Adapting Adventures: Adapting Plots

One of my secret pleasures as a game master is adapting adventure material to my own purposes. Last time we looked at the mechanical side of things: adapting monsters, dungeons, and NPCs. All of which is a lot of work. This week we'll look at some cases of stitching together plots into an ongoing game. It's a fun puzzle, working out how this plot fits into a grander vision or how that story hook meshes with another. While it is almost as much work as converting mechanics, it is an activity that I enjoy more and so the time spent passes quickly for me.

Adapting Plots

(S)Entries (Night's Black Agents)

By its very nature, this introductory adventure for Night's Black Agents invites customization, at least in the later scenes. There one needs to adjust things in order to fit whatever conspiracy you as the GM have chosen. Of course, I went a couple of steps further.

Spoilers Ahead!!

One thing I like to do it start the action as soon as possible. Begin with a fight then deal with the investigation. So rather than follow the original spine of the story (get hired for a heist, do the job and then run into trouble), I went and added action up front by jumping in 'in media res' with a car chase through the Balkan wilderness. The job was done and they were on their way to meet, if only they can escape their pursuers. Why a chase? Because I've never really used a car chase before in my games and I wanted to be sure it happened for once.

This left me with the question of who was chasing them and why. The who was easy. I wanted bikers and the Night Wolves fit the bill of being based in Eastern Europe and somewhat villainous sounding. Why was harder. I didn't want the PCs to be sold out early by their handler or employer so they needed to miss an unexpected detail, a tracking device in the laptop they stole.

That led directly to the question of who put the tracker there. Obviously the conspiracy, which implies the owner, Lennart was not the innocent depicted in the original story but an agent of the conspiracy, probably an information gatherer positioned in the UN to access their databases. This fed well into my idea that the paymaster was betraying her organization, stealing intel from one branch of the conspiracy to enable her rise along another branch.

It also made sure that the PCs would be hunted no matter who they cut a deal with. Either the original betrayer in the story gets the laptop or their paymaster or the guys they stole it from. Someone loses out and they probably blame the PCs.

Stringing Ideas Together

Corrupted Transmission

The main plot arc of my Hunter: the Vigil Chronicle essentially was assembled from a collection of disparate story seeds. A lot of bits came from World of Darkness: Asylum, whose titular building featured heavily in the game. I grabbed bits like the paralyzed master psychic Ambrose Grant and "Bateman's Children", derro-like beings composed of extracted madness and evil.

To this I added the Dream Computer from Night Horrors: the Unbidden. I tied this tale of interconnected dreams inhabited by the nightmare of a serial killer the other parts by replacing the creator (a Mage) with Ambrose and another stranger creature.

Specifically the Mnemovores (from a different Night Horrors book: Wicked Dead), who I had wanted use for a while. These memory devouring undead are normally isolated and forgetful. The one working with Ambrose (whose powers shielded him from the creature's powers) was able to access a source of power: a primal memory. Which incidentally allowed it to remain sapient without constant feedings.

The primal memory was an aspect of the God-Machine, specifically a key to accessing Infrastructure for creating Tulpas (thought projections, for which I used the representation from Over the Edge). These beings were used by Ambrose and the Memnovores to impersonate mortals and provide quick supernatural muscle. They also mirrored Bateman's children who might be seen as a primitive version of them, created crudely through the strange mechanisms located beneath the asylum.

Thus tying everything together (not including other ideas like Ambrose's psychic enhancement via a black book CIA program involving the Wintergreen process or the possible connection between Demon: the Descent Covers and the Tulpas).

Putting all of this together was a matter of collecting all the ideas I found inspiring and shifting them around until they began to click together like a giant puzzle. Some pieces were discarded like the Groetnich, a strange alien fish while others were spun off the main plot like my brain spider story.

Lessons Learned

I think the fundamental lesson is to start with cool ideas and then follow the logic to glue them together. Ask why an antagonist is present here, what he/she/it wants and what their goals are. Are there connections you can draw between other foes? Are they friends? Enemies? Something more complicated?

For scenes (especially action scenes) that you want top include, I recommend embracing them. If you want a chase across roof tops, figure out who is chasing them and how they ended up there. Sometimes you'll need to start in media res to short-circuit the typical PC tendency to avoid unnecessary danger (but make sure that there is some logical reason for them to be there and use it sparingly, player hate being railroaded). Other times you will find a compelling reason for them to get involved. Perhaps their contact will only meet atop a certain shop. when they are gunned down and the figure takes off on foot, they may have little choice but to pursue.

Enough rambling for now.