A Peek Behind the Curtain, Part 2

(This is the second in a series looking at some of the setup that goes into RP events.  The first part is here.  Enjoy!)

Last time, I talked in a general way about how we set up the kickoff night for our Naiara-napping event.  But when you pick it apart, a lot of the plot setup had taken place months — and even years — beforehand.  So rather than jumping forward in the planning, I thought we could first take a step back.

In order to have a successful event, you need the player characters to be emotionally invested in the plot.  There can (and probably should) be several different levels of involvement here — does what’s at stake directly affect the PCs?  Does it affect their friends/families?  Maybe it gives someone who’s been on the outskirts of the group a chance to prove their usefulness or loyalty.  As you plan out your event, those are important things to keep in mind, since they’ll become your hooks. But hooks need a line to connect to, something (if you’ll pardon me the butchery of what was probably a perfectly good fishing metaphor before I got my hands on it), for the GMs to cast them out on, and to tug on when the story gets moving.

Where do those lines come from?  Plenty of places.  (“Gee, thanks, falconesse!”)  I’m going to look at two — backstory and NPCs — but feel free to add more in the comments!

Backstory: fodder for the future.

Part the First: Your character’s backstory

Whether your character is newly rolled or has been around since launch, chances are you’ve thought about some of the significant events in his or her past.  Take a look at those stories.  Did you leave some loose ends you might like to tie up?  If you didn’t, is it possible that the character thinks everything’s been said and done, but you as a player can see new opportunities?

Let’s say that when he was a younger man, the character got revenge on the person who had swindled his parents out of their fortune.  He killed the con artist and recouped the money, end of story, right?

Not necessarily!

What if word got out that the character’s parents are still a wee bit gullible?  Maybe a new con artist rolls into town, gets wind of the old scandal, and decides to try her hand at siphoning off the parents’ wealth.

Or maybe the dead con artist had a lover or a sibling or a child who wants revenge and has been biding his/her time to confront the person who killed their loved one.  Now they’re ready.  Remember the end of the fight scene between The Bride and Vernita Green in Kill Bill, vol. I (“When you grow up, if you still feel… raw about it.  I’ll be waitin’”)?  Maybe your character’s been anticipating the confrontation, maybe he hasn’t.*

This might depend on the kind of story you want to run.  If you want a straight-up, ass-kicking adventure, your character might know right away who it is and start sharpening his knives.  But if you want to add a mystery element to the plot and have something for other players to investigate, perhaps the vengeance-seeker sends some threatening letters first, and the players have to figure out who, precisely, is after their friend.

But what if there isn’t much of anything from your character’s pre-WoW past you’d like to delve into?  Here’s something kind of neat to consider:  all those stories you’ve been participating in since you started RPing are also now part of your character’s backstory.  Was there something from a past in-game plotline you didn’t get to resolve?  Did you have to cut out a subplot, but you’ve always had it gnawing at the back of your skull?  Did one of the villains get away?

Old stories beget new.  Just as everything that’s happened to your characters so far informs their decisions and reactions to new situations, everything that’s come before is also an opportunity for a new story somewhere down the line.

So, all right, you’ve got your character’s emotional investment in the plot sorted.  But, well, you guys know my mantra by now: 

RP doesn’t happen to you; it happens with you.

How, then, do you reel others in so the story isn’t just a single-character adventure?  Sometimes it’s going to be as simple as “My character’s friends will help her out in a heartbeat, because that’s just what friends do.”   And that’s totally fine!  However, if you’d like to give them their own subplots, you need to consider…

Part the Second: Participants’ backstories

Sometimes this is still going to be easy, hookwise.  Say you have a player whose character owns a shop in Stormwind.  If your character’s investigating a series of break-ins at businesses near hers, she will most likely have an interest in helping you find the source of the burglaries.  However, remember that your NPC thieves can only break into her shop if her player gives you the go-ahead on it.  Maybe she’d prefer her shop to remain unaffected, or have an attempted burglary thwarted, rather than come home to a trashed and gutted store.

This is where communication is, as always, key.  While you might know everything there is to know about your fellow players’ backstories, you will need to check in with them and get permission to use those elements in your plot.

This also illustrates the collaborative nature of storytelling in an MMO.  Participants might have an NPC they’d like to offer up, or a subplot of their own that might fit in with yours.  Ask first, see where they’d like that part of the story to go, and if they hand over the reins, make sure you ask now and then if it’s working out for them.  If they run with a related story of their own, make sure you’re keeping one another abreast of important developments in both stories.

NPCs:  your supporting cast

All right, so you have the basics of your plot laid out, and know how to hook in your players.  Now, you might find yourself in need of a few more GM characters to make the story work.  NPCs don’t just have to be your villains; they can move the plot along in other ways, as well.  Some of them will have vital information the players need to make their next move.  Others will be your proxy in leading the players to certain realizations (about themselves, about your character, about the villain, etc.)

So who are they?  Make a list of your NPCs — their names, descriptions, the role they’ll play in the story, and any other important information that springs up around/because of them.  Make sure you have it to hand when you need to refer to it during RP.  And always, of course, expect your players to ask at least one question you weren’t prepared for.  Write down your answer to that, too — just because you planned on the NPC serving Purpose A doesn’t mean your players won’t also drag Purpose B out of him.

