Narrative Design

The Branching Story of a Root: The Roleplaying Game Campaign

Root: The Roleplaying Game is a Table-Top Roleplaying Game set within a fictional medievalist world where cutthroat politics and violence are carried out by otherwise adorable woodland creatures through various conflicting factions. Within each campaign/adventure, the players take control of ‘Vagabonds’, roaming mercenaries with no clear allegiance. The rules of the game emphasise creating and breaking alliances for the sake of survival within the confrontations that endlessly roll through the Woodland.

Even though TTRPGs are usually characterised by improvisational storytelling and high levels of malleability, I decided to challenge myself before this game began by writing out a broad range of routes that the party could end up taking. The story still remains interactive, largely so, but I think much like when designing the narrative of a videogame, there is a ratio that exists between things players should be able to do and the realistic scope of what you can prepare.

So when writing out the campaign, I made sure that the decisions players made during key moments could be guided either back into the plot direction the players would currently be on, or into a new storyline that could later fold back into the original path or be carried forward to a unique ending.

Perhaps the most important requirement of writing in this manner is finding clever ways of reusing the same locations and characters. Coming up with entirely new content is difficult, time-consuming, and easily has the potential to not be visited by players at all if they simply chose to not visit there. I made sure that a decent number of critical locations in the middle-sections of the various storyline options could be visited for as many reasons as possible.

In the location of Windgap Refuge for example, a battle takes place that will result in the town ending up in the hands of only one of the two belligerent sides. The players might be present to support the defenders, learn of the coming battle and join the attackers, arrive just as the battle is happening and pick a side, use the conflict as cover to steal lost cargo, or turn up shortly after the battle is over to negotiate with the winning side.

The players that I lead through this campaign of course played only a single time, but due to the variety of content and branching paths available they could have easily played again with different characters and find themselves experiencing the content in an entirely new way.

If you want a more technical breakdown of what choices can be made and where they lead, you can view the design document here.