Alternate Narrative Structures
Previously, we explored the Hero's Journey, or the Monomyth. It's an excellent structure for most RPGs, as most RPGs focus on heroic adventures where characters journey forth and discover the secret world and are changed by their experiences. We like to explore the "zero to hero" story in a lot of RPGs, and the Heroic Journey offers an excellent set of conceits to explore the improvement of characters, so it's definitely a narrative structure I recommend.
It is, however, far from the only one. There are loads of different story structures, or even completely different theories of stories and how they should work. Different cultures have different storytelling traditions worth exploring and mining for ideas, and different genres have intriguing ideas too. I'm going to explore three more story structures which I think have direct relevance on most modern RPGs.
The Iconic Story
If you ask someone to name their inspirations for their RPG, they might cite:
- A Western
- Conan the Barbarian
- Super-hero comics
- Sherlock Holmes
These don't actually follow the heroic journey. In fact, Hollywood often struggles with super-hero movies, or it did before Marvel perfected the formula, that aren't origin stories precisely for this reason, because they have been schooled on the monomyth, but not the iconic story. An iconic story inverts what changes and what doesn't. In an iconic story, the icon descends into a corrupted world, and imposes his own moral order upon that corrupted world and changes it and then departs once more. What is "moral" and what is "corrupt" is based, typically, on what the audience expects to be moral, and the corruption is usually centered on something typical for the era in which the story is written. That is, the iconic hero represents the audience and their morality, and the corrupted world represents something they'd like to see changed in the world, and the story represents an exercise in fulfilling that wish. The hero does not grow as a result of the story, but the world does.
For example, in some lawless, broken-down town on the edge of civilization, a school marm works hard to educate children who don't want to be educated, tends to her sick mother (who fears a growing plague within the local environments and speaks of previous plagues). We see shots of how run down everything is: leaking pipes, the filth of bathrooms, etc. We get the impression of a medieval world, but also of the "third world," with its faltering infrastructure and crude, uneducated populace. The town is in the iron grip of an ignorant preacher, an exaggerated religious figure who preaches ignorance, while he has a cohort of mercenaries with excellent, advanced weaponry, provided for him by some outside corporation.
Then our hero arrives, wounded and on the run. His name is Johnny Zero, and he sports a cybernetic eye, a neural interface, super-human reflexes and an amazing gun. The school marm tends to his wounds, and he offers up his own medical supplies, the excess of which help heal the school marm's mother. Johnny is appalled by the state of her aparment, and begins to fix things. The school marm warms up to him, but he's cold, detached, and ruthlessly efficient, and thus hard for her to connect to him. When she discusses what they're teaching in school, he snorts, corrects some of her material, and then asks incisive questions that makes her realize that she's been teaching an unquestioned dogma without realizing it. She begins to question her own cirruculum and makes changes to what she teaches the kids, and how, making it more hands-on and more directly relevant, so they become curious and engaged. But the Preacher catches wind of the changes and disapproves. He sends his well-armed goons to capture her and bring her in and he insists she return to her previous education standards. She suspects something and refuses. During all of this, she reveals the presence of Johnny Zero, and the Preacher reveals that Johnny is a known criminal. He's willing to forgive her lapses if she gives up his location.
Meanwhile, Johnny Zero has realized the school marm has been missing for quite some time and realizes the town is occupied by the preacher and an old nemesis, the head of the mercenaries. Using his hacking skills, he breaks into the local network and finds where the Preacher is keeping her. He breaks in and uses his superior reflexes and weaponry, as well as his superior knowledge of technology, to coldly defeat all of the mercenaries, including his old rival. He rescues the school marm and faces the preacher, who reveals that the corporation was intentionally indoctrinating the town to keep them docile and good workers, and that Johnny Zero's presence has awoken a rebelliousness here that the corporation won't tolerate. He escapes and vows to bring the law down on Johnny Zero.
The town has changed from one of misery and filth to a cleaner, well-maintained one with a self-educating and independent populace. The school marm confesses her love for Johnny Zero, but he explains that he has to leave, to draw the corporations attention onto him and keep them away from her and the town. And then he rides off into the sunset.
