GENERIC JRPG PLOT GENERATOR

This entire thing is to help with inspiration, and to encourage cool ideas.

This won't create a linear, ready-to-use plot. Instead, you'll come out with a plot map: a graph detailing the relationships and connections between the elements of the plot. It's up to you what those connections mean and how the player gets involved with the whole thing. But don't worry, it's easier than it looks.

How to use

The second post in the thread features a "Transmission", a collection of elements from the generic jRPG plot. Anytime you're asked to "generate a node", roll two six-sided dice: the first one will determine what kind of node it is (connection, event, location, faction, object, or threat) and the second will determine which of the nodes of that kind is chosen.

There are six kinds of elements in a Transmission:
Connection: an important NPC, one who can provide the player with information.
Event: an important event with wide repercussions in the game world; it can happen in the future, it can already have happened, or it can be happening right now.
Location: an important place to the plot.
Faction: a group, with distinct goals and means of achieving them. Factions are supposed to feel larger than life. The player isn't supposed to confront them directly; instead, they can pitch the factions against one another or deal with their agents (the threats).
Object: a physical item that's important to the plot.
Threat: a group of NPCs that are in direct opposition to the characters. These are not the faraway bosses of a faction, but the guys who get down and dirty and confront the PCs personally. Think of them as recurring villains.

These aren't supposed to represent all the stuff in the game world, just the ones that directly interact with the plot. You'll notice there's no "big and prosperous kingdom" among the factions; that doesn't mean there's not a big and prosperous kingdom around, nor does it stop you from putting a location, connection, threat, etc. in said kindgom.

Step 1: Create the Seed

Generate three nodes, and connect them together. Come up with a situation explaining the connection between these three nodes. This is your seed, the starting point of the plot. It's important that the seed not be a boring status quo: whatever you do with your first three plot map nodes, the resulting situation should be on the brink of going wrong.

So let's go through an example together, shall we?

First off, we go to random.org and roll 6 dice for the seed. We get:
6, 6 - Theat, evil advisor of a decaying ruler
2, 3 - Event, an impending natural catastrophe
2, 1 - Event, the cataclysm of 10,000 years ago

Okay, this is a fairly standard set-up for a plot. Let's say... 10,000 years ago a huge cataclysm took out the dominating civilisation of the time, let's call them the Ur. But a few of them survived. They've kept their lineage going, hidden among mankind. Nowadays, one of the few remaining Ur has landed a job as the chancellor of the King of Tal. This evil chancellor is planning on somehow triggering some sort of apocalypse that will wipe out humanity and let the Ur rise to glory again. This is the skeleton of our plot.



Step 2: The Hook

We now need a plot hook, something that will make the characters involved in the plot and get them to act. You can incorporate the characters directly or indirectly, as long as there's a reason for them to go find out more about the established situation.

Here's some standard hooks:
Reward - "there's something in it for us if we attack this crisis"
Self-defence - "if we don't attack this crisis, it will attack us!" Seeing as most jRPG protagonists are passive suckers anyway, consider this the default option
Vengeance - "I have something against this crisis personally and I don't want it to happen"

Now, the characters and the player don't necessarily know all about the current situation. In fact, they very likely don't. Our hook here is easy: the main character knows nothing about the event of 10,000 years ago or the chancellor, but they can observe the signs of the coming disaster. Let's go with the traditional option: the trees have started withering, the animals are going berserk and becoming monsters. Suddenly, the wilderness has become exceedingly violent and dangerous.

Our hook here is our protagonist is charged by the elder of their village to go out in the world and discover what's going on, and preferrably a cure to what ails the wilderness.

Step 3: Early Game

What we need now is a Lead. A Lead is when something new gets added to the plot map and the plot deepens. Leads come from connections: the early game is about setting the characters up with one or more connections.

The traditional way of doing so in jRPGs is starting the main PC out on an extremely mundance quest or mission that they do on a daily basis, but insert a twist at the end that gets them in contact with one connection.

Generate this connection by rolling one die and checking the connection options in the Transmission. Add the resulting connection to the plot map, and connect it to one of the three existing nodes.

You can do this with one connection, or with multiple ones. It depends on the scale of your game. Maybe you go after a connection and their Lead is another connection!

Okay, so we have a brash youth from a remote village, tasked by his elder to find out why the world has decided to go dangerous. Back to random.org and we roll a 1 for a connection: a grand sage, disguised as an ordinary old man. We add that to the plot map. Now there's a few options here. We can say the village elder himself is a grand sage, and thus the first quest of our jRPG would be about figuring out that the elder knows more than he's letting on.

