World of Darkness - SAS - Users Guide.pdf - World of Darkness - RPG

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a

situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

— Leo Tolstoy

White Wolf

Publishing, Inc.

1554 Litton Drive

Stone Mountain,

GA 30083

Written by: Will Hindmarch Layout: Will Hindmarch Original Product Design by: matt milberger SAS created by: White Wolf Game Studio

© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire and World of Darkness are registered trademarks of CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Vampire the

Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Storytelling System and the Storytelling Adventure System are trademarks of CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP, Inc. The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to

the trademark or copyright concerned. This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are ﬁction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.

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Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a mans life, must place

him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the

whole man is visible.

How to Use a

Storytelling Adventure

System Story

“Drama is based on the Mistake.

I think someone is my friend

when he really is my enemy, that I

am free to marry a woman when

in fact she is my mother, that

this person is a chambermaid

when it is a young nobleman in

disguise, that this well-dressed

young man is rich when he is re-

ally a penniless adventurer, or

that if I do this such and such a

result will follow when in fact

it results in something very dif-

ferent. All good drama has two

movements, first the making of

the mistake, then the discovery

that it was a mistake.”

Think of an Storytelling Adventure System (SAS) product as a story

kit, as if you’d bought a piece of modern furniture and brought it home

in a big ﬂat box. Inside, you’ll ﬁnd all the parts you need to build a story

at home, through play. The tools you need to put this story together are

in the World of Darkness Rulebook and its supplements. When you

get your troupe together, you’ll use all these parts to build something

together. It might not look quite the picture on the box, but that’s ﬁne.

Your troupe doesn’t get together to look at a story, it gets together to

build one.

So the SAS story is a nuts-and-bolts thing. The parts in each kit are

designed to make the actual job of being a Storyteller easier, to make

the craft of Storytelling fast and fun for you. The heavy artful majesty

you’ve read about — the transcendent game experiences that shock and

satisfy as well as any novel — those come simply from doing a great

job. Everything in an SAS adventure is intended to take up the slack so

you can focus on doing that great job.

The basic parts that make up most SAS stories are simple: Storyteller

characters and scenes. Each of them can be used in different ways to

keep the story building towards its climactic end.

— W.H. Aulden

Characters

The Storyteller characters presented for most SAS stories use the same

format and rules as those in the World of Darkness Rulebook , with a

few elaborations and expansions. The archetypal characters you ﬁnd in

the main rulebook are intended to be used again and again, whenever

you need someone like them in your story. The characters in an SAS

product contain special advice and notes to help you use them in this

speciﬁc story. You’ll ﬁnd sample descriptions, monologues, tactics and

goals for the most important Storyteller characters in the story. Draw

from them during play as needed.

How to Use a

Drama is based on the Mistake. I

think someone is my friend when

he really is my enemy, that I am

free to marry a woman when in

fact she is my mother, that this

person is a chambermaid when it

is a young nobleman in disguise,

that this well-dressed young man

is rich when he is really a pen-

niless adventurer, or that if I do

this such and such a result will

follow when in fact it results

in something very different. All

good drama has two movements,

first the making of the mistake,

then the discovery that it was a

mistake.

Scenes

The scenes that make up the story follow a format you won’t ﬁnd in

the main rulebook. Each scene is built as a discrete game encounter

(or a collection of game encounters) for the players to play through. As

the players take their characters through these scenes, a story naturally

unfolds.

The scenes in most SAS prodycts are a mix of two types:

Encounters are scenes that occur when the characters initiate them

— they encounter the murderous vampire when they enter the aban-

doned church, for example.

Events are scenes that occur when criteria speciﬁc to the story’s

timeline or dramatic arc are met — which is a dry way of saying

“whenever the scene says it happens.” One event, for example, hap-

pens when the characters successfully notice they’re being watched,

the next happens when the story reaches midnight in the World of

Darkness, and another happens whenever you think the story needs a

quick dose of violence.

Pacing and plotting scenes, whether in advance or on the ﬂy, is part

of the fun of being a Storyteller — for some people. If it’s fun for you,

take these scenes apart and use them however you like, maybe even

importing scenes from other stories or creating new scenes for yourself.

If that sounds like a hassle, and you’d rather focus in on the visceral,

in-the-moment details of Storytelling, you’ll ﬁnd and example of the

scenes already plotted for you in each story’s “Treatment” section.

Reading The Story

There is no story. Not yet. What you have in an SAS product is a collection

of situations and settings that describe the general plot a story could follow,

but the story doesn’t really exist until you and your players tell it.

While you’re reading the product, you’ll infer a story — or several

stories — from the scenes and characters within. That story you read

is just one possible story, which can serve as a guide for you to follow

when you get together with your troupe to play. The story you all tell

together around the game table is another story, with no obligation to

imitate the story you imagined when you read the guide or the story we

imagined when we wrote it.

