設計冒險的懶人指南
原文 作者: Sandy Petersen
我流翻譯：手把手帶你寫冒險。
1. 設定情況
想像一個有趣的情況。
例如－－
情況：你被關在一個房間裡。
目的：逃出房間
因為是CoC，所以我們不用小丑或是酷寒隊長來當作敵人，而是狂熱信徒。當然你也可以有更有趣的想法。
2. 主線
看看你的基本情況然後試著想像它要如何發展成故事。壞人的目的為何？有趣的NPC？如果沒有PC的干擾事情會如何進行？
玩家前晚投宿的旅店其實是狂熱信徒為了喚醒xxx（視GM喜好）而用來獵食祭品的。
2.1 誰可以當作犧牲者？
CoC在辦案過程中有較高的死亡率。你必須要找到其他犧牲者來代替玩家被殺。幸好我們可以多準備幾個NPC來當作犧牲者。
2.2 為什麼玩家會被牽連？
需要但不用交代太瑣碎。
玩家因為去爬山/旅行/泡溫泉而住進這間旅店。
2.3 主線要如何延長？
很多冒險不適合CoC，因為對於主持一個好遊戲的長度不夠。更重要的是，我們必須要延遲惡人的計畫，讓PC有足夠的時間去拼湊真相並阻止它。以我們的冒險舉例：為什麼惡人想要喚醒xxx？為什麼是xxx而不是OOO？為什麼要把PC關起來而不是直接殺掉？為什麼在這裡？這個旅店的歷史為何？
以我們的情況來回答：惡人是xxx的信徒，他過去曾經接觸過xxx。把PC關起來是因為獻祭時間還沒到，或是還沒滿足獻祭的條件（可以跟xxx背景結合）。這個旅店過去曾經是xxx信徒聚集之處，或者周圍有跟xxx相關的物品。
2.4
Substep Two/D - Why Don't the Authorities Intervene? This is not a problem in every adventure. Often, in fact, the authorities CAN'T intervene because the bad guys haven't done an obvious crime, or because the (the authorities) are hunting the good guys, or because it would be pointless. In this case however, a hostage crisis could bring out the SWAT team and end the scenario way too fast, so we need to keep them at bay, at least until the climactic ending sequence. The best way to keep the authorities out of action is to cut off the mountain resort's communications. The villains can do this themselves by cutting the telephone cables. If we're hosting the scenario in modern times, the players are likely to claim they have cell phones. This isn't really problem -- cell phone jammers are legal and easily available. A small one that would fit in a suitcase would be sufficient to blanket the entire resort hotel. Even better, anyone trying to phone into the hotel would simply think that his connection's phone was turned off, so there's no clue to the outside world at all. Of course, if the people at the hotel were held incommunicado for too long, presumably someone would get suspicious, but we only need to hold them hostage for a day or two for the scenario.
Step Three - The Wow Finish Every scenario should have a great climax. The upcoming ritual gives us a terrific possibility. In addition, if the investigators have somehow managed to contact the authorities, the police could show up (in a helicopter) just as the ritual is performed and some kind of awful frost-breathing monster shows up to destroy said police helicopter and show the players that mere human techniques are of no avail against the forces of the Unknown. Or, perhaps the cops show up safely and there is a big gunbattle in which the investigators are trapped between the cops and the villains. Trying to get from the resort to the relative safety of the police without getting mistaken for a bad guy and shot might be interesting, especially given that there is likely to be tear gas and smoke blanketing the area at the time. (You can provide gas masks for the villains if you need them immune to the tear gas. Might be even scarier to have them NOT immune and firing off shots randomly around them as they choke and wheeze.)
Step Four - Finalize the Plot Okay, the situation is that an evil cultist, committed to an asylum for his activities, has recruited four lunatics and escaped. He has arrived at a "mountain resort" and taken the player-characters hostage, among others. Either tonight or tomorrow night (depending on how much time you want to give your players), the "planets will align properly" so he can perform an evil ritual, and he no doubt plans to sacrifice his hostages at that time. What will happen if the PCs don't interfere? The villain will try to keep his victims under control and terrorized. To keep his insane buddies happy, he'll let them kill a few people for fun. During the ritual, he'll sacrifice his hostages and achieve his results. It's probably best to let the results be unspecified, so that you can adjust them to the situation at hand. You may not know until the actual event whether you want the ritual to summon a monster, or turn the cultist into a monster, or whatever. If the ritual gets thwarted by the players, then you can have it be as fearsome as you want (after the fact). Example: Keeper - "As you throttle the cultist and stop his chanting, the huge black hole in the air starts shrinking. Just before it vanishes you see Cthulhu's dread visage peeping through." Players - "Wow we're glad we stopped THAT!" If the ritual is NOT thwarted by the players you can have it segue into your next adventure - now they have to figure out a way to close the gate / eliminate the monster / stop the plague of madness / whatever you wanted to have happen as a result of the ritual. Another possibility - if you want to get your players to the Dreamlands or somewhere else exotic, have the ritual transport them all there.
