Beating the Story: Narrative Mapping in Practice

Beating the Story is my new book of practical storytelling techniques, now on pre-order from its publisher, Gameplaywright. It provides a system allowing you to, as its subtitle says, map, understand, and elevate any narrative. This approach breaks moments down into key types, the most important being dramatic beats of personal interaction and procedural beats in which characters overcome external obstacles. It lets you mark the flow of information with other beat types: pipe, question, and reveal. The system also encourages you to note the presence of oddball flourish beats, like strong spices, register most satisfyingly when used sparingly: commentary, bringdown, gratification, and anticipation.
(You may be familiar with these concepts from Hamlet’s Hit Points, which gears itself to the needs of roleplaying GMs and designers.)
Thanks to convenient timing, I happen to be working on a novel that I developed using the system shown in Beating the Story just as we are making the book available for pre-orders. This gives me the chance to discuss the translation of its tools and principles to an actual writing process.

The novel, called The Missing and the Lost, is part of the initial release of books for Pelgrane Press’ The Yellow King Roleplaying Game. We crowdfunded the project through a Kickstarter last summer and remain on track for our December 2018 release date. The novel features a character who first appeared in a short story in my original fiction collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign.
The first draft isn’t done yet, so it’s way too early to be giving away anything that might be construed as a spoiler. For both the examples given here and the above sample illustration, I’m either changing details or talking about them vaguely.
I’m now two-thirds of the way through the initial draft, give or take. At present the story map, as created on storybeats.io, consists of 159 beats. Twelve of them appear in the illustration here.
It also allows you to test the power and appropriateness of your shifts between scenes with transition icons, each with its own impact on pacing.
For this project I’ve been using the beat map as my only outline. This choice has given me the structure required for a genre novel in which several parallel threads eventually converge, and the flexibility to easily improve the interweaving while I write.
The graphic presentation, abetted by the ease of moving elements around with the storybeats.io tool, has enabled me to keep the various threads of the multi-threaded storyline active over the course of the narrative.
The map excerpt here shows the novel’s opening. The icons tell me that I’m hitting my desired mix of emotional and problem-solving moments.
This first-person novel follows a single viewpoint character throughout. The domino effect of scenes tumbling out of one another has yet to kick in, so the smaller transition icons you see are all Continuations—shifts featuring the same character but not in an Scene A causes Scene B sort of way. Later on Outgrowth transitions come to dominate.
During the draft process I’ve been revising the beat map continually. The writing of a scene may suggest more moments that rise toward hope or drop toward fear and ought to be included on the updated map. As characters flesh out on the page and become richer, I’ve discovered the need for additional dramatic moments in which they address obvious conflicts arising from my execution of particular sequences.
In a couple of instances I’ve spotted ways to stoke momentum by making previously disconnected scenes flow directly into one another, as marked by Continuation transitions.
In one instance the beat map allowed me to spot an opportunity to excitingly connect two previously disparate scenes by having a character in scene A provide a reason for the protagonist to initiate scene B with another supporting character.
Checking the overall narrative line with the web app, I can see that it fits the pattern of most satisfying narratives—a modulated but gradually downward line.
Overall the beat map process encourages you to think about key moments, their purpose in the story, the impact you intend them to have, and how they can best be threaded together.
Preorder Beating the Story today, get it in electronic form immediately, check it out, and then head over to storybeats.io to turn practical theory into creative action.

Help Our Fiction Writing Visualization Tool By Taking This Survey

Gameplaywright is developing a writing visualization tool that might seem familiar to those of you who know my book Hamlet’s Hit Points. It might even have something to do with the HHP follow-up project I’m working on, which uses its beat system, plus spiffy new insights, to address fiction writing in general. If this intrigues you, please help us out by taking a brief survey.

Hamlet’s Hit Points Applied to User Experience Design

A Thing I Always Say is that the beat analysis system from Hamlet’s Hit Points can be used to look at much more than what we traditionally consider as narrative. News broadcasts, commercials, and political speeches all resound with the emotional up and down beats that engage our attention over time. One area I’ve never thought to examine, because I know nothing about it, is user experience design—the methods used to navigate us through web sites and keep us from closing that tab.