Though most SAS products are broken down into acts, which have

an important and intuitive order to them, the scenes within do not have

to occur in exactly the order you read them. This is another way that

the story you read here may be different from the story you tell around

the table. The acts occur in order almost naturally, from the beginning

through the middle to the end, but the order and the outcome of each

scene depends on the choices your players make.

Watch out for the assumptions you make when reading an SAS product.

Each of those assumptions is one way your players might interpret the

story, too. But don’t hold the players to any preconceptions you make

about the story they’ll play.

Remember that each SAS product is a blueprint, and blueprints aren’t

subtle. Although you should imply, hint and allude when you tell your

story, it’s not in your best interest for us to be coy when talking about

the story. You get an insider’s look at what the story is. Blueprints should

be clear.

Don’t be put off by the functional voice of this guide. Don’t let it spoil

the mood. This is a behind-the-scenes look at the stories you’re going

to get to enjoy for real later on, when you play. Be sure not to let this

tone seep into your story when you tell it. You’ll ﬁnd plenty of ways to

maintain the mood in every scene. Use them.

What’s A Treatment?

treatment: n. In Hollywood parlance, a treatment

is a short prose description of a movie’s story, written

before production begins. A treatment describes all the

major dramatic “beats” of the story and sometimes

includes directorial or developmental information, too

(i.e., it doesn’t necessarily restrict itself to relating the

story).

In Storytelling terms, the treatment is the Storyteller’s

core overview of the story, from authorial notes on

subtext all the way to frank narrative tips. Nothing is

implied in a Storytelling treatment; this is where the

author breaks it all down in brief for the Storyteller

at home.

Reflecting on these complex rela-

tionships between reader and story,

fiction and life, can constitute a form

of therapy against the sleep of rea-

son, which generates monsters.

Reflecting on these complex relationships

between reader and story, fiction and life, can

constitute a form of therapy against the sleep

of reason, which generates monsters.

— Umberto Eco

Telling The Story

Stories are about characters making important decisions. Games are

about players making important decisions. Storytelling games are about

both.

If you want your story to be truly meaningful when you and your

troupe tell it, the players must be given a chance to make meaning-

ful decisions. Making a blind choice between two unmarked doors

isn’t interesting. It’s not fun, and it’s certainly not dramatic. Clarity

is vital to good gameplay. Players need information for a decision

to be important. Knowing that the reek of rot coming from behind

one of those unmarked doors might be from the corpse of your dead

brother makes the decision more interesting.

Deciding how to confront an enemy or accomplish a goal is fun,

because something clearly meaningful is at stake. It might be justice,

money, a family’s safety or a friend’s honor — it might be anything.

When the consequences of the players’ decisions are known, at least

to some degree, choices become more interesting, more dramatic.

If the antagonist isn’t dissuaded (or caught, or killed, or whatever),

then that family is still in danger, or the money is lost, or a friend

goes unavenged. Something is at stake.

A World of Darkness story isn’t just about making choices, though. It’s

about making difﬁcult choices and living with the consequences.

So what is a difﬁcult decision? In short, a dilemma: A choice be-

tween two equally unwelcome outcomes. You only have time to save

one of your brothers, who do you choose? Would you kill someone

yourself to prevent your child from becoming a murderer? Would

you risk jail to stop a supernatural force that you’re not absolutely

sure is real?

Tough choices can be put before players or their characters. It may

not matter much to the player whether or not an imaginary grandmother

gets hit by a bus, but it should matter a great deal to her character. (If

you do a good job of bringing the character of that grandmother to life,

though, it’ll matter to both the player and her character.)

For example, a character can be confronted with the choice between

stealing or going hungry. This decision might not be too difﬁcult for a

starving character, but at the same time the player can be confronted

with the choice of risking some damage to the character in exchange

for fulﬁlling his Virtue of Fortitude. A player might not be interested

solely in thinking like her character, after all, but also to contributing

to the themes of the story. In this case, for example, she might choose

to have her character steal just to play up the theme of desperation

being evoked at the table that night.

It is absolutely fair game to use game mechanics to make tough choices

real for the player. This is built into the Morality mechanism. A player may

have no problem with imaginary arson, for example, without the risk of

a substantial personal consequence, like a derangement. (Not to mention

police action.) One of the easiest ways to do this is with bonus or penalty

dice to actions that follow as the consequences of a tough choice later on.

Think about it: this is the kind of tough choice a player is making when

she’s deciding what items her character brings with him. The motorist,

stranded on the side of the road in a freakish rain, can only carry so many

items on the hike back to civilization; does she choose the riﬂe (and its

Damage dice) or the ﬂashlight (and its equipment bonus)?

Not every challenge should necessarily be reduced to an either/or di-

lemma, of course. Deadlines, for example, automatically create situations

in which decisions become important because every choice uses up the

precious resource of time, but the actions a character can take between

the start of the countdown and the end aren’t limited to binary choices.

