Genre Police: Juggernaut

So, we’ve talked for the last couple of articles about dramatic situations and using them to generate ideas and plot, using the work of Georges Polti as the basis for our investigation. 

In this last article in the series, I want to talk about the final situation Polti listed, the unstoppable force.

When something vast and unstoppable crashes into the lives of our protagonists and, by its very nature, is not going to be preventable or resolvable in the same way as any other type of instigating factor, you have an unstoppable force. Things like huge wars, natural disasters, awful misfortune and cataclysm.

This can be a difficult thing to get right with a group of players without it feeling like you are robbing their agency from them and providing just a showcase of horrors. So let’s look at it as a situation and how we can use the idea to bring forth worthwhile hooks and motivation for RPGs.

The Obvious Problem

Now, a lot of RPG games are about threats you can face. Even in something like Call Of Cthulhu, you might not be able to stop the eventual reckoning for the human race but you can stop the plots to end the world tomorrow. You can buy a little more time in the light.

In a lot of disaster style plots, the only real win condition is survival. So using this sort of plot outside of a one-shot game can be quite difficult. This can often be a situational. No one in my Blackout game thought they were going to stop World War II. They were just focusing on surviving one specific air raid. But try telling a group of mid level Dungeons and Dragons players there isn’t much they can do about an exploding volcano. It’s a very different situation. They’re used to winning.

The key here is to present the threat in a way that means they can get small victories. Maybe they save as many people as they can. Maybe the invasion is bloody and horrible but they can fight a retreating action and regroup in order to find a way into the enemy lines later on. Using an unstoppable force in order to generate an ongoing storyline can be a very effective method of creating a new status quo. If it’s pitched as not the end of everything, but instead a shot fired that kicks off new opportunities, then players will take it much easier.

This needs to be discussed with players beforehand. During a session zero, outlining that there is a limit to what can actually be achieved? Should players be able to overcome everything the setting throws at them? It might be an important problem. In one of my 80’s superheroes games, one of my players decided they wanted their super scientist character to work on combating the AIDS crisis. 

That was a difficult choice to manage – I was stuck between robbing a player of hope and agency and reducing the struggles of thousands to a die roll. So we had a discussion out of game as to how to treat the situation with tact and clarity, how we could explore that if more allies and scientist had spoken out earlier, more deaths could have been prevented and focusing on speeding up the development of existing treatments so by the 90’s, the situation looks more like the modern day. 

It turned out to be a deeper experience for all of us, but even in a game with Gods, I felt a need to place that restriction so as not to undersell the real-life impact of such a massive worldwide tragedy.

It was like this when we got here

You can also use the idea of an unstoppable tragedy like this as a backdrop for an entire setting. The  Eberron setting, Eclipse Phase RPG and Classic Cthulhu setting all take place a handful of years after epoch ending war, with societies struggling to find a new status quo in the wake of incredible loss. Most players and NPCs have some background that took place during these conflicts. This can inform NPC creation, when you have can have disenfranchised war veterans, extremist demagogues preaching a return to glory, communities thrown together and struggling. 

Exploring that in your game can be a really rewarding element and can in itself generate conflict, need, or the search for peace that other motivations come from. A perfect example of this is Karli Morganthau, ‘Flag-Smasher’ from the Falcon & The Winter Soldier. Motivated by a need to stop pain, she’s prepared to do anything it takes to shape the world to her vision.

Or if you want, the backdrop can cast a shadow over everything else, become part of the set-dressing of the campaign. Werewolf: The Apocalypse has always been a game about how we are destroying the planet. It’s a more terrifying game these days than it was when it was written, as the apocalypse that was fictional in the game becomes more realistic with each carbon emission. It’s a source of rage for the Player characters, who struggle to hold back their fury at the human race. 

In Mörk Borg, everything is already done. The world is ending, it’s up for you to find meaning in that messy end of things, usually with the blackest sense of humour manageable. 

Wild Cards lives within the shadow of mutagenic plague that created a whole host of superheroes and has changed everything we know about the world to the extent that Fidel Castro is a famous baseball star and several population centres hold things both wondrous and unspeakable rubbing shoulders with the oppressed and fantastic. 

These unstoppable, massive events are here to create a mood, a way in which things are ruined and teetering on the edge of a new narrative. When we design hooks and elements around this type of motivation, it’s to highlight that setting element, draw our focus towards the big problem while telling stories of how people, as a whole, find a way to move past tragedy. People who have survived these disasters may be forever marked but some of them find joy again. Or love. Or hope. Will your characters be those people? Or have they lost too much? Only playing will tell us.

I hope that gives you a new way of looking at disasters and world-shaking events in your campaign worlds and stories. In the next article we are going to move on from motivations and into a new area around how we talk about games with our players.