Onion Plots, An Alternative to Linear Narratives For Game Masters

Every game master knows the pain of players wandering off into the weeds, and away from the plot they had ready. The challenge in this instance is respecting your players' autonomy to go where they want and to explore the world in their own way, while also trying to get them to actually go toward the destination and story you have prepared for them. And no matter how artfully you push, players can feel like they're being railroaded and just driven along the preset path without any choice when you start manipulating things from behind the scenes.

Something that can often help in this instance is to think of your plot not in terms of a line between A and B, but rather as if it were layers of an onion. It doesn't matter where your players start peeling at the onion, because any point of entry can progress them closer to the goal.

Ogres are optional.

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What is an Onion Plot, And How Does It Work?

When most of us think of plot in an RPG, we tend to think in terms of straight lines. The party fights goblins in encounter A, this leads them to go up road B to the caverns, and then to go into cave C to slay the leader and rescue the hostages. If they deviate from this path (the party ignores the goblins and keeps moving, they save the town but elect not to go up to the caverns, or to go a different route than the one you prepared, etc.) it can throw you for a loop as a GM.

Instead of thinking of the game in branching paths, like you get in video games and other linear narratives, you need to think of your game in terms of layers instead.

It's just one mask atop another mask.

So, let's take the following campaign premise. The central thrust of this arc is the goblin war chief is raiding surrounding towns. However, the chief is doing this at the behest of a local nobleman in order to justify a clamp down from the duke who wants to expand his military presence. The goblins provide destruction, take hostages, steal things, etc., and this gives the duke the political leverage to recruit, train, and deploy more of his own men across the region. An action that, in other circumstances, would be highly suspicious. Once the duke has an iron fist across the region his plan is to consolidate power, and to draw more allies to him. He then plans to repeat this success with other monstrous allies, growing his forces exponentially until his personal army rivals the king's, allowing him to seize power.

That's the whole onion, and your players are going to start on the outermost rim of it. The actions they take, or don't take, is what determines how they get to the next layer.

Say they defend the town from goblin attack, because they're in the town and it was at least partially self-defense. If they track the goblins back and kill the warchief in the caverns, so much the better, that will end the threat entirely. If they don't do that, word will spread back to the chief about the stiff resistance from one particular village. So now goblin forces will need to be drawn away from other towns and raids, bringing the fight to the party. This will eventually force the party to fight for their lives, as even escaping may be impossible. In either case, the goblin threat will be dealt with, and the party will have thrown a spanner into the duke's plans.

Now you've entered the second layer. The duke wants to expand control over the area, but with his goblin allies defeated he has to now take another tack. Perhaps he approaches the party to try to recruit them to his army. If the party agrees, you now have the ability to send them out to "problem" areas that aren't in the duke's hair, hoping they are killed so his plans can continue. Perhaps the "rebellion" they are putting down informs them of the knights who came, executing dissidents and hanging so-called traitors without authority, thus showing the duke's hand early. Perhaps young men were being press-ganged into the army, and the townsfolk are resisting what is basically the kidnapping of their young men. If the party refuses the duke's offer, then the nobleman can send his own men disguised as bandits to try to assassinate the party and eliminate them that way. Either way, the party faces danger, and in the end will become a much larger thorn in the duke's side.

And so on, and so forth.

Focus on The Goals Instead of The Methods

This is something I've said before, but it bears serious repeating. Focus on what you want the party to do, rather than how you want them to do it. If you create the scenario, just roll with what actions the PCs take, keeping the big picture in mind.

Trust me, it's ALL connected!

The major advantage of thinking of your plot in terms of layers, rather than in terms of lines, is that it stops you from getting overly hung up on how you want the PCs to accomplish their goals. If they want to fight the mercenary band of orc raiders, cool, throw down in a field and call it a day! If they want to wage a campaign of assassination and poisoning, taking the orcs out one by one, that gets the job done, too. Maybe they want to negotiate with the orc leaders and become their new paymasters, giving them a fair wage and benefits to staff the abandoned fortress the party recently acquired. If that's within the sensible nature of the leaders of the band, there's no reason that couldn't work... and if you want to throw in a complication like the mercenaries' mates and children are being held hostage by a cult forcing them to fight, now the party can save the children, defeat the cult that was going to be the next big enemy early, and make a slew of new allies in the process!

If you think of your plot in terms of layers of complication that are fluid, and able to respond and change to fit what your party does, it allows you to give players that freedom and agency, while also maintaining some kind of structure for the story you're trying to run. Because you may not know how the party is going to defeat a given challenge, but whatever they do is going to cause ripples, and that will peel back the layers as they go.

Additional Reading

I didn't have any organic way to work in some links for my other articles and projects, but folks who liked this article should definitely check out the following.

- The Onion of Secrets (A Character Concept With Layers): This unusual character concept piece is the one that indirectly inspired this Monday's post. As such, I figured those who want to make characters who keep a lot of different secrets going might enjoy it... applicable to PCs and NPCs alike!

- Critical Hits: The Curse of Sapphire Lake: With the spooky season upon us, I thought I'd share this module of mine for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. It's been struggling to get over that Copper metal status, so check it out... especially since it offers your players multiple endings depending on the actions they take!

- 100 Encounters in a Fey Forest: A system-neutral list of potential incidents, this is always a good one to keep up your sleeve if you want your players to stay on their toes while they're traveling through fey territory.

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