Matt Leacock, who we in the tabletop world know better as the genius designer of Pandemic, knows a lot about user experience design. In his civilian identity he does it for Sococo, a virtual office space site. And in the presentation below he applies beat analysis not only to the play experience of his board game Forbidden Island, but to the process of engaging with a site like LinkedIn. This last choice is not coincidental, as he’s speaking to designers from that company.

The entire talk will well reward your time, even if you don’t care about user experience design. It includes great insight into his process, the development history of Pandemic, and even the German market’s preference for meeples over abstract pawns.

Thanks for the insights, Matt!

Video Interview with the Secret DM

In this Gamerati interview, I talk Hillfolk, Stone Skin Press, Dreamhounds of Paris, Hamlet’s Hit Points, and our plan to apprehend Flattop, with David Melmo, the Secret DM.  Check out his lovely intro, subscribe to Ed Healy’s Gamerati YouTube channel, or dive in directly below.

Improv Goes Fantasy – With a Hint of Hamlet’s Hit Points?

Toronto’s coolest comedy venue is without a doubt Comedy Bar, at Bloor near Ossington. Although my favorite of the various sketch and improv formats is Catch-23, a competition in which teams have to play exactly that number of minutes worth of scenes before judge and voting audience, I may shortly have to revise that opinion, out of raw self-interest. Comic Doug Sheppard and a marauding band of fellow improvisers are unveiling Tomes, in which the group improvises based on the back cover copy of a fantasy novel they have never read. Curiouser still, Doug, who one must assume has some d20s under his furniture somewhere, got in touch to tell me that he drew some inspiration from Hamlet's Hit Points. I’ll be checking out the epic first performance on June 20^th at 8 PM and reporting back afterwards. Keep up with Tomes events by liking their Facebook page.

Update: This event has been indefinitely postponed. When I get word of a rescheduling, I’ll let you know.

90% Vampires

As someone who has himself been guilty of diagramming out narrative structures, I recently had my attention directed to an infographic alleged to depict the thematic content of a particular book. On first glance, this looks cool, and not unlike the slow downward progress of a Hamlet’s Hit Points beat analysis map.

When you check out what it actually measures, the wonkiness surfaces. Welcome to the blissfully obtuse world of the Book Genome Project, which measures the quantity of certain tropes and motifs, which it seems to think are the same thing as themes. It bases itself on the already peculiar assumptions of the Music Genome Project, which powers the Pandora streaming service. The MGP thinks that people choose music based on abstract, objective criteria like “major key tonality” or a “dynamic male vocalist.” Actually we respond more according to cultural aspiration, identity formation, and the indefinable talent of people working within the styles we’re already drawn to. When Pandora works, it’s because of its user fine-tuning.

Gene-sequenced music seems downright on-point compared to judging a book by the quantity of attention given to a motif or trope in a work of literature. This leads to such hilarity as the following gem, from the Book Lamp FAQ. (BISAC is the standard subject header system, as seen on a book’s front matter page.)

A book with 90% Vampires is a very different book than one with 5% Vampires, but both would probably receive the same label in the BISAC classification. 

Clearly the above was typed by an android.

We as readers might respond to certain tropes and motifs, seeking some and staying clear of others. But they are externals, and tell us nothing about why one story using a motif becomes a staple of the canon and countless others vanish from the collective imagination.

Believe me, I didn't want to take the glasses off for this one. But if we’ve learned nothing else here today, vampires are not a theme!

Core Resolution and Emotional Dynamics

How To Design Games the Robin Laws Way

(Part Six of Several; see part one for introduction and disclaimer)

With the core book outlined, it’s time to tackle the question of the game’s core resolution system.

(The reality isn’t so linear; thoughts about the book’s structure generally arise in parallel to ideas about the resolution system.)

If you’re designing a new game based on an existing core rules set, the choice is simple—let’s use that one. It might be dictated to you by the publisher, or a decision that you make as a designer. In the latter case, you'll obviously be constrained to the core rules sets available to you. Most likely, you’re working with a rules set by the same publisher. Or you might be using one available through a license, open or limited. We’ve already talked about the process of fitting a new game to an existing rules set; you’re presumably doing the Game X take on Y genre/setting.

