This is a series that explores Tropes and tries to apply them in RPGs. Have a look here, I wrote over 20 of these so far.

So Sorry for the double feed, something happened when I posted this the 1st time and 1/2 the text was eaten!

One of the things I’ve seen GMs struggle with is campaign secrets and big reveals.

Oh, how we GMs like to be full of secrecy about our pet plots and NPC motivations!

Often, we become overprotective of those secrets don’t we? We hoard them and keep them near. Oh yes! Our preciouses!

We tend to think that by handing secrets in X-Files-thin slices, the unfolding multi-dimensional story will grab our players by the throat and the campaign will culminate in a crescendo of coolness followed by an instant Ferris Bueler’s street party where you get to crowd surf and the whole world basks in your awesomeness…

Hum, no. Chances are you’ll get your players confused and/or impatient and they’ll most likely go try to poke into the undefined parts of your neat plot-lines. Worse yet, they may just ignore it altogether and jump the rails.

It happened to me in a spectacular fashion once.

I was playing a Gurps Fantasy campaign game on a world ruled by dragons, made up of the standard fantasy races.

The plot I presented to the players was that they had to bring down a ruthless Dragon prince who was holding the relatively benign Dragon King and Queen of their kingdom in the castle’s dungeons.

Pretty standard fare huh?

What I failed to tell my players was that the dragons came from a Shadowrun-like Earth, had read The Hobbit and found the whole ‘Smaug’ thing to be quite sensible. In order to live that dream, a bunch of filthy rich dragon billionaires built a STL Arkship, stole a huge pile of Human DNA and left for the stars. They later found a planet and terraformed it to lord over a bunch of fantasy races they had tinkered from all that DNA.

Yeah, I used to go for the real simple stories like that all the time.

My campaign’s main plot was to have the players explore/adventure around the world a bit and then get hit in the face with an honest to goodness alien invasion/Sci-fi vs Fantasy mash up!

When I did my Great Reveal® by describing the crash of an alien spaceship near the player’s campsite, my players’ PCs basically blinked, picked up their campaign gear and left the scene to go explore something else.

So yeah, that didn’t work. I humbly came back with a more traditional storyline, leaving the aliens in orbit while the PCs returned to killing Demon Assassins, Senile Undead Dragons and a Wight named Barry.

So what’s the point of all this and what’s the link with tropes?

Well, I think that you can have secrets and big reveals in your campaign world, as long as it doesn’t send the adventure down a path players refuse to walk.

Three related tropes I discovered that are especially well designed for that:

Tomato Surprise

The resolution of a plot by the sudden revelation of some important detail which has been deliberately hidden from the viewer. Had this detail been made known at the beginning of the story, much or all of the dramatic tension would have been missing from the plot. Usually, it hasn’t been hidden from the “viewpoint” character(s). Sometimes, it has been hidden from one character, so the character will be just as surprised as we are.

This is a trope you can use when you wish to have a campaign-level cliffhanger or a game defining plot-twist.

In the RPG version of the trope, the twist is definitively hidden from the PCs and others but possibly not for some key NPCs.

This is especially interesting when you pull this, successfully, mid-campaign and offer the PCs the choice to pursue the story as if nothing happened or take the twist into account and redirect the story (i.e. Take either the Blue or the Red Pill)

Examples:

• The PCs are serving an aging/sick/senile king/old man that turns out to be a God/Dragon/Demon or to be From the Past/From the Future/their father/the BBEG (this is the Classic, almost Cliché version of the Tomato Surprise)
• The Ultimate Evil that threatens the whole universe turns out to be an innocent 5 year old big eyed little girl, complete with cute animé puppy, whose nightmares become reality and devour whole countries.
• The PCs must recover the Seven Whatever from each kingdoms of Gamecubia to stave off a meteor from crashing into the planet. It turns out that the Whatevers were in fact seals that protected each kingdom from a plague and now everyone is dying. Awwww.
• Two words: The Matrix

My Dragons vs Alien game was an example of a failed application of this trope. For it to have been successful, I would have had to come forth and tell player of the game’s Sci-Fi background and to expect it to become significant later in the campaign.

