Game Ideas Un limited: Spelunking

  It strikes me that several of the recent columns have been a bit, qu'est c'on dit, esoteric, perhaps.  In any event, talking about homes and anniversaries and such provides some interesting ideas for color in our games, but it isn't terribly practical.  It's time to get back to something more generally useful.  Thus I am picking up the thoughts on how to design an adventure.

  In the last quarter, we had several articles specifically aimed at quest adventures, adventures focused on a goal.  Flag Captures, Treasure Hunt, and Scavenger Hunts were all models of this concept, and we gave consideration to how to craft a practical McGuffin to motivate the characters in their quests.  We've finished with quests.  They are a useful approach to adventure design, but as is apparent from the fact that our first adventure design column focused on the Antagonists, it should not be surprising that there are quite a few ways to design good adventures that are not quests.

  The quest model assumes that characters need an objective to seek and a motivation for seeking it.  Some characters do require this, just as some people do.  However, the classic answer George Mallory gave as his reason for attempting to climb Mount Everest, "Because it's there", is a motivation for exploration that deserves consideration.  Many have scaled mountains, entered caves, blazed paths in the wilderness, and otherwise moved forward for no better reason than that there was something to discover.  Confronted with the unknown, man responds by advancing into it.  It is a drive that carried us to heights of the moon and the depths of the Marianas Trench, that encouraged feet to trudge to the poles and robotic spacecraft to land on Mars.  It drives scientific inquiry, from Newton's Laws of Motion to Watson and Crick's Double Helix.  Inquiring minds want to know.

  Thus spelunking, that is, cave exploration, is a model for adventure design that contains its own motivation.  Characters want to explore the unknown because they want to know; players want to explore the unknown because they want to discover.  It can be the reason for entering a cavern complex or a dungeon compound, or for visiting ruins or graveyards, opening pyramids and other ancient crypts, advancing beyond the frontier into the unknown, landing on an uncharted island or unexplored planet.

  If you find it difficult to fathom the motivation for such an adventure, you are not alone.  My first complaint concerning the recent remake of the movie The Time Machine centered on the fact that the film's creators could not understand the central character of the book, and so destroyed him and the point of the original story in an effort to provide something the modern viewer could grasp.  Alexander Hartdeggen, in H. G. Wells' famed book, was modeled on the great nineteenth century independent scientist inventors as they were perceived in the popular mind.  Working alone in his rooms he created a time machine for no better reason than that he wanted to learn, to learn about time itself and to learn about the future.  That was all the motivation he needed.  Believing that modern audiences would be unable to grasp this as a motivation, the filmmakers invented a fiance named Emma, then killed her (twice, in fact), to motivate Hartdeggen so he would have a reason to invent the time machine to try to save her, and then to travel to the future looking for the answer which would explain why he could not do so.  Setting aside the utter nonsense of that proposition (he in fact did change the past, and the answer he ultimately gains makes no sense), it is striking that the pure quest for knowledge was disregarded by the filmmakers as an incredible motivation for a character.  Some people don't get it.  That's all right.  Spelunking is a model of adventure design for those who understand Hartdeggen and the quest for knowledge for its own sake.

  There are a number of challenges with this type of design.  Nearly all of them revolve around the central challenge of offering something that is worth exploring.  It must be interesting, because by the very nature of the concept, failure to be interesting is to be boring, and boredom is failure in exploration.

  To make it interesting, you must have many ideas for things that are worth imagining.  This is a challenge in itself, as the things that might be interesting in the real world are difficult to convey as interesting within the game.

  I have visited a number of caves and caverns over the years, now tourist attractions but not entirely spoiled for that and in some ways benefited by it.  For one thing, extensive electric lighting made it possible to see the cavernous interiors which flashlights or even Coleman® lanterns would not have illumined.  For another, were they not tourist attractions, it is extremely doubtful whether a young teenage boy, his parents, and three younger siblings would have been given an opportunity to enter and experience these caves in a single day's visit.  I can recall to mind memories of waterfalls of solid rock, formed on the walls by the deposits carried by dripping water.  One cave highlighted some odd features that had the look of fried eggs about them, bulbous in the center.  Cavernous ceilings and tall columns were at times breathtaking.  There was much that was fascinating to the eye, and visiting a cavern such as Luray or Skyline is an experience I recommend.  Similarly, although I have never been to Yellowstone or to the Grand Canyon, I am given to understand that just seeing these sights is worth the trip.