If, however, I’m working from scratch, I want to design a core resolution system that creates the emotional dynamic implied by the core goal. Dying Earth, with its rolls and rerolls, evokes the comical back-and-forth of the source material. DramaSystem emulates the basic construction of dramatic scenes and otherwise gets out of the way. HeroQuest zooms out to a broader emulation of story construction, including the pass/fail cycle I later refined in Hamlet's Hit Points. GUMSHOE asks why it feels cool when heroes gather information in a mystery story, and brings that to the gaming table.

I never start out with a novel or abstractly intriguing mechanical idea and then try to build a game around that chassis. It starts with feeling. The mathematical construct is secondary; what the players are feeling when they use it is everything.

Recently I had the experience of switching from one core system owned by my publisher to the other. Before digging into the research for The Gaean Reach, I figured it would be Skulduggery-based, with bits of GUMSHOE sorted in. After reacquainting myself with Jack Vance’s delightful source material, I saw how the structure of its stories differed from the superficially similar Dying Earth tales the core rules were originally designed for. The SF novels played were more about investigation with the occasional setback than the constant picaresque reversals undergone by the likes of Cugel and Rhialto. So I shifted gears, to a GUMSHOE core with appropriate Skulduggery elements grafted on. Again this was a matter of creating the right feel, whether or not the crossover between the two systems introduces brand confusion.

Disorienting Exposition

In fiction set in unfamiliar times and places, it often falls to the author to explain details of the world well-known to the characters but not to the reader. How straightforwardly to lay this out is a matter of style, and therefore taste. I tend to want to deliver it in a compact way and get on to the story it’s supporting. Some readers prefer obscured approaches that take longer but don’t necessarily signal themselves as expository—world detail through dialogue being a key technique.

A more complex technique presents expository detail about the world as if addressing a reader already familiar with it. Most often you'll see this in SF novels. The narrator rattles off terms and describes situations without full explanatory context.

According to the beat analysis system found in Hamlet's Hit Points, these mystifying references serve as question beats. They arouse our anxiety and our curiosity, impelling us to read on, in search of clarification. As we figure out the world through additional context, we feel counterpointing up beats, when those questions are answered.

This might be seen as the SF version of a common literary fiction gambit, where details of the story being retold are teased but not fully laid out. In both cases these can substitute for the basic building blocks of most fiction, dramatic and procedural scenes.

How much one digs this is another matter of taste. Personally, I prefer to be invested in a character, to hope for her success and fear for her failure, before I’m asked to puzzle through an alien future. Other readers might be perfectly happy with pure world extrapolation, without all that pesky story and character always rearing its head.

Flames Rising Interview

As part of Flames Rising’s ongoing interview series with the authors of Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales line, Jeremy L. C. Jones puts the questions to me regarding The Worldwound Gambit, novel development, and the essence of a compelling protagonist. Along the way I drop a hint or two surrounding my unannounced next Pathfinder novel, talk up Hamlet’s Hit Points as  a plotting aid, and provide aspiring writers with either encouraging discouragement or discouraging encouragement. Check it out.

Scene Study: Luck

With DramaSystem now out for playtest and wending its way toward crowdfunding, I’m kicking off a new occasional feature. In Scene Study, we look at dramatic scenes from other narrative forms, see how they tick, and look for lessons we can apply when playing Hillfolk, or roleplaying games in general.

The new David Milch / Michael Mann HBO series Luck follows an ensemble cast of race track habitues, from trainers to jockeys to owners to degenerate gamblers in pursuit of diverse agendas, all of which depend on the titular quality.

In episode two, freshly paroled gangland figure Chester Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and his right-hand man Gus (Dennis Farina), recap events of the recent past while on a car ride. Gus drives, with Chester in the back. In Hamlet's Hit Points terms, the scene acts as a reveal. It tells us what both men already know about the events that led Chester to prison, and which motivate the revenge he’s now plotting against Mike, the confederate who let him take the rap for him.

On paper, you’re never supposed to write a scene in which two characters reveal information they already know. On screen, this plays as a transcendent acting duet, with the music of Milch’s stylized dialogue perfectly executed by two great actors.

