Adventure Architect: Part Three

Giving the game a beginning, middle, and end

Adventure Game Design Journal—Day 57. Nearly two months of work has led me to write the following paragraph in my notebook:

Players will take on the role of a down-on-his-luck cowboy as he stumbles across an old treasure map scrawled with strange symbols. With nothing to lose, and hounded by the law, he sifts through ancient Indian legends, tracks down the skeletal remains of a 300-year-old Franciscan missionary, navigates an underground river, and attempts to avoid the clutches of a mysterious secret society bent on finding the treasure before he does!

I’ve taken all of my ideas about ancient conspiracies, mythical treasures, ghost towns, abandoned mines, hidden Indian villages, and on and on, and condensed them into the above paragraph. Now I need to turn that paragraph into a story with a definitive beginning, middle, and end.

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For the past few weeks, my days and nights have been filled with thoughts of hidden treasures and vast conspiracies. I’ve been working out all of the details of the game’s back-story, and the final results are this: The treasure is an artifact related to the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola, which were first revealed to the Spanish explorers by a Franciscan missionary named Fray Marcos de Niza in the 16th century. The secret society in pursuit of Cibola goes by the name of the Brotherhood of the Hidden Sun, and they have roots stretching as far back as the Crusaders.

(And as an aside, when I talk about vast conspiracies and legendary treasures, I subscribe to the school of thought that says that facts are meaningless—except when they help to embellish something I’ve already made up, of course. So be warned: This game will not be historically accurate, unless you’re inclined to believe the ravings of a 16th century missionary.)

With a general story in mind, and two months worth of notes in hand, I look to see if any of the ideas I’ve jotted down in the past might be a good starting point for the opening scene. A few words jump out at me: Abandoned gold mine. Ghost town. Treasure map. I jot these down at the top of a new page and decide to come back to them later. Next I scratch a few more words on another page: Strange rock formations. Indian legends. Franciscan abbey. Bandits. Train robbery. Jail cell. Ghost stories. Old hermit.

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These are the story elements that seem to be the most fleshed out in my notes. I put the two pages side by side and try to figure out how all of these locations and ideas might come together. Could they all be connected somehow? If I could relate the Indian legends to the treasure, and the treasure to the gold mine, and the gold mine to the town—then the town itself might be important to the hunt for Cibola. And on and on it goes, like a never-ending game of connect the dots.