Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on building individual adventures and bulls$&%ing about high concept stuff. And, as a result, I stopped talking about the campaign level stuff I was discussing previously. There’s been a lot of reasons for that, but I don’t feel like going into them. Basically, the types of articles I write varies based on how much work I’m trying to get done on what. Some articles are just more complicated than others. The ones that involve designing rules are the most complicated. And they also require substantial playtesting. I’m actually playtesting something right now for a future article as it happens. Then come the ones that involve actually designing game content like adventures. Especially if I have to draw things and take screenshots and s$&%. Those involve all the design work and all of the writing work. That’s why I HATE the f$&%ing Megadungeon Project and wish I’d never told you all about it. I’d be done with it by now if I didn’t have to explain every f$&%ing line I draw on a piece of graph paper. And screenshot each one. Then comes teaching you how to run and build a game without having to provide extensive examples. And finally comes the pontification about stupid bulls&$% or polishing off simple questions.

Anyway, the point is: part of what I will laughingly call my “time management” comes down to just picking the right articles to write at the right time. That said, I’ve spent a lot of time on useless bulls$&% pontification lately. I can’t get away with any more of that garbage. But I can move up one step on the proverbial ladder this week and go with “instructive non-mechanics.”

My brand team is advising me that it is possible to be TOO honestly transparent. What I MEAN TO SAY was that it has been a long time since I added an entry to my series about designing your own campaign and my whirlwind tour of the different types of campaigns one might run. So, while I’m working on some plot flowcharts for an upcoming entry in the Let’s Build a F$&%ing Dungeon Adventure and playtesting a future Rules Hack, I think I’m going to spend this week’s three to five thousand words on describing another type of campaign you might decide to run. One of my personal favorites. A Peeling the Onion campaign.

Here, There Be Dragons

Now, I’ve mentioned the Peeling the Onion campaign before. With good reason. It’s one of my favorites. But, it’s taken me a while to address it because it is really easy to f$&% up. And it is actually hard to explain how and why it gets f$&%ed up. Because a lot of the f$&%ing up is very vague and subjective. That’s just how it is.

The thing is, you need a group of players that are really onboard with this kind of crap. And you need a really solid plot progression. And you need really good information management skills. And you need a little luck. The problem is, there’s lots of examples of Peeling the Onion campaigns done very poorly in pop culture. But they don’t feel badly done when you’re just passively enjoying them. Well, some do. But most feel perfectly fine when you’re just watching them. But once you’re inside of one, all sorts of strange issues start to rear their ugly, green heads. Worse, the problems that can occur in Peeling the Onion campaigns aren’t big and obvious. They don’t crop up right away. They tend to dig at you slowly, over time, like a small lump in a mattress. Or a pea placed under said mattress as some sort of purity test for royalty. And where the hell did that story even start?

In other words, these sort of campaigns seem easy and fun to run, but they are not for the unprepared. They are easy to do wrong, and it’s hard to spot that they are being done wrong until the campaign just f$&%ing falls apart. So, be ye warned, traveler. Here, there be dragons. Subtle dragons.

Ogres are to Parfaits…

Warning out of the way, let’s actually get around to something useful. Like what actually IS a Peeling the Onion campaign. A Peeling the Onion campaign is a campaign whose major plotline involves solving a mystery. But it’s a very specific kind of mystery. It’s a big, deep, hidden secret sort of mystery. See, a normal mystery begins with the posing of a question and ends with the resolution of said question. For example: who killed the queen. The heroes must figure out who killed the queen and then, in the climax, confront the killer.

A more complex mystery reveals partway through that the initial question was the wrong question. Either because the question was actually based on faulty information and assumptions or because there is a more important question that drove the initial question. For example, the adventure might start with who tried to kill the queen but failed and left only her bodyguard dead. It might be revealed that the bodyguard was the target all along. The killer had some personal vengeance thing to sort out with the bodyguard and was hoping people would assume that the queen was the intended target and never track him down. Alternatively, the question might start with “who killed the queen” and then reveal that the queen was dying of an illness and hired the assassin to kill her. The new question is “why did the queen want to die of murder instead of natural causes?”

Now, those might sound like adventure-level mysteries. But, the truth is, any mystery could be turned into an adventure path or campaign. And then you have a mystery campaign. But a Peeling the Onion campaign ISN’T just another mystery.

A Peeling the Onion campaign does have a mystery at its heart. Or a secret. But that secret is buried under layers of other mysteries. As the campaign goes on, the heroes find themselves pursuing those mysteries. But each time they solve one of the mysteries – or get close to solving one – they discover that they were pursuing a superficial mystery and the real mystery was hidden underneath.