It’s also a dramatic scene, in which Gus, the petitioner, seeks for something other than the facts. They are the pretext for something deeper. He’s drawing out the account of why Chester let himself take the fall to answer a question for himself. What he really wants from Chester is reassurance, a staple dramatic goal that often arises in Hillfolk games. He wants to know that they’re doing the right thing, that he shouldn't have killed the other guy, as Gus was willing to do.

Chester grants Gus his petition. By conceding that Mike would never have done the same for him if their positions were reversed, Chester shows Gus that he understands the situation. Reassured, Gus accepts the matter as closed. In a DramaSystem game, Chester’s player would earn a game currency called a drama token as reward for having satisfied the petitioner’s emotional need.

The scene shows that low-key interactions can be just as memorable as the higher-stakes confrontations that appear around them. No great heat passes between the two men. They remain cordial throughout, and Chester winds up giving Gus what he wants. The moment affirms the tightness of their friendship. A compelling scene needn’t turn on heated conflict. Here the answering of an audience question supplies all the interest we need to care about their exchange, to enjoy hearing these two guys talk.

Headlines as Story Beats

Hamlet's Hit Points identifies three basic story beats relating to the presentation of information. The pipe beat hides info for later, and as such is strictly a creature of fiction. The other two beats, the question and the reveal, are central to any narrative communication that seeks to attract and hold audience interest. Questions cause emotional friction or longing; reveals relieve these feelings. The first is a down beat, the second an up beat.

New stories can be broken down with beat analysis, too. The shoehorning of information into a storyline with emotional ups and downs becomes most apparent on television news. However, it’s present in print reporting as well.

However arranged, a newspaper or magazine headline poses a question. As much as it may seem to lay out the basics of a story, it’s really working to excite your imagination and formulate questions about its further details. The body of the story then proposes to answer that question, along with the core journalistic five Ws: what? Who? Where? When? Why? (And the red-headed stepchild, How?)

If you’re using social media to spread awareness, you can garner more clicks by hooking into the beat structure of headline and story. When you write a blurb on Twitter, Facebook, G+ or whatever to a post you want people to read, compose it so that it poses a question, in the reader’s mind if not directly. Reference to one of the 5Ws never hurts.

The hidden dynamic of the headline, and how to harness it.

Why ghouls are the next vampires.

Who are the players of the future?

When to eject dysfunctional gamers.

Of the 5Ws, the most clickable is the H. People want to know how to do things.

Other classic headline tricks attract clicks. Citing a number poses an implicit question. If your headline reads “Ten Mistakes GMs Make”, I’m immediately wondering which items you’ve chosen.

2 GMs, 1 Mic On Hamlet's Hit Points

In episode 20 of their 2 GMs, I Mic podcast, the irrepressible Joe Wolz and Nicky Helmkamp tackle the issue of pacing in roleplaying games. In the process, they give Hamlet's Hit Points a thorough and gratifying examination. Those of you already familiar with the book may be most interested in the examples they give of applying its lessons to actual play.

Joe tells a funny story on himself in which, when talking to me at Gen Con, his comments on the book led me to look at him like he was a “total douchebag.” While it is true that he led with a wee faux pas, I would, and will, characterize the moment somewhat differently. But before I turn the anecdote into a remake of Rashomon set at the Pelgrane booth, I'll give you time to listen to the Wolz-Helmkamp version.

Dramatic Poles of the Walking Dead

At first glance, the survival horror cable series “The Walking Dead” would seem clearly procedural, devoted as it is to the efforts of a small band of people to tough out a zombie apocalypse. Certainly, many of its most memorable scenes pit characters against practical problems: finding a missing party member, snagging needed medical supplies, and the ever-popular hiding from undead. To run it in DramaSystem, you’d need to up the lethality level, replacing, for example, the rule that characters only die with their players’ consent.

Despite its emphasis on the procedural, it is also a dramatic show. As the second season gets underway, we can identify the dramatic poles of its key ensemble. You might peg them differently, but here’s what I’m seeing:

Rick: heroism or doubt?

Shane: altruism or selfishness?

Dale: wise old man or old man?

Andrea: survival or suicide?

