This is a series that explores Tropes and tries to apply them in RPGs. Have a look here, I wrote over 20 of these so far.
So Sorry for the double feed, something happened when I posted this the 1st time and 1/2 the text was eaten!
One of the things I’ve seen GMs struggle with is campaign secrets and big reveals.
Oh, how we GMs like to be full of secrecy about our pet plots and NPC motivations!
Often, we become overprotective of those secrets don’t we? We hoard them and keep them near. Oh yes! Our preciouses!
We tend to think that by handing secrets in X-Files-thin slices, the unfolding multi-dimensional story will grab our players by the throat and the campaign will culminate in a crescendo of coolness followed by an instant Ferris Bueler’s street party where you get to crowd surf and the whole world basks in your awesomeness…
Hum, no. Chances are you’ll get your players confused and/or impatient and they’ll most likely go try to poke into the undefined parts of your neat plot-lines. Worse yet, they may just ignore it altogether and jump the rails.
It happened to me in a spectacular fashion once.
I was playing a Gurps Fantasy campaign game on a world ruled by dragons, made up of the standard fantasy races.
The plot I presented to the players was that they had to bring down a ruthless Dragon prince who was holding the relatively benign Dragon King and Queen of their kingdom in the castle’s dungeons.
Pretty standard fare huh?
What I failed to tell my players was that the dragons came from a Shadowrun-like Earth, had read The Hobbit and found the whole ‘Smaug’ thing to be quite sensible. In order to live that dream, a bunch of filthy rich dragon billionaires built a STL Arkship, stole a huge pile of Human DNA and left for the stars. They later found a planet and terraformed it to lord over a bunch of fantasy races they had tinkered from all that DNA.
Yeah, I used to go for the real simple stories like that all the time.
My campaign’s main plot was to have the players explore/adventure around the world a bit and then get hit in the face with an honest to goodness alien invasion/Sci-fi vs Fantasy mash up!
When I did my Great Reveal® by describing the crash of an alien spaceship near the player’s campsite, my players’ PCs basically blinked, picked up their campaign gear and left the scene to go explore something else.
So yeah, that didn’t work. I humbly came back with a more traditional storyline, leaving the aliens in orbit while the PCs returned to killing Demon Assassins, Senile Undead Dragons and a Wight named Barry.
So what’s the point of all this and what’s the link with tropes?
Well, I think that you can have secrets and big reveals in your campaign world, as long as it doesn’t send the adventure down a path players refuse to walk.
Three related tropes I discovered that are especially well designed for that:
The resolution of a plot by the sudden revelation of some important detail which has been deliberately hidden from the viewer. Had this detail been made known at the beginning of the story, much or all of the dramatic tension would have been missing from the plot. Usually, it hasn’t been hidden from the “viewpoint” character(s). Sometimes, it has been hidden from one character, so the character will be just as surprised as we are.
This is a trope you can use when you wish to have a campaign-level cliffhanger or a game defining plot-twist.
In the RPG version of the trope, the twist is definitively hidden from the PCs and others but possibly not for some key NPCs.
This is especially interesting when you pull this, successfully, mid-campaign and offer the PCs the choice to pursue the story as if nothing happened or take the twist into account and redirect the story (i.e. Take either the Blue or the Red Pill)
Examples:
- The PCs are serving an aging/sick/senile king/old man that turns out to be a God/Dragon/Demon or to be From the Past/From the Future/their father/the BBEG (this is the Classic, almost Cliché version of the Tomato Surprise)
- The Ultimate Evil that threatens the whole universe turns out to be an innocent 5 year old big eyed little girl, complete with cute animé puppy, whose nightmares become reality and devour whole countries.
- The PCs must recover the Seven Whatever from each kingdoms of Gamecubia to stave off a meteor from crashing into the planet. It turns out that the Whatevers were in fact seals that protected each kingdom from a plague and now everyone is dying. Awwww.
- Two words: The Matrix
My Dragons vs Alien game was an example of a failed application of this trope. For it to have been successful, I would have had to come forth and tell player of the game’s Sci-Fi background and to expect it to become significant later in the campaign.
