People can have a lot of expectations going into a narrative event.

They probably expect a story. They probably expect to have some impact on it. They probably expect to play some games.

With just those three expectations, we can start building something that works for them, and for us, the event-runner.

What follows is my guidance for people following my advice from the prior article – namely that your event have at least three games.

You can break these rules, but I wont have as much advice for you. We could discuss what might or might not work, in fact Id love to have that discussion with you, but this article is about what has worked for me, and for my players.

Planning The Basics

The bare minimum of what you’ll need to consider when planning the narrative of your event may not surprise you:

• A setting and a status quo for the narrative
• Custom mechanics to spice up play
• An established role or roles for players to inhabit
• An inciting Incident which disrupts the status quo
• A story for the escalation and climax of the narrative.
• An outline of player choices, and the story’s conclusion(s)

Of these elements, many are directly narrative, specifically the setting, escalation, and climax. How you present these is a choice you’ll want to make early, and will tie into how much effort you want to put in, and will inform the other choices you make.

The oldest way of conveying the narrative of a wargaming event is to have a GM at the table, orally relaying the story to players.

This is still something you can pursue, but it has a few practical limitations. You can’t be everywhere at once. This adds a time and waiting component to your event. Further, you’ll need to ensure that you play in an environment where players can hear you, and that all players who need to hear you are present and paying attention.

I prefer to convey my narrative through text whenever possible. This has a few positive impacts:

• It allows players to engage with the narrative asynchronously
• It allows players to re-reference what is happening if they get lost
• It does not require as much real-time organization

It also has a few drawbacks:

• Some players are slow readers
• Text can feel impersonal and repetitive compared to oral narration
• Some players may not enjoy reading

Whichever you choose, this will help you decide how complex of a narrative you want to convey, and how you let players make the choices you have planned for them.

Broad Strokes And Practicalities

I recommend splitting your narrative into four parts, selected from the necessary components mentioned previously.

• A setting and a status quo for the narrative.
• An inciting Incident which disrupts the status quo.
• An escalation of the narrative which introduces new problems.
• A climax of the narrative that brings the conflict to a close.

Your top priority when planning and executing a narrative wargaming event should be to finish the event – an unfinished story may have been interesting, but its fundamental incompleteness is unsatisfying.

With that in mind, most of the recommendations to follow will center around saving as much time - your’s and your player’s - as possible.

There is a lot of time to be saved by doing things ahead of time. To that end, it’s a good idea to provide the first part of your narrative – setting and status quo – prior to the start of the game. Providing players with a short PDF, or making a teaser publicly available are a great way of achieving this.

The one caveat is to avoid the temptation to make this pre-work too exhaustive. If it’s more than half a page players will likely have difficulty retaining it. If it’s longer than a full page, players likely have difficulty finishing it. If it’s longer than two pages, players won’t read it.

You will compromise your vision in a lot of ways as part of this process. That is a fundamental aspect of design. Reducing complexity while maintaining clarity is the most difficult part of writing for a narrative event.

Remember: players are here to play a game. The narrative is set-dressing. Every word you can shave off puts players closer to the game, and if the essence of your narrative is maintained, all the better.

You should write the broad strokes of your other three narrative components – the inciting incident, escalation, and climax – with similar constraints.

The bare minimum event using this model is one in which players simply read one of these narrative segments, in the appropriate order, before each game.

Players arrive having taken in the status quo.

They read about the inciting incident, then play a game related to the consequences.

They read about the escalation following their first game, then play a second game related to the consequences.

They read about the final escalation going into the climax. They play their final, climactic game.

Speaking from experience, this is a very effective model.

Choices and Variety

It is likely that players will inhabit characters that are in your narrative – I cannot think of a way to host an event of this type where that is not the case. If you do figure it out, let me know.

As humans with functioning brains, your players will want to have an impact on the narrative, because otherwise why are they taking action at all?

If they make choices, whether presented or spontaneous, and all have the same outcomes, it makes their role in the story feel less special.

Players expect to get something from an event they couldn’t get just playing the same game at home.

Adding in extra rules, gear, conditions, and custom scenarios can make your event really stand out from a basic game-day.

These elements can be used as a lever for making player choice meaningful – they can choose or vote on modifiers for a scenario, or make cumulative choices which impact all games at the event.

All of these elements are important, but they are ultimately ornaments hanging over the narrative, which itself exists to get people engaged in playing the game.

If all of this still feels a little arcane, I'd like to offer you a case study to go over the principles we've covered by way of analysing my first event narrative wargaming event.