Rick’s wife Lori has been written as mostly a foil for Rick and, to some extent, Shane. We tend to see her acting as the opposing force telling other characters not to do what they’re considering. Hopefully we’ll see her drawn as more of an individual, with her own clear and consistent poles, as the series progresses.

The redneck bad-ass Daryl at this point appears to be, in DramaSystem terms, a GM-controlled supporting character. His purpose is to provide relief by being an enjoyable rock of confidence, in contrast to Rick’s doubt and Shane’s concealed dark side.

Shane’s poles are turning out to be very familiar in both gaming and fiction. He shares them with Rick Blaine of Casablanca (as seen in Hamlet's Hit Points) and two characters from the in-house Hillfolk series. I expect to see them appear a lot as DramaSystem rolls out to the public.

A Look Back at Korad I: The Process

Since June 2010 this blog has hosted the Korad experiment, an exercise in group world-building. The final fact we learned about Korad concerns its nominal future. We selected the three candidates for a future ideology which will one day supersede the empire's dominant worldview. As determined by you, they are:
Candlism, a stoic blend of religion and philosophy.
Satirism: a working-class magical movement subverting official opposition to frivolity
Symbotomism: a movement determined to eradicate Aesigil influence, at the cost of also destroying written language
My original intention was to use the world creation as a prelude to another play-by-blog exercise, along the lines of Angels and Operators. As you may guess from the opening clause of the previous sentence, I’ve reconsidered and will no longer be going ahead with that.
It used to be that an ongoing feature, like Korad or Angels and Operators, offered me an acceptable trade-off on the time versus inspiration scale. They took more time to write than the average blog post, but they reliably provided a guaranteed topic for one slot a week. The Hamlet analysis proved even more fruitful, leading as it did to a gratifyingly successful book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, and acting as inspiration for my upcoming new game engine, DramaSystem.
Even more so than a year ago, a blog designed to attract an audience thrives on one-time clicks from social media platforms. Ongoing features did well back when LiveJournal was still a growing concern, and users reloaded their friends page on a habitual basis. Readership for LJ has been slowly deflating over the past year, in part prompting my exodus to the new blog. In the social-click driven environment, which I can now measure with a reasonable degree of accuracy, repeat features lose attention after a while. Those with a play-by-blog format suffer doubly, from what might be called the Babylon 5 effect. They require a high degree of investment and are hard to catch up with if you don’t jump on board from the outset. Given the challenges of LJ’s decline and timing of the move to the new blog, we still had great participation on the world-building end. However, in the new environment or paradigm or whatever it is, I don’t see a play-by-blog series as the best use of my limited outreach time in future.
What I was going to do was have commenters play, to whatever extent they wanted, influential members of the chosen ideology. I’m betting the collective would have chosen Satirism, with few participants rooting to play either stoics or destroyers of literacy. Each play session would present a turning point, where the group would have to decide how to handle a crisis affecting the movement from within and without. Each turn would jump forward in time, allowing for multi-generational play as the ideology adapted itself to changing historical circumstances.
If I had the time to do this, which I’m sure I don’t, I might attempt to do the play over on Google+. It’s new and shiny; its circle feature and discussion orientation might prove more amenable to play-by-blog than a standard comments arrangement.
I’ll do one more blog post, looking at what we’ve learned about world-building from this collective process. In the meantime, though, it’s time to throw Korad’s fate open to you. My final version of the resulting world bible, has now been uploaded to Scribd. The document and its underlying intellectual property are, as always, public domain. You are free to do what you want with it. Peruse it. Change it. Use it as a setting for fiction, your home game, or a published RPG. If you do choose to do something with it, be sure to check in with a report.

The Three Reveals of Gen Con (Part Three): DramaSystem / Hillfolk

At Gen Con, brave questioners heard details on up to three unannounced projects. Over the last weeks, I’ve been making those revelations here.

The first: New Tales of the Yellow Sign

The second: Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff

Now the third and final reveal: my new rules engine, DramaSystem, as expressed by its first game iteration, Hillfolk. The tagline for the project is: If Hamlet's Hit Points is the theory, DramaSystem is the practice.

