Tabletop RPGs have interested me in a long time because i'm a massive weeb and got to borrow the DND book with kitsune in it once. That's the truth and the entire rational. At least it was for quite a while. Years later I ended up listening to Adventure Zone and Critical Role and started to understand that it was more than just magic katana and silk-clothed fox-monks. It was storytelling. And boy do I like stories. I'm a huge Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol fan, i've read the hero with a thousand faces, and i probably look for the hero's journey in places it doesn't exist.
*. Knowing that TTRPGs were in fact stories and stories have structure, I picked up a Delta Green Keeper's book.
Why Delta Green? Well, good friends spoke highly of it. Which is the reason I checked it out at all, but boy, is it rad. The mix eldritch and sci-fi themes, the X-Files-y creepiness, and the built-in decline in sanity of characters makes it very alluring. !!Hard Ticket to Baghdad!!http://www.thebadguyswin.com/2016/08/wtf-dd-hard-ticket-to-baghdad-1-kuwait-beach-party/!! and the rest of the 80s-90s Call of Cthulhu games Zack Parsons and Steve ????
† run is one of few things I'll rererereread.
So Delta Green has a guide for what makes a good encounter. A kind of template/list to have as a starting point. My memory is mostly shit at this point so this is mostly to cement the list in said shit-memory. The list items are theirs, the descriptions are my fault. (Also mind you that I have no experience here )
1 The Hook
This is the core thing, their recommendations are that you only have one, as not to overcomplicate things, and that everything comes from this. I really like the limitation this imposes, because my immediate instinct is to just cram as much stuff into a story as possible. Working from a known point and elaborating out from that ensures that all the details make thematic sense. The book recommends normal things turned unnatural and in this day and age you can probably take an unnatural trope and turn it even more unnatural. Fish Cult being infiltrated by a Snake Cult?
‡ Sometimes the ideas write themselves like
"Santería cult imports gigantic invasive, building-eating snails" This should not be confused for the intro or an actual story beat.
1a The Location
Obviously the location should, probably, be where the hook happens. The interesting take here was that the location could also be an event. Should the story take place in a small town in Kansas or in the
path of an oncoming tornado which happens to be in a small town in Kansas. Weather, holidays, and events are all location-y.
2 NPCs
aka extra work. Watching Mathew Mercer do NPCs on Critical Role is exhausting, he does such a perfect job conveying a totally different character for each one. In liue of trying to figure out how he does it here are some notes for a simple character: What they want, what they fear, who they know and how they feel about them, and what they will do to get what they want. Lifting from the Big 5: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism are all sliding scales that could be balanced. Mental state aside: pretend you're filling out a job application: age (unless you're in CA), ethnicity, work exp, education history, and "fun facts"