NaGaDeMon 2024 - Developing a Narrator's Guide (Part 2)

 

Today's first of our two guides for running the game is the Vampire Storyteller's Handbook, it's similar to the Werewolf one from yesterday. However, the stories told in Vampire aren't a struggle of horror against the end of the world, they're stories of horror against the monster you will inevitably become.

It starts with an introduction which generally explains what the book is about and an overview of the design teams intentions with regard to vampires in the setting.

Chapter One gives us an overview of how vampires are different to mortals and what their stories are intended to be like in light of this. It does this through a series of questions and answers over the course of 8 pages or so.

Chatpter Two tries to get into the heads of the different clans of vampires, presents a few mysterious bloodlines that may (or may not) exist in your stories, and gives a few new backgrounds and powers that might makee antagonsists a little more unpredictable, maybe a bit more powerful. It finishes off with a range of ideas for running a game based around vampiric elders (while the main game tends to focus on young vampires struggling against a bureacracy millenia in the making). This whiole section is about 50 pages.

Chapter Three is about the types of stories that fit the game and how to tell them. Explaining how the world is unfair, but that does't meant the stories can't be fun and interesting. It give ideas about how to run stories about vampires versus mortals, vampires versus other supernaturals, or vampires versus each other. It provides a few ideas for advanced storytelling techniques such as using downtime to your advantage. This chapter is 42 pages long.

Chapter Four provides some basic hints about how a storyteller should work to create a cohesive group with the players. It adds a few more pages about specific ways to deal with certain types of problem players too. A lot of it is common sense, but this might just be my 30 years of running games talking. This takes up 24 pages.

Chapter Five is dedicated to thinking "outside the box" and playing games set in different time periods, with some helpful hints for how vampires might have operated differently in these periods. It also touches on ways to completely shake-up the game system by eliminating fundamental elemnts like clans or modifying the way discipliens work. This takes up 20 pages.

Chapter Six is the inevitable bit where the game provides ways to cross-over into the other game lines of the World of Darkness. It really only covers variations in the game systems and how to limit these variations from becoming problematic. This is only 16 pages.

Chapter Seven is all about the mysterious group known as the Black Hand, who are basically a cross clan secret society who have been manipulating vampiric politics for as long as the vampires have been manipulating human politics (that is...since the dawn of recorded history). This is a group who are meant to be known more through rumours that through facts. In most games they aren't really a part at all because their overt presence can be quite disruptive. This chapter is 24 pages long. 

The whole guide is about things to add into your game and ways to add those things to make meaningful stories.

3rd Edition D&D was a product of late 90s game design, coming out in the early 2000s. I've often mentioned my dislike of D&D as a game that is designed through exceptions, a rule for this bit that works differently, another rule for that bit of the game because it also works a bit differently. For this reason, the three pages of contents kind of makes sense, but let's break it down into areas. 

Chapter One focuses on Dungeon Mastering. There's bits about establishing a world, game balance, how to teach the game, how and why you might modify the rules, and a couple of pages on actually running a game. This chapter goes for 18 pages.

Chapter Two is about the characters in the setting, but talks about it from the perspective of NPCs, their fighting statistics, and the tyes of equipment you could loot from them. This chapter goes for 40 pages.

Chapter Three is loosely about running the game, but is more about what different conditions you can apply to characters, how you can apply them (and how they can resist this), along with things like skill checks, failures and successes, and saving throws. This goes for 38 pages.

Chapter Four is bout how to run an adventure, spending most of its time decribing random encounters and the things you'd find in dungeons. This chapter goes for 43 pages.

Chapter Five generally claims to be about how to tie single adventures into campaigns, but ends up deliving into the types of equipment and NPCs that might help to facilitate this. This goes for 12 pages.

Chapter Six is about worldbuilding. It balances its pages between what it takes to set up and maintain a cohesive setting, an overview of how religion might work in a game, and how different types of setting might need different types of equipment (adding guns to D&D). This also goes for 12 pages.

Chapter Seven is all about how to reward characters, and how to establish the cycle of risk versus reward leading to higher risks and higher rewards. It goes for 7 pages.

Chapter Eight is all about how to use magic itesm and how to create new ones of your own. This goes for 73 pages.

If we assume that the focus of the game is proportional to the number of pages dedicated to it, we can see that magic items are a massive part of D&D 3.5

With these books looked at, I'm figuring the 16 pages for the "Bustle in your Hedgerow Narrator's Guide" will follow the structure below...

1 - Front Cover

2 - Table of Contents, Credits, and Legal Stuff

3-4 - Further context to the intended game setting with explanations for who the characters are, why they've been awakened, and what they need to do in the world. 

5-7 - The process of following the four act structure of Scarecrow stories, what should generally happen at what times, how things ramp up, how things can go awry, and how to get things back on track.   

8-9 - This is the "centre-spread" of the zine. This will basically be the narrator's play-mat indicating where to put tokens, and how the tracking of these tokens reflects the events of the night and the flow of the narrative.

10-13 - Creating spirits, hunters, and variant antagonists for the scarecrows.

14-15 - Rituals and variant powers that might be used by scarecrows or ther antagonsists to help drive the story.

16 - Back Cover