Specifically, it picks up on the HHP observation that the core scenes of any narrative can be broken down into two categories: procedural and dramatic, and that RPGs have traditionally excelled at the former and given short shrift to the latter. You know those magical sessions where the rules melt away and you just find yourself freely interacting for four hours? And next week you can’t recapture whatever lightning found its way into the bottle? DramaSystem makes the free-flowing story-making happen as a matter of course. It changes the roleplaying dynamic, allowing you to create ongoing collaborative stories that unfold like serialized drama shows (“The Sopranos”, “Six Feet Under”, “Shameless.”) I’ve been in-house testing this for most of the year and am beyond excited by the results.

The first game is Hillfolk, in which you play the core members of a clan of uplands raiders at the dawn of the iron age. Their personal stories play out in a crucible of competing civilizations. Do their histories change the world forever?

Pelgrane Press will be publishing; I’ll be talking about it in stages in the weeks and months ahead. For the moment, here’s a peek at the character sheet. This is my playtest rough and has yet to undergo graphic design beautification. But you get the idea.

Link Round-Up: HHP Goes Boardgame, RPG PhD, West Memphis 3 Released

Chris Farrell applies the Hamlet's Hit Points method to board game analysis. See if you can spot the line that is exactly what I'd hoped a reviewer would say about the book.

Dissertation by Doctor of Roleplaying Michelle Nephew now available in affordable e-form.

The West Memphis 3 are to be released today, thanks in large part to a series of documentaries about their clearly unjust murder conviction. The third installment is due to play the Toronto International Film Festival in a few weeks; the directors are now rushing to add an updated ending. Among the celebrities helping their cause, it turns out that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh provided funding for the forensic tests that finally forced prosecutors to act. The three were released under something called an Alford plea, which stops short of an exoneration, leaves some charges on their records, but does not (contra early reports) require them to admit guilt.

Ashen Stars on The Game’s the Thing

Episode 90 of Ron and Veronica Blessing’s The Game’s the Thing podcast focuses on Ashen Stars, with yours truly as the guest. Join us as we talk about the game’s premise, genesis, development process and additions to the GUMSHOE toolkit. Also up for discussion are Hamlet's Hit Points, why players only think they want their characters to be irresponsible, and teasers for two of the three reveals of Gen Con. Put it in your ears!

Site link.  / iTunes link.

Gen Con Wrap

Another Gen Con has steamrollered by. Now we the legions of gamers and game designers straggle our way home, heads full of ideas and colons full of chain restaurant food. I'm happy to have seen my various homies and comrades and already looking forward to our next grand convocation.

Sales went smashingly at the Pelgrane booth. The beautiful blue shiny tome that is Ashen Stars flew off the shelves like a crew of freelance interplanetary troubleshooters fleeing a swarm of Class-K entities. We ran out of Mutant City Blues, Skulduggery, and Bookhounds of London. Trail of Cthulhu sold out multiple times, sending chief Pelgranista Simon Rogers scrounging through the hall to round up additional copies from retail partners. A stack of Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu also vanished amid the onslaught of the book-snaffling hordes. I'll let Simon crow as loudly as his British reserve will allow him, over on the Pelgrane blog, but let's just say it was a big leap over last year, which itself was hardly chopped liver.

In addition to signing tons of Ashen Stars, I was asked to deface a good many copies of The Worldwound Gambit and Hamlet's Hit Points. With the latter book out for a year, I got to hear readers' responses to it, and found them immensely gratifying.

But enough with the residual glow. It's time to buckle down to the elevation of a victor and the lamentation of the also-rans. I speak of course of the buzzword competition. In previous years judges required self-reporting to occur at the show. Given how busy Gen Con has become, and thus how hard it is to buttonhole any specific person, the judges have now generously ruled that post-convention accounts of one's statusing efforts will be considered before a winner is declared. So please tell your story of buzzword use, preferably in the comments here at the newly inaugurated blogspot HQ.

Considerable panache will be required to topple the clear front-runner, Kevin Kulp, who uttered the dread phrase with utter straightfacedness in his opening speech at the ENnies. Only a nigh imperceptible puff of vapor rising up behind him indicated that a portion of his soul had detached from the rest of him, died, and evaporated.

Can anyone top this chilling act of linguistic vandalism?