Step Five - Create the Characters Work out personalities and "trademark" features for the main villains and good guys. In our case we have five villains, and we may as well as work out the basics for all five of them. Naming characters can be a pain. I have three techniques for getting character names for my adventures.
1) I use names of childhood friends that my players won't know. 2) I get them out of a phone book opened at random. (Only good for locals.) 3) I get them from a movie filmed in the character's nation of origin.
I used technique #3 here -- I simply looked up an early Peter Lorre movie on the internet and stole the names of the first five cast members. Hans Albers, Anna Sten, Heinz Ruhmann, Ida Wust, and Kurt Gerron. Two are female, but that's good. Now for the bad guys. Since the scenario probably will revolve around the players' interaction with them, we need more distinctive personalities than most cultists get to have. Here goes:
THE CULTIST - HANS ALBERS He worships Ithaqua (since his ritual requires the mountains). If you don't want Ithaqua you can use the Fungi from Yuggoth or whoever else you want haunting your mountains. Hans is quite intelligent and charismatic and manipulative, which is how he convinced his crew of lunatics to come along with him. He needs to survive until the very end of the scenario, so we must give him a means of so doing, considering that he will be a prime target for the investigator's acts of violence. Here's one way to ensure his survival -- when a person is killed, Hans can do a ritual that "absorbs" the victim's essence, thus giving him unnatural health (in game terms - huge hit points). This may also explain what his ultimate goal is - the final ritual is to make him invincible and immortal. And maybe his lunatic chums, too. And of course, if he absorbs life from murdered people, he has a nice relationship with his lunatics - they kill 'em, he absorbs the life. He can already have absorbed as much life as we need (from people murdered in the escape) so that the investigators can't easily hurt him. 100 hit points or so should be enough. Of course, the investigators are likely to try to kill him shortly after his arrival. Since he's so tough, he'll probably survive, and then he'll need to restore some of his life, by killing one of his prisoners.
FIRST LUNATIC - ANNA STEN Let's just have her be totally romantically obsessed with Hans Alber and eager to do everything he says. To add poignancy to this portrayal, we can have him treat her like dirt. Let's make her a little bit pathetic - perhaps she has scars on her forearms, relics of attempts at self-mutilation. Each time Hans is rude or cruel to her in public, she shows up soon after with a new bandage from a shallow wound she gave herself because she was "bad". Can the investigators make contact with her and talk her out of her obsession? Maybe. She's not innately bad, just obedient. She doesn't take pleasure in killing people, but is happy to do it if it will make Hans happy. If the investigators DO manage to somehow awaken her to the awful things she's doing, her likely fate is for Hans to kill her when she tries to talk him out of his plan.
SECOND LUNATIC - HEINZ RUHMANN For this guy, I decided to have an old-fashioned serial killer. He could even be famous (i.e, the investigators have heard of him). He just plain likes killing. Modeling him after a famed serial murderer like Jeffrey Dahmer (for instance) makes his personality easy. Of course, he's happy to stick with Hans Albers because Hans got him out of the asylum, but he is a loose cannon. He may well decide to torment or harass someone that Hans wants left alone. He may even kill one of the other, lesser, villains if you, as keeper, decide the adventure is too hard for the investigators.
THIRD LUNATIC - KURT GERRON To give the bad guys more firepower, I made Kurt Gerron an ex-cop who went schizophrenic. This way he can be a gun expert, making him potentially very dangerous. To make him more interesting, let's put him on some medication. If he gets too little medication, he goes catatonic. If he gets too much, he becomes docile and friendly. Hans Albers controls a supply of the drugs Kurt needs, and dishes them out as necessary. If the investigators can somehow meddle with the drug supply, perhaps Kurt can be taken out of the picture, at least temporarily?
