A recent post by Marcia B of Traverse Fantasy got me thinking about the nature of interstitial scenes; the moments of play that occur before, between, and after each of the integral scenes: combat and chases, social interaction, and dungeon room or local wilderness exploration - all familiar from fantasy adventure gaming.

Integral scenes are identified by a couple of traits: they are usually stationary (opening and closing in the same mode or imaginary space), and embody the lion’s share of the interactivity promised to players. The usual pattern of play in these scenes is to establish and then resolve a conflict where a protagonist pursues a goal against an obstacle or threat (narrative lens), or else must male one or more meaningful informed choices (ludic lens). The so-called core rules of the game usually relate primarily to these scenes, and hence the main character-building gubbins offered to players interface with these systems as well.

Conversely, interstitial scenes are transitive (opening and closing in different modes or imaginary spaces) and unfortunately can be somewhat neglected in terms of interactivity and meaningful character input. These sometimes vexatious scenes are vital to giving form and substance to a session of play; the results mercurial due to inadequate or poorly-received scaffolding.

I am going to non-exhaustively enumerate some key interstitial scenes in a session of play, and touch on specific procedures from games I have read and played that interact with these moments.

Departure

How do we transition from our quotidian lives into the imaginary world, the magic circle of play? Unhelpfully, many games do little to codify or even directly address this issue. Megeuy Baker has written on play as performance of ritual, and this is a helpful lens through which to ponder this transition.

Before the game ‘starts proper’ there is activity at the social level: getting people interested to play, scheduling and setting up a venue, preparing snacks and drinks. This can blur into somewhat metagame elements including: conversation (safety) tools; CATS (concept, aim, tone, subject matter); and a session recap.

Brad Kerr of the Between Two Cairns podcast leads a brief group fantasy visualisation exercise focused on a dragon in a forest. This serves a ritualistic element, clearly demarcating the start of play, but is also a social icebreaker and creative warm-up stretch.

Wildsea by Isaac Felix offers framing (canonical) and unsetting (non-canonical) questions to open play: Sawnanas are far more versatile than most fruit. What are some of their unexpected uses? This is similar to above, but trades less ritualism for more creative juicing.

Delta Green: A Night at the Opera by Arc Dream Publishing presents agents’ standing orders, which I previously wrote about reciting as a group to open a scenario. This was a powerful ritual and provided several callbacks through the session, establishing strong themes of compromise and inevitability.

Initiation

Similarly, how do we transition into the first integral scene or between such scenes? This includes establishing shots and overland or waterborne journeys.

The success of the classic Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawl format is in part the clear structure and rhythm of entering a new room and having an interactive scene (combat, exploration or social interaction), then choosing between a few routes of egress that lead to further scenes. Although the early games defined movement in terms of travel space in feet and squares and 10 minute dungeon turns, most modern Old-School Reinvention games have loosened this up to a turn being entering a new room or any non-trivial action undertaken within a room. I’d argue this has largely been refined over time to the minimum viable procedure to get us between the moments of interactivity.

Conversley, Dungeons & Dragons has struggled to present a coherent method of playing out overland travel and journeys, with many third-party efforts dumping into this void. Hexcrawl and point crawl procedures can be seen as interstitium between the keyed or improvised encounters at each point of interest. How does this interface with the resource economy of HP and spell slots? How do you make weather, wayfinding and getting lost, and tracking rations and foraging more than just busy work? This deserves at least a post of its own, so I’ll park that thought for now.

Blades in the Dark by John Harper presents the package of Engagement and Gather Information rolls, and the Flashback mechanic, to anneal the issues readily observed when players optimise the fun out of play by endless planning and debating before undertaking an adventure or risky action. This is analogous to the screenwriting advice of ‘late in, early out’ of a scene: it makes the interstitial moments quick and punchy, and lets us hop back and fill in the blanks in the canvas that we might uncover later.

13th Age by Pelgrane Press introduced through its organized play adventures travel montages: a round robin where each player sets up an obstacle for the next player who describes how their character overcomes it, then sets up the next challenge before passing the turn over. This can easily be admixed with dice rolls to give colour and texture to the narration: either binary strong vs weak hit or trinary up-beat / mixed-beat / down-beat. Importantly we aren’t rolling for success / failure, as that will inevitably block play.

Silt Verses RPG by Gabriel Robinson and Jason Cordova have Journey scenes that are lightly prepared transitional scenes of collaborative fiction combining paint the scene (leading/motivated scene-setting questions), recall a time (loaded background-establishing prompt), and an evocative moment of surrealism or banality.

The Between by Jason Cordova also has the unscene: a moment where we play in a place (and perhaps time) removed from the protagonists with often only thematic connection to the central plot. This is intended to be cinematic, flesh out the setting as a character, and through the echo in the night mechanic rewards players to draw out the allusions and motifs connecting the unscene back to the central plot.

Wildsea also actually breaks its phases of play done into: scenes (analogous to our integral scenes), montages, and journeys. My experience was that montages were a powerful and easily deployed technique (whether exploring an adventure site, docking at town, or running a quick action scene). Unfortunately journeys felt a bit cumbersome with turns at the helm and on watch with multiple rolls filling progress clocks and randomly generating Peace / Order / Nature encounters of three different threat levels.

Delta Green has home vignettes that prompt us to check in on how the mundane lives of our investigators is put under strain, and tap their bonds to restore Sanity, feeding a cycle of decline. Other games like Lancer by Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan similarly have downtime scenes punctuating the procedural action with moments of recovery and reflection, marrying the mechanical need for resource repletion with prompts to have interpersonal character-driven scenes.

Pendragon by Greg Stafford has the winter phase that punctuates sessions or adventures with the roll of years, leading to both green shoots and prematurely withered family trees. This forcibly grounds the otherwise heroic mythic fiction in more temporal issues of family and legacy.

Return

These final melting moments occur just after an integral scene or help us conclude the session of play:

Dungeons & Dragons seems to naturally produce moments of looting the room and dead bodies, juggling inventory and negotiating who carries what, and upon return to town liquidating ‘discovered’ assets and tallying up new GP and XP totals. These don’t seem exactly designed, but rather have arisen spontaneously at tables the world akin to convergent evolution.

Blades in the Dark has its post-score into downtime procedures of earning Coin, gaining Heat, and generating Entanglements that feeds into the downtime worker-placement game.

Not only Blades but many other Powered by the Apocalypse games also have an end of session move where you answer some questions to earn XP and engage with character advancement. These have the additional effect of providing a tight recap of memorable moments from play.

The final prompt card in For the Queen by Alex Roberts (The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?) and the final Angle roll in CBR+PNK by Emanuel Melo feed into an epilogue moment: who do you ultimately decide to be? where are they now?

At a meta-level, using stars and wishes or roses and thorns to check-in with everyone and help calibrate further sessions of play is a form of interstitial play.

Conclusions

The after taste I am left with from this amuse-bouche is that rewarding moments of interstitial play balance the need for providing a worthwhile experience in their own right, while efficiently escorting us from departure to arrival at our destination.

A common element of all my preferred interstitial procedures is a focus on theme and content, leveraging the input and output of interstitial scenes to add variety to the surrounding integral scenes.

Trying to cram numerical systems and extraneous dice rolling into these moments of play feels misguided. Leave that instead for the integral moments of high-action and back-and-forth investigative play.

Luxuriate in the slower pacing and sparser liminal space that is the interstitium.