Hello! This is Chant, DIE RPG producer & book janitor. One of the perks of working on DIE RPG is that Kieron’s got more good ideas than we can responsibly cram into books. That’s no reason to deprive you of them, so for the next three weeks we’ll be presenting these excellent thoughts on how to create DIE scenarios that are personal, sophisticated, and make you look really clever, from Kieron himself:
When preparing to commission folks for DIE Scenarios, I wrote a big ol’ guide for the writers. Then, when the first set of scenarios came in and I had to give feedback, I realised a bunch of other stuff I missed, so I entirely rewrote it.
And now, with the first volume of DIE Scenarios out in the world and folks on the Discord writing their own adventures, it seemed a good idea to take the guide, make it more presentable to the outside world and likely add some extra jokes to see if I can annoy Grant. (Grant was in Poland when we published this so every single one of those jokes made it through editing – Chant)
It’s also quite long, so we’re going to break it into a few parts. (Told you he had a lot of ideas – Chant)
Let’s start with the top level stuff…
WHAT A DIE SCENARIO DOES
1) Generates a group of real people (Personas) with their own issues and connections.
2) Provides a place for them to have an adventure – and reach a point where they decide whether to go home or not.
The art of a DIE scenario is how the two feed into each other – the world has to be meaningful to the Personas. When we generate Personas it’s not just providing protagonists – they’re generated to provide material for the adventure.
The best DIE adventures give the GM firm guidance on where and how to use the material Persona Gen created.
PREPARATION
This is absolutely a me thing, but; before I do a thing, I deconstruct the pre-existing thing, doing a close reading of what it actually does. If you want to start chewing over DIE, here’s a reading list (from the core DIE RPG rulebook unless otherwise specified) and some pointers for what to pay attention to.
Of course, there’s also the great alternate creative tradition of Winging It. If you follow that, skip all this next bit.
DIE Rituals
This is the backbone of what a DIE game is, and how to run one. Anything in this chapter can be taken as given. These Rituals work and we know they work, and it’s absolutely fine for a scenario to mostly stick to them.
Look at how Do You Remember The First Time (starting on page 336) takes almost all of DIE Rituals, and just adds one quirky rule to twist it. A Scenario describes what is different from DIE Rituals. (Remember these notes were first written for authors writing for the DIE Scenarios series of books, where one of the goals was to show how you can twist DIE in new ways. If you’re running a home game there’s not a thing wrong with sticking to Rituals as written. – Chant)
DIE Rituals is broader than any scenario, but it still follows the structure. It creates a group of Personas who are connected (played RPGs at school together) and provides a place to go (they go to a warped version of their childhood RPG world), ensures it’s meaningful to all the players (it’s their childhood RPG world, generated by asking the players questions about it!), and provides methods to mine Persona Gen for material (the whole of the preparation section).
Con Quest
This is the simplest example of how a DIE scenario can work. It follows the larger structure of DIE Rituals, but swaps in a different specific social group (creators of a comic) and provides a completely different locale to visit (a comic convention – generated by riffing on any convention map). The third key element is that the locale has relevance to the whole group (they’re comic creators, it’s a con).
Total Party Kill
Con Quest is a little bit quirky – the group is very different to a DIE Rituals RPG group. Total Party Kill is closer to the core DIE Rituals game. It narrows the scenario (“The Master hates the players, and wants to kill them”) and then uses Persona Gen to create animosity between the other players and the GM. It has backbone encounters (whose details are either filled in with answers from Persona Gen, or questions in the moment) and smaller encounters for colour between them.
TPK was my first attempt to do something which really plugged things in directly as this, born of Grant asking me if you can do something like a real play-out-the-box classical adventure.
Read Bizarre Love Triangles
As in, the first scenario in DIE Scenarios vol. 1. Bizarre Love Triangles was my attempt to take that same idea of a “traditional” RPG adventure, and really go for it. While it has a theme (the Personas’ messed up love lives), a lot of the encounters are highly keyed to specific Personas, with questions in Persona Gen explicitly linked to specific encounters.
This will likely balloon the word-count. Bizarre Love Triangles is 5000 words versus the usual 3000, but there are definitely lessons you can lift. (And if you’re not writing to a word count and deadline, write as much as you like – Chant)
Social Groups
The core of DIE really is Persona Gen, and while you’ll have seen certain groups in the above scenario, there’s lots more you can do to adapt Persona Gen – including how questions can be phrased.
If you look at the alternate social groups (DIE RPG, page 292) you’ll see a lot of these.
DIE Worlds
If you read the chapter on Building DIE (page 171) you’ll get useful ideas of how one could generate a DIE world for the Personas to explore.
OVERALL
You’ll see that the scenarios have very specific groups leading to very specific worlds. By narrowing who the Personas are you can give very flexible guidelines for how to create a world. The scenarios normally give the Personas a shared experience which means the place they end up is meaningful to all the players. In Con Quest, the Personas all worked on a comic together. In the scenario, they arrive in a horror take on a comic con in a dimension where their comic became a huge deal. That is automatically relevant to all the Personas.
The more you move away from a shared character experience, the more you’ll want to personalise the world in other ways. Note how Total Party Kill continues to ask Persona questions in play, to generate encounters in the dungeon. Using Persona questions (either in the Persona Generation section or later) to personalise an encounter is very useful.
Next time: The structure of a DIE scenario…
And some closing notes from Chant: look, I really can’t stress enough that writing DIE scenarios is easy and fun… but if you don’t want to, or you want to see how some pro authors and game designers have put this advice into practice, we do sell books. You can buy the first volume of DIE Scenarios, Bizarre Love Triangles, now, and pre-order the sequel, Love is a Battlefield, at the same time.
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