While most RPGs don't have this structure, it offers a compelling approach for how a lot of gamers actually treat games. They tend to come into a new area, identify a problem and then impose their own values onto the environment. They "change," but only in the sense that they gain a new level: their fundamental outlook on the world does not change.
Robin Laws explored the Iconic Story first in Hamlet's Hitpoints, which is a good book for exploring narratives in RPGS in general. I highly recommend it.
The Murder Mystery
A lot of RPGs will feature mysteries or at least mysterious elements. The most common GURPS game to feature these would be GURPS Monster Hunters, but GURPS has a whole book devoted to the mystery as a narrative structure.
Broadly speaking, mysteries break down into one of two structures: the ball-of-yard and the cozy.
The ball-of-yarn suits a "railroad" narrative better, and tend to be more common in "pulp detective" sorts of stories. Here, a crime occurs, and the detective discovers a single clue that leads him to some other location (say, a bar). There, he questions people and something happens (say, two guys break in with guns to shoot the place up) and he finds a clue which takes him to the next location, and so on, like someone winding up a ball of yarn, until they reach the end of the mystery and resolve it.
This sort of structure works best when the mystery acts more as an excuse for action and cool set-pieces. It guides the heroes along and let's them see the sites, wonders, dangers and evils of their world. This also means it suits railroad narratives well, as the clues themselves act as the rail that draws the players a long. Critical to this approach, you cannot play footsie with the clues: the players must always find the minimal necessary clues to advance the plot, and they shouldn't find so many clues as to short-circuit the plot. Gumshoe games, like Nights Black Agents, have excellent mechanics for this sort of thing. Kenneth Hite also observed that this sort of story is typical of the action/thriller genre:
"The price of information is danger; the reward of information is more danger." -- Kenneth HiteWhat he means here is that the core difference between a thriller and a pulp detective novel is the heartbeats of danger. In a story like the Bourne Identity or a James Bond film or the Fast and Furious, we have a ball-of-yarn, but to get at the clue, the hero must face danger (say, for example, breaking into a vault, or capturing a dangerous criminal for interrogation). Once he has faced the danger, he gets the necessary clue (the vault contains a valuable map; the criminal gives up important information). As a result of this, though, the bad guys have realized that someone is on to them, and so sends goons to defeat them, or silence their information source, or retrieve the stolen property. The heroes must then defeat this new danger, but the new danger usually has the seed of their next clue ("I hacked their communication network and they were sent... from our own headquarters?!")
The cozy, by contrast, better suits the typical sandbox and represents the ultimate sort of sandbox. It's typical of stories like Murder She Wrote or the works of Agatha Christie. A series of interesting characters gather in a single, isolated ("cozy") place, and are introduced; the purpose of the gathering might be innocent, but is often itself a mystery. For example, they all might board a cruise ship at the invitation of an eccentric technology tycoon, or an extended clan of aristocrats might gather for the funeral of the family patriarch. After meeting the various characters, something happens ("The lights go out, someone screams") and murder happens. Because everyone is isolated at the location, only someone at the location could have done it, and we've narrowed our suspect list down and created our carefully bounded sandbox. We can then allow the players to question the various characters and explore events until they figure out whodunit.
A good cozy turns on exploring interesting characters and their relationships ("airing everyone's dirty laundry"). You can treat this as a character study, and a lot of discovered things might not be directly related to the plot, such as the affair the wife was having as a red herring, or the fact that the tycoon was donating to a kid's school not out of charity, but as the result of a blackmail scheme, etc. In a cozy, the GM can be a lot cagier with the clues, especially as he has several possible routes to the final solution ("motive, means and opportunity"), so if a player screws up one, he can carry on down another line of investigation.
The Romance Novel
My mother avidly read Harlequin novels when I was a boy, and she once explained how they're so formulaic that writers are ultimately rewriting specific, pre-written formulas with slightly different characters. I don't know if that's true, but romance novels definitely have their own narrative structure.
