Can you please summarize for me the concepts and clocks for arc that you have run?
I’m trying to come up with an arc and I have no idea how to set up the clock, should each step be a mystery, but then if hunters kill every monster the last step doesn’t make sense etc, so I’m looking for examples.
The clock isn’t about the hunters, at all. The clock is the steps that the monster will take towards its goals, and what happens if no one ever finds or opposes them.
Let’s say you have a vampire that comes home for their high school reunion.
First step is that they feed on someone, and leave a decapitated corpse–this is the clue to the hunters that they have something weird going on.
Now, let’s say each other step of their plan is getting revenge on someone they hated in high school.
The final step is that they turn someone that they always thought was a friend or ally to them in school into a vampire.
If no hunters show up or figure out the plan, four or five people die and an additional person is turned into a vampire, and the original vampire goes back to their old stomping ground.
The hunters can look into who got killed, notice patterns of where and who got killed, and figure out that they were all in the same school, in the same class, etc. They may even figure out exactly who would have had it in for exactly those people that died up to whatever point they get their information.
The hunters come across the monster whenever their investigation crosses over with the mystery. If they figure out exactly who has an axe to grind with the, say, three people that have died up to that point in the mystery, they may find out where they stay, fight off their hell hound or zombie guards, and then confront the monster.
If it goes badly, they may still need to go to the reunion to stop the vampire from taking their victim. Or they may force their hand and have to go to that person’s house, because we’re a step or two away from the “end” of where the vampire’s original plot would have ended up.
The clock doesn’t need to hit all of its steps. It’s there to make sure that the monster as a motivation and a plan, so there is a mystery to investigate in the first place. It also gives you some backstory to use so that you can improvise once the action deviates from the monster’s plan.
In the example above, figuring out who the vampire is early means you know where the vampire might go if they can’t get revenge on everybody in the original plan. You aren’t improvising everything in the mystery, just making informed improvisations based on where the point of deviation happens.
The clock is what happens if the hunters never intervene. It guides how you direct the fiction as things progress. But it really should never happen exactly as written. The hunters do intervene. So some things happen, and others won’t. From my last mystery:
– John steals something, and minions kill him, but not before he can send the item to Jane.
– Minions stalk Jane, but because of reasons, they don’t kill her but summon the big bad.
– Big bad seduces Jane to get to the maguffin and to breed.
– Big bad discovers where the maguffin is. Minions retrieve it, killing many.
– Big bad gives maguffin to even bigger bad who will use it to accomplish great evil.
– Big bad impregnates Jane and kills her after she gives birth.
In our case, the first four happened, but the hunters retrieved the maguffin before five could happen. Jane gets saved, big bad and minions were defeated (for now), and now they’ve drawn the attention of the even bigger bad.
Jared Rascher what you wrote is cool advice for creating one mystery.
I’m interested in creating an arc where the steps and plans of the bigger evil somehow have to happen during/between normal mysteries? That’s the part I’m not clear at, as one mystery is happening, how should the arc steps happen and what they should be about?
My concept is that some force is delivering books to people who have somehow been wronged and hold a grudge against society, those people use those books to summon evil and hunters come to stop them. Force behind the books collects small tributes from each evil doer in hope to stay under the radar, but of course PCs should learn about it and stop it, I just don’t want it to be as simple as finding one item so that ancient ritual cannot happen or something like that.
Pawel Solowczuk, sorry about that. I’ve been on cold medicine all weekend, and apparently I didn’t notice the word “arc” in there as I should have.
Arcs have clocks too. The manual has some good examples.
I missed the word Arc too. Sorry. My arc, for example, is very similar to the summoning arc in the manual. And you tie it into the back stories of your hunters.
Jared Rascher I really want to steal this mystery idea! I think it’d work really well for my setting.
Arcs operate on the same logic, just a bigger scale generally, and there may be multiple clocks for multiple bad guys with background machinations. I actually don’t come up with the whole clock all at once for arcs, since it’s much slower moving and I try to let it develop more naturally. I’ll try to write something up when I get a chance though.
My advice is don’t worry about clocks. You should have a better feel than a game mechanic for when something needs to happen in your group’s story.
Try just making some notes about the forces that will be in conflict with the PC’s: what they want, what they are doing to get what they want, connections to the PC’s, connections to what the PC’s want, etc. Roll them out as the narrative requires. And then adjust them as they change by interaction with the PC’s.
I find the most important statement in all PbtA games is “play to find out”. Having a few notes with my ideas and responding to the narrative as it is created works better for me than ticking boxes in some pre-planned mechanic. If that all sounds like basic GM’ing for any game, you’re right. PbtA games really support that kind of GM’ing, so I recommend giving it a try.