I like a lot about the Stargate RPG — based on a beloved show, a gorgeously illustrated rulebook — but there’s also a lot I don’t like.
Topping the list is their insistence that a single “mission” should only take 3 hours. It’s extremely difficult to deliver a new, wondrous, suspenseful roleplaying experience to your group in that time.
In Stargate—and other mission-based RPGs like Star Trek—you receive your goals up front, which helps. But keeping the action dense and well-flowing still takes a ton of effort.
Each homebrew “mission” I write for my Stargate campaign is like a TV script. I even divide it up into three acts: the Introduction to the problem, the Investigation of the problem, and finally the Twist a.k.a. the Reveal.
There’s usually something the PCs need to figure out, something they need to know, to truly understand the mystery or deal with the antagonist successfully. So there should be clues, but it should still be a bit confusing, right up until it all falls into place (or possibly starts the climactic battle).
Managing the pace of reveals is…really hard. You want to feed them clues, but not railroad them. You want the answers to feel like they come from their actions, but you also don’t want them to be frittering away the minutes on false leads. You can’t reveal everything all at once, but you also can’t require too many torturous steps (any one of which they might get wrong) to get to the prize.
I think I’m getting better at writing it, and running it.
In our most recent adventure, one group of locals, the putative allies of the team, wanted to keep a Naquadah mine open and running, while another group had seized it and wanted it shut down, but wouldn’t say why.
Immediately after coming through the gate, the party was thrown into a banquet involving the leaders of the two groups, and had to both (a) navigate the two sides’ accusations, and (b) ascertain as much as they could about what was going on. That was Act I, and afterwards the players said they enjoyed the give and take of it, the gradual pace of revelations.
The party impressed the second local group enough that they were invited on a tour of the mine they had captured. I planned Act II to be an inspection of at least some of the mine, while Act III would be figuring out the second group’s perspective and dealing with it.
But it turns out, the team had gotten far enough with their discussions with the second group that they were able to figure out the why at the very beginning of the mine outing. (The mine, in addition to Naquadah, also had mercury in it — a twist!)
So the remainder of the mission was just exploring the rest of the mine to find the mercury leak. The challenge was making the final hour still feel like a climax, even though most of the work had already been done.
I sprinkled in some action by having a build-up of carbon dioxide, which caused hallucinations in one character of a Goa’uld firing at them. Extremely simple on paper, though it did cause some excitement. But it was also nice to not have real fighting, since the Stargate RPG is based on D&D 5e, where combat can be cumbersome and time-consuming.
I’m going to get a lot more practice, because we’re only about halfway through the “season”. And while this is a campaign, the techniques I’m employing here are exceptionally well-suited to the one-shots I’m also running these days, in a wide variety of systems. Third-party modules tend to have too many scenes to really be played in a single session, but for the adventures I write myself, I can avoid that mistake.
It’s gonna be fun!
Weaponized Fluff 
