Adventure Anatomy — Advanced Old School Revival

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Now that you've decided the scope of your adventure and whether it will be linear or nonlinear, you can start creating the scenes and adventure hooks that will make it all come together as a sandbox.

In a nutshell, an adventure is made up of a handful of scenes connected by adventure hooks. There are many different types of scenes and adventure hooks, but ultimately scenes are the where and when of the fiction and hooks are the how and why.

As players explore scenes, they uncover hooks that point them in the direction of other scenes. In this way, players are in charge of how the adventure unfolds, as they get to make decisions about where to go based on the hooks they discover in each scene.

Scenes

At its heart, a scene is a self-contained situation for players to explore, usually a physical location. The adventure is made up of scenes connected together by adventure hooks, so each scene is a self-contained situation that exists to yield adventure hooks which help players decide what scene to go to next.

A scene can have any number of adventure hooks pointing to other scenes, but as a rule of thumb, each scene in your adventure needs at least three hooks that point to it from other scenes. This is to help reinforce players' awareness of the scene's existence.

Scenes in Monsters in Merovia

The boundary of the adventure in Monsters in Merovia is the town of Glenluce and the woods immediately surrounding the town.

The adventure has six exploratory scenes: the Constabulary, the Church, the Bakery, the Tavern, the Old Mill, and the Docks. Some of these exploratory scenes are also variable, in that they may contain different things depending on when the heroes visit the scene or what has happened in the adventure. The Old Mill, for example, does not contain the villain if it’s visited too early in the adventure.

There are also a handful of floating scenes that occur based on what players do in the adventure: for example, the ghouls attacking the gates at Glenluce is a scene that occurs when the heroes’ investigation starts to threaten the villain’s plans.

Adventure Hooks

Adventure hooks are narrative clues that "hook" the players into exploring other scenes. They create incentives for players to explore the content you designed for them, giving your scenes a natural fictional "gravity," because the more hooks they uncover that point to a scene, the more "presence" the scene has in their minds.

Hooks can be presented in a number of formats, such as information about the scene or the events occurring in it, or as physical artifacts that indicate the same, but they primarily exist to communicate that other scenes in the adventure exist and remain to be explored.

Ideally, every scene yields several hooks to other scenes. This means that as you design your scenes, you need to think about ways in which each scene can plausibly indicate a few other scenes. It's OK if players uncover hooks to scenes they've already explored: that redundancy is a good thing, because it reinforces their understanding of the adventure's "big picture."

Hooks in Monsters in Merovia

Consider the tavern scene in Monsters in Merovia. The scene contains four hooks pointing to four other scenes:

The fishermen discuss rumors of a foreign vessel at the Docks.
The townsfolk are concerned about the Constabulary overflowing with the sick.
The barmaid speaks fondly of Elder Aidan, who has kept the town fed with his bread at the Bakery.
The Tarth cleric Stahl plans to deliver a sermon to the town at the Church.

These hooks are all very straightforward and delivered to the players through NPC interactions (as information), but could alternatively be communicated by found artifacts at the scene: for example, if you wanted to include a hook to the Old Mill, you could have the tavern wall be adorned with a freshly retired grindstone, engraved with details that indicate the grindstone has been recently replaced.

Why Scenes & Hooks?

The inherent nonlinearity of designing adventures this way will make life easier for you, both in prepping for the adventure and in maximizing players' enjoyment of the game. You won't have to write up endless contingencies outlining your course of action if the players do this or that: by organizing the adventure into scenes connected together by hooks, you've already accounted for their agency in the structure of the environment. Like pinballs in an arcade machine, your players get to bounce around the adventure unpredictably, but in the predictable context of the scenes you created.

Maximizing Meaningful Choice

On the one hand, you get to sit back and react to what the players do, since they're the ones making the decisions about where to go next based on the hooks they discover. While you still have some leverage over the adventure through pacing and the strategic deployment of floating scenes, you maximize their opportunities to make meaningful choices in the context of the adventure by privileging their agendas over your own.

Strategic Prep

Once you've laid out all the scenes you need for your adventure, you have a clear picture of all the mechanical stuff you need to prep to handle just about any situation. Add to this that your prep naturally gets organized by scene, so you can grab exactly the prep you need the moment players enter a scene.

A single scene might require the following prep:

A map or visual aid of the space if a combat encounter might take place (though this isn't strictly necessary, as combat in OSR+ can be handled in the theater of mind, most of the time);
Shorthand for NPCs or monsters that require stats;
The adventure hooks;
Any unique treasure or items;
The stats for any known perils.

Prep in Monsters in Merovia

To prepare for the entire adventure, you’d need to lay out the contents of each of the six exploratory scenes (as well as their variable states). In your back pocket, you’d also have prep for any floating scenes that can be deployed on the party when certain conditions are met. A map of the town could be a helpful visual aid as well.

For example, consider the tavern scene in Monsters in Merovia:

While the scene contains a number of NPCs, only Stahl and Barmaid Lala (if she is the villain) need stats. We know that if the players linger too long in this scene, a secret clock will have one of the townsfolk turn into a ghoul, which means we need stats for the ghoul.

If the players consume the poisoned food, this presents a peril that increases their stress, so you’d want the mechanics for this peril handy.
The tavern itself doesn’t need a map, though it doesn’t hurt to have one handy if your table likes visualizing combat. You could also render AI art of the scene and its inhabitants to have a handful of pictures to present as the players explore the space.
Keep on hand the page with the four adventure hooks (identified above) that help connect this scene to others, so you can check off what the party knows as they discover the hooks.

On Boundaries of Play

As you design the adventure, you may have a niggling question of what to do if your players try to exit the boundaries of your adventure in the back of your mind.

We addressed this to some degree in the what ifs of linear vs. nonlinear play, but let's now look at those what ifs in practice.

Suppose at the gates of Glenluce in Monsters of Merovia, your players decide they don't want to go into the town. Instead, they'd prefer to leave the scenario and travel north to join the Dread Lords in their conquest of Merovia.

There's a couple of responses to this impulse to consider:

First, there's the social contract. Everyone at the table agreed to the premise of Monsters of Merovia in session zero (or, in the absence of session zero, when you presented your pitch deck or setting overview). Monsters is a short that features adventurers exhausted from dangerous travel, who take refuge in Glenluce because they have nowhere else to turn. If your table suddenly doesn't want to play that game, they're violating the social contract by rejecting the enjoyment you get out of the game: running what you want to run as a GM. It's acceptable to tell them that this is not the adventure you designed for them, and if they want to reject the premise, then they'll have to play a different game.
Second, there's a matter of prep, which is unavoidable. If this were a campaign and not a short (and so there is a wider world to explore that would dovetail with other adventures you have yet to design), the party might be warranted in exiting the boundaries of the adventure, for reasons that make sense in the context of the fiction. In this case, it's OK to say that you need to end the session to prep for where this new direction in the campaign is going. The good thing is that because your adventure was designed in a nonlinear fashion, you can cannibalize your scenes and put them into other adventures.

Both of these responses are abortive in nature, and that's because at its heart, OSR+ is a simulationist game.

While there are mechanics in the game that help you improvise things out of thin air, the world exists out there to be discovered. Mysteries have definite answers that can be uncovered with pre-existing clues, and factions are up to stuff independent of what the PCs are doing. Without a certain amount of prep to make the world feel free, meaningful choice becomes a bit of an illusion, reduced to the whims of GM who's just making things up as he goes along.

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