For example, you create an NPC whose sole reason for existing is to stagger into a character’s arms, a blackmail note for that PC pinned to his back.  With a dagger.  If you planned for the note to be the dramatic introduction to a blackmail story (the note being the important element, not the dead guy), count on your players to also want to know who the dead guy is, who stabbed him, why they stabbed him, and how he was connected to your character.  Maybe he was just someone unfortunate enough to cross the villain’s path that afternoon.  But maybe, as they players decide to go search the dead guy’s apartment for clues, you see the opportunity to sprinkle in a few more clues.  Go for it!  But make sure you remember what you reveal.

Pulling it all together

You’ve got your backstory, your NPCs, your plot threads and your hooks.  Now what do you do with them?  At this point, you’re mostly ready to dive right into the plot.  But what if you take it a little slower?  What if, for a week or two, or over the course of a month (or longer, if you’d like), you sow some seeds?

Have your character allude to some of the odd goings-on. In the string of burglaries example, you could have your character reading an article about one of them in a newspaper and commenting on it.  A day or two later, she might talk about a friend of hers who owns the shop next to the first, and finds out that shop was also broken into.

Start small, throwing the hints out there so they’re on people’s minds when the plot kicks off.

Write up some prologue/introductory fics for your guild or realm forums. Write a newspaper article.  Explore the day in the life of an NPC.  Write a story about your character interacting with an NPC, or a story explaining some of the events leading up to the in-game plot.

Have your character mention the NPCs you’ll be using. It might just be a drunken tale about his best buddy in the army, or it could be a chilling ghost story about a nightmare about to come true.  Again, put the name in players’ minds so they have an idea of who they’re dealing with.  They don’t have to know everything, but something like this can help set the mood for when the NPC is introduced in-game.

If you or someone else is playing the NPC, have them come out to RP. This won’t work for all NPCs, obviously.  If the villain is already kill-on-sight for your character, chances are they’re not going to swing by the Legerdemain Lounge for a drink and a hand of gin rummy with your character’s friends…  though, he might.  Likewise, if seeking out the character’s reclusive mentor is part of the plot, you probably want the first time he’s seen in-game be the night the players find his hut in the middle of Stranglethorn.

However, if it’s someone your players will need to trust eventually, bring ‘em around for a while.  If it’s someone they’re going to distrust, that can be just as fun.  “Wait, Jack’s the one who’s been blackmailing you?  But… I bought him a drink last week!  He seemed like such a nice guy…”

Example time!

How did we incorporate some of these things into the current storyline?  I’m glad you asked!

Maggie Maunt, our villainess, was an NPC from one of the very early Bricu and Threnn stories.  Her son, Thomas, was the ultimate villain of that particular plotline, but his mother certainly did her share of messing with Riders and friends.  She had, as far as anyone knew, been killed by a very angry Ilanna Stormrunner, but… she was also very involved in the Cult of the Damned.  It wasn’t too hard to imagine someone like Magdalena Maunt making plans to come back, even from death.

So, while the body in the Maunt family crypt is Maggie’s, her soul was already finding itself a new home.  She inhabited a younger woman’s body, and got herself a job as Threnn’s mother’s shopgirl.  No one was the wiser for nearly two years.

On occasion, Maggie would come by the Pig to deliver a message from Thenia to Threnn or Annalea.  Bricu, Threnn and Anna mentioned her often when the shop came up in conversation.  Whenever Bricu or I would write scenes that took place in the al’Cair fabric shop, Maggie was there.  While she was always, on the surface, just an NPC related to the al’Cair family, for almost two years Bricu, Yva and myself knew that the shopgirl was far, far more dangerous, and merely biding her time.

Part of the hook for the Naiara-napping was the disappearance of two other NPCs, Thenia al’Cair (Threnn’s mother) and Naiara Bittertongue (Threnn and Bricu’s daughter.)  Both have been well-established in-game and in fics, giving the players who’ve been in their company — or at least in Naiara’s, since Thenia isn’t always the Riders’ favorite person — reason to give chase.

This was also one of those hooks that comes with the “Of course they’ll help; they’re our friends” clause, but since we knew Maggie was getting away at the end of the night, we needed to have another round of hooks ready to go.  Enter phase two.

Now that Maggie’s on the run, Yva’s written a series of hauntings for the players, sent by Maggie to warn them off.  Not only has she tailored them to the players’ fears and personalities if she knew them, in some cases she’s tied them into what she knows of the characters’ pasts.  She’s sent the players drafts for approval.  Once they’re posted, the hauntings are the players’ to control.  The degree of participation and enthusiasm has been amazing.

We still have a few more tricks up our sleeves before endgame, and I’m betting this series will go beyond the three parts I’d originally intended.  I hope you’ll bear with me while I try putting thoughts in some sort of cohesive form.  In the meantime, tell me about some other types of hooks and lines you’ve used to draw in players’ interests!

*This very nearly led me off on another tangent, which is, in a nutshell, Villains Are People, Too.  But I have a feeling that’ll be long enough to be its very own post.

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