Transmissions, Plotmaps, and Prep

The amount I like Technoir isn’t really a surprise if you’ve seen my previous posting or heard me talk about my hack of the game. It’s a game full of neat ideas and mechanics I really want to play with. The biggest thing I’m finding I’m stealing most of all though, is Transmissions and the Plot Map.

Look, I would have linked to my Technoir posts but I haven’t ported them over to the new site yet.

So, with that we’ll start with Transmissions. Quoting the now-offline post…

Transmissions in Technoir are the game’s version of an Adventure module. Instead of it being fully written out though, it’s a table of 36 entries, 6 categories of 6 items each… The 6 categories in Technoir are Connections, Events, Factions, Locations, Objects, and Threats. You use these to seed your mission and add nodes to the map as the players find clues and talk to their Connections. These represent the part of the city or region that you’ll be exploring in, the major players, and major features of the area. You will not use everything on a given Transmission for a single mission.

Technoir uses a sort of procedural generation to set up a mission, which means that no two play throughs of the same Transmission will be the same. To start, you roll up 3 items, then connect them to each other to make a plot map. When I was first going through this stuff, I made a mockup of a mission. I was using the Kilimanjaro Ring transmission that’s included with the Technoir book, and got the entries: Beanstalk Bombing, The Lifesavers (a group of medics who rush into dangerous situations, mainly volunteers), and the CZ Identity Card.

So, connect them, the Lifesavers were harmed by the blast, but CZ ID belonged to a Lifesaver member, and was used to commit the bombing. Immediately we can go “oh, was someone in the Lifesavers responsible? Was their ID swiped?” I don’t know! But it was a good start, and I could spin off it through play.

I adopted this system for my Pathfinder game this week. Well, at least my prep. During the time between sessions, I took out a notebook and made a grid, so I could fill it in during times I was watching TV. Once I filled the grid, I ported it to my Obsidian prep document for my campaign, made a couple tweaks, and was happy with it. Then, I took note of a few things that really inspired me when I was making the list (which I’ll share later). For part of it, I pulled up the Pathfinder 2e Bestiary to find humanoids around level 5, and found the Demonologist, which went great, and I made a note of that. That became the seed for this mission.

I’ll share my starting image first, then my grid.

And here’s my table.

So the main plot is something is going on at this casino. The crown is a cursed item that drains luck, which means that like, if any of the PCs gamble, the House will oppose the flat Luck Check with a +5 modifier. The House wins just a bit more than other casinos might, but it makes it weirdly addicting. Hooray, forcing Will saves.

So, I used this method to give myself a solid base to work from, and then I branched out to a bunch of cool ideas. I know a bunch of locations at the casino, and now I have some encounter ideas I can pull from. If I really want the chips to fall where they may, I’ll use the table more actively during the game, rather than in my prep phase.

I had a fake Siegfried and Roy group on the Threats list, but I figured I can just rope them into the Loose Animals event. I think they were called Siggurd and Joy, because I’m not very clever.

The way it works in Technoir is that you would roll the table when the party investigates a scene or something happens that changes the course of the story, or you need the next clue, or hell, if they’re stuck. Normally the plot map is always visible so they can track the relationships once they know them. Like, for example, if I rolled Loose Animals, I’d need to figure out how it’s roped in. Is it caused by the demon appearance and they can sense it? Did the dark magics spook them? Does the crown have a weird effect on animals? Is the Casino lousy with upkeep and they broke out? Were they abused by casino staff or civilians? So on and so forth.

The Transmission system is so good for someone like me who thinks in these huge broad strokes, that it lets me go “well I like these things here”. I can make the connections up easier on the fly than I can in prep, so with this, I get a bit of both. Inspiration for random things and how things can go off the rails, and enough rails for me to get a good strong central plot out of to set everything up. Highly recommend it.