that's ready to get into a fight? If they were clearly marked as a noble the PCs probably wouldn't fight her, so maybe she's traveling undercover for some mission and taking one or two guards along to keep her safe. Madam Sophie is looking to pick a fight with her and get her killed, so she'll pretend to recognize the noblewoman (Lady Bertha?) as the leader of a bandit gang and have the PCs "defend" her (Sophie). So we've got Lady Bertha on an undercover mission not wanting to identify herself, escorted by two guards, knowing full well that trouble is looking for them and ready to fight at a moment's notice and they run into the PCs and Madam Sophie. Sophie claims Bertha is a bandit, and tells the PCs to defend her, and Bertha and her guards are ready for a fight when trouble looks like it's coming they leap to the attack. This way the PCs are more or less innocent in the matter, and the fight is all but guaranteed to happen - since from the PC's point of view they're just escorting someone they trust when they run into bandits who draw weapons as soon as they're called out as bandits. Makes sense to me. Now we still need that evidence. Perhaps Sophie is killing this woman to take something off her body? Maybe Bertha is undercover because she's escorting something of great value (maybe GP value, maybe political value, maybe magical value?).

Our plot points haven't changed, but we've fleshed them out. We don't need to add all this detail to the plot points, these can go in our notes further down in the document. Let's have our plot points act as a table of contents and then have the "chapters" be the details on those events. So something like:

• 0) The players are a band of mercenaries that are meeting for the first time.
• 1/16) The PCs are hired as bodyguards to escort their female employer somewhere.
• 1/8) Along the way they run into and kill a noble woman without knowing she is one.
• ...

0) Description of how the PCs meet. Where they are. Who they are. Etc.

1/16) Notes on how they meet and get hired by Madam Sophie

1/8) Notes on the encounter with Lady Bertha.

etc...

So now we would determine the item Bertha is carrying and why Sophie wants it. I'm going to move on from these points though because there's a more pressing issue. How do the PCs get hunted by the law? If there are no survivors, how doe the law know the PCs killed Bertha? Sophie can turn them in, but why? Maybe Bertha is killed pretty close to a town, and after the PCs kill her someone on the road finds her and her guards, tells the authorities, and the authorities start looking for the killers. To make sure they find the PCs there should be someone who can ID them, so lets say they have to pass through gates into a town and there are guards on duty. That way the PCs kill Bertha, get to town a bit latter, a guard on the gate lets them in, but notices these well armed people entering, then a little bit latter some sort of guard shows up saying Lady Bertha's been killed and have any armed people come this way? They still need to find the PCs, so lets put a tavern right at the entrance of town so the guard could have seen the PCs go into it so the other guards can follow the trail to the PCs right away. That means Sophie needs to be gone so the PCs can take the wrap for it, so this town is their final destination. Maybe they just came from the next town over, like a 1 day trip? So we've got Madam Sophie hiring the PCs in town 1 to escort her to town 2, they get into a fight with "bandits" along the way, and get to town 2 where their employer pays them and leaves. Then a little later guards coming looking for them and want to arrest them for Bertha's death and the theft of this prized thing she's got. The PCs might try to say, "our employer took it", but that's not going to fly with the guards. We don't want the PCs to be arrested and we don't want them to kill the guards, and they need to understand that they need to find proof that Sophie did it instead of them, so maybe town 2 isn't a town but a rest stop between two places. Maybe it's just a tavern with wall around it to keep out monsters. If it's going to be this small, we still need a reason Sophie isn't around. So maybe this isn't their destination, and they spend the night here and in the morning someone comes looking for them, but by then Sophie's already taken off? That works. Now if the PCs kill the guard or run from the guard (that's looking for them) there are witnesses and they can tell the law and the PCs can be hunted! Perfect. Somehow we need to tell the PCs that they need to find proof and turn in Sophie, and there's still the loose end of the guard on the gate who saw them come in together, so maybe the gate guard and the person chasing them both fight the PCs and we make sure the gate guard dies (leaving them without a witness to Sophie's entrance). To make sure the gate guard dies, s/he will have to run into the PCs first, but that's easy to do. And Sophie would have not be seen entering the tavern itself with the PCs, so maybe she splits from them after they enter the wall to... go to the bathroom or take care of animals? That way the people in the tavern will see the PCs enter alone and only the gate guard sees them all together?

This works great. It's just that matter of getting the PCs to find/turn in Sophie. All that takes is some NPC in the bar saying something like, "I believe your story. There was something strange about that Madam Sophie woman, she kept looking to the stables every few minutes. If you don't want the law to hunt you down, you'd better find her before the law finds you!" Now we just have to work in some details before hand to corroborate his story, make sure the PCs have a chance to blame it on Sophie so the NPC can believe them, and they're off! 

And this is just the appetizer of the story, how the PCs get together and learn to trust each other. We still have the main course, the dragon story line! I think I've made my point on how this outline process works, so if you're still with me, why don't you outline the dragon story's plot points and post them in the comments? 

Finally I want to speak to the notation we're using. I like to use fractions for my plot points because they're infinity and easily divisible. We could have started with Point 0 being Point 1, and Point 1 being Point 100, but going from 100 -> 50 -> 25 -> 12.5 -> 6.25 is just awkward. We could put points in order without any numbers, but then it's harder to reference further in the document. We could just do increments of 1 -> 2 -> 3, but then we need to keep changing numbers as we add in new ones, and that means changing the numbers later in the document which is a lot of work and if we forget to change one things might get confused. I like the fraction notation, but you can use whatever floats your boat. #FractionsAreYourFriends

That's it for this week's Koibu's Corner! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.