To begin, I should mention that this is not an article about your typical dungeon crawl, nor about the motivations behind those simple adventures. This is the second approach to the design of a quest, in our miniseries concerning good adventure design techniques. A Treasure Hunt is again a type of game that is played at camps and youth group retreats and in similar venues, which forms a good model for a quest-oriented adventure and proves to be distinct from the Flag Captures model already examined.
A treasure hunt is a particularly linear form of adventure. The players are expected to follow the prescribed route rather closely. Perhaps again a description of the popular game which illustrates the concept will show how this works.
It is again a team versus team competition in its natural form, but this can be ignored for the purposes of designing the quest. Each team, or as an adventure model the one team, is given a clue, written on paper, which if properly understood will lead them to some unique place where, with a bit of searching, they should find the next clue. This will in turn lead them to the next place, and the next clue, and eventually by following the clues from one to the next they will reach the end, the object of the quest, the McGuffin.
Note that the clues are not more than that; they are clues. You don’t find a slip of paper that says, “Go to the mess hall for the next clue”; you find instead something like “Builds strong bodies twelve ways” or “Satisfaction is found here thrice a day”. As the team reaches each location, the new clue gives them something to ponder, something to unravel. Once they’ve solved the clue, they’re off to find the next one.
This creates the opportunity for the team to be misled. The clue might not be so clear as to point to one place unequivocally. Sometimes the team will wind up in the wrong place, and realize after some searching that the next clue is not there, and they are off the track. Sometimes they will see the uncertainty immediately, and will hedge their bets by dividing their efforts to cover multiple possibilities. Builds strong bodies twelve ways might be the mess hall, but it might be the gym or the recreation hall, if there is one, and if you’re not sure which it is you might save time by checking both at once.
Converting this to an adventure design is not so difficult, although it does require some careful preparation.
A mystery investigation can be set up this way. The heroes begin with a clue that takes them to the nightclub. The waitress remembers the taxi driver, so they have to go to the cab company to find out how to reach him. Finding him at home, they learn where he took the guy he picked up at the nightclub. Reaching that location, they pick up the fact that it’s a meeting place for a certain gang. Each step in the investigation points them to the next; they don’t know where the end will be, nor where they will have to stop along the way, but they know that they’re after something, in this case the truth.
Doctor Who’s Key to Time series had some elements of this approach. The Doctor and Romana must gather the six pieces of the key, and as each piece is gathered they gain knowledge of the location of the next to continue their quest for the whole. Similarly, a quest can be designed such that several items must be collected, and in collecting each it becomes possible to gain information concerning the location of the next. Blake’s 7 did much the same over several episodes in which Blake was attempting to locate Star One, the central computer system that controlled all automated systems in the galaxy, knowledge of which was thought to be nonexistent. With each stop he found not the information he sought but a lead to where he might yet find it.
A similar adventure can be devised around the pursuit of a person. The person left this location and said to forward his mail to that one. From that location, he was bound north toward a certain outpost. He was at the outpost, but left to find the native tribes in the hills to the west. The natives met him, and sent him on his way. The amount of information may vary as he continues his travels, but the attentive players should be able to keep to the trail.
Well designed, the treasure hunt itself provides incentives at each step along the way in the form of gaining the next clue. The players should at least feel that they are on the right track, even if that confirmation comes from someone attempting to stop them–as all the detective shows remind us, that means we are getting close to the truth and someone doesn’t like it. Having “one more piece of the puzzle” is itself a reward. Should the players somehow fail to reach their ultimate goal, they will console themselves with the fact that they played the game well and reached many of the intervening goals. Staying on the trail is itself an objective, a success not to be undervalued.
What happens if the players lose the trail? Hopefully they have the ability to back up to the previous clue and rethink where they should have gone. If the clue is so weak that it really doesn’t lead anywhere, the referee may consider finding a way to add another clue. If the clue is there but the players missed it, they may have to return and look again.
Some adventures that are very like dungeon crawls follow this design. Each stage of the journey ends in a place, perhaps a room, in which something must be solved to point the direction for the next leg of the journey. In this design, the only side paths that exist are those that might be wrongly chosen at those critical junctures, which will shortly reveal themselves to have been wrong, sending the party back to that place from which they must again consider the options, costing them at least some time, possibly significantly more. Gandalf’s trek with the Fellowship of the Ring through the Mines of Moriah had some of these features, made evident when he would stop to examine various paths attempting to determine which they should take, although we are not always told the clues.
Given that with this technique the clues usually will not be little slips of paper that say, “This is the next clue”, it is wise to place several clues at each location. This has the twin advantages, first that if they miss one clue they might still work out the next location, and second that the clue you thought obvious might not be, but the other clue might click with them. If there is to be a single critical clue at any location, it is important that it be both discoverable and decipherable, that is, the players must be able to spot it and they must be able to determine what it means. Also, given that the clues are rarely labeled as such, the less evident the clue is the more obvious it must be. It’s all right to make the players ponder what the clue means if it’s staring them right in the face. If they have to search for the clue, it had better be clear to them that it is the clue when they find it. In Blake’s 7 Blake expected that the coordinates of Star One would be imprinted on a data card, and so he was making every effort to examine the few data cards that were worn by the royal family of the tribe on this primitive planet. These were all fake, leaving him in a quandary. He found the information, though, revealed through a triggered post-hypnotic suggestion implanted in the mind of the court jester, stated very clearly as the desired information as soon as it was discovered. Conversely, in an earlier murder mystery episode, Kerr Avon held the solution to the murder in his hand within the first few minutes after the crime was discovered, and knew that this was something important, but spent the rest of the episode attempting to solve the mystery unaware that the solution was in his hand. You can hide the clue either by making it difficult to find or by making it difficult to recognize, but if you do both the players are likely to falter. Either they must recognize it when they see it, or they must be guaranteed to see it if they won’t immediately recognize it.
The adventure may be enhanced by applying pressure to complete it. In the Treasure Hunt game, this pressure derives from the fact that it is a race, that someone else is trying to get through all of their clues and reach the finish first. Including an adversary on the same trail can make an interesting challenge, although the referee must play fairly. Many quests of this design have a time limit, a deadline by which they must be successful, whether this is a fixed time or a race to beat an event that could happen abruptly (for example, the prince is dying and we need to find the cure). Time pressure can also be applied if there is reason for the clues to deteriorate with time, as there might be with a mystery investigation, or if the quarry is on the move and so might escape if they don’t catch up with him. These can be combined in interesting ways, such as a quarry who is on the move and does not know that he’s carrying the bomb that is going to kill him in three days if we don’t catch him.
Ultimately, the players should reach something that is obviously the goal. It may be that this is the moment at which they finally reach what they set out to get; it may be instead that this is when they discover what it was they had been seeking from the beginning. If they have been pursuing a person, they might now say, “You’re under arrest in the name of the King,” or perhaps, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” It will be the conclusion of the quest, the journey’s end. They have reached the treasure.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
