Looking for narrative adventures and tips on writing them

[rylen dreskin]

Hey,

I'm putting this one in HQ and RPG Theory.

I like what I've read about narrative games. But I'm not entirely sure how to put one together. I've read the basic tips about having relationship maps sketched out, with bangs, and kickers. I'm going to wait until I have characters and see what they stir up (hopefully a lot.) But ...

The HQ adventures I've seen in the HQ book and on the web seem pretty standard modules. Are there any good narrative adventures out there I can look at and see what those writers have done? Are they more narrative then I realize? How do I get players to take control of the story? And how much control should I give?

Thanks for the advice.
Rylen

[contracycle]

These techniques are best articulated in Ron's own publication Sorcerer and its supplements.

I think whats important is that HQ's mechanism facilitates this sort of play; it is not necessarily that the existing products are actually built that way as yet.

[pete_darby]

Well Peter Nordstrand & Chris Chinn made this amazingly spiffy adventure with narrativism in mind for HeroQuest...

[John Kim]

Are there principles which can be defined from "Well of Souls" and other adventures?  Essentially, "Well of Souls" provides a briefly-described starting situation, a bunch of detailed characters, and a list of about 30 potential "Bangs".  

Now, personally, I prefer to have a few more things in modules I use: primarily maps and player handouts.  I don't consider the sample list of Bangs very important, since I tend not to use them -- but I don't mind having them, either.  The key thing that I don't consider important are the common content of (1) keyed room/location descriptions; and (2) scene-by-scene breakdowns of the plot.  I think that breaking out of these two typical approaches is the biggest step.

[Sean]

I was browsing through books at the local borders and the recent D&D 3.5 module "Bonegarden" (Lance Hawvermale for Necromancer Games) caught my eye. I didn't buy it, so I don't know if it is good, but the design philosophy is explicitly to give you a site, several groups of NPCs all with their own plans and goals, and let you go from there, with response to player intervention explicitly expected, without a set 'story' or 'climax' other than the various ones implicit in the setting and NPCs.

I don't know if this module pulled it off or not, but it seems to me that that's the kind of structure you'd want for a narrativist scenario. Get the setting, get the various moving agents on the table, give some likely responses to various things the PCs do, accept the fact that your PCs may derail it and be prepared to improvise, and then go to town.

[Bankuei]

Hi John,

A good conflict is one, particularly if it has some form of emotional draw for the players, much like the "issue" for any given court drama needs to be emotionally loaded.  Not having much to go with for WoS, the focus is really on the father and his two sons, rather than the politics, everything else is just complications.  Further sub-conflicts exist to allow the group to "aim" towards whatever has the most draw for them emotionally.

When you have scenarios with pregen characters, you can usually load the characters towards conflict and make a much tighter scenario.  The benefit that most groups have over any designer in this case, is the GM usually knows the players and the characters and can tailor from there.

Chris