Instead, let's say the village elder is old pals with the Sage of Eremin, who lives as a hermit in a remote cabin in the woods. The first quest of our jRPG is about hunting down this elusive guy and his elusive cabin. Or better yet, let's make the Sage a woman. No reason, really, I just like making random characters women in my plots, and honestly, more people should do this.

Now we need to connect the Sage's node to one of the nodes we've already got. Let's connect it to the evil chancellor: the Sage is an Ur himself, who distancied himself from the chancellor's plans because he found them too evil.

I think it's about time our chancellor got a name. He needs a proper evil name. Let's call him Cornelius.



Leads

When a connection provides a Lead, do the following:
Roll two six-sided dice and generate a node for the plot map from the Transmission below.
If the generated node is not on the plot map yet, put it in, and connect it to another node of your choice. Tell the player somehow about this newly found relationship.
If the node is already on the plot map, tell the player about one of its existing relationships.
If the node is the very connection the character is speaking to, the character has just discovered about one of the connection's relationships. Things can get hairy at this point; don't hesitate to make the connection betray the character, if that's what makes sense.

Step 4: Middle Game

Middle game is about going after the connections revealed in the early game and getting Leads out of them. As described above, every Lead leads to something new on the plot map.

During the middle game, other elements other than connections can provide Leads. For instance, going through an important dungeon may provide a Lead at the end, even though none of the connections live there in the last room.

So we've gone through one or two dungeons and arrived at the Sagess of Eremin. She agrees to help the character with some information, maybe out of friendship with the old village elder, maybe to stop Cornelius' plan, maybe after a trial by combat... it doesn't matter.

Note that the Sagess knows about Cornelius, probably not everything about his plan but some of it. It doesn't mean she has to relay that information to the player. It's okay to make her tell the character something else. She must have her reasons. This generator is about creating conspiracies, and no one is immune from taking part in them. Maybe at some point in the future something in the plot map hints at this Sage being herself a villain! At this point, this is still up in the air. So she generates a random Lead as normal.

We roll 2d6 and come up with:
3, 4 - A landscape of dreams and memories, with tough access and almost no way out
We add that to the plot map, and we have to connect it to another node. Let's connect that to the cataclysm of 10,000 years back.

What this translates into in the game itself is that the Sage gives the character a hidden key to enter a sacred mountain, where the memories of the Ur live. The character finds himself inside the ancient memory of the race of the Ur, reliving the great cataclysm of 10,000 years ago in glorious magical virutal reality.

After the trials of the Ur's memories, the character now knows about the tragedy of 10,000 years ago. We have several options here:
1) At the end of the memories, there's some insight: the character gains a new Lead.
2) At the end of the memories, there's someone: the character gains a new connection.
3) The character goes back to the Sage, and she can provide a new Lead.
4) The character now knows everything they need to know to directly confront Cornelius, the evil chancellor, and save the world.
5) etc.

Let's say the memories of the Ur hook the character up with a new connection, just to pad out the game some more. We roll a d6 and it comes out 6: this connection is a lone knight, travelling the world in pursuit of his goals. So this is what happens: when the character snaps out of the virutal reality of the Ur's memories, they find evidence that someone else was there before and has experienced the same memories: the legendary wandering knight Tura. He gets added to the map and, naturally, connected to the memories.

Upon finding Tura, he will provide the character with another Lead. Again, here's how it goes down:
1) The Lead is another connection. The character must go and seek someone else!
2) The Lead is properly random.
3) Just let Tura spill the beans about Cornelius; this will lead into the Late Game phase.
4) etc.

We go for a random Lead. We roll 2d6 and get 4, 1: Faction, the authoritarian empire. We add that to the plot map and connect it to the pending disaster. The Kingdom of Tal is neighbour to the scary Acthuan Empire, and Cornelius' plan, which was left vague up to this point, is in fact providing the Acthuans with ancient Ur knowledge powerful enough to make the Empire nuke itself and the rest of the world out of existence in their hubris. Tura knows this because he's an exiled member of the emperor's personal guard, why not?



Step 5: Late Game

At some point, things will click together in the plot. You'll look at the developing plot map and go, "holy hell, I see the big picture now". At this point starts the late game, where the characters will know what their ultimate goal is and actively pursue it.

"Endgame stuff" is just a matter of scale, mood, and atmosphere. Any threat from the Transmission below can be a final boss, if they're scary and magically corrupted and powerful enough. Any location can be a final dungeon if it's got a dramatic enough soundtrack.

Tura tells the character everything he knows. This is enough to drive the characters into decisive action.

