The Glendale Hotel - Star Master Log: Worldbuilding Through Improv

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Jeff rambles on about Episode Five, “The Glendale Hotel” diving into the chaos, character moments, and improvisation that shaped the story.

He covers:

• How much improvisation is in a typical episode versus this one

• Worldbuilding, and how he approaches it

• The need to lay down plot hooks, even if you don't know where they will go

• Character actions with real consequences that shape the game

New Star Master's Logs drop every other Tuesday, bridging the gap between our main adventure episodes.

• Show Transcript

  [00:00:00] Hey everyone, star Master Jeff here. Back with my special bonus series where I talk about how I plan the Adventure Cast campaign available exclusively for our Patreon listeners. In this debrief, I'm pulling back the curtain on episode five, the Glendale Hotel. I'll be going over what was planned, what surprised me, and exactly how much improvising I'm doing behind the screen.

  If you're into GM ing world building, or just curious about how the story takes shape, this one's for you. So this episode starts out with a bang. The characters leave the methane switching station after their success, one of their first big successes at the end of episode four, and you immediately see that scapegoat is taking off to the north side of the city.

  The characters had to reluctantly leave the scapegoat behind, hoping that they could pick up Dr. Voss, go back to the scapegoat, and hopefully had healed [00:01:00] up enough to turn the tables on the guardians of the work who were trying to break in. What actually happened was they left the scapegoat, they talked to Voss, they had to go to the switching station, and that was just too much time and they never went back and checked up on their ship.

  So as they're leaving the switching station, not only is it torrential, disgusting, smelly methane rain. Just pouring down on them from the skies of Waa, but their ship is now gone in the hands of the Guardians of the great work. This was a really cool moment because it showed a real world consequence for an action they had taken earlier.

  Yes, maybe they wouldn't have been able to survive that fight, but they could have tried to turn the tables in some other way. They could have went back sooner. There's really a lot of different things they could have done, but the thing they chose to do was li Low and hope for the best. Unfortunately for them, that didn't really work out.

  So the campaign takes a bit of a divergence here. They thought they were gonna be leaving waa. [00:02:00] Basically this episode, they thought, Hey, we did the methane switching station, which go pick up Dr. Olavo and leave this place forever. And honestly, I thought that might be possible too. Two episodes ago. I was like, oh, well FISA might just be like a pit stop.

  They talked to Dr. Larvas. This methane switching station thing that she wants done and they leave. But because they decided not to go back or to protect their ship, their ship is now in the hands of the guardians of the great work. And so their stay on WAA is gonna be a little bit longer than they wanted, which is actually pretty cool because for this episode, we dive into the history of Wolffia and I have to say.

  This is the first episode where everything is completely sandbox. It's a lot of improv on my part. Of course, to sort of talk about that a little bit, the way that I normally run a game is I come up with a loose set of goals that I wanna accomplish for that night, and I will usually write a few [00:03:00] story beats around those goals.

  For example, episode three, I knew that those two guardians of the great work were gonna come and ask them for taxes, and it may or may not turn into a fight. I knew that they would talk to Dr. Voss either in episodes three or four, and get the mission to go to the methane switching station and recover it for her.

  So just using those like loose story beats, I form an adventure and everything else is, we're winging it for a nice adventure. I didn't know what was gonna happen. I have a very clear idea of WAA as a world and as a city. I have a lot of notes on it. I know how the guardians of the great work came to power and how they operate.

  I know about their fascistic society. I know about how the oligarchy crumbled this world. So I was very well prepared for an episode of this type. The first thing that kind of happens is they go back and they talk to Dr. Olavo and you know, she doesn't have a ship for them. They need to recover their own ship, et cetera, et cetera, and then they ask her about wa FISA itself and about [00:04:00] Black Harbor.

