Encounter & Narrative Designer
Team: 4 people
Design Time: 7 weeks
• Designed co-op encounter sequences based on real world locations and a custom version of Chaosium’s BRP system.
• Populated maps with realistically placed interactable furnishings and item pickups to enable strategic combat.
• Wrote dramatic scenes and character profiles to build the world’s narrative for prospective game masters.
Our tabletop RPG campaign tells a character-driven story based on The Last of Us and Chaosium’s BRP system. As a team, we collaboratively developed an eventful journey that takes new tabletop RPG players through the beginning of the cordyceps pandemic.
We provide everything a group needs to start playing our campaign, including maps and floor plans, starter character profiles, stat sheets, campaign events, and scripts of dramatic scenes to understand the feel of the world.
The maps are based on and scaled accordingly with real world locations — in this case, the Michigan State Capitol building, MSU campus area, and suburbs in Lansing, Michigan. They are then populated according to story events, with areas blocked off to create better layout, cover and half cover for combat encounters involving ranged weapons, and interactable furniture. Item drops are suggested based on what types of storage crates or enemies players try to loot. The final battle takes place in the capitol building and there is a scripted event where the chandelier crashes from the third floor to destroy the current map, creating broken paths, new cover, and new item pickups.
We have four character sheets, one for each player, that we use for our sample narrative. They include important role-playing details like motivations, fatal flaws, and value shifts that occur throughout the sample campaign.
Interested in the juicy dramatic details? Here are the parts of our guidebook that I wrote.