October | 2017 | Justin Achilli

I often run one-shots for the World of Darkness. Whether I’m doing demo sessions or running games for the local RPG club, I find the setting of the World of Darkness and its essential experience are very well suited to single-session stories for a variety of reasons.

The session can address a specific topic without having to sustain a full chronicle
Players can satisfy and gain feedback on short-term goals
Players can indulge intra-player treachery and intrigue without jeopardizing their relationships to one another over the long term

This last one is probably the most important. Treachery and intrigue are built into the DNA of the World of Darkness. A unifying theme across all of the WoD titles is the presence of a secret history and wheels that turn within wheels to satisfy the inscrutable goals of often unseen engineers. This is great stuff and it makes for marvelous conflict in stories around the game table — and conflicts are the stuff of which stories are made, of course.

With that in mind, when I set out to write a one-shot for the World of Darkness, I try to satisfy the following objectives.

Create Pregenerated Characters

Pregens are almost a must-have for a one-shot. At the table proper, they save session time that would otherwise be spent in character creation. Most importantly, they can be written to guarantee the presence of the themes and elements you construct your story to demonstrate. A wise Storyteller will create pregenerated characters with dependencies on each other and with complementary traits, which you almost certainly won’t get with an open-table approach to characters. Indeed, pregenerated characters let you manage some of the players’ expectations, which can be a huge deal if you’re not personally curating who’s at the table. (Seriously. I ran a demo game at the Essen Spiel once for a group of players that included a guy who wanted to fight everything with his claymore and a woman who wanted a session of pure gothic romance. And never again did I run demo sessions without pregenerated characters. Not because these concepts or expectations were bad, but because attempting to appease them both just left each of them disappointed.)

Have Players Suggest a Character Type or Concept

Here, you should expressly communicate that your pregenerated characters are just that — pregenerated, so there’s not a lot of ability to make a whole lot of tweaks on the spot without compromising the story’s plans. Players can certainly change details like their name, Nature and Demeanor, and maybe a trait or three, but you likely will have made certain considerations with the characters that are required by story elements (see below). Maybe you’re bold enough to let people adjust their clan or Disciplines, and if you are, bravo.

Myself, I ask players to write down a list of three adjectives that describe the type of character they’d like to play. With that sort of coaching from the players, I can usually get a pretty good match for at least two of those adjectives per player. And the players also feel like their desires have been considered, as opposed to just taking what was left over.

Build Relationships Between Characters

Remember the old coterie charts from the classic Vampire supplements? They depict visually a snapshot of who feels what about whom. You don’t have to go so far as to draw a coterie chart yourself, and you don’t have to connect every player’s character to one another, but you should definitely build opportunities for interaction between the characters. In itself, this serves two purposes:

It proactively prompts players to action
If you build antagonisms and contrasting goals into the relationships, it lets you shine a light on the themes of treachery and intrigue

Provide Goals for Each Pregenerated Character

If you’re writing the pregenerated characters, you probably have at least a hunch of how the characters you conceive would act. Players, however, haven’t incubated those thoughts yet, so you should provide them with a list of things the character wants to accomplish. The player doesn’t have to use these, but they’re a good way to jump-start the players into activity.

Make these goals obvious. (May you eventually enjoy the discovery of self-starting players and their capacity to surprise you with the tools you provide them!) Don’t bury the provided goals in paragraphs of background. Bullet point these mofos in a separate section of the pregen materials and call them out with their own header. If the player reads literally nothing else on their character sheet, working toward these is enough to get them participating.

In scripting the events of the one-shot — whether you do this in-depth or as little more than notes or an outline — relate at least one the character’s goals to the primary conflict of the story. All of the characters should have something investing them in the central plot component so as to bring them all together. This is also a great opportunity to foster those greater WoD themes of treachery and intrigue because here’s your chance to set some of those character goals in opposition to one another. Maybe one character wants the diabolist brought before the Prince to answer for their crimes while another player wants to enact retribution upon the diabolist and yet another character wants to take advantage of the Lex Talionis and diablerize the diabolist.