Any limited resource can be used to lend weight to any situation, to make

any choice into a tough choice. The police will be here in two minutes,

what do you do with the body? You can only go four or ﬁve more miles

before the car runs out of gas, where do you go? There are ten bullets and

twelve zombies in the house, how do you survive the night?

While you’re telling this story with your troupe, remember the Story-

teller’s mantra:

Difﬁcult choices make drama.

Strive to confront the players with at least one meaningful decision to

make every thirty minutes.

The Cardinal Sins of Storytelling

1. Boredom

2. Confusion

1. Boredom Is Poison. If players are bored, the story will die. If the

story dies, the chronicle is likely to wither and perish, too. “But it’s es-

sential for the slow build!” or “But it makes the pacing more dramatic!”

are not excuses for boredom. Don’t kill the story for the sake of pretend-

ing to legitimize it — that’s crazy. Remembering, if it’s boring, it’s not

suspense. You know how you can tell? Suspense isn’t boring.

Raymond Chandler said, “When in doubt, have two men come through

the door with guns in their hands.” If it was good enough for Chandler,

it’s good enough for us, too.

2. Confusion Kills Fun. Being mystiﬁed isn’t the same as being

confused. A puzzle or a riddle can be fun because you’re not sure how

to solve it, but that’s not the same as being confused about just what the

hell to do with it.

You know what to do with a puzzle: you put it together. You know

what to do with a riddle: you look it up in a book and then tell people

you ﬁgured it out on your own. Or whatever. The point is, once you’re

no longer sure what you’re supposed to be doing, your fun begins to

erode.

Clarity in every scene is important, whether that clarity comes from

the big picture (“We have to get out of this room before midnight so we

can save Daphne!”) or the little picture (“We have to break down this

door so we can get out of this room!”).

Raymond Chandler’s gunmen trick is also a viable trick to avoid

momentary confusion in a Storytelling game: when two guys with guns

bust into the room to kill the PCs, confusion is dispelled. The players

now know, “We have to stop these guys so we can live!”

Cheap Tricks: We’re not above cheap tricks and neither are you, the

Storyteller. Just because you think a cheap physical conﬂict is weak

plotting doesn’t mean it isn’t fair play in the game. Players come to

be entertained in the hours they sit at the table. They shouldn’t have to

wait around for the end of the second act to get a dose of excitement

just because you resent Hollywood action tropes.

If you, the Storyteller, are out there in a bind, facing a lethal dose of

boredom, get the story back in motion if you have to use duct tape and

a mallet to get the drama back into shape.

Developer Notes on the SAS

“Storytelling is a skill, which means you can get better at it.”

by Will Hindmarch, Storytelling Adventure System Co-Developer and

Vampire: The Requiem Developer

About ﬂexibility and adaptability...

Flexibility and adaptability, without sacriﬁcing quality color text and

mechanical systems worthy of quoting and reappropriating in your

own home stories, is what our scene-based structure is all about. The

regular, but versatile, format of the scenes is meant to make it as easy

as possible for you to jettison one part of a story without a bunch of

other stuff unraveling. Even better, you can add in other scenes from

other stories to easily dial-up the amount of investigation or action (or

whatever else) in your stories.

It’s what we’re essentially all doing when we adapt published ad-

ventures for our own games anyway, right? We’re trying to scratch out

the stuff we don’t want and squeeze in our own stuff, whether we do it

before play or in the thick of the game. I’m just trying to create some

common language for how we do it. We want to systematize it so the

process is easier to talk about and easier to share.

This ties into the community building idea. Community building is

another one of the big goals of these new adventures, and one of my

particular missions. This common language makes it that much easier

to talk about how you ran an adventure, or how you’re thinking about

running it.

To use an example from Chicago Workings , you might move the

foot-chase scene elsewhere, or basically run it twice if the characters

have multiple encounters with the, uh, perpetrators in that scene. (I say,

trying to avoid spoilers.) I might cut that scene out entirely.

We could compare notes, share advice and appreciate each other’s

“this is how my story turned out” anecdotes by comparing the ﬂow of

scenes (and substituting scene names for the shorthands here):

“When I ran Parlor Games, it ended up going…

Musings on the SAS

When we released the ﬁrst SAS products — Chicago Workings,

Parlor Games and The Resurrectionists — we immediately sought

out feedback and questions from fans and customers. And, of course, the

fastest way to do that was to tour some internet forums. In the course of

that electronic tour, and answering questions, we put some of the ideas

behind the SAS into frank, conversational writing that we thought was

worth sharing with you here.

What follows are some of the musings we shared online, and just a

couple of the questions we answered from fans and customers. We’d

like to thank everyone who took the time to gab with us online, and

everyone who asked us the really provocative questions.

Enjoy.

Scenes A > B > E > F > C

…then I tossed in scene G from this other adventure, and ended with

a climactic scene of my own design.”

“What scene is that?” I ask.

World of Darkness - SAS - Users Guide.pdf

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