For example, suppose they start investigating the murder of the queen. They discover she was killed by someone who was trying to start a war. Investigating further, they discover that the other side in the war also has an unexplained regicide on their hands. And they discover that both sides are working for a guild of dwarven weaponsmiths who instigated the war to increase their sales. Pursuing the dwarves, they discover that the guild is run by a member of a strange cult. So, they pursue the cult and discover that the cult worships a mysterious ancient figure. So, they research the founder of the cult and discover that he made the whole story up and the ancient figure never existed. But he is a member of a different, ancient order who is bound to one of the Dukes of Hell, specifically, Levistus. Levistus has been trying to gather corrupt souls to empower him because he was imprisoned by Asmodeus for an ancient slight. Levistus wants to break free. And he’s got this plan going. The heroes discover the plan, confront Levistus, and destroy him. At which point Asmodeus shows up and thanks them for killing Levistus because Asmodeus wasn’t allowed to by the Ancient Precepts™. Asmodeus allowed Levistus’ plan to go forward and also made sure the heroes learned just enough information to figure it just as Levistus’ plan was to reach fruition, thus necessitating his death. Then, the heroes attack – and kill – Asmodeus. Or they die. Either way, campaign over.

That’s an actual example of a campaign I ran. There were two survivors. Asmodeus and one of the five PCs who managed to escape Hell. The end.

Admittedly, it was a d$%& ending. But I never claimed not to be a d$&%, and the heroes could have just let Asmodeus go.

The point is that there is a single, deep, dark truth at the heart of the campaign. And there are layers and layers of plans and deceptions and misdirections the heroes have to get through to resolve it. And that’s a Peeling the Onion campaign.

For the Love of a Good Mystery

Peeling the Onion campaigns aren’t for everyone. And I’ll get to why they aren’t in a moment. Just trust me. Not everyone likes them. They are absolute gold, though, to people who put Discover and Narrative first and foremost on their list of gaming loves. And note, when I use those terms, I am using the capital letters that mean I’m not talking subjectively. I mean those regarding the actual game design engagements that you can read about in the article I linked. Seriously, I don’t cross-reference all this s$&% for my health. But it seems like no one can be bothered to go back and read the prerequisite material and then I have to deal with moronic comments made by mouth-breathers with no context for what I’m talking about.

A Peeling the Onion campaign promises the ultimate in Discovery-based experience. It is literally about constantly pushing back the darkness that shrouds the world and discovering the capital-T Truth at the heart of it all. And because of the way the campaign has to be structured – unless you’re a s$&% GM who wants to run a s$&% mystery as I explain below – such campaigns also promise a strong, well-structured, and well-paced Narrative. And no, that isn’t the same as the bulls$&% phrase “story-focused.” I don’t use that phrase because it doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING. It’s a s$&% term used by idiots who don’t actually understand what a story is or how to build one.

But, if your players don’t respond very well to Discovery and Narrative elements, they aren’t going to have any fun. And some players will respond very poorly to Peeling the Onion campaigns. And, again, I’ll talk about why below.

The point is that you want to make sure, in your Session Zero, that you have the right players for a Peeling the Onion campaign.

The Heart of all Plots

So, how do you put together a good Peeling the Onion campaign? The first – and the most important – part is also the one that a lot of GMs balk at. You have to start from the end of the campaign. That is to say, you have to know the Truth. You have to know what the ultimate, final revelation is. You can’t improvise it. You can’t fit it together later. You can’t half-a$& it. If you try, it won’t work. And, I’ll explain why in a moment. Again, just trust me.

Now, I don’t personally consider “figure out how your campaign is going to end if the campaign is going to be heavily based around a single narrative thread” to be a ridiculous requirement. But I have said it enough times on the Internet – or variations like “you should know the solution to any mystery story you tell before you start telling it” – I’ve said s$&% like that enough times on the Internet and been met with sputtering, stunned incredulity to learn that there is a contingent of GMs out there who think that planning for the ending is a f$&%ing crime against gaming humanity. And, as near as I can tell, there are two reasons for that. First, some GMs are dumb enough to think “any planning is railroading,” which is a statement that is so stupid on so many levels that I don’t even address it anymore for fear of catching whatever mental illness causes that thought in the first place myself. Second, some GMs are lazy and figure the ability of the GM to improvise means they don’t have to do any forward work.