Providing contrasting and even exclusive goals does more than emphasize the themes of the game. It provides the impetus to disagree with other players, act against them (whether overtly or in secret), and takes some of the burden of being the focal point of player interactions off the Storyteller and onto the players themselves. They’re the leading characters of the story, after all, so let them celebrate interacting with one another. Beyond the role-based dependencies facilitated by more tactical situations, these personality-driven interactions make the characters themselves feel more vital, and they make the story more than a series of external obstacles to be overcome.

Provide Secrets for Each Pregenerated Character

Sharing secrets — whether accurately or falsely — is the currency of a World of Darkness story.

Add value to individual players’ characters by taking advantage of information disparity. Everybody should know at least one thing that others don’t. Privileged information makes the player feel powerful. Unique information also makes them valuable to the big picture (whether they share the info or act on it as part of a personal goal.

If you craft them wisely, a player’s secrets can:

Provoke conflict or cooperation with another player
Provide insight into how to resolve one of the plot conflicts
Function as leverage over another character in order to stimulate the social dynamic
Tip the balance of power in the story’s climax

Example Materials

Here are some links to planning materials for games I’ve written in the past.

The Apostate’s Wish

Chicago, 1896 — three years after the World’s Columbian Exposition. Three short years ago, the world marveled at the wonders of science, industry, and architecture on display at the expo. The now-abandoned fairgrounds of the grand exhibition harbor a darker side: The remains of the expo have become a stalking ground for a more insidious and decidedly less human horror — albeit one that poses no less a threat to the world of mortals. Into these long shadows steps a team of investigators, their fate as yet unknown….

Character Background Materials

Character Sheets

Storyteller Notes

Undying Ambition

A mysterious missive arrives in the night promising the auction of an incomparable prize: A staked and torpid Methuselah. Those accepting the invitation to the auction each have their own reasons for seeking the torpid ancient, but their true opponents may not be their rival bidders. Are the players masters of their own destinies? Or are they pawns in the War of Ages?

Character Background Materials

It’s Worth It

It sounds like a lot of work, and, honestly, it is, but when you plan your story and assemble the characters with attention to their polish, the players truly appreciate it. Overall, it makes for a stronger story, and it ensures that players have ample ways to impact the story (even if it’s not the core plot over which they have the most influence). And you don’t have to restrict it to the tabletop: You can develop LARP characters or characters for boutique events the same way. Ultimately, it’s about creating opportunities for action, because players want to see the results of the choices they make.

In fantasy RPGs, and in some other theme-forward RPGs, maps are often assumed to be one of the high-impact setting artifacts. They’re great for demonstrating production value, they provide valuable in-game information, and they’re good goal-setting tools that inspire their players to seek out far off and challenging destinations. Heck, “map fantasy” is an entire sub-genre of literature.

This map makes me want to play this game.

A conversation in one of my online communities recently got me thinking about what maps suggest, however. While I don’t have an issue with maps, in general, I often find myself working with with much less precise geography when I run games. I responded that GMs could also use flowcharts instead of maps, and I wanted to explore that more substantially here.

Some of things that come up when discussing maps:

When your fantasy campaign/ scenario/ session relies on a map, that document makes many decisions for you, rather than letting them emerge from the gameplay. A savvy GM can deviate from this, but it becomes a little more difficult to account for than changing an antagonist or substituting a faction. There’s a cascade effect of consequences that changing “map truths” has, not the least of which is invalidating some of the visual verity of game materials designed for that very purpose. Certainly, fantasy and games are about imagining “what if?” but if the tools for doing that reinforce a different what if, they’re fighting the player’s sense of authenticity.
Hexcrawl nerd nirvana, from Tomb of Annihilation.