  This is where I get a little bit info dumpy, and it's not really the way that I wanted to convey this information to the players. In fact, I don't really care if they ever find out about what happened on Wolffia. I wrote a little bit of backstory about Wolffia, just so I can understand how the world should operate, but I'm more than happy to tell them about it if they ask.

  They and you, the listener, learn a little bit about Black Harbor Waa and kind of what happened here and what caused things to crumble. They have a long walk to the Black Harbor and it's torrential rain, and Dr. Voss still refuses to let them in. They have to retrieve the ship and then come pick her up that she only way that she's willing to leave.

  She mentions the Glendale Hotel. They think that's a great idea. It's about a day's walk away so they can start moving in the direction of Black Harbor and then bed down there for the night. Glendale Hotel pulled that one outta my butt, uh, only because they were thinking about needing a place to sleep.

  I didn't know if they were gonna actually end up there. I didn't know where they were gonna go, what they were gonna do. So from there on out, it was all just flying by the seat of my [00:05:00] pants, the Glendale Hotel. I wanted it to feel lived in. I wanted it to feel like a monolithic structure that people have camped in and that a lot of history has happened to.

  So the monofilament wire that trap. Maybe an alarm system, whatever it was supposed to be. They never really get too deep into figuring that out. And the broken down elevator, the stairs, the, you know, each floor being, you know, empty. No one really wants to live in this hotel. It's not one of the better places that you could live as a person.

  But I knew I didn't want just a hotel. I didn't want them to go through all of the searching and be like, okay, dust off your hands, bed down for the night. You're good to go. Because then what? Now we have the players traveling towards Black Harbor again. And there's a lot of time of walking, so then they run into something else.

  I can't just have that something else be, oh, that's that thing. Okay. You see a grocery store, you explore it. There's nothing in it that's boring. You want things to be in places that the characters go into. And just like in real life, [00:06:00] if you walk into a random place, you're gonna find stuff, especially when it's abandoned.

  You're gonna find history. You're gonna see. Photos or documents about who worked there or the people that lived there, or the people that inhabited that space for whatever reason, wherever they were there. So I wanted to make the space be more lived in. So in the Glendale, they find all about this family and through the families emails and their videos and their personal diaries or logs.

  Also the items that they have on their bodies, the players and the characters of course, learn about. Afia the fall of Afia, and they start to fill in a couple of extra pieces here and there. And then I decided to drop a couple cool plot hooks. 17 Millbrook Lane. That's their house. A mysterious book in a bottom drawer, a storage facility with a mysterious mechanical object in it immediately peaked Felix's interest.

  I knew that they would go straight for that. How could you pass up a hook like that? [00:07:00] So it would give me time to kind of plan out what do I want to be in that house? What do I want to be in the storage facility? Even though I wasn't positive what was going to be in there or what these different things were, I knew I could come up with something meaningful that they would enjoy finding.

  So setting up the hook and then figuring out what that hook means later is actually a really good improvisation device that I do in all of my games and in many different sessions. I like laying down hooks that they can then deal with later, and it gives me a chance to kind of figure it out. Actually episodes five and six we've recorded in one night, so I didn't actually end up having time to figure it out.

  But when we took our break between recording five and six, I went and I made a couple quick notes and then the rest of all that, all of episode six as well was improv and I'll get into that in the next star master log. So it turns out, unlike the other episodes, I ended up improving a lot of this episode and I really enjoyed doing it.

  I don't think I like to do it every single time. 'cause it's hard to build a narrative when you're doing everything improv like that, [00:08:00] especially when you're trying to hold all of that in your head. And of course, expect the players to do that as well. So, yeah, I know I've sort of rambled on about Waa Planet, waa City Waa, and about the history of Waa, and I really hope that you enjoyed this episode because we had a really fun time making it.

  And when you move into episode six, you'll get to see the characters explore 17 Millbrook Plain and the storage facility, and an extra secret location. There's three locations in the next episode, and I think you're really, really gonna enjoy it. Thanks for listening. Love you all and bye for now.