It's definitely worth studying up on what makes romance work, because love is a powerful driver and motivation for all stories, and a lot players have come to expect romance to occur in RPGs. This sort of thing tends to make GMs nervous, because it can easily come across as cheesy or inauthentic to do, but there are ways it can be done right that will make it feel less cheesy, or make the cheese matter less. After all, real-life romance is often awkward, and those who excel at it learn to "break the ice" and make people comfortable with it. A lot of it, like with the cozy, turns on character studies. Said differently, a good romance begins long before the first date or that awkward kiss on the veranda, when the two characters first meet and what sort of chemistry they might have. A lot of the story will turn on exploring the secrets of their prospective mate, and overcoming the obstacles that stand between the two characters, not on gathering the courage to kiss someone.
This brings us to an awkward truth about romance in RPGs: chances are, if you're reading the blog, you're probably a dude running games for dudes, while most romantic literature is written by women for other women. Look, the best way to learn how to run a good romance is to read romances. Sorry. Go pick up Pride and Prejudice (get the one with "And Zombies" on the end if you want to pretend to be a little more manly). Reread Romeo and Juliet a little more carefully. Pick up a couple of Harlequin Novels, or some Urban Fantasy Young Adult novel if you want to pretend you're studying up on World of Darkness. These latter tend to be exceedingly formulaic, and thus you'll pick out some of the core tropes well.
Now, as I said, most of these are written for women, so what works here might not work as well for a male audience. You'll need to hunt harder for "romances written for men," and they do exist and, no, they're not found exclusively in the pages of Playboy. Most of your action stories written for men also include a romantic subplot, though typically rather simplistic, often with the roman reduced to a flat characterization geared to cause as many complications for the man as possible. That said, there are connections you can draw between the male-oriented action-romance subplot and the female-oriented pure romance to create an intriguing fusion between the two, especially to deepen the character of the romantic interest, which I guarantee you will be appreciated by male players, who definitely like it when the female character is more than just a pretty face. In fact, you'll start to notice "stock characters" in romance literature, and begin to realize that the romance subplots that target men also have "stock characters" that get used again and again too, though because men talk about romantic subplots less than women do (at least, outside of anime circles) they tend to be less widely known.
A Worked Example - Making Use of our Alternative Narrative Structures
We already know what structure to use for our Ranathim Bounty Hunter game, but that doesn't mean we can't use some of the ideas laid out here for subplots or stories-within-stories, or just to inform the rest of our plot.
We can expect our players to treat the story a lot like an iconic story, so we might focus on providing playgrounds for them to impose their morality. After all, fighting monsters and saving town is what these Bounty Hunters do. We had also noted that one of the story elements might be about pirates attacking a town, so we could borrow the iconic structure for that series of sessions, where the heroes learn about the sorry state of the town and whatever cultural issues that we know our players will enjoying imposing their view upon, let them do so and improve the town while facing resistance from mean-spirited curmudgeons and the pirates themselves until the arc climaxes in a clash between the pirates and the heroes, which will determine the fate of the town itself. Once they're done, they can move on, having participated in their iconic story.
We can also toss in some romantic elements into the game. Let's assume a male target audience, not to besmirch female players or to assume they won't play, but because writing romantic plots for men has a lot less obvious source material than for women, so you'll likely appreciate my insights here more. What we introduce depends a lot on who's playing: the advantage of running a romance in an RPG is you can tailor it directly for your players, rather than just write a generic story and hope it's a hit. But two obvious stock characters that might work well, that we often see, are the ingenue and the femme fatale. In both cases, we need something that makes them interesting, some conflict and secret that keeps them from accepting the romantic overtures of the PC.
The Ingenue, or the "girl next door" is typically innocent and gullible. If we're looking at the "virgin/whore" dichotomy, she's the "good girl." The typical problem faced by the good girls tend to be distress: their relative incompetence leads to their need of the hero to rescue them and their virtuousness means the hero is justified in rescuing them. That said, I find a lot of people don't particularly enjoy this sort of story anymore, and the girl-as-macguffin does little to make the girl interesting, and we need to make her interesting if we want to kindle a real romance. Instead, I find it more useful to create an interesting tension between her need to be moral and righteous and her simplistic view of what morality and righteousness is. She can object to what the hero does, and then eventually realize, later, the rightness of his actions, and grow as a result.
