Scenarios & Campaigns

At this point, you’ve talked to your group about the overall shape of the campaign and what their PC team will look like. You’ve also got some ideas of your own together. The internet holds endless advice on how to plan RPG campaigns and design scenarios. If you’re new to gamemastering, search around, then come back here. This section will focus primarily on how to design campaigns and scenarios for Eclipse Phase.

How Many Sessions?

Planning campaign length in advance lets players know up front how much time they’re committing to, making it more likely you’ll finish the campaign. It makes planning your campaign easier because you get a time budget during which you have to hit all the points in your story. You can plan how many story arcs will make up the campaign, how many scenarios make up each arc, and roughly how many sessions each scenario should take.

In a four-hour play session, most groups can get through two to four encounters, depending on how many of them contain combat. In an Eclipse Phase game, encounters tend to be punctuated by a lot of planning and mesh use. A complicated break-in or a big fight might mean you only get two encounters in a given session. On the other hand, a session that is mostly investigative legwork might cover a large number of short encounters before the team amasses enough intel for a big scene.

Investigative games can meander — another reason for committing to a fixed length. Eclipse Phase doesn’t have to focus on the investigative aspects of the game, but when it does, timeboxing is key. Players can always Insight their way through a tricky investigation, but sometimes they need time pressure to be willing to spend pool to get clues.

With a fixed number of sessions in mind, you can also time the off-camera movements of NPCs more easily. It’s very easy for a PC team and a group of antagonists to keep tabs on each other with the technology in the setting. The opposition can and should make moves that the players don’t see the consequences of until later. But they also probably have a plan they’re trying to execute, and having a timeline for this will help you create strong story arcs.

Story Arcs

Using story arcs as containers within the über-plot of your campaign is common practice for a lot of reasons. Arcs are milestones. Completing them gives your players some reinforcement, a moment to celebrate. For player characters, they provide a natural place for downtime activities (training, fabricating and repairing gear, maintaining social networks). For the GM, the breaks between story arcs are a chance to advance events in the world, do time and place jumps, or bring in new characters. Boring events like acclimating to a new morph or long space travel can also happen off camera, between story arcs.

If you’re designing a campaign where forks of PCs will be active on their own for long periods, story arcs are a useful delimiter for the time spent apart by the forks. One group of forks gets a story arc, then another group of forks, covering the same period of time. Decide with the group beforehand whether the outcomes of each separate arc can be changed at all by the other group of forks (via retconning or other means).

The novelist Graham Joyce taught story structure as a sequence of rising and falling arcs of tension. In this way of visualizing the flow of a story, a story arc might be thought of as more like a story wave. Let’s consider three shapes of story arc, and how they can play out in an Eclipse Phase campaign. Assume you’re planning this story arc to take up six sessions of play (a month and a half, if your group plays every week).

Basic Story Arc

In the most basic story arc, the facts of the scenario are set up before a conflict is introduced. Pressure mounts to deal with the conflict, crescendoing to a high point of tension midway through. Once the chief conflict is resolved, the tension de-escalates, and the aftermath plays out. In the basic arc, the first two sessions reveal the full scope of what the player characters are up against. Some shit should probably hit the fan right at the end of session 2. Sessions 3, 4, and possibly 5 should feature the action and climactic consequences of the main plot resolving. Session 6 then ties up loose ends from the arc. In a common variation, the arcs of tension are like a suspension bridge, with a crescendo of action toward the beginning of the arc followed by a second, more decisive one near the end. This type of arc is extremely common in stories across all media. The Hobbit (the novel, not the movie) is a good example of a story that follows a basic arc.

Eclipse Phase messes with how this type of arc normally plays out. Had a climactic battle with the villain, did you? “This is great,” thinks the player, “we just kicked their ass.” The villain, of course, has resleeved and is already plotting revenge — they are not removed from the equation yet. Also consider character death; in most story arcs of this kind, the danger to the characters is worst as the conflict with the antagonists climaxes. But in Eclipse Phase, you’re free to hand out a TPK (total party kill) in the second session, then have the team resleeve and pick up the trail not much worse for wear in session 3. Suicide missions have a different meaning in this game.

Hot-Opening Story Arc

In a hot-opening story arc, an in media res beginning often places the team in jeopardy from the very start. The first scenario might literally start with rolling initiative, or it might be more like, “You’ve detected an anomalous radar blip. It’s closing fast. You have 30 seconds. What do you do?” In arcs like this, tension de-escalates as the protagonists manage to catch a breather during the middle of the story. The first three sessions of an arc like this should go fast and furious. Things pick up again in the final two sessions as the player characters, rested and rejuvenated, re-engage with the threat. A good example of a hot-opening story is the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.

This kind of arc is useful in horror-oriented Eclipse Phase games because it gives the GM so much control over the situation at the start of the arc. If the plot calls for it, the team can start off: in the mesh in an isolated location, in new morphs, under attack in space, or in other precarious situations. Care has to be taken not to make players feel railroaded, but if done right, hot openings are a great way to get characters into a survival horror situation without the players spending a ton of time agonizing over what gear to print before they leave.

Hot openings also work against another tendency of cautious players: the “scan everything” syndrome. Some players, once they realize any piece of electronics could be infected with the exsurgent virus, spend a lot of table time describing elaborate precautions. This is great in a tense, disarm-the-bomb type scene, but it can make play drag at other times. Partly this can be solved by making it clear to players when they need to describe their precautions and when it’s not necessary. Alternatively, a slavering exsurgent beating down the lab door, an out-of-control fire in the corridor outside, or a reactor meltdown can all encourage players to speed things up and not scan every door lock they encounter for infection.

