NaGDeMon 2024 - Developing a Narrator's Guide (Part 1)

I often like doing a bit of research because I launch into something. So, when developing a new Narrator's Guide, I'm going to have a look over a few books in a similar vein that have influenced the way I run games.

Starting at the top left and moving clockwise, we get the Werewolf and Vampire Storyteller's Guides, the Chill Companion, and finally the D&D 3rd Ed Dungeonmaster's Guide.

3 out of 4 are for horror games, so that fits where we are heading. 

The main bit of this analysis is looking at the types of things that might be important in this type of book, then considering that the whole thing is going to get compressed down to 16 pages (let's say 14 once the front cover and table of contents have been added). I'll look at two of the guides in this post, and two in the next one. 

Let's start by looking at the Werewolf Storyteller's Handbook. We've got an opening story, like a lot of books in the World of Darkness lines. 

Then an introduction that goes for 12 pages, which basically contains a brief overview of the book, gives some general ideas about the stories you can tell, then answers a few common questions about the setting. 

This is followed by a description of the world that goes for over 50 pages; in this section there are more details about rites, rituals and elements of the game that can be used to help drive a story. This section of the book is all about providing a storyteller with the depth of knowledge about the ways that the Werewolf setting varies from our own world.

The second chapter is about the battlefield of the world and how different types of environment can shape the stories being told... city stories versus wilderness stories. It goes for 32 pages, mosstly detailing what can harm or kill the characters in the game, and how these might be turned into story elements.

Chapter Three is about how to link individual stories into a long term campaign. It details things like drawing inspiraton from players, and inspiring them in return. It goes for 20 pages.

Chapter Four goes for 32 pages and is about the things that might threaten the characters. Monsters, spirits, anatagonists for whom only the Storyteller should have all the details.

Chapter Five is about varying the stories by including creatures other than werewolves in a story, or even basing an enture story around the other ccreatures that appear in the Werewolf setting. Obviously, if you're going to play a game about vampires, you'd use that game instead rather than using werewolf to tell vampiric tales...but this chapters goes into that a bit.

The final chapter "Odds and Ends" provides a few bits and pieces that just didn't make it into other books but which might be useful to the storytelling process.

This quick overview gives us an idea of what the game designers intended Werewolf stories to be about. There is certainly an impression that surviving against the odds will play a major role, so will fighting creatures and mortal authorities...both of whom are trying to squeeze every last drop out of the planet before their machinations wipe it out forever (but then again, the full name of the game is "Werewolf: the Apocalypse"). It's a game wher the world is on the verge of collapse. This book just shows how to make that desperation fun...or at least tell a good story as everything goes down in a blaze of glory. 

Next we'll look at the Chill Companion, which is more of an expansion to the core game Chill (in this case the 2nd edition by Mayfair games). I don't know if they ever released an actual book for the "Chill Master", I only ever got the main rules, the companion and a few of the awesome supplements about different monster types in the setting....but enough context, let's look at the book. There are a lot more sections to it, so I'll cluster a few together at a time.

The introduction and "What happened to SAVE?" both help to explain how this book transcends the basic rules and opens up the game to tell any story within the horror genre. It's about 3 pages in total.

The next sections "What is Horror?", "The Horror Genre", "Subgenres" and "Subgenres in Chill", all get into the nuances of telling a horror story, and how this type of narrative can be brought to the gaming table. I rememebr being blown away by the ideas in these chapters back in the day because I'd seen a number of people try to tell horror stories in D&D and other TTRPGs, but they always fell flat. 

From "New Rules" on page 26 through to "The Character Sheet" on page 126, the book expands on the rules in the basic game and introduces a magic system. It's one of the better magic systems I've ever encountered, but for the purposes of this investigation, it's a player facing element rather than something for narrators...so it's something we'll leave behind.

For "Scenario Design", "The Goal" and "Step-by-Step Design", we get a couple of really solid pages about how to make a horror story that will work in the game. Then leading up to page 147 it breaks down the design process of a horror scenario, with branching narratives that gradually work their way back to a singular climax. It's a bit railroady, but for the early 90s it was actually a pretty interesting structure.

The book finishes off with a "Horror Hall of Fame" describing some of the infamous characters in horror stories with statistics for use in a Chill game.

All in all, when we look at the companion it basically describes a few ways to run a game, a few styles of genre and subgenre, with the relevant conventions associated with them so that you can really get the vibe right. It's a game about horror, and in those middle rules sections there's a couple of systems that push the horror agenda with mechanisms and systems that are designed to heighten the tensions and emotion of the narrative. That's what the game is about, and that's what this books attempts to show the "Chill Master".

I'll look at the other two tomorrow, but these books suggest that the narrator will need...

Some hints about how to construct an atmospheric story

A way to make antagonists or dangers for the characters

Ideas about how to make the story fit a theme or mood

A bit more informattion about the world

Each of these will probably run 3-4 pages.

We'll see if things get modified based on the other two books.