If you’re either of those GMs, that’s on you. Please stay out of my comment feed though. You run your game any wrong way you want. But I’m telling you that if you try to run a Peeling the Onion campaign with that mentality, it’ll likely be garbage. If you’re really good, it might approach a level of mediocre non-suckage that will convince you that it doesn’t have to be bad. But there’s no way to get a great Peeling the Onion campaign by cobbling it together.

Now, the Truth and the Resolution of the Peeling the Onion campaign go hand-in-hand. My Lord of the Icerazor Glacier campaign (the Levistus one) was always going to end with the heroes penetrating into the heart of Stygia and confronting the dark form of the Lord of the Fifth as it broke free from its icy prison. And then, when he was struck down, Asmodeus would appear to gloat. And to offer one of the PCs a chance to take Levistus’ place. And then, smart heroes would say no and leave. Dumb, prideful heroes would attack Asmodeus. Of course, they might win. I guess that would have been the best ending. The second-best ending, though, was to walk away.

Beyond knowing the Truth, you also have to plan the major plot points. Not all of them, but some of them. Enough to draw a line between the Truth and whatever dumb story starts your campaign. Like an attempt to corrupt two kingdoms by drawing them into an unjust war and then pushing them to commit atrocities against each other by gradually offering them more and more horrific and horrible weapons at steeper moral prices. And some layers of cults and false prophets to keep the operation secret so Asmodeus couldn’t connect it all to Levistus. Or even to Hell at all.

Now, you don’t have to plan absolutely everything. You can’t, anyway. You just plan the major plot points. And you use those to plan minor plot points as you need them. And you use those to plan adventures as the players move through the adventure. But you have to have an outline. And the reason for the outline gets to the heart of the campaign – or any mystery – and also prevents one of the biggest, most dangerous pitfalls of the Peeling the Onion campaign. Let’s dig through those one at a time.

The Fun of Figuring it Out

When you sell a mystery to a group of players and those players are onboard, they are excited because they want to solve a mystery. If they just wanted to experience a story about people solving a mystery, they’d read a book or watch a movie or TV show. And they wouldn’t read Sherlock Holmes. They wouldn’t watch Monk. They’d watch CSI. Or read Agatha Christie. The difference between those things is that Holmes and Monk empowered the reader to solve the mystery alongside – or before – their titular detectives. CSI and Agatha Christie-like to keep information from the reader or watcher until their detectives can spring it on everyone and solve the mystery in one fell swoop.

Players who actually want to play a mystery want to solve the mystery. And building a solvable mystery is hard. Trust me. I build a lot of them. I love this s$&% almost as much as I love good epic fantasy and ripping on D&D for losing its epic fantasy roots and settling on bombastic, over-the-top, ridiculous magicpunk bulls$%&. And also, for being poorly presented and sold by a company that is run by retards.

Here’s the point: if your players are all-aboard for this sort of campaign, they want a solvable mystery that will take them weeks or months to solve. And that means the mystery has to be fair. Just like you plan a combat the PCs can win, you have to plan a mystery the players can solve. And solve right.

A Peeling the Onion campaign involves layers of mysteries piled on top of each other. It’s mystery inception. It’s a stack of mysteries. And each and every mystery has to make sense by itself and also as part of the stack. You can’t have a detail out of place in one stack that creates a plot hole in a deeper mystery because you’ll be f$&%ing with the players’ ability to solve the mysteries. I’m not talking about red herrings by the way. I’m talking about plot holes and inconsistencies that lead the players to wrong conclusions unfairly or prevent them from being able to draw the right conclusions.

The less you know about the Truth of your campaign – that is, how the stack all fits together – the more you risk creating inconsistencies. Now, inconsistencies will happen. No one is perfect. But each one is a potential breaking point. You never know which inconsistency will be the one the players seize upon and use to chase the wrong leads and do the wrong things for six f$&%ing months. And that is a GENUINE risk when you ask people to solve a mystery and then give them the freedom to pursue any wrong solution any way they want.

And no. No matter how good you are at improvising and fitting things together after the fact, that’s no excuse to not plan the Truth, the Resolution, and the major plot points. You can’t uncover the story as the players do. Because even if you already DO plan your Truth, Resolution, and major plot points, you’re still going to be doing a Hell of a lot of s$&% on the fly and off the cuff. Improvisation is part of running every game. You have to react to the players and the things they do to change the plot. If the players manage to prevent the war before the dwarves even start selling their weapons, you’re going to have to draw them into a new plot involving a cult leader corrupting a population. And every bit of improvisation risks the structural integrity of your game. So, you don’t want to rely on any more of it than you have just to run the game.