If the mapped area is known, that diminishes some of the discovery incentive for exploring the area. Put in practical terms, there’s a reason that Tomb of Annihilation has a huge number of unknown hexes on its player map. It’s an encouragement to seek the answer to a question the game asks. If the players’ map was filled in, it’s simply an exercise in choosing the perceived optimal route. But when the players are able to fill it in because they found the answer, that’s intrinsically rewarding! They’ve pushed back the unknown themselves, which is extremely satisfying. In a perfect world, your players may be the ones to make the map and introduce it to the world (or keep it secret). But those decisions and outcomes are the stuff of which games are made, yes?
Assuming a semi-medieval information state and economy, maps are extremely valuable, and the information they contain isn’t necessarily common knowledge. This is less important in worlds with magic and million-year written traditions and infinite non-exploitative production means, but overall, if your world assumes some historical affections and not others, that makes it more difficult for the players to understand which of the unspoken truths are in fact different. Not a huge issue, but a seeming incongruity with certain assumptions of authenticity.

Again, my intent is not to eliminate map use, but to provide an immediately useful and perhaps more relevant alternative. Especially as a GM, you may need more or different information more readily at hand than a traditional map provides.

A dungeon arrayed as a flowchart rather than a traditional gridded map. The dotted line indicates a secret passage. The numbers correspond to encounter details on a legend (not depicted). Note the one-way path from the Treacherous Bridge to the Black Idols — reaching the idols this way probably means falling from the bridge!

I’m reminded of an early Robert E. Howard sketch of his fantasy world as he envisioned it*, which didn’t have a map paired with it. rather, it was a description of the various lands and the themes they evoked, but with a very impressionistic description of their locations, largely in relation to the other locations. This seemed to me a clever narrative way of handling things — I know that Area X is off to the badlands of the west and Region Y is mired in the swampy southeast and that’s pretty much all I need because I’m reading about story events rather than planning a road trip to either location.

This dude is pretty sure he’s within a day or two’s travel from Greyhawk.

In my experience, that’s the most important determinant: Is the destination more important than the journey, in terms of how the game is set up? For example, if the game is planned as a series of narrative events planned at key set piece locations, the actual map geography becomes less important. If the game is planned as a hex crawl or a journey into the unknown, a map is more important — and the players may even be creating a map of their own, perhaps even the only such map that exists in the world! OSR gameplay, for example, often emphasizes travel to the destination, while many more narrative games focus on the planned encounter locations instead of the interstices.

Replacing the Map With a Flowchart

When the fine details of a map aren’t critical to the gameplay decisions, I can set to work building the flowchart. Even “flowchart” implies more structure than is necessary, as it suggests dependent, sequential movement. A simple chart, showing relative position, is really all you need. You can build these with heavy tools like Power Point (not optimal) or Visio (better, as it preserves the spatial relationships and connections). I’ve found, though, that lighter mindmapping programs work best. I use Scapple most often and sometimes MindNode (which I also use to collect campaign details, plot events, and player responses). Different programs should also let you use different shapes and connector types that give you visual cues of different information types.

Here’s a map chart of a local-scale campaign environment. The green location is the starting locale, and probably the one best known to the PCs. The blue entries are the areas that PCs can gain rumors about while asking around the village. The uncolored entries are feature areas — dungeons, buildings, interesting places. The red entry is a planned encounter tied to a specific area proximate to other nearby features. The numbers on the dotted lines are travel distances expressed as times, which can be used for random encounter checks or for time-dependent events.

Things to Include in a Map Chart

Spatial relationships of geographical entries
- Include sequential travel relationships. For example, if you have to go under the mountain to get to the castle on the other side, the chart should depict that dependency
- This also lets you array the alternate routes. In the example above, it may be safer but longer to travel through the forest to get to the castle, but faster and more dangerous to go under the mountain
Distance between geographical entries
- Stated as a value; will usually fit on connector lines
Some differentiation between geographical entries of different types
- E.g. Region vs community vs geographical feature vs adventure site vs encounter
- Use different colors to denote different entities (cities in one country all have a blue background, all dungeons with artifacts have a yellow-highlighted header, etc.)
References to relevant encounters
If you want to get sophisticated and interactive, you can link from the map chart to wiki entries, Trello cards, Obsidian Portal campaigns, etc.

* “Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyborean Age,” “The Hyborean Age,” and “Hyborian Names and Countries,” pp. 375, 379, and 417, from The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

Justin Achilli

Creative Direction | Games Direction | Narrative Direction

Month: October 2017

Writing Characters for WoD One-Shots