I hosted my first narrative wargaming event in early June of 2024, about 60 days after getting back from Adepticon.

The event was called “Phobeus Eclipse”, and was designed for a game you may have heard of called “Flames of Orion”.

Compared to my other projects, its pretty straightforward, and I think it may make a good template for your first foray into event-hosting.

You can find a link to a PDF of the event file here.

If at some point in the future the link is inactive, please let me know. I will be referencing enough of the content that you should be able to reconstruct it, more or less, but having the document itself is probably helpful.

The Structure

Phobeus Eclipse will probably seem familiar to you, having read the preceding articles in this series.

The event packet is pretty small - only seven pages - but seven pages is plenty.

The first three pages are some general rules and guidelines, a narrative hook, and some additional gambling mechanics for the players to engage with. The very first page is meant to function as a teaser to hand out to players when they sign up, or show interest.

The other four pages are scenarios, with an attendant narrative blurb to support them. The scenarios are divided into three “cycles”. Each player plays one game per Cycle.

The overall structure of the story is very straightforward: there is a planet near its parent star, so close that it needs a shield, so close that nobody can approach it. That sun has dimmed, and planet is ripe for the taking. Players invade, some have an easier time than others, and there is a final fight over the shield generator to settle the fate of the planet.

It is probably helpful but not strictly necessary for you to at least skim the packet if you haven’t already.

Player Choices

At the point I had started to write Phobeus Eclipse, I already believed what I’ve relayed to you about the importance of player choice – that what players do should have an impact on how the narrative responds to them.

In Phobeus Eclipse, that is facilitated in three ways.

In the first game players compete for hostages to secure passage into the planet’s largest remaining city.

In the second game, players who won the first played their own scenario, all other players had to assault the walls of the city in a semi-cooperative engagement.

The choice which the narrative responds to is whether you won or lost your first game. Players may not choose whether they win directly, but by giving a nod to the win/loss state of the game you give feedback on the choices they made as a part of play.

The second game also contains my first failure – a form of role-voting mechanic, where players could choose whether they were friend or foe to the denizens of the city using a frankly baffling card-picking mechanic.

It was my ambition to find a way to give some players a choice, while ensuring that a game with opposing parties still occurred, but this largely failed to work as I had hoped.

Both aspects of this idea – card picking and role-selection were things I would refine in later projects.

In the third game, players came back together for a large final battle. The winner in the second round from among those who did not have to attack the walls is given some preferential treatment, but otherwise are not given immense recognition by the narrative.

Players could also choose to engage with the Tides of Orion; a mechanic which allowed players to vote on how strong they wanted the solar winds to be, with various risk/reward mechanics associated with their choices.

What Phobeus Eclipse Does Well

I think Phobeus Eclipse’s bones are a good model a first-time event host. All the pieces are there – the beginning, middle, and end of a story, and not every player will have an identical experience.

The narrative elements are present but digestible.

There is a story, but its not getting in the way of anything.

I have mixed feelings about the way I templated special rules for events - placing the full rules in an index, and referencing them by name in each scenario which needed them.

I think its good because it saves ink, but it does result in some cross-referencing work for the players. In the future I’ve tried to limit myself to two templated special rules per scenario when I can.

Overall I’m still mostly happy with this, twoish years later. Were I in a hurry, I could confidently bang-out something like this for any game, and feel more or less satisfied in a job well-enough done.

If you’re willing to spend the time, I’d like you to think carefully about your own critiques – that way you can learn from my mistakes.

Let me share some of what I would have done differently.

Where Phobeus Eclipse Can Be Improved

Phobeus Eclipse is a very simple event. In that way it could be improved by just having a bit 'more' of a lot of things - more player choices, more event variety, stronger story beats. However it was my first outing, and I had not yet committed to the bit, as it were.

These are things which would change with subsequent events, but I want to acknowledge that I know that Phobeus Eclipse is pretty dead-simple. That is a big part of why I chose to include it as an example.

Using winners and losers to split player’s experiences was a good choice – it rewards players who lose with something winners don’t get access to. It gives the event replay value. However, the second semi-cooperative event forced on players who lost the first round, titled “The Wall”, is too unconventional.

Recall my warning that players come to events to play the game: cooperative play is not exactly what Flames of Orion was designed for, and really a fairly fraught design space in general. For further reading I would recommend looking up the “Quarterbacking Problem” on your own time.

Its also worth mentioning that I did not test any of the scenarios for this event – at the time in 2024 it was hard enough to find people familiar with Flames of Orion, and I wanted everyone with an interest and the time to come to my event and experience it with fresh eyes.

As mentioned previously I think that the second-round winners bracket event is also critically flawed. In pursuit of giving players choice I made something, quite frankly, a bit shit. The high probability of asymmetric play was just not a good move, and wound up creating a real feel-bad scenario for the player in that situation.

Luckily on the maiden voyage of this event I was that player, so I bore the brunt of my own mistake.

The “Tides of Orion” mechanic was a good idea in principle, but when you offer player a risk they will usually take it– narrative events have paradoxically low stakes, as they are self-contained.There is very little reason not to risk big to win big.

This can produce negative outcomes where players, by their own action, end up hobbling themselves in persuit of the loot you dangle in front of them. Its their choice to make, but you control their ability to make that choice.

Bringing all players together on one table for the finale is something of a white whale of mine. I put it in too many of my events, but I just cant help myself. There are ways of making it more or less successful, but I do not recommend it for a first-timer.

That dissonance is a problem I have not solved, though I have some ideas that I share in the Pitfalls section of this series.

The Way Forward

Its my belief that these first four articles are enough for you to host your own narrative event.

Maybe I didn't tell you anything you hadn't already known or suspected. Maybe you already had these ideas.

Maybe what you know now is that those ideas are not only good - aligned with good outcomes in hosting narrative wargame events - but that they work successfully and are worth pursuing.

So far, none of these ideas are terribly unique either. If you've been to a narrative wargaming event before, you've probably seen some version of this format deployed.

Further articles are going to pivot a bit from talking about what you can do and maybe what you should do, to what I did following Phobeus Eclipse and why.

Up next a considerably more advanced deep dive into exactly how I designed my next Flames of Orion narrative event - Emperor of Sands.