Quest

These are design notes. The game Errantry is based on them.

A quest is typically episodic.

In each episode, the hero(es) encounter(s) someone or something which offers either assistance, an obstacle, or a diversion. By courage and perseverence and the help of well-wishers, the questers eventually attain their goal. They must then usually return home in order for the quest to be complete, and overcome a situation which has developed in their absence, using the new resources they have gained on the journey.

An episode has the following elements:

Location (Where)
Encounter (Who) - includes beasts
Stakes (What)
Approach (How)

There is generally a When as well. Why? You’re on a quest. That’s always why.

So for example:

In the noontide of the day, Sir Everick the Questatious encounters a hermit while riding through the Forest of Things To Encounter. He greets the hermit courteously and tells of his quest. The hermit offers his aid; he knows of a legend regarding the artefact Sir Everick seeks…

Ideas Dump

Choosing Elements

Should be playable solo, not rely on a GM.

Possible mechanisms include:

Chinese menu (one from each column), player choice.
Playing card draw.
Dice - either selecting by number or having a default number for a stage of the quest and modifying to either side by Fudge dice.

The elements are not independant variables. You are unlikely to meet a bishop in the forest or a hermit in the city. So once you have decided where, that affects who. You will not fight a bishop (usually) but you will almost certainly fight a fellow knight unless you already know him as a friend.

Time of day is generally “colour” rather than an essential element which affects anything.

Location is more likely to be a forest (or wilderness) than anywhere else. Second most likely is an isolated castle, then town, city, village. (Villages aren’t very interesting in chivalric terms, there’s nothing useful there.)

Encounters are most likely to be trials of arms against other knights, monsters, possibly bandits. Then meetings with potential helpers (trial of courtesie?).

Three stats: Arms, Courtesie and Faith? Trials of all three? Is Honour another one or does it fold into those? Or is it a “currency” that you win/lose?

Player choice how you respond to a given encounter? Or by rules? In practice, there were strict rules about how a knight responded to a given encounter (lady or churchman: courtesy; knight or beast: violence; peasant: opportunity for resupply).

In the source material, peasants are more or less invisible; they could be treated as occasional scenery.

Stakes/outcomes

Outcome of an encounter can be to delay the quest, to divert the quest, or to advance the quest. Some kind of track for how far you are from achieving the quest?

A new obligation may come out of an encounter; this may end up as a sub-quest.

Obligations: gratitude, protection, service…

How discharged?

Quest tokens (like plot coupons)? How earned?

A scene/encounter may have as outcome:

Gain an obligation
Discharge an obligation
Gain a quest token (by discharging obligation?)
Lose a quest token (and gain the obligation to regain it)
Modify your stats
You need help (a kind of obligation?)

Quest Objects

Possible quest objects include:

Maguffin (i.e. it doesn’t matter what, just a thingy) - Well at the World’s End
Someone imprisoned, a “damsel in distress” typically
True Love (Twwoo wuuuv…)
Knowledge of one’s origins (e.g. Amadis of Gaul)
Forgiveness, redemption, atonement or penance for one’s past actions - quest as pilgrimage
The safety of one’s home and kin (e.g. Lord of the Rings)
One’s birthright as a ruler/proof of one’s worthiness to rule (e.g. Jason)
Revenge

The gaining of a Maguffin is sometimes part of one of the other objects, e.g. Jason’s Golden Fleece.

Encounters

Pas d’Armes - holding the bridge, etc. against all comers. The holder is the tenan, the challenger the venan (“comer”).

Supporting characters often won’t have personal names, or they won’t be known upfront. For example, the Maiden of the Four Friths is not called Alianora until quite late in the Well at the World’s End.

Name generator: The X of the [Y] Z. The Knight of the High Tower, the Maiden of the Dark Sorrow, the Hermit of the Forest of Evening…

Characters

For Errantry game, perhaps all PCs are knights (or warrior princesses)?

Hangers-on such as men at arms, jongleurs, hermits, squires, horses, hounds and what have you are like “NPCs” but are played by the player - who is therefore playing a troupe, potentially?

Return

If you encounter the same kind of character again you should be able to decide that it’s the same person you met before (assuming you didn’t kill them).