Slow Burn

In a slow burn, dread and creepiness build gradually through the first three or four sessions. Disturbing evidence, subtle threats, and transformations that the team can slow but not entirely stop escalate toward explosive action that quickly resolves the story. In this type of arc, the initial sessions are all investigation and minor threats, until the final two sessions, when the threat is revealed and must be directly faced. A good example of a slow burn story arc is the first season of Stranger Things.

Unfortunately, the plot line of Stranger Things relies on 1980s technology to limit how quickly the characters can get information and make connections. The slow build of dread and unsettling clues in this type of story wouldn’t survive a few characters with smart phones, let alone the technology in Eclipse Phase. In a slow burn arc, the threats and the trails of evidence they leave need to be unconventional and obfuscated. A person who commits a crime in this setting without covering their tracks well can be identified and located quickly.

In the early sessions of a slow burn arc, the evidence encountered by a team needs to be difficult to put together into a clear picture of a threat. Async powers are useful to antagonist NPCs in a slow burn arc, since most psi sleights leave no physical evidence, and therefore their use must be inferred based on circumstances. Novel threats — things there’s no detector for yet — can also fly under the radar of the team’s technology. Some clues might require a multi-session research effort. And clues that fit a motif can gradually reveal their meaning through repetition (e.g., the initially meaningless wall scrawl that turns out to mark an exsurgent clan’s nests).

Creating Scenarios

Scenarios are the building blocks of story arcs. If you’re designing a scenario as part of a campaign, you’ll want to make sure it’s doing the work it should toward advancing the whole. How many sessions will it take out of your total run, and what point of plot should get answered or resolved?

Try listing the scenarios that will make up your campaign, subdividing by story arc. Make your best guess at how many sessions each scenario will take (one four-hour session for every two to four encounters is normal). Looking at them together, think about how much payoff each one contains for the players. A scenario that takes a lot of sessions but only resolves a minor plot point should be revised; either make it shorter or make it do more work. By doing this time comparison among the “chapters” of your campaign, you’ll know ahead of time how you want to pace your sessions before you’re in the thick of running the game.

At some point, your players are going to do something that requires you to redesign a scenario you had planned. The technology in this setting provides lots of unexpected ways for this to happen. Perhaps they’ll even do something that makes ripples across multiple story arcs. Don’t freak out. Rewrite what you need to, but also take another look at your time budget. If player actions made one story arc take longer than expected, you might consider cutting things you had planned later in the campaign. Or you can just kill the entire team and make their backups forget about how they borked your plot … but don’t expect your players to let you get away with that very often.

For a wide selection of scenario seeds, see Plot Hooks, the booklet accompanying the Eclipse Phase Second Edition Gamemaster Screen.

Character Tie-ins

While your campaign idea about tracking an exsurgent-infected smuggler’s forks across the Martian hinterlands might be quite cool, you should always be on the lookout for ways to link your scenarios to the PCs themselves. Every PC has a set of motivations (and possibly distinct motivational goals). Keep a list of these on hand and consider NPCs or events you can insert into your plot that will give the players opportunities to pursue or even resolve their motivational goals. Likewise, don't forget to include the occasional roadblock or obstacle towards these ends, to keep them on their toes. Unless you are constructing an entire scenario around this subject, however, be careful to not let motivational pursuits derail the central plot.

There are many other PC aspects you can use to personalize a scenario: backgrounds, traits (Allies, Contact, Enemy, and Patron specifically), faction affiliations, async infection sub-strains, rep favors, and so on. If a player has gone through the effort of writing a detailed character background, mine that for ideas and use them! Also take note of interactions with NPCs and the downtime actions the players pursue. Is someone they deceived in the past holding a personal grudge? Is there an ego hunter on their trail for crimes they thought went unnoticed? Does one of their rep network buddies approach them for a favor at odds with their current mission? Your players will appreciate the personal touch and it will inspire them to engage more with the world you have established.

Easing In

The Eclipse Phase setting is quite detailed — don’t rush into it. There are a few strategies you can use to control the information firehose pointed at your players.

If the campaign allows it, you can start in an isolated locale, away from the full panoply of technologies and peoples inhabiting the setting. This could be a small habitat on the fringe, an exoplanet, or a remote and isolated part of the Martian wilds. By limiting the utility of the mesh, at least at first, you can hold off on explaining rep networks and hacking until they become relevant. Try to stage the scenario so that you can introduce a new part of the setting/rules each session.

Another option here is to start the PCs as newly reinstantiated. Perhaps they died during the Fall and are the latest batch of infugees to be revived from cold storage. Their hosts or muses can then walk them through how things have changed, acclimating them to their new environments.

You can also design low-stakes tasks that give players a chance to practice with subsystems they haven’t used before. For example, have the hacker repair a virus-ridden bot before they intrude into a major hypercorp system. Give the async an opportunity to use their sleights in low-pressure situations before they do so in a combat. Prompt your players on appropriate times to use pool points. Some GMs prefer to avoid resleeving early on so that players don’t need to learn the capabilities of a new body — don’t wait too long, though; resleeving is one of the things that makes this game cool!