Montage — Advanced Old School Revival

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The montage action allows players to simulate the PCs' working toward a goal over time. The core rules speak to training, carousing, making preparations (reforging the magic sword, building the fortress, seeking out contacts), and performing intricate rituals, investigations, or meditations as examples of montages.

Running Montages

Montages are not defined as a mechanic unto themselves like the dungeon crawl or the journey action. Instead, the PCs identify a goal—training for the tournament; reforging the magic sword; finding the secret informant in a bar crawl—and then you choose a mechanic (or another downtime action) to allow that goal to be carried out. If you want to resolve the montage in a single scene, a three-act or single-act scene check might suffice. (Or if a single PC is involved, you can keep things simple and use a success check.)

Montage as a Scene Check

If you want to distribute a montage across multiple scenes, you can use the rules of social combat. If there is an NPC involved, you can base the TN for windows (i.e., the "social defense" in social combat) on a roll that makes sense for the montage. And if there isn't an NPC involved with the goal to set the TN, use an escalating TN starting at 11.

Let's look at two examples taking this approach.

In the first example, the PCs are searching for an informant who is said to possess incriminating evidence against the evil duke. The problem is that the informant is a notorious drunk who can only be found by carousing the local taverns.

Carousing for Trouble

GM: Sounds like we’re gonna do a little montage. They say this guy starts his or her night at Flute & Willow and ends up at the Last Laugh before sunrise.

Zed: May the gods protect our livers.

Mister Loan: Just pass your shots to me, Zed. I can take it.

Nyn: I don’t suppose they have a light Yevim wine at these bars, do you?

The GM sets up a scene check, asking the players to describe their collective approach to searching for the informant in the throngs of drinkers during the night’s bar crawl. Zed decides to use his Changeling abilities to look like the locals and attract them to a central spectacle: Mister Loan downs as much alcohol as possible to impress them and potentially draw out the informant. Nyn observes the crowd from the bar, looking for clues in the patrons’ behavior.

GM: So while there’s a lot of deception involved here, it sounds like an overall strategy to divide and conquer, so it’s Smart for this first act…

In this second example, the PC is trying to reforge a sword, which ordinarily would take a great deal of time and effort on the PC's part that the table is not interested in playing in real time.

Reforging the Magic Sword

GM: Okay Yovan, it sounds like you want to embark on a quest to reforge the Axe of Pharkun. Let’s set a clock of 3 and your next 2 windows will be the next two downtimes we do. You will need to gather rare earth to repair the blade, and then seek out the knowledge necessary to reforge it. And of course, there’s the matter of actually reforging it. Since we’re in the hinterlands of Farlas, where do you find the rare metals?

Yovan: When I was a child my father used to take me into the goatmen-riddled caves in the North to wrestle with their ilk. I once saw a blue crystal there and remember it was the same color as the powder we used to forge our blades.

GM: Those caves are a few miles north. What’s your approach?

Yovan: I’m going to challenge their chieftain to a wrestle in exchange for a crystal. Hopefully he remembers me, as the goatmen live for hundreds of years.

At this point, the GM may roleplay the scene with Yovan speaking to the goatman chieftain before calling for a Mighty check, and Yovan adds Athletics. Because we’re treating this as the first window of success, the TN is 11. The roll can be handled as an attribute check or a success check to advance the clock, and your choosing one or the other depends on how you want to advance the narrative. A success check will always move the clock (with complications on an insufficient result), whereas a pass/fail attribute check will reinforce the status quo on a failure and require the PC to find a different approach to try again. The next window for success will be the next time a downtime occurs in the adventure.

Montage Using Other Downtime Actions

When you montage, you can use the mechanics of other downtime actions to resolve windows of success. For example, if the montage involves the PCs traveling across the countryside to spread the word of the return of the Queen Who Lives, you might resolve each window of success as a monologue.

Similarly, if you are trying to simulate how the party's relationships deepen over time ahead of a harrowing battle that could mean their deaths, you might montage over the course of their travels where each window of success equates to a parley. In the parley, the PCs individually share their fears and doubts. The mechanical outcome here could be generating global story tags to use in the upcoming battle, for example.

← Parley

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