At the very least I should have planned in advance that the characters might decide to take the other pill.
If you want to pull some really weird crap on your PCs, you may want to explore another trope where the Tomatoes are the actual PCs!
Our protagonist is going through a perfectly normal day. Only… something’s wrong. The people around him are acting just a bit off. They keep mentioning a string of words, or are trying to herd him to a certain place.
It looks like the town’s been taken over by the pod people, and our hero’s the only one left. He attempts to either escape and warn the outside world, or find where the invaders are coming from and shut it down. But once he gets there, he discovers the horrifying truth: he’s the fake! A robot, a clone, a ghost, or some other duplicate that forgot he wasn’t the real thing, or was programmed to believe that he was. In an ongoing series, it’ll be a duplicate of one of the main characters. In an anthology, it’ll just be someone who thinks they’re human. Either way, it’s an effective inversion of The Puppet Masters.
This is a trope when you want to make one or all PCs to be something else than what they think they are.
This can be dangerous. If played badly it can change a PC’s core reason of being and totally screw a player’s characterization and possibly ruin the game. Thread carefully.
I beleive that the key to successfully pulling a Tomato in the Mirror reveal is to, once again, give the players to chance to ignore the reveal without major impacts or embrace the plot twist fully!
Another important aspect of this trope is that you must drop subtle hints and sprinkle flashes of the TRUTH so the players start piecing what they are slowly. That’s tricky, but just watch a few hours of Lost or the X-Files and you’ll get the hang of it.
A few examples:
- Your characters are Cylons-equivalent, and get the choice of turning traitor or sticking on the side of the race they were imitating.
- One character is in fact a shapeshifter with amnesia sent in the party as a sleeper agent, however, the trigger to recall it’s mission and lift the amnesia partly failed and now the character gets a highly skilled Jason Bourne character!
- Characters are all Angelic/Fiendish Outsiders sent, memoryless, to the material world in humanoid form to learn the realities of terrestrial life. Later in the campaign, a war between the Celestial and Infernal forces break out and all PCs learn of their true heritage… and get to choose either of the 3 sides.
Finally, here’s one last trope that I used quite successfully once.
Usually a variant on the Tomato In The Mirror, where it turns out that the lead character is in fact the main character on a Reality TV show. Exactly how much of his life is controlled varies: in some cases, every little detail of his life is controlled by the network, while others basically let the main character do whatever he wants, so long as they catch it on camera. It can be a twist ending, or it can be established right at the start of the show.
I pulled a successful version of this trope in my Iron Heroes Campaign.
At one point the players investigated a strange portal found at the bottom of a Sunken Tower and that brought them to a fortress that was sitting right beside a huge force bubble sitting over a ring of mile-high mountains. That was the whole Iron Heroes world… and they had been unwitting prisoners for countless generations.
Their warden were fiends and angels trapped with them, posing as normal people or monsters and such.
I had decided this on a whim mid-campaign and when I revealed that, the face of my dumbstruck players was worth billions!
You should try it… 🙂
Here’s one last example:
All characters are in fact trapped in Hell in a fake Fantasy world. They are led to believe that they are adventurers exploring dungeons and killing monsters for loot. In fact, the adventurers are part of the eternal punishment of the damned souls there that get reincarnated in new monsters every day and placed deeper and deeper in the dungeons.
The reveal comes when the PCs find a secret exit (perhaps aided by a Damned one) that reveals that the whole thing is the Infernal equivalent of a reality TV show and the Dungeon was this huge divinely morphic stage!
Imagine the Asmodeus, the Lord of the Nine Hells, siting in the director’s chair, clapping slowly, an enigmatic grin on his face.
Yeah!
Can you come up with other examples of these 3 tropes? Have you played any of them?
P.S. Anyone think what the recipe would be to make a Truman Mirror Tomato Surprise?
Easy enough- make a character an amnesified sleeper agent for the director. .. or even the director themself.
You could mess with them even more- if you really wanted to get meta, reveal that the PCs are actually a roleplaying group mesmerized into an unexpectedly immersive game for the entertainment of some dream-viewing race…
I’ve been meaning to implement the Truman Show trope for awhile now…it’s been sitting in my mind and found a home in: Entire campaign is really TV show. Throw dice at DM.