At the very least I should have planned in advance that the characters might decide to take the other pill.

If you want to pull some really weird crap on your PCs, you may want to explore another trope where the Tomatoes are the actual PCs!

Tomato in a Mirror

Our protagonist is going through a perfectly normal day. Only… something’s wrong. The people around him are acting just a bit off. They keep mentioning a string of words, or are trying to herd him to a certain place.

It looks like the town’s been taken over by the pod people, and our hero’s the only one left. He attempts to either escape and warn the outside world, or find where the invaders are coming from and shut it down. But once he gets there, he discovers the horrifying truth: he’s the fake! A robot, a clone, a ghost, or some other duplicate that forgot he wasn’t the real thing, or was programmed to believe that he was. In an ongoing series, it’ll be a duplicate of one of the main characters. In an anthology, it’ll just be someone who thinks they’re human. Either way, it’s an effective inversion of The Puppet Masters.

This is a trope when you want to make one or all PCs to be something else than what they think they are.

This can be dangerous. If played badly it can change a PC’s core reason of being and totally screw a player’s characterization and possibly ruin the game. Thread carefully.

I beleive that the key to successfully pulling a Tomato in the Mirror reveal is to, once again, give the players to chance to ignore the reveal without major impacts or embrace the plot twist fully!

Another important aspect of this trope is that you must drop subtle hints and sprinkle flashes of the TRUTH so the players start piecing what they are slowly. That’s tricky, but just watch a few hours of Lost or the X-Files and you’ll get the hang of it.

A few examples:

• Your characters are Cylons-equivalent, and get the choice of turning traitor or sticking on the side of the race they were imitating.
• One character is in fact a shapeshifter with amnesia sent in the party as a sleeper agent, however, the trigger to recall it’s mission and lift the amnesia partly failed and now the character gets a highly skilled Jason Bourne character!
• Characters are all Angelic/Fiendish Outsiders sent, memoryless, to the material world in humanoid form to learn the realities of terrestrial life. Later in the campaign, a war between the Celestial and Infernal forces break out and all PCs learn of their true heritage… and get to choose either of the 3 sides.

Finally, here’s one last trope that I used quite successfully once.

Truman Show Plot

Usually a variant on the Tomato In The Mirror, where it turns out that the lead character is in fact the main character on a Reality TV show. Exactly how much of his life is controlled varies: in some cases, every little detail of his life is controlled by the network, while others basically let the main character do whatever he wants, so long as they catch it on camera. It can be a twist ending, or it can be established right at the start of the show.

I pulled a successful version of this trope in my Iron Heroes Campaign.

At one point the players investigated a strange portal found at the bottom of a Sunken Tower and that brought them to a fortress that was sitting right beside a huge force bubble sitting over a ring of mile-high mountains. That was the whole Iron Heroes world… and they had been unwitting prisoners for countless generations.

Their warden were fiends and angels trapped with them, posing as normal people or monsters and such.

I had decided this on a whim mid-campaign and when I revealed that, the face of my dumbstruck players was worth billions!

You should try it…

Here’s one last example:

All characters are in fact trapped in Hell in a fake Fantasy world. They are led to believe that they are adventurers exploring dungeons and killing monsters for loot. In fact, the adventurers are part of the eternal punishment of the damned souls there that get reincarnated in new monsters every day and placed deeper and deeper in the dungeons.

The reveal comes when the PCs find a secret exit (perhaps aided by a Damned one) that reveals that the whole thing is the Infernal equivalent of a reality TV show and the Dungeon was this huge divinely morphic stage!

Imagine the Asmodeus, the Lord of the Nine Hells, siting in the director’s chair, clapping slowly, an enigmatic grin on his face.

Yeah!

Can you come up with other examples of these 3 tropes? Have you played any of them?

P.S. Anyone think what the recipe would be to make a Truman Mirror Tomato Surprise?