the other adventure funnel
I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with the right combination of search terms to locate a cool blog/forum post or comment from somebody, where he described a method of scenario design called something like the "inverse|reverse|inverted funnel".

Problem is that when I try any of those terms, I either get Doc Rotwang's excellent but different Adventure Funnel, or some idiotic marketing scam.

Does anybody, anybody remember this thing? I sort of remember the person talking about how they used it in a campaign involving bandits, or zombies, or a sorcerer, or a sorcerer who controlled a band of zombie bandits.

While I'm here, I might as well repost a couple things I've put up lately in different fora.

The first riffed off of something Calithena wrote:

Calithena: [Among other things, dungeons are important because] they free up the group to take the adventure in the way they want, and for surprises to happen.

I've had an interesting time writing up a dungeon adventure that I ran a while back. This is the first time I've tried to document "an adventure" in a manner suitable for others to use. At first, I wrote it up in terms of an introductory scene that clearly oriented the party toward the dungeon and a particular goal inside it, which is how I'd used it for an actual group.

But since I'd designed the dungeon (however humble it may be) as a multipath setting, with at least 2-3 other interesting things going on besides "the goal", I realized that it wasn't really necessary to have a fixed introduction. The dungeon should work fine as just "a place that the party stumbles across in the wilderness". Or the party could seek it out for reasons other than the maguffin I originally built into it. However they enter the dungeon, interacting with the "stuff" inside it can become threads for additional adventures outside the dungeon.

So I rewrote the thing, genericizing the descriptions a bit so as not to presume a particular motivation for exploring it. Then in my "designer's notes" I wrote up a few ways that the dungeon could be introduced, and ways that the "aftermath" of exploring it could impact an ongoing campaign.

A benefit of this exercise is that it gives me hope that I can "deconstruct" more linear adventures in ways that will make them useful, by locating other situational entry/exit points than those defined by the actual modules.

The second is inspired by some things Rob Conley's written regarding how he designs NERO LARP events.

The fundamental problem is limited resources and gamer expectations in terms of plotting. Basically, you want there to be more than just the climactic battle, but you don't want to railroad the players through a set sequence of scenes that have no real consequence.

[...]

I bring this up because I'm mainly a location/situation type guy, but a friend has expressed a desire for a game with more of a three-act structure per session. The only way I can think to do this, and still enjoy GMing, essentially, would be to create multiple paths that all lead to a climactic endpoint.

In reality I think it would be something like the old subquest setup, the one where you need to get all the parts of the artifact before you move on to the big confrontation. Except here, in addition to the order of subquests not mattering, only a subset would be necessary. In fact, to add further consequence to the structure, only a subset would be possible, because once a certain amount of time passes, the final battle will occur, ready or not. And the outcome of each sub-scene ("module" in Rob's lingo) would potentially offer a bonus for the endpoint.

Meanwhile the endpoint itself needn't necessarily be a do-or-die situation. Suppose the player(s) screw up entirely and fail to accomplish any of the sub-quests. They'll probably lose at crunch time, but the more interesting question will be how badly they lose, which just sets up the next arc of the game. This is similar to how Rob talks about building new LARP events on the results of past events.