Given the relative obscurity of tabletop role-playing games, I have been fortunate enough to be introduced to the genre as early as middle school. A friend of mine invited me to check out D&D after I had mistakenly bought Legend of the Five Rings, 3rd ed. thinking that it was some sort of fantasy novel or fictional encyclopedia. We ended up finding others who played tabletop games in high school and played a lot of D&D 3.5 over those years. Only after college had split the party did I start growing curious of that L5R book I’ve kept untouched in my library for so long.

As a bunch of high-schoolers playing D&D, we spent many campaigns wandering random dungeons, slaying endless waves of monsters in search of more powerful loot. I do not mean this as a critique of my old dungeon masters—they made tabletop gaming so fun that it has become a major component of my free time—but either the eternal will of D&D creator Gary Gygax or our immaturity made our old campaigns more of an action/battle puzzle than a story-driven experience. Hell, it was a great time.

But it did not help me when I decided to pick up GMing L5R. I open up the book and it’s full of pages upon pages of Rokugan’s history, clan relations among the eight different major clans and dozen or so minor clans, and other bits that I passed off as meaningless filler. And one of the three possible classes was a courtier, some politician or diplomatic figure! That was one way to die in a dungeon crawl.

As with most things, however, I was wrong to dismiss intrigue as a way to play an RPG. I promise that with a prepared GM and some captivated players, an intrigue campaign can have the thrill, affection, suspense, wonder, hatred, and betrayal rivaling a blockbuster movie or open-world video game. Intrigue is now the only way I run my games. So for those of you who are as clueless as I was and want to figure out how to create an intrigue-heavy game, here are some considerations I have picked up along the way:

Establish preferences. This is the golden rule to not only intrigue games but to any tabletop RPG campaign you wish to establish. Make sure your players actually want to play the type of game you are running. Everyone has different tastes and preferences and that means that an intrigue game might not be for them. Don’t be sure that you will win everyone over if your GMing ability is good enough or if you put enough time perfecting your story. Have a time to meet up and discuss what you all want to do. And make sure to spell out what is on the table. Give an idea of what you think certain classes or groups should act with maybe a couple pop culture references as examples. A lot about intrigue lends itself to playstyles of role-playing what a character would do over performing the mechanically optimal action, which can be very frustrating for some. If you know your group loves maximizing their +1 damage bonuses but hate talking (nicely) to NPCs, maybe rethink that 3 year intrigue campaign.

Themes. It is viable to play an entirely sandbox experience where the universe is in equilibrium and every corner has its own ecosystem with its own sets of local problems. Eh, maybe I’m old fashioned or lack the creativity but I have found that a really—ahem—intriguing story has a universe that’s tied around a theme. A brewing galactic civil war? A wandering clan’s diaspora? Each quest will be unique to the questgiver and the location but it is nice to see many of them connect to the same global issues that stricken your setting.

The dynamic world. A story-driven game requires a living world. Tying back to themes, every quest or adventure will be a reflection of needs and wills of the NPCs in your world. How is it related to the local needs of the questgiver? How might it be related to the global narrative of your setting? Does the quest naturally follow into a larger arc tackling the problems of the region? A good story will be more than just one session of slaying the goblins and saving the village from attacks. A good story is multilayered. That village may be chronically undermanned and defenseless… because the village depended on the protection from their lord’s armies… who conscripted all of their strongest villagers but left the village to die to the greenskin hordes… for the general to usurp power through fear of invasion. A humble request can unravel an intricate storyline that adds depth to your setting.

Carve depth in NPCs. A jaw-dropping intrigue game is not possible without its share of multilayered characters the party comes across. Every NPC, from the most powerful ruler to the most mundane guard, should have some personality. This is easier than it sounds; you can find a list of personality traits all over the web and just assign an arbitrary trait or two to them as they are generated. If an NPC becomes an important character to the party—and I mean become, not that you planned it—then start really fleshing out the character. Provide him or her a backstory that may be revealed over time and think about evolving the character’s personality or opinion of the party the more he or she becomes a persistent entity. A really juicy backstab is a friendship built over many sessions, not a helper that attacks them before the end of their introductory session.

Establish cultural norms. Especially if a norm in the setting seems counterintuitive to the players—removing armor and weapons in a city—it is important to reinforce conformity to those norms. It is supposed to feel… normal. Reward players who follow those norms with friendlier NPC interactions. It is a wonderful immersive experience when players play to the societal standards of the world and get a sense of what is safe and what isn’t. They really feel like they understand the society they live in. The drama comes when those assumptions of safety are broken. Just be wary, setting up these norms takes a long time, so don’t break them until they become solidly engrained in the setting. You can’t blame the players for not removing their weapons when entering a home if they keep getting ambushed afterwards.

Adapt to the players.* It may be fun to plan out an elaborate mapping where X event must lead players to Y location which activates Z trigger but no one will have fun being pushed into your Rube Goldberg machine. The players must decide what they are going to do. This includes both their desired goals and their approach to doing it. All you need is a feel for your antagonists—their goals, personality, and competence—and possibly some potential avenues those antagonists can influence your players’ interactions with the world. That empty space between the opportunity and the resolution is an empty space where your party can take the initiative and navigate through the complex web of connections they have at their disposal.

Illusion of Transparency.* Shamelessly stolen from Peter McIntyre’s Cognitive Toolkit which you can find here, this concept is why players never seem to find those important clues or read your NPC’s intentions. As a GM, that moment when the party enters a new area is when your brain rushes together a vibrant portrait of the scratching of hardwood floors on bare feet, the lights dimming behind dull white rice paper walls, and the faint smell of green tea as the players step into a samurai lord’s estate. You can see every petal of the vased flowers and every pebble in the adjacent rock garden but as you try to describe your own vivid imagination, you can barely mention that Lord Shimazu’s estate is fairly regal. And the worst issue is not even realizing the ambiguity of the narration. The solution: recognize that the players will think differently from you and only take your literal description for granted as the image the players can conjure. One can either choose to make their descriptions longer or leave them as blank space and fill them in as the party asks about it. Just make a particular detail very clear if you wish to hide specific clues in the location.

*I will write about positive and negative space in running a game in a later post.

Let them metagame: It is incredibly tempting to stop a player from using out-of-game knowledge to reach a conclusion their character may not necessarily be able to ascertain. It may seem strange to let players use prior knowledge to navigate through a game based around public and hidden social dynamics. Just take a deep breath and hear me out. Much in the same way railroads are often not fun, GM policing is not either. It can get very frustrating contributing to the problem solving and discussion and being constantly interrupted by a GM for using information they may have read about on a certain kingdom or profession. There are players who are self-policing and try their best to limit their comments to only character knowledge and that is great. But for the others, their metagaming is harmless. Navigating a complex intrigue game through a collective imagination is already difficult and the players have a lot of fun figuring out the connections steadily hinted at them. Of course, at a certain point the metagame can become borderline cheating but try to draw the line there and not every time a piece of information may not befit the character.

If there are any other major considerations I have missed, I will update this post with more topics. Intrigue campaigns are what I like to do so I’ll to use this post as a framework for more in-depth discussion on specific aspects of the intrigue campaign.