But yea…the matrix trick will be nice if I decide to transition from D&D into a d20 modern campaign sometime…what fun that will be…
I’ve done specifically the Truman Show trope.
In my d20 Modern College game, I had a sub-system of hidden allegiances that I was never able to implement very well. I also had a new character to introduce.
So before the game, I told the group that I had to talk to each of them individually about their allegiances. This provided the cover story.
I told each player that they had been replaced by actors playing the part of their character, and gave them specific character traits. I also told them that they all already knew the new character, and should just act like she’s always been there.
…Except, of course, for poor Mike. I gave him an actual mission for his allegiance, as the only one who had not been replaced by an actor.
Mike first sort of just rolled with the idea that there was this new person there that everyone else seemed to know. Then there was a typical plot that they began to investigate. Then he started to notice that everyone else in the party was acting weird.
He eventually did a full-on flip out (Mike was an awesome roleplayer who never took in game stuff personally) and the rest of the story played itself out, and he was able to escape and find his real friends. There was a reason for all of that happening, of course, that may have made some amount of sense… but who cares! I managed to successfully inflict the Truman Show on a player. Mike may never have forgiven me, but I know that everyone had a blast.
One of my favorite adventures I’ve ever run.
Dave T. Games last blog post..“Guitar Hero IV” will feature a Band… of Rock…
Oh, and in that same campaign, I did a Matrix parody where the PCs were told there was another world above this one, and head upstairs in an elevator.
There they are to meet someone who has information for them. The doors open… and there’s a fat guy with glasses in a funny t-shirt who says “Not what you were expecting, right?” And offers them Doritos. He says some cryptic things before sending them away.
It wasn’t really a big element, more of a 15 minute gag.
Man, that game was just TV Tropes the RPG…
Dave T. Games last blog post..“Guitar Hero IV” will feature a Band… of Rock…
‘sgood.
Here’s two other great things to do with Secrets:
1) Let the players come up with them.
I do this A LOT when playing Mutants & Masterminds, mainly because I’m a Lazy GM ™. We ran many unprepared scenarios and I have half an ear listening to the players’ chatter. If one of the says “I reckon the Green Lady is behind this. Who else would want to raid a museum and a nature reserve?” then that becomes the climax. The look of satisfation on the player’s face at the end of the session because HE WORKED IT OUT FIRST is worth it.
2) Use the Great Reveal as a to get players to the game
“But you’ve GOT to make next session. That’s when you find out who killed your father and why that amulet embedded in your chest glows when redheads are around.”
I mean, who could resist?
greywulfs last blog post..Comments on ShouldIStayOrShouldIGo: Yeh. I could always move greywulf.net (and this blog) over to hcoop too…… Later. We’ll see 🙂
@greywulf “Use the Great Reveal as a to get players to the game
“But you’ve GOT to make next session. That’s when you find out who killed your father and why that amulet embedded in your chest glows when redheads are around.””
Is there a TV Trope for that? I mean, running series do this all the time… “Tune in next time where you’ll see these random scenes.”
You know… I was planning a “Prison Dungeon”, involving a Tarterian dragon (from the 3e Draconomicon) where the players were going through a prison to rescue someone… Now I’m tempted to pull one of my party aside and have them rebuild their character as a Changeling (from Eberron) who’s impersonating that character, and they’re actually rescuing one of their own… and have to fight the changeling when it’s done…
P.S. Anyone think what the recipe would be to make a Truman Mirror Tomato Surprise?
Hmm… I’m unsure as to the exact recipe, but I believe it would involve cooking blindfolded.
contructs. Awakened nimblewrights or something like that. One of my PCs is an Elan (psionic race) with no memory of her past life. She only remembers the past 5 years.
Thanks for the comments. I see that a lot of you have tried it in the past or were thinking of doing something similar. That’s cool
@ Dave the Game: You are a walking Tropedia Dave! If I ever write a book or publish my trope posts, I,m picking you to write the preface!
@Greywulf: Excellent tips! The ‘listen and pick the players secret’ is awesome.