The Femme Fatale, is the "bad girl," the "whore" of our "virgin/whore" dichotomy. Unlike the ingenue, she does not lack in skill or competence. Indeed, she often makes an excellent villain or opponent to face. Where the ingenue is often unconsciously sexy (typically "beautiful" or "cute" rather than "sexy"), the Femme Fatale is consciously sexy and is savvy enough to use it to her advantage. She is dangerous not just because she's physically competent, but because she's socially and psychologically competent: she can and will manipulate you. Her failing and weakness are ultimately moral. She tends to be deeply cynical, often wrongly cynical. The struggle in the story is to find some way to redeem her, or to redeem the world in her eyes and pull her back from the brink of an abyss of depression and nihilism.
For our story, the Ingenue is easy: an apprentice monster hunter has joined the guild. She's a bright, country Ranathim, hale and hardy, with a perky, upturned nose and a dusting of freckling and reddish hair and short, cute horns. She herself is short, and she hates it when people point that out. She's trying very hard to prove herself to the guild, so she pushes herself extra hard and lives and breaths their doctrines. She also has a crush on one of the PCs, which some of the other characters tease him about. Inevitably, though, when the Death Cult betrays the PCs and they become the targets of, rather than members of, the Monster Hunter Guild, the ingenue feels betrayed: her heroic mentor and crush turned against everything she believed in. The Death Cult leader has also been feeding her lies and trying to turn her into his bride and dragon, his right-hand woman for defeating the enemies of the cult. He does this by giving her the approval she craved from the PC and the cult. The romance here will be about bridging the lies, showing her that while her righteousness is right, it's being used against her, and about finding some way to defeat an increasingly competent and capable opponent (all of that monomaniacal training is paying off, over time) without alienating her or hurting her.
For the Femme Fatale, we invert the above: while the heroes are part of the guild, she is their enemy, but once they're betrayed and "on the outside" she becomes a natural ally, to highlight their "fall from grace." She'll be a rival bounty hunter and/or a pirate that the heroes face early on in the first arc of the campaign, a sultry and sinful Ranathim witch who fights the Death Cult and the Monster Hunter cult and trades in forbidden artifacts and technologies. She'll be black-haired and pale-skinned, emphasizing the "vampiric" nature of the Ranathim. She'll encounter the PCs a second time after their fall from grace when both end up fighting the Death Cult together by accident, and then she'll help them out because "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." She'll give them the rough schooling they need to survive the world on the outside of the cult (helping hook them up with criminal connections, set them up as mercenaries or hitmen, or use them in her smuggling operations). She faces a mounting debt issue to a Slaver who intends to use her addictions and gambling against her to finally increase her debt to the point where she must sell herself into slavery, or join him as a slaver. When the PCs find out, she'll need their help to extract her from the morass of sin she's gotten herself into, and once that happens, she'll reconsider her dissolute life, but where can a girl like her behave in a more moral fashion and make a living while "going straight?" Can she even go straight? Resolving that with the help of the PC will become one of the major points of their romance.
Finally, we have the "mystery" plotline, and the Monster Hunters of Psi-Wars tend to follow the natural course of a monster-hunter plot. Thus, we can use the ball-of-yarn structure to guide our heroic journey. The PCs find need to risk danger to find the clue to lead them to the next bit of danger to find the next clue. This will be especially true after they've recovered The Child, because they'll need to learn what the Cult's ultimate goals for the child will be. We might have sessions that look something like:
- The heroes escape an attack by the death cult
- They learn of a secret library that houses the rituals of the death cult
- They break into the secret library, fighting its guardians
- They learn of the ritual, but accidentally unleash some monstrosity buried in the library
- They learn that the monstrosity is tied to the ritual and the child
- They also learn where the homeworld of the monstrosity is, and most go to it to figure out what the ritual would attempt to do with the monstrosity.
And so on.
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