1: SCENARIO
a written outline of a film, novel, or stage work giving details of the plot and individual scenes.
a postulated sequence or development of events.
a setting, in particular for a work of art or literature.
Scenario is a term in RPGs somewhere between Module and Adventure to describe that kind of source material, a more-or-less ready to run session or more for a specific game. (Outside of RPGs “scenario” often follows “nightmare”.)
Adventures were a mainstay of the likes of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons and Call Of Cthulhu publishing schedules back in the day, adventure booklets were industry standard, with games like Marvel Super Heroes having them and D6 Star Wars launching with a run of them alongside its sourcebooks.
White Dwarf in the 80s had a shorter adventure or two most issues, and other RPG magazines had more - Dungeon spun off from Dragon, and Challenge covered lots of science fiction games as well as publisher GDW’s own. (I got to run the Golden Heroes adventure from my first WD issue a few years on... and got to tell both the game’s creator and the adventure’s writer about this at a con a few years back.)
Vampire: The Masquerade had a few early on, but never very many - V5 has actually seen an uptick. Its mainstay short supplements were the likes of the Clanbooks, something players could read as well as Storytellers.
Nowadays D&D publishes one or two official hardback adventures per year that can take up an academic year and a lot of shorter adventures come through free or creator content sources, while Cthulhu keeps going with its model of the occasional big book of multiple adventures as well as its own online resources. (It also uses its classic rulebook adventure slash rite of passage The Haunting as its quickstart to this day, so it has been published continually for forty years.)
And if you want a big adventure book or set these days, consider calling in Gar Hanrahan.
As someone who started with gamebooks and then went straight to improvised adventures before starting to get scenarios, I use them pretty rarely, but pick them up for games I’m doing, to use, adapt or take ideas from.
The series I’ve run most of of was The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay first edition, as it was coming out, with a captive high school player audience. We got stuck at some point in Power Behind The Throne and never finished it. Which is a shame about Power, but the following adventures were... there’s a reason the fourth edition revision is going a different way.
The single adventure I’ve used most is Fated Voyage by Michael R. Mikesh, from Challenge issue 46. It was intended for MegaTraveller, a system which I’ve never even read. It has a throughline and various optional asides so could reasonably be called a scenario. It sends the PCs in a space opera kind of setting onto a ghost ship, with enough plot twists and spooky options that I’ve run it for Doctor Who and a Star Trek inspired setting. (I could probably run most of the adventures in that issue with Doctor Who, Doctor Who being like that...)
So what to take away? I like a mix of a plot and some optional extras. And a ghost ship.
Designers & Dragons on the history of the scenario
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