Part IV. Finding the Essence (Settings, Sessions & Story Arcs)

When adapting something that’s larger – an entire world, a television series, a lengthy story arc, a series of novels, etc. – it’s important to distill it down to what makes it great. Because plenty of ancillary details will have to change. It’s the nature of the non-RPG to RPG transition. So you’re looking for the spirit of the material. Once you’ve found that, the rest falls into place much more easily.

Adapting Setting in RPGs

So we determine our essence first: what separates this setting from any other? Once we know that, you can start to figure out how those unique qualities interact with your RPG system’s mechanics. Is the setting low on resources? Or is it alive with so many manufactured stimuli that visitors are overwhelmed (think Times Square)? Does it feel like you’re constantly being watched?

Respectively with those three, what resources exist in your RPG system that you can make scarce? What would the Times Square of your system look like? Could it literally be Times Square, or would you have to adapt it to fantasy, sci-fi, or something else? If the players are being watched, do you create that through literal surveillance? Is it magical or technological? Or through a police force? Or do you simply create the feeling of being watched through exposition? If so, what environmental elements need to be in place to create that ambiance? Are there madness mechanics that could heighten the paranoia? If so, how do you introduce those mechanics in a natural way?

There may be other ways of thinking about this, but that’s the Socratic process by which you can believably convert a setting into an RPG system.

Adapting Sessions in RPGs

I feel like this is television’s moment to shine, because the episodic nature of TV makes it wonderful for adapting into one-shots, or standalone adventures in an ongoing campaign. Adapting entire arcs is trickier, but a single story can be easier, because a lot of the work is already done. You probably don’t even need to find the essence because what makes that story interesting should be obvious if you want to adapt it.

My favorite inspirations for this are Doctor Who and Star Trek, because they largely feature “monster of the week” challenges with interesting premises, twists and situations, and occasional moral conundrums, which is (almost) everything you want in a session. Many other great TV shows also follow this format.

So this becomes more about mutation. Think of it like a photo filter. If you took an episode of Doctor Who and put a “D&D filter” over it, what would it look like (this is exactly what we’ll do in the case study below)? Or American Horror Story with a “Call of Cthulu filter” over it. Chances are, your players won’t even recognize the translation unless you make it explicit. It doesn’t take much for something to become unrecognizable, so don’t make it harder on yourself than you need to in order to adapt a session.

The lone fear here is that you try to railroad the session into the clever ending that the show (or other media) has. So my only other advice is to script more heavily at the beginning, setting the characters and events in motion. Pull back on scripted materials as the session progresses to allow for more freedom of choice.

Case Study: Doctor Who: End of the World

This was a full episode lift I added into a campaign. In brief, this episode features the Doctor and his companion in the far future, watching the destruction of Earth from the safe confines of a (shielded) space station. The other occupants of the station are wealthy businesspeople from across the cosmos. The antagonist sabotages the station’s shielding while having a quick way for her to escape (teleportation). She had previously invested in each of the other guests’ competitors, so after their deaths, their companies’ stocks will plummet, their competitors’ stock will rise, and she’ll become rich.

In my campaign, I changed very little. The space station inhabitants became nobles of a large city attending a party at a mansion, and the villain, who was the mansion’s owner, trapped them all in the house, which she had rigged to collapse on itself, burying and killing them. She planned to teleport out after sharing her evil plan, and had similarly set herself up to become rich after the incident. The only addition was an encounter (battle) at the end. Right down to a few personalities at the party, I kept a lot of things intact, and my players had no idea they were in an episode of Doctor Who (including a couple DW mega-fans).

Adapting Campaigns & Arcs in RPGs

A useful exercise here – with larger materials – is to first describe the campaign or arc in a setting-neutral way. If you had to do a writeup of your favorite novel in a way that could be inserted into nearly any RPG system, could you do it? The second part of the exercise is to imagine the players’ role in this story. How will you insert a group into the campaign in a way that feels natural? Everything else will flow from that, and if you try to get too granular in the early stages, you’ll inevitably have to alter your planning later on. Let’s give it a try…

Dune:

Description: A series of powerful houses vie for control of a precious substance that is in short supply.

