Let me give an example of how the adventure and roleplaying layers will interact, before I delve deeper in theory and lose everyone. People need concrete examples in order to grasp how this thing will work, because without them it just sounds like I am doing a whole lot of handwaving, which couldn't be further from the truth. All the other GMs throughout the decades were handwaving the adventure- and strategy-layers, but not me. The entire purpose of Master of Heroes is to replace the handwaving with an actual game, with concrete rules instead of GM whims. And boy have I succeeded, as you're about to discover.
So I've already given an example of how the roleplaying layer will affect the adventure layer: the adventure-layer players will only be able to spawn heroes in population centers unlocked by the roleplayers, so they'll be terribly interested in ALL the roleplaying teams' progress; when say the Sandpoint Crew heads over to Magnimar, suddenly everyone will be able to spawn heroes there! When another team steps through a teleporter and finds itself in a city in the Forgotten Realms or some literal hellhole settlement in Planescape, suddenly the entire Battlegrounds can spawn heroes there! The roleplayers in other words will have the power to utterly transform the adventure- and strategy-players' world, and will be doing so regularly as long as they keep progressing in their campaigns. They will even be unlocking new races and classes for everyone to use with future heroes.
At the same time, the game has to also reward the adventure-players' exploration progress, not just the roleplaying-players'. But whereas I made the latter universal, I made the former personal. So that when a hero arrives at for example Irrisen after a long and perilous journey from his starting point in Varisia, he and only he can spawn further heroes there, and all the rest of the adventure- and strategy-players can only look on in envy. But the adventure-player won't be able to unlock possible new races, classes and so on by exploring the world. These are major unlocks, and as such only the roleplayers will be able to unlock them, through their fully zoomed-in viewpoint of the world. They will have to encounter an actual shifter NPC in order to unlock the shifter class for everyone in the overworld. And then the random hero generation engine will also be able to use the shifter class. Also, adventure-layer unlocks of population centers aren't permanent. Once a player has moved his hero away from one of them, he can no longer spawn further heroes there. He'll have to maintain hero presence in all the population centers he wants to use as spawn points, unlike roleplaying unlocks which are not only universal but also permanent.
So that is a good introduction into how the roleplaying layer drastically affects and reshapes the adventure layer. Let's now see an example in the opposite way.
And let's take something happening right now in the game. Right now SriK and Rory are forming a team to tackle the Master of Combat Scenario Black Fang's Dungeon. Little spoiler: Once they've finished it, regardless of whether they survive, they will unlock a bunch of further scenarios that comprise the so-called "Beginner Box Bash" event. That was 10 further Beginner Box scenarios released by Paizo, all playable with the simplified "Beginner Box" rules (which is what we should have started playing Battlegrounds with to ease us into the game, but in the end it worked better anyway since otherwise we wouldn't have had these scenarios now to use with the adventure layer).
So the moment Black Fang is over, a bunch of new black exclamation marks will pop up all over the Sandpoint Hinterlands map [ > ]. It won't be all 10 of them because I think a couple of them take place around Magnimar, so I'll save those for later. But it will be most of them. And anyone with a hero, or who purchases one at that point, will be able to play them.
In what order, though? Because, though the scenarios are nominally equal (all for 1st-level), in reality nothing is equal, and that's before considering cases where some ability or skill that a team doesn't have would be particularly useful for a particular scenario, so that teams with that ability or skill (or item for that matter) will have an easier time, while other teams will have a harder time. So if you knew which scenarios are easier for the team you have assembled, you could tackle them in order from easier to tougher, and massively boost your chances of coming out of all of them victorious, and much stronger and wealthier.
And that's where the adventure-layer's Scheme move comes in.