FOURTH LUNATIC - IDA WUST I didn't have any good ideas left when I got to her, so we can make it simple. She is a prostitute who murdered a client and avoided prison by faking insanity. So she is the only non-insane person in the crew, and she is probably trying to think of a way to escape the resort and her obviously-insane pals. She doesn't care about Hans' ritual, and doesn't feel comfortable around Heinz or Kurt. She is, at heart, a bad person (she is a murderer and whore after all), but she is first and foremost selfish, and if the investigators convince her that she is likelier to survive by helping them, she'll switch sides. Of course, she is terrified of Hans and won't like any attempt to shoot or kill him, because she knows that he is practically immune to gunfire.
THE GOOD GUYS - these can be caricatures. Only the investigators will actively try to escape, since we don't want non-player-characters to get the glory. The good guys are divided into three camps:
Heroic Hostages - these may interfere with the players by bungling an escape attempt. They are also useful as early "kills" for the villains, to show the investigators that the bad guys mean business.
Normal Hostages - take minor steps to help the investigators, but nothing too daring. They can be children or old people to explain their inaction.
Intimidated Hostages - so terrified for their lives that they are willing to betray their fellow hostages to save themselves. This won't buy them anything in the long run, but their existence makes things more interesting (i.e., harder) for the PCs.
Step Six: The Setting To ensure that you have as clear an idea of the mountain resort's layout as possible, use the interior design of a ski lodge or hunting lodge YOU have been to in the past. If you've never been inside one, you can use a youth hostel or even a small-town hotel as exemplars. The important thing is that there is one big room on which all the other, smaller rooms open, so that the bad guys can easily control everyone. The surrounding mountains cut off TV & radio communication (of course, the lodge gets cable, but the bad guys probably cut that ...). There are two ways out, should the investigators escape the resort - either they go down the main road (risky, because they'll probably be on foot, and the bad guys will be driving after them) or they climb over the surrounding mountains. Climbing over the mountains should be pretty fun, actually, with the heavily-armed bad guys chasing them. The investigators should get lots of use out of agility-type skills such as Jump & Climb, and you should let them try to set up booby traps or otherwise incapacitate their pursuers. Starting an avalanche or rockslide would be good technique, for instance. The chase over the mountains could be a very exciting climax to the scenario.
Step Seven: Potential Problems 1) EARLY ESCAPE - if the investigators escape in the first five minutes of the scenario it would ruin everything. The likeliest way for them to do this is to sneak out a back window in one of their rooms and then just run off. The bad guys should be expecting this, so at least one (more probably two) will be watching the back of the lodge at all times to prevent this, except when all the lodge's people have been gathered into the common room.
2) PLAYER DESPAIR - I've seen this before; a scenario seems too tough, and the players simply give up or can't think of any way out. Usually at this point they do something really stupid, like attack the machinegun-armed thug frontally or otherwise get themselves killed. If you sense that the players can't figure out what to do, this is the time to play the Ida Wust card - as you remember, she's not really insane, just criminal. Have her covertly talk to the investigators, tell them that she's scared of Hans and the others, and that she would welcome a chance to escape, if the investigators can only think of a way that won't endanger her. This kind of secret ally will boost the players' spirits no end.
3) INCREDIBLE LUCK - either good or bad, a real lucky series of d100 rolls can sometimes spoil scenarios. Have emergency back-up plans to solve these without looking like a cheater. "Good Luck" example: one of the bad guys takes a pot shot at an investigator to wound or scare him. You roll 1d100 and the result is 01, right there in front of everybody. Suddenly the investigator has taken 16 points of damage and is stone cold dead, according to the CoC rules. Yuck. You have two solutions: kill the investigator, or find some way to keep him alive. The best way to do the latter is to have the shot be really good anyway - say that the bad guy's shot exactly creased the investigator's skull and knocked him out cold. Explain that this is what the bad guy wanted to do. After all, he rolled an 01. You can think of other ways to neutralize an especially lucky result that you don't want. "Bad Luck" example: the players think up a clever plan to get phone communications working again. When they go into the back room to put their plan into operation, one of them rolls "00" on his Sneak and has obviously made some kind of loud noise. But you feel that the players deserve some reward for their behavior. Off-hand I can think of one easy way to save them. Sure the noise alerts a bad guy who rushes into the room. When he steps into the room, a raccoon or cat or something suddenly runs by him, and he decides it was "only an animal" and departs. This is a classic horror and suspense film ploy anyway (remember Alien?) and players should appreciate it. You can think of other ways to void such bad results at need.
Step Eight: Have Fun It's only a game!