  However, descriptions of such wonders do not make for superb role playing adventures.  Those who have seen them take the descriptions as recalling the images they know, and those who have not seen them gain less from the descriptions than they would from a picture postcard, which is to say nothing at all of the true feeling of such alien places.  To make such places interesting in the shared imagined space of a role playing game, you have to be inventive.  Things must be happening, or must have happened, that are unexpected or at least suggestive of the unusual.  This is why so many imagined caves in our games have creatures living in them (something that is rare in real caves, apart from bats whose presence tends to make such places less than hospitable to humans, and blind fish trapped for generations in underground waterways).  They also have writing on the walls, ancient carvings and statues and other decorations (again rare, although found in some caves, mostly near the entrances), because these are easily imagined but not easily fathomed, and so create interest.  If you expect your players to enjoy exploring your caves, or any other locale, purely for the interest of the place, you must create an interesting place.

  One of the great advantages of the dungeon or cave complex model for spelunking type adventures is that it can be very much contained or controlled.  There can be one entrance; passages branching off from the starting point can be limited.  This permits the world designer to begin with a few ideas positioned near the entrance, and to expand gradually on those initial ideas as the complex is built outward, staying ahead of the player characters so they don't come to the part that is still under construction.  That illustrates one of the challenges of spelunking design.  You must either have a means of containing your players within that part of the world that is ready for them, or you must have a wealth of good ideas spread across a very large area so that wherever they go they will encounter something else interesting.

  One means of making it seem as if everything everywhere is interesting is to so order the game that the player characters are told where to go.  If stories of the ruins to the east are played in their direction, they are likely to head due east to find the ruins, and so be blissfully unaware that a mere few miles to either side of their course nothing has been created.  If on the return journey there proves to be a lake which they had not seen on the outward trek, this is not necessarily a surprise--after all, they were focused on their destination before, and something a mile or two off the road could easily have escaped notice.

  Another potential shortcut for this sort of play is to create spare points of interest.  There may be a hundred inns in the city, but if you create five it is unlikely that the player characters will visit all of them before you have a chance to create five more.  Interesting sights and encounters can similarly be completely mobile from the referee's perspective but absolutely fixed within the world whenever it is decided exactly where they would be.  Thus if the characters head south, and nothing has been planned to the south, you can pull out four or five modular points of interest and place them along the road.

  Such points of interest can be quite varied.  An old adventurer living in a run down house along the road who sits on his porch and greets travelers would go unreported by traveling merchants, but might be of great interest to young adventurers looking to know what is out there.  Geographical features such as hidden ponds or unusual rock formations can color the journey favorably if not overused.  Players frequently take interest in archaeological points.  Even so little as a cryptic tombstone marking an ancient grave can fascinate, and can be used as information in the present adventure or as the basis for a future direction.  The ruins of an old castle, fort, or town; a graveyard complete with crypts; and an ancient boundary marker all have possibilities.  Even a modern trading center, that is, a genre and period appropriate place to buy and sell goods, can be a point of interest in the explorations undertaken by the adventurers, if it's made interesting.

  Related to this are the sorts of encounters used for Stalling.  An interesting and involving delay can let the night play out well and give the referee an extra week to build the world in front of the characters.  To this end, our previously discussed Encounters with people the characters already know can be effective here.  It could be fun, at least once in a while, to regale the players with tales of adventures had by others, invented at this moment by you, and to invite them to recount stories of what they've been doing in response.  As suggested when we considered having characters write Reports on their characters' behalves, the retelling of such stories by the players often reveals much to the referee about what the players are enjoying and remembering.

  There is much debate among gamers and gaming theorists concerning the proper meaning of the word story, and it would not be worth the space in this column to attempt to clarify that.  Yet it is appropriate to mention that in this approach to design, there is nothing of what is traditionally considered a story.  We are not building toward a climax.  There are no issues of human tragedy or comedy at stake at any point.  There will be no sense that the story is ending.  Any character development, any plot points, anything that resembles a storyline, will be both accidental and incidental.  This is not an effort to create a story, but an effort to create and explore a setting, a place where stories might occur but need not.

  At the same time, exploration may have its own dangers, and its own rewards.  Even without the usual trappings of a story, players whose characters have been trapped by a collapsed roof yet managed to survive and escape will tell the tale with excitement initially and nostalgia eventually.  These are adventures, as the characters take risks to unearth the secrets of the world around them.

  It is also reasonable for there to be rewards for the characters beyond that discovery.  Not every explorer becomes fabulously wealthy for it.  Many die impoverished.  Yet those archaeologists who unsealed the ancient Egyptian tombs brought out much of value, and divers exploring for the lost Spanish Silver Train recovered a significant amount of wealth.  In life these are the exceptions; in play, they become more the expectations, but they need not be rewarded at every turn.  Discovery is its own reward; other rewards are bonuses.

  Don't become too concerned about where the player characters will find their motivation for every adventure.  Discovery is its own reward, and players can be driven to learn about a world by the bare fact that, as Mallory said, it's there.

  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.