Players’ Role: The protagonist(s) are charged with guarding this substance in the midst of complex political and religious intrigue.

War of the Roses:

Description: The mental and physical instability of the nation’s ruler sparks a series of civil wars between two rival claimants to the throne.

Players’ Role: The players start as a band of troubleshooters loyal to a minor lord who backs the would-be usurper’s claim to the throne. They soon become embroiled in a conflict with few heroes on either side, involving backstabbing, bribes for loyalty and murder. They must choose how their influence will eventually affect the leadership of the nation.

Charlie’s Angels:

Description: A mysterious but seemingly benevolent figure recruits a group of specialized investigators and crime-fighters to right wrongs in a “villain of the week” style action drama. This mysterious figure gives them assignments remotely.

Players’ Role: As the special forces team selected by the mysterious figure, the group is given disparate assignments that are for the greater good, but may be connected to larger machinations.

Once you have that, maybe the other details of those settings still work. You could put the Dune summary above on a desert planet. Hell, you could literally set it in the Dune universe and not even hide it. And maybe that’s exactly what you want. But by starting with the above, you can also have a campaign that feels like Dune, but without literally being Dune, giving you a lot of flexibility in the other details.

To continue to run with the above examples, I could see Charlie’s Angels making a great horror game, since the mystery behind Charlie could add to the paranoia, and the missions could have to do with supernatural or eldritch events (like a Ghost Hunters setup). And something like the War of the Roses could be mined for its actual political and military history, giving you elements to adapt later on as the campaign evolves.

But none of these get us to a particular, specific campaign. Let’s do that with our final case study:

Case Study: Mouse Guard Star Trek

Let’s stretch a bit here, because I haven’t actually done this combo. But what if we wanted to? What would it look like? First, what’s the essence of Star Trek? For me, it’s about adventuring into the unknown with a clear set of rules and directives, and with a clear command structure, but in an inherently messy universe that subverts and challenges those beliefs. So what would this look like in Mouse Guard? Well, they aren’t space-faring, but the unknown is anything beyond the current mouse territories. So maybe the mice are outgrowing their current cities, and the party is an expeditionary force searching for new settlements to colonize. Their ship could be a sea-faring ship, and Star Trek’s planets could be the areas the mice land in search of land to colonize. The ruler of the mice has given them clear guidelines about not interfering in a negative way with existing creature habitats (which adapts Star Trek’s Prime Directive). And one of the mice is made the de facto leader, and a command structure is put in place. Perhaps if you include the players in this prep, they could establish a captain, first officer, navigator, “away team” leader, medical officer, etc. Mouse Guard’s mentor structure also lends itself to a Wesley Crusher-style newbie who is trying to work their way up the ranks and prove him/herself as capable.

Now look at what we have: an inherently episodic adventure format with countless permutations for adventure, one in which you can easily create moral conundrums for the players, and which rewards creative specialization of skills. Which could perfectly describe Star Trek, even though all of the details will be different. And you’ll have the spirit of the show without being tied to a particular system or canon of lore. Any experienced GM will already have thought of a dozen plot hooks from that start, with countless more possibilities.

Part V. Summary

Characters

• Change only what you need to, which could be very little.
• Don’t overlook minor NPCs for opportunities to bring in a favorite character.
• Steal individual elements from existing characters to spice up existing NPCs that fit the same archetype.

Find the Essence

• What makes a setting, individual story or story arc great? Distill the adapted work down to its most crucial elements, and be willing to change things around that core.

Settings

• Identify what makes the setting unique and how that will interact with your system’s mechanics to assess viability and the need to alter details.

Sessions

• Put an “RPG filter” over the work, since it’s likely in near-complete form for most single-session adaptations.
• TV works great for adapting into individual sessions.
• Script the early stuff, which includes all the characters, locations and events that are set in motion, then script progressively less as the session goes on to allow for alterations to the source material.

Campaigns & Story Arcs

• Write out a system-neutral and setting-neutral summary of the work you’re adapting to focus on the most important elements of the story.
• Imagine the players’ role in this setting in a way that seems natural.

I hope a few ideas I offered help you. Cheers!

This article was originally written for RPGGeek’s “Behind the Screen” series. You can read the original here.