On you way home you will probably revisit at least some of the same locations - but should be able to avoid some or go different ways. What you did there before will have consequences.

Final denouement takes place on your return home - how have things changed there? How have you changed? What happens as a consequence?

Game Flow

Create your character, with a name and (optionally) a designation - you can add the designation later in the adventure. Distribute points among Arms, Courtesie and Faith (or whatever).
Decide on the object of your quest. Describe how you came to hear of it or be sent on it. This in itself will involve a scene.
Does your quest include returning home?
Based on how hard you think the quest should be, designate a number of “quest points” (or could be other way around - randomly generate a number of quest points, this determines how hard the quest is and is the second step).
Scene of leaving home. Openly or in secret? In honour or dishonour? Who gives you what to take with you, or what do you take?
Series of encounters. If you have not already done so in the leaving home scene, at least one of the early ones should involve receiving assistance or a gift of some kind. (Or the number of gifts related to the number of quest points? Gift = quest point/token? First one is free? Or comes by trial of courtesie?)
Each encounter has an outcome as above.
After sufficient encounters you have earned enough quest tokens to fulfil your quest. Scene in which you do so, making use of all the tokens.
If you are to return home, scenes along the way in which you re-encounter earlier helpers/enemies and deal with them in accordance with your new status. Culminating scene at home.

Encounter Generator Braindump

3 types of setting:

cultivated land
forest
wilderness

3 possible cross-types:

town
castle
unpopulated

Wilderness vs town is a ‘draw again’ or unpopulated?

Draw 2x court cards to get 3×3 matrix. This also gives you 2 suits to use later.

Draw 2x non-court cards to get percentile result. Gives you another 2 suits.

Percentiles = who/what you encounter. Except that you will encounter different people/things in the 8/9 possible settings.

The 4 suits, arranged in order of drawing, give 256 possible combinations. These would be the specifics of the characters/beasts encountered (abilities, secrets etc.)

This gives over 230,000 possible encounter characters, in theory, though it will actually be less than that because some types should be more common than others.

But the percentiles can be used for several different things in different columns - 100 rows with multiple columns.

Want to make certain things more likely at different points - towns and castles are more likely at start of quest, forests in middle, wilderness at furthest point; some correlation of character strength to how long the PCs have been building up advances. Add total XP of the party to the percentile draw?

Even just drawing 2x non-court cards gives percentile plus 16 possible suit combos = 1600 possibilities.

Types of Character

Churchman: Hermit (in forest/wilderness), Friar (anywhere), Monk (towns), Priest (towns/castles), Bishop (towns). Also Nun, Abbess and Prioress (perhaps; actual medieval nuns were enclosed, usually, but Chaucer has at least one and probably two on the Canterbury pilgrimage). Key Pool: Piety.
Noble: Squire, Knight, Warrior Maiden/Princess. Key Pools: Valour and Courtesie.
Commoner: Man-at-Arms, Serjeant-at-Arms, Troubadour, Brave Damsel. Key Pools: Valour and Courtesie.
Magician: Sorceror, Sorceress, Enchanter, Enchantress, Wizard, Witch. Key Pool: Piety.
Beast: Natural Beast, Talking Beast, Unnatural Beast (made up of several natural beasts), Heraldic Beast, Monster (Ogre, Giant etc.). All should be able to talk or not. Key Pool: Valour.
Spirit: Angel, Djinn, Imp, Hobgoblin, Woodwight etc. Key Pool: Piety, perhaps Courtesie.

Ability to “set the dial” for supernaturalness? Could be interesting to implement.

Some characters will occur in groups, e.g. lord and lady; pack of wolves; company of troops, perhaps accompanying a knight; party of knights, etc.

What A Character Has

Encounter characters will have:

Abilities at varying levels - should increase as the XP increases.
Pools - probably fairly minimal
Secrets - related to their place in life
Weapons and Armour - likewise
Bits of the puzzle/quest tokens (can we call these “achievements” or “gifts” or something?) which the questers get if they lose
Likely obligations which they can impose if they win.

Ideally, all of these should be generatable from a couple of card draws and lookup on no more than a couple of tables. You don’t want it to take half an hour to set up each encounter, only to not use most of the material anyway.

Other Material

“The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability… “ - Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 33.