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Last time we learned about building a story around your
characters and adding sub-plots into the story to make them more
engaging and interesting. If you’ll recall, our heroes Jak
Nightwing and his co-pilot Rajbacca got coerced into helping the
Empire locate Jak’s old Rebel squadron. What’s more, we learned
that Rajbacca might have set up the whole thing to get the
bounty on Jak.
The story sounds like it’s off to a decent start,
but we’re going to see if we can develop it some through the use
of an inciting incident and maybe a MacGuffin to drive the
story.
An inciting incident is the event that gets the
story rolling. Every story, movie, book and comic has one.
You’re probably using them in your campaigns without even
thinking about it. In “A New Hope”, the inciting incident
occurs when Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer overtakes the Tantive
IV, which forces Princess Leia to send the droids down to
Tattooine. In “The Empire Strikes Back”, the Empire sends
thousands of Probe Droids out into the galaxy, leading them to
find the Rebellions hidden outpost on Hoth. My personal
favorite inciting incident is in “The Big Lebowski” when the
Chinaman pees on The Dude’s rug. But that has nothing to do
with Star Wars, so we’ll move on.
If we wanted to try and start the current Jak
Nightwing adventure, we could start it easily with a message
over the holo-net requesting his services. Or we could have him
go into an exotic pub on some backwater planet looking for work,
and get in a tussle with strange creatures. Maybe he owes
someone a favor and takes this job from a mystery client. Any
device can be used to kick-start the adventure.
One of my favorite techniques
is to start stories in medias res. In medias res is a Latin
phrase meaning, “in the middle of things.” You can have your
hero begin this new campaign in the middle of an epic space
battle that he may or may not know the reason for. You can
start an adventure by telling your players, “You’re in a bar on
Coruscant and you hear blaster fire uncomfortably close.” Even
though the situation may not offer a nice smooth introduction,
it serves as an exciting inciting incident because your players
have to figure out what is going on and why. The space battle
at the beginning of “A New Hope” is a great example of this
technique.
Yet another storytelling
technique that can be used as an inciting incident is to
introduce a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is an object that is used as
a goal for the characters to retrieve. Think of every Indiana
Jones movie. Right at the beginning of each film, Indie is
given an object to retrieve by the end of the film. You can do
the same thing with your characters.
As an interesting aside,
Alfred Hitchcock often used the device in his films and
popularized the term, MacGuffin. When asked what it meant he
described the following scene: A man gets on a train with a
cage covered in a sheet and sits down with it in his lap. The
man next to him asks what’s in the cage. The first man says,
“It’s a MacGuffin.” The second man asks, “What’s a MacGuffin?”
The first replies, “It’s used to hunt Australian Lions.” The
second says, “But there are no lions in Australia.” The first
man shrugs and says, “Well, I guess it’s no MacGuffin.”
In other words, the traveler
was using the word MacGuffin to politely say, “None of your damn
business.” For Hitchcock, MacGuffin was a meaningless term for
what he viewed as a meaningless object, what mattered to him
wasn’t the object, but the adventure that the characters had
along the way trying to retrieve it. The MacGuffin you provide
for your players doesn’t have to be pointless, however. It can
be something deeply important to a character such as a data file
with clues to their family history, or a new hyperdrive for
their ship. You can have them search for an old Jedi Holocron,
a missing person, a lost city of gold, or just their stolen
Steltek Gun. Either way, the MacGuffin can be used to get an
adventure rolling and keep it focused.
For the campaign I have in
mind for Jak Nightwing and Rajbacca, I think I’m going to start
in medias res. When Jak sits down and gets his dice situated,
I’ll start with the lines, “You’re on the run. You’re in an
open-air market on Malestair. The familiar sounds of stun
blasts explode in the air around you. You’re not sure who is
after you, but at least they’re not trying to kill you… yet.”
A MacGuffin isn’t out of the
question, though. It can be introduced anytime, as we’ll see in
the next article, which will cover turning points and the
importance of outlining. Stay tuned.
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