Story Elements Part 2: Inciting Incidents, In Medias Res, and MacGuffins

Here is Part 2 of my old story elements series.  In this installment, I introduced the ideas of Inciting Incidents, starting a story in medias res, and the use of MacGuffins.

Part 2:  

    Last time we learned about building a story around your characters and adding sub-plots into the story to make them more engaging and interesting.  If you’ll recall, our heroes Jak Nightwing and his co-pilot Rajbacca got coerced into helping the Empire locate Jak’s old Rebel squadron.  What’s more, we learned that Rajbacca might have set up the whole thing to get the bounty on Jak.

    The story sounds like it’s off to a decent start, but we’re going to see if we can develop it some through the use of an inciting incident and maybe a MacGuffin to drive the story.

    An inciting incident is the event that gets the story rolling.  Every story, movie, book and comic has one.  You’re probably using them in your campaigns without even thinking about it.  In “A New Hope”, the inciting incident occurs when Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer overtakes the Tantive IV, which forces Princess Leia to send the droids down to Tattooine.  In “The Empire Strikes Back”, the Empire sends thousands of Probe Droids out into the galaxy, leading them to find the Rebellions hidden outpost on Hoth.  My personal favorite inciting incident is in “The Big Lebowski” when the Chinaman pees on The Dude’s rug.  But that has nothing to do with Star Wars, so we’ll move on.

    If we wanted to try and start the current Jak Nightwing adventure, we could start it easily with a message over the holo-net requesting his services.  Or we could have him go into an exotic pub on some backwater planet looking for work, and get in a tussle with strange creatures.  Maybe he owes someone a favor and takes this job from a mystery client.  Any device can be used to kick-start the adventure.

    A common technique is to start stories in medias res.  In medias res is a Latin phrase meaning, “in the middle of things.”  You can have your hero begin this new campaign by dropping into the middle of an epic space battle that he may or may not know the reason for.  You can start an adventure by telling your players, “You’re in a bar on Coruscant and you hear blaster fire uncomfortably close.”  Even though the situation may not offer a nice smooth introduction, it serves as an exciting inciting incident because your players have to figure out what is going on and why.  The space battle at the beginning of “A New Hope” is a great example of this technique.

    Yet another storytelling technique that can be used as an inciting incident is to introduce a MacGuffin.  A MacGuffin is an object that is used as a goal for the characters to retrieve.  Think of every Indiana Jones movie.  Right at the beginning of each film, Indy is given an object to retrieve by the end of the film.  You can do the same thing with your characters.

    As an aside, Alfred Hitchcock often used the device in his films and popularized the term, “MacGuffin".  When asked what it meant he described the following scene:  A man gets on a train with a cage covered in a sheet and sits down with it in his lap.  The man next to him asks what’s in the cage.  The first man says, “It’s a MacGuffin.”  The second man asks, “What’s a MacGuffin?”  The first replies, “It’s used to hunt Australian Lions.”  The second says, “But there are no lions in Australia.”  The first man shrugs and says, “Well, I guess it’s no MacGuffin.”

    In other words, the traveler was using the word MacGuffin to politely say, “None of your damn business.”  For Hitchcock, MacGuffin was a meaningless term for what he viewed as a meaningless object, what mattered to him wasn’t the object, but the adventure that the characters had along the way trying to retrieve it.  The MacGuffin you provide for your players doesn’t have to be pointless, however.  It can be something deeply important to a character such as a data file with clues to their family history, or a new hyperdrive for their ship.  You can have them search for an old Jedi Holocron, a missing person, a lost city of gold, or just their stolen Steltek Gun.  Either way, the MacGuffin can be used to get an adventure rolling and keep it focused.

    For the campaign I have in mind for Jak Nightwing and Rajbacca, I think I’m going to start in medias res.  When Jak sits down and gets his dice situated, I’ll start with the lines, “You’re on the run.  You’re in an open-air market on Malestair.  The familiar sounds of stun blasts explode in the air around you.  You’re not sure who is after you, but at least they’re not trying to kill you… yet.”

    A MacGuffin isn’t out of the question, though.  It can be introduced anytime, as we’ll see in the next article, which will cover turning points and the importance of outlining.  Stay tuned.