Every 6 months or so, I come back with this very question: “any chance to see some of the now-famous BE demo/con scenarios coming out any time ?”
There. I’ve done it. 
Omac has been out for a long time. That is the only one I know of.
I know, I know… I’ve played another one called “Mercy” GMed by Luke, and there is also another couple of BE scenarios as mentionned by the BWHQ somewhere on the boards (“No Exit”, etc…)
Now that BW is over and well over, maybe Luke would have some time to take care of the most beautiful baby of the Burning family.
“Personne ne m’aime” says The Brick. 
Okay, so I was thinking about this leading up to last year’s 10/10/10 event. I ended up running a full Phase across three days of play but that was, uh…not ideal. I mean it was awesome, but I think I’d like some time to sample other games next time as well.
I spent some time noodling on what would go into a BE “scenario” and, honestly, I’m just not sure how to go about doing it. What would a good scenario entail? How long would you expect it would take? My problem, thinking through it last year, was that everything I came up with by necessity left out the fundamental tension of the Infection roll, and how that tension directly impacts the dynamic of play.
With a little more space now between last year’s event and now, I’ve got some new thoughts. Can you tell me which of these things matter and which do not?
- I’d build a scenario to be run in 4 hours or less with 2-4 characters
- I might actually designate the Infection moves at play: the PCs are Taking Action while the NPCs are Going to Ground, something like that, with maybe a graf of context leading up to that decision.
- Highlight each of the main systems: the scene economy, DOW, Firefight!, and maybe the tech burner
- Maybe leave one Belief blank for the players to fill in? Or fill all three and just require they work with them?
I’d like to put some BE scenarios together, possibly for a future BWHQ event or just because I want to spread the BE love.
1-3 are how I handled my con scenarios.
But I just wrote the Beliefs out for the players. There’s a lot going on in BE. Writing Beliefs is nice, but maybe extra and unnecessary work.
Heh…I may need to go and actually read OMAC, eh? 
Didn’t realize you baked the move into the scenario. Look at the big brain on you!
You can’t pick maneuvers in a demo, no way. For one thing, picking a single maneuver is a silly and meaningless thing to do. It’d be like reading only Chapter Three from a book, and worrying a lot about the foreshadowing. If you pick the right book, chapter three might be a good self-contained adventure (and for “pick the right book” read “make a decent demo scenario”). But that foreshadowing sets up stuff you won’t be reading anyway, so why bother?
For another, understanding how the maneuvers work takes either playing a few out or doing a fair bit of reading and thinking. Now, if you knew you had veteran players, and you had one day of gaming, I bet you could pre-bake a setup at the end of a phase so that it would wrap in two well-chosen maneuvers, and then do the choosin’.
Right, yeah, totally agreed! I meant that the scenario would come with a pair of maneuvers already chosen, with the instruction to players that one of their goals is to win that roll at the end of the scenario.
Yeah, totally. Though, honestly, I’d treat the maneuver roll as a sideshow, like doing artha awards in a demo: it’s not “Here’s the point of the game,” it’s “Here’s a thing we do in a campaign, I’m gonna do it here just to show you how it works.” The more important thing is at the beginning: “You guys have a Gambit, so blow something up. I’m on Conserve, so I gotta build.”