Big Bang Events

Big Bang Events: How to Create Player-Proof Plots

I’m very excited to announce GM’s Log #12 is now available. The topic is a core method I developed in the early 2000s that’s saved my Canadian bacon for over two decades now.

A problem that hits my inbox and my coaching sessions on the regular is players wrecking your plots.

You prep a great plotline but players ignore the hook, kill the wrong NPC, or solve the mystery in the first encounter. 

Worse, logic bombs you didn’t know were there go off mid-session, and you’re fixing them in real time.

The problem is not our players, however. It’s that we typically write plots forward, from a blank page, with no history anchoring them.

This causes plot improvisation, and improvised logic breaks the moment our dear players make contact with it.

Big Bang Events anchor our plots in historical facts, so there’s no improvised logic to break.

The Method’s Secret Sauce

Instead of writing your plot forward, you detonate one big event in the past and trace its consequences to present day. Then you play that chain in reverse.

Here’s one from a recent Night’s Black Agents game:

Prep:
BBEG => Stage Boss => Fixer => Military Base Heist => Night Club Drop-Off

Play:
Night Club Drop-Off => Military Base Heist => Fixer => Stage Boss => BBEG

It’s the same chain, played backwards.

The adventure opened mid-car-chase. The crew chief pointed to the night club. The club pointed to the heist. The heist site gave up the fixer. The fixer pointed to the Stage Boss, who pointed to the vampire for the finale.

From behind the screen, GMing it was effortless. My plot was rock solid because I wrote a fact-based history instead of a story, and truth has no plot holes.

Every clue pointed one link up the chain, so players didn’t get stuck and I was never railroading. Characters simply followed the trail.

But what if players figure it all out early? 

It doesn’t matter.

Knowledge, good guesses, and spoilers don’t short-circuit a Big Bang Event plot. Players still need to take action and characters still need to beat your encounters.

Get GM’s Log #12 & Plot Like a Genius

This Log is a CampaignCraft member benefit.

Inside, you get the full Big Bang Event method in four steps, with a step-by-step example from my Lost Isle campaign:

  1. Detonate Your Big Bang: The origin event and the “debris” it scatters.
  2. End Point: Your campaign’s current day situation.
  3. Name & Pin Game Pieces: 3 to 5 pieces (NPCs, Locations, Items), each one a key to a lock.
  4. Connect the Dots: The four link types that chain your game pieces together.

Plus how the method fractals to any scale from a 5 Room Dungeon up to a full campaign, a do-it-now exercise that gets you a working event chain in about fifteen minutes, and a completion checklist to pressure-test your chain before you run it.

Membership gets you this Log, the complete GM’s Log library, and each new one as its published.

Join CampaignCraft today.

Then detonate your first Big Bang tonight.

Cheers,
Johnn
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