The final stretch of the game writes itself: Cornelius is going to secretly meet with the Acthuan head of state right now. The characters will have to infiltrate the evil empire's capital citadel and fight through its defences, before reaching Cornelius and the emperor. There's even an obvious, self-writing final boss, too. First, the characters confront the emperor, and defeat him. Second, Cornelius goes berserk that someone is messing with his plans and uses on himself the secret Ur knowledge he was going to impart on the emperor. Thus, he becomes a very powerful monster of legend, and that's our final boss. Or you can swap the emperor and Cornelius in this last couple of sentences and it works just as well.

This is a very simple example of a plot, with very few nodes on the plot maps. You can go wild with Leads and nodes and all that jazz, and the more you do, the more complex the plot gets.

Make Stuff Up

Again, it's important to remember that the nodes in the plot map aren't everything in the game world. A node is just a nexus of plot that connects to other nodes. In the end, it's all inspiration for you to come up with cool stuff. If you try to build a plot like this and find your head swimming with cool ideas that aren't in the Transmission or don't follow the simple model I put forth, great! That's what this entire exercise was about.

Rename, reskin, reflavour

Change stuff around in the Transmission below! Replace things! Rewrite things! Give things names and give people identities, very specific ones. Make the Transmission your own.

THE GENERIC JRPG PLOT TRANSMISSION

(1) Connections

(1) An grand sage, in hiding as an ordinary old man.
(2) The wise king of a benevolent kingdom.
(3) The smartest person on the planet, a genius of technology.
(4) The most important figure in a clan of mages.
(5) A member of a xenophobic community, carrying secrets forbidden to foreigners.
(6) A lone knight, travelling the world in pursuit of their goals.

(2) Events

(1) The cataclysm that destroyed an ancient civilisation 10,000 years ago.
(2) The invasion of a military superpower, and the bodies left in their wake.
(3) The approaching natural disaster that will spell the world's doom.
(4) The birth of a very special child, which happens only once in 10,000 years.
(5) The unexpected thinning of the barrier between this world and another.
(6) The death of a legendary hero.

(3) Locations

(1) Technological ruins of an ancient civilisation, their purpose long forgotten.
(2) A complex of crystalised caves.
(3) A grand and prosperous palace or castle.
(4) A landscape of dreams and memories, with almost no access or way out.
(5) A ghost city of dark alleys and dangerous secrets.
(6) The oldest forest of the land, nature's finest work.

(4) Factions

(1) The authoritatian empire, advanced in technology and military.
(2) The resistance, fighting the losing battle against the oppression.
(3) A secret clan of people with special skills long thought lost, bent on survival.
(4) The people of another world, believed a myth by the inhabitants of this one.
(5) The cult of a force of light.
(6) The cult of a force of darkness.

(5) Objects

(1) A sword, possessing unknown but crucial mythical capabilities.
(2) A flying vehicle, marvel of technology.
(3) The shard of a crystal that keeps the world in balance.
(4) A lost ritual that serves as a code or password.
(5) The ancient symbol of power of a god or goddess, its pieces scattered.
(6) A sparkling elixir with mythical properties.

(6) Threats

(1) The elite special operations team of the great empire.
(2) A band of thieves and scoundrels, infamous across the land.
(3) The monstrous lieutenants of a monstrous army, and their general.
(4) A travelling, bloodcrazed madman, carrying a personal vendetta.
(5) A once noble order of knights, now either corrupted or misguided.
(6) The evil advisor of a decaying ruler, and the forces under their command.

The Transmission as a game resource is taken 100% from the indie tabletop RPG Technoir: http://technoirrpg.com
It was originally intended to generate futuristic cyberpunk conspiracies, but I find it lends itself well to the tradition of jRPG plots, which are convoluted, obscure, and relayed to you in tiny pieces by people you can't really trust. I heartily recommend checking Technoir out if you're a fan of hardboiled cyber-augmented jerks hacking, driving, and shooting their way through the dark alleys of uncaring cities and corrupt megacorporations.

The Transmission in this post is my own work, and the steps on how to use it are my own way of explaining it, with a couple of differences from the original Technoir way. Please tell me if it's confusing, I'll do my best to explain things better.

If you use this to come up with a cool plot, or if you decide to go creative and write up your own Transmission (it is very easy to do), post it here! I'd love to see it.

I haven't done this yet, but I think this might be a wonderful resource to use for my traditional RPG parody series whenever I start it up. I like tying things together, because it makes it rewarding for the player experiencing it.

Very inspiring. Gives me ideas.

Laziness please go away.

This is really cool. Should be front page imo.

Absolutely front-page material. And anyone can write for the main site now, even people like insultobot or TheGnasher....