Beyond that, though, starting any story without the end in mind creates a very particular risk. But that risk is SUPER EFFECTIVE against a Peeling the Onion campaign. Let’s talk about Plot Plague.

A Spreading Blight O’er the Land

Once upon a time, there was this TV show about a pair of FBI agents who investigated supernatural cases. One day, their plane crash landed on an island with a giant, ensemble cast of other characters. As they explored the island, they discovered a mysterious hatch and a smoke monster and a polar bear. Then, some of the people started to develop superpowers inexplicably. A guy with horn-rimmed glasses and a serial killer started targeting the superheroes while the FBI agent had an on-again-off-again alliance with a smoking man who had black cancer – probably from smoking too much – and his sister had been vaccinated against smallpox and then given a social security number which meant aliens kidnapped her and she had to press a button every two hours or else the devil or something. I don’t f$&%ing know. And the reason I don’t f$&%ing know is because the creators didn’t f$&%ing know.

Actually, I’m being unfair here. Heroes – the FIRST SEASON of Heroes ONLY – actually determinedly and steadfastly avoided Plot Plague because the story was limited to ONE SEASON and had an ending that had already been planned. Watch it. It was really good. It’s just too bad they NEVER MADE ANOTHER SEASON AFTER THE FIRST. Capiche?!

But many, MANY TV shows are designed to run for as long as they keep making money. And they are rarely planned with the end in mind. And so, as the show goes on, the writers keep adding plot threads. And they keep asking questions. And every time a question is answered, it’s answered with another, deeper, more nonsensical question.

This is bad narrative structure. And it also causes the big problem that lies at the heart of all failed Peeling the Onion campaigns that I promise I will reveal once we get there. The reason it represents bad narrative structure is that all stories need to contract toward an ending. Mysteries, especially, start with infinite possibilities. The answer could be anything. And then, as the plot moves from beginning to end, the possibilities start to contract. The story condenses toward a single, final resolution. That’s how its’ supposed to work.

Now, stories can start small, spread out, and then start to contract in the middle. That’s fine too. But if you don’t know where the story is going to end, you don’t know where the middle is. So, you don’t know when to start contracting. And, when you do start to contract the story, you have to bring EVERYTHING together. If your story has been spreading for years, growing new plots and questions and getting bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper, when it comes time to start contracting it to the ending, there’s just too damned much to get it all. So, you either end up leaving whole plot threads unresolved, like the forgotten war between the Sopranos and the Red Mafia led by that bulletproof Russian dude or the entire alien colonization thing in X-Files, or else you’ll end up ham-fistedly slapping together an unsatisfying answer to something you realized you forgot about, like the idea of bringing polar bears to a tropical island because their excellent memories made them good for research into electromagnetic fields or some bulls$&% like that.

Improvisation leads to your plot growing and spreading like an uncontrolled virus. Some folks call this The Chris Carter Effect after the creator of the X-Files. Others call it a Kudzu Plot because of the way it spreads. But I like to call it Plot Plague. Because it f$&%ing kills a good story dead and, once it starts, there is NO getting back under control.

So, you have to keep your improvisation under control.

But as deadly as a Plot Plague can be to a good Peeling the Onion campaign, there is one thing that has ruined more mystery campaigns than J. J. Abrams has ruined franchises: and that is mishandling the revelations that accompany the peeling of each layer. That issue is pretty much the core of the onion, the bottom of the parfait, the spleen of the ogre.

Your Princess is with Another Dragon

A Peeling the Onion campaign has a very particular narrative structure to it. That’s why it rubs the bellies of the Narrative-seeking player so nicely. Because those players crave a proper story structure. They are the real story gamers. But, again, if you haven’t done the prerequisite course-work, you don’t get to comment on that.

Generally, the structure begins with the players becoming aware of a mystery to solve. As they pursue the mystery, one of two things happens. First, they might solve the mystery. But the solution leaves another mystery behind or another question to pursue. Second, while solving the mystery, they might become aware of another mystery or question that is related, somehow, to the one they are in the middle of. Then, when they solve their current mystery, they pursue the other mystery instead.

Essentially, the entire campaign takes on the form of a series of questions and answers. And each answer either provides another question OR the act of answering the question raises another, different question. Along the way, the heroes also encounter details that don’t quite make sense in and of themselves.