Ignore their continued use of the word "downtime". None of this shit is downtime, downtime is relaxing. What they mean is DOWNTIME FROM ROLEPLAYING, i.e. that none of these moves WILL BE ROLEPLAYED. You won't sit around with the GM for hours and roleplay researching the servant's uniforms or some shit, because it would be boring. The player will state the move and the GM will register it, a die might be rolled or not, and that will be one adventure-layer turn for that particular hero, exactly as with a strategy videogame. And THAT is what I call ADVENTURING in Battlegrounds. So both Paizo's "downtime" and my "adventuring" are TECHNICAL terms not to be taken LITERALLY. We just need some terms to label our games' various modes, layers and moves, and for better or worse these are the ones we chose; in Paizo's case because they are confused on what downtime really means, and in my case because of historical reasons (which I will elaborate later, as they're very significant to the development of videogames, and ultimately the game of games, my game).
There is also the Research move, which Paizo terms "Research Facts and Lore" which can be used to look into adventure/scenario markers on the overworld and figure out things about them, or gain advantages.
So these are two powerful tools that can be leveraged on the overworld to assist with Master of Combat Scenarios or even with full-blown Battlegrounds roleplaying adventures and campaigns. In Paizo's game it is THE ROLEPLAYING CHARACTERS THEMSELVES who use these tools during their "downtime" from adventuring (meaning from roleplaying), but in my game adventuring heroes can also be used for whom these activities are NOT downtime BUT THE ADVENTURE ITSELF. That's why I call that layer the adventure layer, exactly as it is used in adventure-strategy games like Heroes of Might and Magic. The entire confusion over these terms arises due to their different usage in the roleplaying and videogame industries, which usage differs because of these artforms' differing requirements, and the reason I am the only one facing these difficulties is because I am the only one working to FUSE these two artforms into ONE. So of course I would be mired in conflicting terminology that I need to sort out. But not to worry, I am a philosopher and terminological problems are our specialty. Common people even think that that's all we do (Feynman famously thought so).
So in the case of SriK and Rory, who are currently playing strictly in the adventure layer (Rory's roleplaying character isn't even in the area yet, he will only arrive 6 months later), it will be their choice if they want to spend turns scheming and researching before tackling further scenarios. These same turns could be spent working and making money to buy better gear for example, and it's these kinds of choices that we call strategy. Or at any rate adventure-strategy, because strictly speaking strategy is for war. And don't forget that they'll also have to WALK to the different scenario markers, or to wherever else they need to be in order to scheme about and research them. Actually, since the entire Sandpoint Hinterlands is merely ONE HEX in the overworld, they won't have to walk anywhere. But when the scenarios are in different hexes, they will have to travel between them, unlike Paizo's Organized Play characters who simply teleport everywhere as if they're really playing an SRPG.
Now SriK doesn't have a character in the roleplaying layer, because he's not playing a campaign yet, but Rory does have a character—at least in the future—so one option in the future will be sending his adventuring hero to research and scheme for his main character. SriK could also do that, if for example he's following one of the campaigns' progress and just wants to help the team out. So here we see a kind of continual interaction and feedback loop between the adventure and roleplaying layers.
One valid objection to this last-mentioned mechanic is that why would these people help each other, when the characters are strangers in the game? I was stumped by this for a little while, but then I remembered the Camaraderie Points, and I had my solution. Characters and heroes must spend Camaraderie Points from both sides to become friendly and therefore be cool with helping each other out, and for this purpose I will have to slightly rework the Relationship mechanics and these points. But it's a simple and beautiful solution that totally solves the verisimilitude issue while further deepening and complexifying the game's mechanics.
Note that this whole system isn't Paizo's. Paizo wrote their "Downtime" rules, and they have shown no interest in adding a real adventure layer to their game, let alone a strategy layer (their entire system assumes each player directly controls ONLY ONE CHARACTER, which utterly negates the videogame adventure-strategy and 4X genres). The Camaraderie Points don't come from Paizo either, they come from Legendary Games' rules supplement "Ultimate Relationships" [ > ]. But the fusion of both these systems—and countless more besides, from a multitude of sources—with the adventure-strategy and 4X videogame genres into a perfectly coherent, magnificent whole?
That's icycalm.