Lore Building: How to Railroad in Secret

You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling.

Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you, you’re GMing a game and you bring your players to a crossroads. You present them with three options of plot threads that they can pull on. Avenues they can pursue to further the story. However one of your players was paying attention, annoyingly taking careful notes and cleverly trying to determine the best course of action for the party. They recommend an option you did not present to the party, a secret fourth path they believe you have hidden on purpose. But there was no hidden path. In fact you did not have any intention of them ever going to the place they now want to go. You are at a loss, completely unprepared for the curveball a player has thrown your way, and are scrambling to come up with a whole new area for them to explore.

Okay now put your hands down, I can’t see you anyways. Still I’m willing to bet most GMs know this feeling well. The moment a meticulously crafted story enters freefall due to the unexpected actions of a player is a well trodden meme amongst those who play TTRPGs for a reason. And some GMs react to that situation with what we call railroading. If you simply tell the player “No, you can’t do that” you have committed the cardinal sin of GMs, you have restricted your player’s actions by railroading them into a specific pathway. (So named because a train car can only operate if it sticks to the tracks, a set route that cannot be deviated from.) Horror stories of controlling GMs who railroad the players into being passengers in the story the GM wants to tell abound on online forums and in salacious youtube videos. For my part, I tend to think any good TTRPG campaign involves railroading your players… at least a little bit. You just have to trick them into feeling like they aren’t.

Let me explain. I recently ran a mystery campaign. The city the players were in was under a magical rainstorm that did not let up for weeks. Houses were flooding or collapsing, and the entire city was at risk of being utterly destroyed in the deluge. The crux of the campaign was the players needed to solve the mystery of WHY the rain was happening, so they could stop it and save the city. If they decided to just do something else, refusing the call to adventure and leaving the city to drown, that would have completely eliminated the campaign I had written for them. So to make certain they engage with the central mystery I would need to railroad them a little, otherwise we don’t really have a story anymore. But the trick is how I achieved this railroading without my players ever feeling like they couldn’t interact with the world in the way they wanted to.

The first thing I did was set up the parameters of the game in session zero. Session zero is a term for the meeting (or meetings) before your game starts where the GM and players discuss what type of game they will be playing. It is a great time to set up safety tools, so you can make sure everyone at the table is comfortable with the levels of, for example blood and gore, the story may get into. But it also is your first opportunity as a GM to lay down the tracks of your railroad. By having the entire playgroup approve of playing a mystery game I had cleared the biggest hurdle: player investment. When we sat down to play our first game, everyone knew they would be solving a mystery. We decided as a group that the players would be investigative journalists working for a local newspaper, and that solving the mystery would be their job. They knew nothing about the plot, or any of the different twists and turns I had prepared, but they were excited to engage with the story I wanted to tell. Think of this like your train station. Your players have all boarded the train, and are ready to travel to its destination.

The second element is also a part of session zero, but is a little more devious. Session zero is also often used for the GM to approve of player characters, and help root them in the world. So by the time our first session started I knew some of the key NPCs that would function as friends, contacts, rivals, and family members to all of the player characters. So when it came time to motivate the players to pursue certain plot threads, I had a stable of NPCs they would trust who could help guide them. When some random guardsman says you should totally check out this secret cult meeting that carries a lot less weight than when your own retired spymaster grandmother says the same thing. By leveraging a character’s relationships within the world I could not only make the world feel bigger and more interconnected, but also could put my thumb directly on the scales to suggest a course of action my players would be more likely to pursue. If you ever need to truly ramp up the tension, you can put those close contacts in mortal danger. (A tool you should use sparingly if you don’t want your players only making loner characters without loved ones to harm.)

So far we’ve only covered how I got the players to pursue the overarching plot. However there are a myriad of ways to interact with a mystery, and I wanted them to investigate four secretive factions, one of which would be the cause of the problem, and the other three just red herrings. I seeded several clues that should have led to these organizations in the first few sessions. But, of course, disaster struck. My players decided to investigate an NPC that was connected to none of those factions. One of the player characters was a wealthy debutante, slumming it as a journalist so she could know what it would be like to have a real job. I accidentally implicated her social strata, as they lived in castles that magically flew above the clouds, and were thus unaffected by the rain storms. So the players logically decided to go visit her family to search for clues as to the origins of the rain among the only people unaffected by it. I had no intention of them ever investigating the floating cloud castles, so I had written nothing for that entire area. Uh oh. 

I could have solved this in a few ways. The easiest one would be to simply prevent them from travelling to the castle. Bad weather could have grounded the flying carriages that would normally have ferried the party skyward. This is a very strict railroad option, and one that is likely to chafe against a player whose only crime was engaging with my game world in a fun way. The hardest option would be to redesign the entire campaign to make their path the objectively correct one to take, changing key NPCs and reworking several weeks worth of plotting. This is a hell of a lot of work considering how much effort I had put into the initial mystery. Luckily I did not have to take either of those options, because I designed my story in such a way where I could simply move a few of those key NPCs to get this story back on the rails. I determined that her family was hosting a dinner party on the night the players arrived, and had wealthy and influential NPCs from three of the four factions present. Now the party was snooping for information among the people I wanted them to investigate anyways. The party tried to go off the rails, but I had diverted the tracks to accommodate their new direction.

This is what I meant when I said any good campaign requires you to railroad your players. No matter where the players went, no matter what left turns they took, I would have just put some piece of my story in front of them. That way they could have the freedom to engage with the story in their own way, and never see the tracks beneath their feet. Some people like to think of the antithesis of a railroad as a sandbox. A pure open world players can engage with however they like. I think of my best games as more akin to a net or a web. There are nodes that represent scenes, NPCs, or combats that I intend for the players to engage with. And between these nodes is an interconnected series of paths that the story can take. So (hopefully) no matter what your players throw at you you are prepared to bring one of your more relevant nodes into play.

Hopefully this metaphor will help you bring a story to life through your TTRPGs, even if your style hews closer to a sandbox or a railroad than mine. But either way that is far more than enough writing for this topic. I am trying to keep to a stricter every other week schedule for writing this blog, so see you in two weeks with more of whatever this is.