A shortish one this time.

* edit: actually no I went on a tangent about mysteries so it’s not short or even shortish

* edit edit: I actually started this one a week ago, but kept adding bits. I’ve left the edit notes in because they' amuse me

The kids are back in school, so the last few weeks have been mostly logistics and adjusting to new routines. Twin #3 is now in school until 2pm, so I have a longer than ever stretch of work time - which means I really need to get back to doing work in that work time, as opposed to let work consume the evenings.

The Dungeon Book is out! And it’s gone back to the printers twice already, which is very gratifying.

edit: three times

I still find the days after a novel release very strange. When an rpg comes out, people have questions, there are things that need clarifying or even errata-ing. There’s a lot for the writer to do. With novels, there’s way more discussion and review, but none of that is supposed to involve the writer. So, there’s a lot of sitting on my tongue and biting my hands.

Tabletop Scotland was a lot of fun. A lot of standing around, I must admit - custom ebbed and flowed at the Pelgrane Booth, and we had a surfeit of staff as we combined the con with a team meet-up. I did get to run two games - Afterlight for Trail of Cthulhu and The Hair of the Hare of the Heir for Merryshire, both of which went very well.

I also got to wander past the Free League booth and track the pile of White Wizards as it diminished.

I didn’t buy many books at the con - I think the only one I actually got was Lo! Thy Dread Empire - as I’ve got a flood of stuff coming in. In the last few days, I’ve gotten Swords Against (of which more below), Impossible Landscapes and Cold City/Hot War, and there are another few games in the delivery pipeline that I’m really looking forward to getting to the table.

The crowdfunder for the tweaked 2nd Edition One Ring Rulebook, the Bestiary, and the Gondor/Rohan sourcebook goes live on the 22nd. I had a nice chat with Will at the Worlds’ End about my writing of The White Tower & Hall of Gold over on his YouTube.

This one’s going to be huge, and my contribution to it does not affect its hugeness one whit one way or another. Writing for TOR is like being an astronaut; part of the job involves making precise, careful adjustments to a highly calibrated instrument under very unusual conditions, and another part is sitting on top of a giant pile of rocket fuel and hanging on for dear life as it shoots skywards.

EDIT: Funded in eight minutes.

EDIT EDIT: dear god

I’ll also be talking about Gondor, and Merryshire, and The Dungeon Book, and whatever else on the Ludonarrative Dissidents livestream on Friday 25th.

I’m also a guest at Octocon here in Cork. My schedule is:

SAT 1130: Meet the Authon (Tucana)

SAT 1300: What’s Happening in Tabletop (Pegasus 4)

SAT 1600: World Building for Realism (Pegasus 4)

SUN 1130: Rooting for the Anti-Hero (Pegasus 1)

SUN 1730: Writing with Aphantasia (Pegasus 4)

SUN 1830: Closing Ceremony (Pegasus 4)

I shall also be hanging around the con for most of the weekend, children permitting.

I got to play a few rounds of the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective game, which is the old GM-less investigative game. It’s sort of a choose-your-own-adventure, with a map of London with numbered locations, each mystery has a book of matching paragraphs, and there’s a newspaper handout with more clues and references. So, if you want to go visit the museum, you check the map to see that’s entry SW28, and then you look up SW28 in the mystery book, and if there’s an entry under that heading you read it.

It was good fun, although you could feel it bumping up against the lack of a GM; a lot of the mystery would have been resolved with a few quick follow-up questions.

I also just got my order of Swords Against, which is… well, it’s a replica of a fantasy adventure supplement that never existed, mixed with a puzzle. I think. It’s deliberately obtuse.

They’re not the sort of games I regularly play. I love writing mystery rpgs, and love playing them, but I don’t have the patience or close attention needed to really do ‘proper’ mysteries and puzzles. I like the feedback and flexibility that comes with having a GM in the loop, even if it’s just a GM as ringmaster, pointing his cane at the interesting bits and assuring the group that we haven’t gone completely off track, that our confusion and headaches will be rewarded, that we’re not doing the equivalent of trying to decode cracks in the parchment as opposed to the mysterious glyphs (as happened to one poor doomed scholar of the Voynich Manuscript).

A while ago, and by while I mean twenty-five years, I wrote a Call of Cthulhu that was just a box of handouts. The players get given this box in the opening scene, and are told to look through it. From what I recall, the gimmick was that the investigators were all, knowingly or unknowingly, the kids of this dead guy, and if they didn’t find the ritual their father had cast and undo it, their souls were all forfeit, but that wasn’t made explicit. The players had to proactively dive into the box of documents and start making connections - oh, this letter’s dated the day after that legal document, that’s what it’s about and so on. And for that one, I could have left the players there and walked out of the room for two and a half hours (and I did stroll around a bit, being pleased with myself), but I was there for most of it, smiling to myself, assuring them that the right track was at least somewhere in the vicinity.

