 Welcome to MAPCRO, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle, and today we are going to be talking about the shapes of adventures. I think I have identified three different shapes for adventures, and what they're good for, what they do differently, and uniquely better than one another. These are, to say, the linear adventure, the arborescent adventure, and the rhizomatic adventure. Linear is like a line, arborescent is like a tree. It's got that root word arbor in it, so it branches out and then it trunks back in. And then a rhizomatic adventure is like a sandbox. It's basically anything where player choice is at an abundance. In the tabletop RPG space, when one starts to talk about linear adventures, the term railroad comes up. And these two terms are often used interchangeably, but I would like to try to separate these two terms. In a somewhat recent stream, Matt Colville kind of delineated the two very cleanly. Railroading is a kind of toxic play culture. It is when the GM cannot allow players to engage with the mechanics of the game to achieve a plausible result from it, because that is not how they imagined the story going. Imagine you are playing your favorite fantasy role-playing game and your players waddle on up to the dungeon, and they realize that the dragon is on the other side of this door. So they just, one of them casts a spell to shape stone and make a hole through, and then they just kind of bust in there and circumvent all of the amazing traps and monsters and encounters and treasures in that dungeon. And then they all die. Well, you can see how a game master would want to protect their players from those decisions, and they would just say something like, your spell doesn't work, or you get attacked by orcs, or something, anything they can think of to keep that spell from going off and breaking the sequence that was intended by the game master. Yes, that might be linear design, but that's not the problem here. The problem is that it denies the player their agency according to the contract of the rules. And frankly, it's not always a bad thing. I mean, in the stated example that I've given, I think it's perfectly appropriate for especially a new game master to say like, hey, I gotta be honest, if you guys do that, I have no idea what we're gonna do. This is gonna be over in a half hour, and I don't know if that's gonna be very fun. If you're okay with that, we can keep going. Like, check in with people out of character. Not everything has to be in game consequences. Game masters are people and players too, and they have a voice in how this goes. And if you're just honest about it and honest about your anxieties and honest about your hopes for the evening, you can avoid the grossness of railroading. Linear design is really an intentional focus on a narrow possibility space. Many of the most famous one-shot dungeons are linear design. Even though the space within the dungeon might have all of these branching paths and loops, the space might be a-linear, but the adventure itself is very linear. You go into the dungeon, you beat the boss, and you win. That's it. That's a straight line from beginning middle to end. Infamous old modules like White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors are very linear adventures, and in fact, that's why people play them. That's why people talk about them. You can always count on certain things happening at certain points in the adventure. Those iconic moments and images from those adventures is what kinda clues you into the fact that they're fairly linear. They are dependable for giving you those moments anytime you play it. And on the subject of famous dungeons, most of the dungeons in the 3D Zelda games are incredibly linear. Unless you're like clipping out of bounds to sequence break like a speedrunner or something, you're basically going to go through that dungeon in the same order as every other player. Many of these big hardback adventure modules that we see in Barnes & Nobles today are what I would call an arborescent adventure. Many of them start out no matter what in basically the same spot, oftentimes reading some box text to get the context and the adventure going. But once things are started, you have what are called branching paths. That is, different ways to explore the adventure and the game space. And some of these things might be critical to the main story and some of them might be side quests, but it is up to the players to kind of determine their route amongst this fruitful but intentional branching path space. But a little bit past the midway point, these side quests start to disappear and all clues begin to lead to the final confrontation. The adventure space trunks back down to the end boss. The Curse of Strahd Adventure Path is a perfect example of this. There are lots of things to do in Barovia, but eventually all paths lead to a final confrontation with the evil vampire at the end. The key to identifying an arborescent adventure is not just the branching paths, but also there's a basic determined order in which these paths are supposed to be taken. Oftentimes they are gated or suggested by level requirements or information that doesn't actually get introduced until certain things fall into place and PCs are introduced or mini bosses slain. There are two different shapes that arborescent campaigns can take. One is the hourglass or bottleneck shape. This structure expresses itself in the Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure for 5e. There are several different towns that you can begin your adventure in and then everything narrows to a specific event and then the possibility space opens up again as the players choose how to react in the new world state. And then there is the diamond or what Mike Shea calls the yam shaped adventure, which we've already discussed, but you can also put several different yam shaped adventures back to back and this is basically how you get organized play. The Pathfinder Society and the Adventurer's League are all modules that have beginning and end points that are predetermined but how you get there there are several paths to, and they always converge before the next adventure starts. Finally we land on the Rhizomatic adventure. I'm borrowing this term from philosophy, specifically from a book called A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Gattari. The authors seize upon the Rhizome as a metaphor for non-hierarchical structures. It's a platform like bamboo or ginger. Note from them they say a Rhizome has no beginning or end. It is always in the middle between things, interbeing, intermezzo. Rhizomatic adventures often take the forms of hexcrawls or city crawls. It is a place that doesn't necessarily have a clear beginning or a clear goal. It is all determined by the players interacting with the world and dealing with the consequences and factions within that world. A Rhizomatic game might refer to what is commonly known as a Sandbox game. In these kinds of games there is no game without player decision. The story is whatever the players do. And this can be a challenging thing both for players who might be used to having kind of more tightly constructed plots or investigations and it can also be a daunting thing for a GM who basically feels like they have to create the whole world before they even start. It's also important to recognize that arborescent structures can arise in Rhizomatic games. Think of Breath of the Wild. It's basically it has a starting point and then you can do kind of whatever but then we have these punctuated moments of arborescence. We have these shrines and the divine beasts and the game does this to give you these poignant moments of focus. These curated moments that act as a break from all of the overwhelming freedom of the game world. The whole reason I'm doing this and applying terms from philosophy and art to game design is so that we can have a more fruitful and meaningful discussion than is often had with the established nomenclature. One of the things I hope I've demonstrated today is that it's not about Rhizomatic gaming being better than arborescent gaming and linear's the worst of all. No, no, it is that each of these structures is particularly well suited for a different kind of gaming experience and storytelling at the table. Ooh, okay. Alright, I think that does it for this episode. If you heard something useful or interesting, maybe leave me a like. Maybe leave me a comment for things you would like me to make a video on in the future. Maybe head on over to the Discord server and continue the conversation over there and maybe just subscribe to the channel and see more videos from me and maybe I'll see you on the old roads. Until next time, farewell.