Now, my Icerazor Glacier already provided a perfect example of the question-and-answer thing in action. But what about the inexplicable details? Well, consider, for example, that the dwarven weapons used a lot of acid and cold magic and had a distinctly devilish design that could be described as spikey-black-iron Lawful-Evil. That stuff makes sense once the heroes connect the fake cult to a real devil cult. And later, makes more sense, when the characters visit Stygia, the Fifth Layer of Hell. A plane of frozen, poisonous salt marshes on the shore of a fetid, icy, black sea.

See, the real core engagement of the Peeling the Onion campaign is the “Aha Moment.” That’s what people call it. I like the term Revelation better. There are two basic types of Revelation. There’s the “things are deeper than you thought revelation” and there’s the “things actually make sense now” revelation. The discovery that the leader of the dwarves was an evil cultist? That makes things deeper. The discovery that a devil from a realm of ice and poison was behind everything makes things make sense.

But all of those come down to the Moment of Revelation. That is the single Discovery that provides the Revelation in question. The strange tattoo on the cultist or the shrine in his bedroom with the name of his dark deity inscribed on the statuette. The moment when the party finds an engraving of Stygia in a book about Levistus and the other Dukes of Hell and the frozen swamps and spiky architecture remind them of those weapons they seized oh-so-long-ago.

Those are the moments the players are living for in a Peeling the Onion campaign. But they can also be the moments that kill any interest they have in the game.

The problem with those revelations – especially the ones that deepen the mystery – is that they can have the effect of moving the goalposts. They can effectively steal the players’ victories. Remember that every mystery they solve represents the culmination of an adventure. It’s the resolution of a problem. And the narrative structure – the pace – of the Peeling the Onion campaign comes from the rising and falling action of mysteries being established, being resolved, and then flowing into the next mystery which raises the stakes. That feels good when done right.

Now, recall how many times movies and TV shows pulled the old “but he wasn’t the real villain, he was just working for someone else” card. The heroes defeat the villain and then discover there’s another, bigger villain pulling the strings. The battle continues. Or remember how the original Super Mario Brothers fed you the “but your Princess is in another castle line” SEVEN F$&%ING TIMES. That s&%& doesn’t feel good. Because the revelation in each case amounts to “but you didn’t really win, did you?”

A good revelation doesn’t steal the victory the players just earned. Their victory does resolve things. Something is better because of what they did. A good revelation simply reframes their victory as a battle in a larger war they didn’t realize they were fighting. Or it infuses their victory with a deeper meaning.

When the heroes discover the dwarven weapon merchants were led by a cultist and now they have to discover the truth about the cult, they have stopped the weapon merchants and ended an unjust war. It’s not just a “he wasn’t the real villain,” because the players can point to how their actions have made the world a better place. They did resolve what they set out to do. The revelation gives them another quest. One that will actually infuse what they just did with MORE meaning.

Good revelations also reframe the players’ previous victories. In a way, a good revelation in a Peeling the Onion campaign makes the prior victories more victorious. They get to win the same victory all over again. For example, when the heroes finally discover that the devil cult was actually trying to corrupt the souls of two nations worth of soldiers to earn as many people for Hell as possible, stopping that war takes on more significance. They didn’t just save lives, they saved immortal souls too. They REALLY won.

Apart from having a plan, the most important thing you have to do when planning a Peeling the Onion campaign is to build revelations that don’t take away the players’ victories or invalidate their accomplishments. You can’t just move the princess or reveal the true villain. The heroes still have to accomplish things all the way.

So, you need to look at your outline – your stack of mysteries laying on top of your Truth – and you need to make sure that each mystery’s solution does actually fix something or solve something. It has to count as a genuine victory. And if you spot a victory that won’t feel like a victory once the Revelation happens, you need to fix that. No moving the princess. No revealing the real villain. Those can’t be the only resolutions in any adventure. Otherwise, your campaign sucks. And then, after you do that, you need to look at each Revelation in your outline and ask how those Revelations make the previous victories better.

If you don’t do that, you’ll be pissing off your players a little bit with every adventure. Every new question will make them a little sadder. Every Revelation will make them feel like their actions are a little more pointless. It’ll be like adding a heavy rock to their backpack while you reveal that there’s another mile – at least – in the long march to an eventual victory.

Of course, when it comes to the ending, all bets are off. The ending of the campaign just has to be a definite end. It has to answer every question. But it can do pretty much anything else after that. And I stand by my Asmodeus reveal. D$&%ish though it was. But then, I’d peeled enough off the layers of my players’ motivations to know I could get away with it. Especially because I was moving away after that and I’d never see them again. So, what did I care?