Gen Con Day 2

At last year’s Hamlet’s Hit Points seminar, I was surprised to discover that most of the attendees hadn’t heard of the book. They’d come either on the strength of the snappy title, or because they knew my name. This time around, the audience included a few newbies but mostly consisted of people conversant with beat analysis. After I supplied a rundown for the uninitiated, I supplied As for the participant’s Qs, focusing on such issues as charging expository scenes with emotional weight (as seen for example in the opening of Casablanca), and how to ease players anxious for constant success into a dramatic rhythm where occasional defeats make victories all the sweeter*.

A like phenomenon occurred at the later GUMSHOE seminar with Kenneth Hite and Simon Rogers. We’re used to describing the system to prospective players and GMs who are concerned about potential issues without having put the game through its paces. Here we had an impressive turnout of folks who have been playing GUMSHOE for a long time were looking for fine pointers. We talked about what to do if the players solve the mystery too quickly (answer: increase the challenge of antagonist reactions and other non-investigative sequences, rather than punishing the players for being too good at what the game asks them to do), embracing players’ choices to hold onto ability points in the early going, and how to calibrate your degree of improvisation to a given group’s expectations. Talk of Lorefinder, the upcoming GUMSHOE bolt-on for Pathfinder, aroused much interest.

Speaking of matters Golarion, later I headed over to the Paizo booth to hang out with fellow Pathfinder Tales authors Dave Gross and Howard Andrew Jones, signing copies of The Worldwound Gambit. Paizo fiction impresario James Sutter says that the novel is selling quite nicely at the show, which is gratifying to hear. If you picked up a copy and would like it scrawled on, I’ll be signing again tomorrow (Saturday) from 4-5. Or grab me after the Pathfinder Tales panel at 2 (also tomorrow.) Or swing by the Pelgrane booth, which is where I’ll be the rest of the time.

Trade remained brisk over in Pelgrane territory, where the company has already exceeded its entire impressive take from last year. Other vendors report results as least as encouraging. There may be a stock market plunge and a possible double-dip recession outside the convention hall, but it’s an upbeat year in our little universe.

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*I’m afraid this wasn’t my smoothest opening in seminar history. For most of this year I’ve been struggling with ergonomic issues in the home office. In an effort to stop this from becoming the most boring blog on earth, I haven’t talked about this pins and needly saga here. Long story short: I finally have a properly adjustable chair at home and have it properly adjusted. But I’ve not yet fully returned to total shipshape, meaning that if I sit in a less than perfect chair for too long, I can mess myself up, often the day after an extended bout of wrong sitting. Both the exhibit hall chair I perched on yesterday while signing Ashen Stars bookplates and the chair/desk combo in the hotel room have shown themselves to be way less than optimal. I probably also need to swap out my many-pocketed manbag for something that isn’t constantly giving me the Vulcan nerve pinch. The upshot was that a spate of wooziness struck me during my intro to the seminar. Embarrassingly, I had to step outside to shake off my discombobulation, leaving Gameplaywright honchos Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball to vamp in my momentary absence. I mention this only to reassure those present that I am fine and have not been stricken with Venusian pleurisy or anything like that. For the rest of the show I’ll be much more vigilant against the malign intent of Indianapolis furniture.

Where To Find Me at Gen Con

If you’re looking for me at Gen Con, here’s my event schedule:

Friday 10 AM Hamlet's Hit Points seminar (Marriott – Santa Fe)

Friday 3 PM GUMSHOE seminar (Indiana Ballroom F)

Friday 5 PM Book Signing @ the Paizo booth

Sat 2 PM Pathfinder Tales panel (Marriott – Santa Fe)

Sat 4 PM Book Signing @ the Paizo booth

Otherwise, unless I am grabbing a bite, standing in line for espresso, or doing the impromptu meeting/interview thing, I’ll endeavor to make myself available for greeting, chatting and interacting at the Pelgrane Press booth.

If you say the right secret words, you might get me to spill the beans on up to three unannounced upcoming projects:

• plans to, in tandem with esteemed colleague, conquer another medium

• a book you should read about a book you shouldn’t

• the rules set called DramaSystem, its first game, Hillfolk, and how they change the roleplaying experience