The downside of having a GM in the loop, of course, is that there are now at least three versions of the mystery in play. There’s the mystery-as-written, which we’ll call A.

There’s the mystery-as-understood-by-the-GM, B. Now, a well-written scenario will try to convey A so B closely aligns with it, but the whole point of writing a mystery in advance is to include enough clues and wrinkles and twists to baffle the three-to-six brains of the players. Therefore, unless the GM has enough time and energy to read the whole mystery over and over many times, B is only going to be a subset of A. There’ll be bits in the written scenario A that aren’t in the mental model B. Let’s call those A’.

And then there’s C, which is the mystery-in-play, it’s B plus bits of A plus whatever’s changed by the actions of the players (and that last bit is one of the upsides of having a GM in the loop; the players can shape the story).

Practical example time, before I wander off into a haze of theory. Say there’s a broken window at the crime scene, and a shard of glass got stuck in the boot of a suspect. Now, this isn’t intended to be the ‘ah-hah’ core clue that ties everything together. Searching the crime scene won’t reveal there’s a missing shard of glass, so it’s not a Cinderella situation where the challenge is searching everyone’s shoes. Depending on the situation, it might be additional confirmation (“not only did he have motive, not only did a witness place him near the crime scene, but he’s got glass in his boot - it’s got to be him”), an intriguing detail that makes sense only in retrospect (“ah, that’s why you mentioned his boot scraping on the ground”) or a hint that the players should look into this suspect in detail (“there’s a flash as something shiny in his boot heel catches the light”) but you wouldn’t hang a whole mystery off such a minor clue. The point is that’s very much in the region of A’ - a bit of the mystery that the writer might include in the scenario, but wouldn’t necessarily include in the summary designed to feed into B.

Indeed, we can divide A’ still further. We could break it into clues that the GM doesn’t need to hold in B, but are still called out in A as part of the mystery (“Bob has a shard of glass in his boot - it got stuck there when he fled the crime scene, and he hasn’t noticed it yet”), clues that have their utility called out (“Bob has a shard of glass in his boot - it got stuck there when he fled the crime scene, and he hasn’t noticed it yet. The players might discover it if they search Bob’s belongings, or spot it with a Notice spend”), or details that are technically clues but are so minor that they aren’t worth calling out (Bob has a shard of glass stuck in his boot).

No conclusions or good advice here, just a meditation on how GMs interact with mystery material. Hell, we can even posit a version of the mystery we call D, where everything is explained in such detail until A and B are perfectly congruent, only D is 80 pages long instead of 20 and pretty much unreadable. We can even dream of the magical land of E, where I get to lock GMs in a sort of Skinner box and study them until I work out the exact number of clues and plot threads they can hold in their brains at once…

Project roundup!

BREAKING GED: Still waiting on editorial feedback.

MERRYSHIRE DETECTIVE CLUB: Still one Dreadful Hare scenario to finish, and then all the extra content from the crowdfunder. But I have written more of the Hare scenario!

FISH STEW: First draft was mostly acceptable; currently working on an additional scenario and general polishing.

TERRAFORMING MARS: Waiting on feedback.

DIE: METADUNGEON: Started! Currently messing with character creation guidelines. It’s a similar situation to Dagger in the Heart (as endorsed by Quinns™) - taking a game that’s designed to blast through a short campaign quickly, and stretching it out to a longer story. It’s easier here, as DIE characters aren’t inherently self-destructive to the same degree as Heart, but I’m still fiddling with the optimal way to slow-press character concepts as opposed to sucking the juiciest bits immediately.

TUNNELS & TROLLS: Getting back on this properly after Fish Stew.

CODENAME EASONS SHELF: Just getting started. This began as a vague suggestion for a location-based sourcebook, then I had the idea for a way to tie everything together that makes it something newer and more exciting to write. Next step is outlining.

CURRENTLY READING: I just finished Ed Conway’s wonderful TRADE WORLD and I’m now burning through the mercifully shorter but also fascinating UNDERGROUND EMPIRE. I grabbed Jon Ronson’s THE CASTLE just for the Linehan bits, out of curiosity, and reread Campbell’s THREE BIRTHS OF DAOLOTH. Now starting in on Premee Mohamed’s WICKHILLS, and I’ve got another half-dozen books that I’ve started and put aside but will come back too, not to mention a million books that I’ve bought and really want to read. Just at my feet is a pile with THE ROUSE, MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA, BLOOD MERIDIAN, CHILDREN OF TIME and X+Y=K, and there’s a whole shelf of TBR stuff. Oh, also a whole bunch of books on the Táin, for research for a possible thing.

I have too many books.

CURRENTLY WATCHING: What am I watching? Nothing especially worthy or worthwhile. The new Taskmaster, obviously, and I’ll peek at the new Slow Horses.

Actually, that’s what I shall do. I’ve been in a funk all day - I shall go and watch that video about games and play I’ve been meaning to watch for ages.