Since I’m working on a project (Wightchester, back it now) it seems like a good time to give a quick summary of how I go about breaking down my writing while I’m working on it, to create a workflow that goes well with my brain issues. The way I do it I can manage a decent word count, whenever the brain worms give me even a small amount of energy to expend on a project.

Assuming you’ve already figured out what system you’re using, what your game is about and so on, it breaks down like this (but on a larger scale).

You’re basically creating a ‘skeleton’ of your whole project, and then proceeding to add the ‘meat’ to those bones until you end up with a fully formed monstrosity of a lumbering, malformed first draft.

CHAPTER

SECTION

SUBSECTION

SUBHEADER

LIST/TABLE HEADER

EMPHASIS/EXAMPLE

So I will go through the prospective book, page by page, section by section, laying out the titles of the sections and making bullet-points of the things I need to cover in each section.

The advantage here is that you can add things as you think of them, easily reference things (by heading) when you want to change them, and that you can pick and choose what bit you want to write, without having to write it out in order.

You can bounce around the text, nibbling away at the overall wordcount, avoiding writer’s block by shifting topics.

Not in the mood to finesse the system? Work on the lore, and vice versa.

Breaking it down into smaller chunks also gives you a real sense of progress as you can complete a paragraph, two, three, four and feel that you’re making headway because you’ve completed a few sections.

If you have trouble concentrating, feel like you can’t make any headway on a project or feel intimated by the size, this really can make a difference in terms of motivation and those little hits of happy brain juices you get for hitting accomplishment goals.

Let’s assume you want to replicate medieval travel in your fantasy world.

How fast can people move and how do people typically move?

Most people walk, and most people don’t ever stray more than five to ten miles from their home at any point in their lives, save maybe for a pilgrimmage. Serfs have to ask permission from their lords to travel outside their Lord’s territory, so a lot will depend on them.

Your average peasant, out walking, can cover perhaps 3 miles an hour or 20 miles in day, barring interruptions.

Professional couriers could move more swiftly, as much 30-40 miles in a day.

An ox cart could carry a lot, but slowly, only make 10 miles in a day.

A horse cart might make 20 miles in a day.

Purely on horseback, you might make 40-60 miles in a day, but for most, horse travel was limited to nobility and knights.

Soldiers (closest to adventurers perhaps) might march 20 miles in a day, in full gear with a pack, and still have the energy to fight at the end of it.

A carriage drawn by a team of horses might be able to make as much as 50-75 miles in a day, more and faster if there are changes of horses available.

A medieval sailing ship might cover an average of 5 miles per hour (120 miles in a day), though in fantasy games ship technology is typically more advanced and akin to Renaissance technology, though the speed isn’t that different, perhaps 8 mph. With fair wind and conditions, a ship could travel twice as fast. Sea turtles can swim at up to 10mph, for comparison.

This likely makes very clear just how disruptive and special magical transportation can be.

Figuring out what to publish as a supplement is always a bit of a puzzler. You see, what sells are corebooks, which was the philosophy at WOTC during the 4th Edition days, and which has bled over somewhat into 5th Edition publication. They say they’re moving away, a bit, from the heavy hardback tomes for everything, but it remains to be seen.

Why have these big tomes become the norm?

Well, supplementary material can be a hard sell. Let’s say you have a GM’s book and a Player’s book.

In practice you’re going to sell one GM book per group (typically 4-6 players) and maybe slightly more Player’s books. That’s still only about one sixth your potential audience, and that’s the most you’re going to sell of just about anything.

Once you get into supplementary material, class books, race books and so on, you’re carving that fraction down more and more. Even the best possible market is only a fraction of the number of players.

What has traditionally sold worst of all (apart from during the early days of gaming when people were starved for material) has always been adventures.

Why?

Because adventures tend to be one-and-done. You can’t very easily play through the same adventure again, especially not with the same players. Reusable materials might be a couple of interesting traps, some monsters and some magical treasure, but it’s not convenient to flip through dozens of adventure books to find the material you want to re-use.

If you want to sell supplements they need to have a purpose and some longevity.

Setting books.

More character options.

Equipment.

Expanded systems for new circumstances.

Otherwise, you’re in for a bad time.

Setting a game against the backdrop of natural disaster can add flavour and drama to an otherwise mundane scenario.

To take just one example, flooding.

An underground dungeon is inherently dangerous during flooding as the rooms fill with water, necessitating water breathing, even far inland, and giving normally sea-bourne races a chance to shine.

Flooding can also act as a natural timer, the longer you wait, the more the dungeon fills with water and the more creatures and monsters are forced to head towards the surface, while you’re trying to get down. Much of this can also apply to modern or sci-fi urban games, or post-apocalyptic games.

Flooding can also have deleterious long term effects on areas in a game, leading to plot points and stories related to te natural disaster.

Floods can wash away topsoil (though they can also refill groundwater reserves and aquifers) and crops.

Crops that survive a flood can be stricken by mould.

Animals can be washed away or drowned.

They can cause migrations and emergence of monsters and creatures.

They can make people homeless or destroy their communities.

They can taint drinking water and flood sewage into living areas.

They can spread disease.

They can wash away roads and bridges, making travel difficult.

They can turn solid land into muddy swamp, making even everyday movement harder.

They can wash away woodland, orchards of forests.

The aftermath of truly terrible natural disasters can cause people to turn to banditry in desperation, can leave communities cut off and leave them to self govern. They can lead people into cultish behaviour, milleniallism, human sacrifice, zealotry and other dangerous mindsets – even foment revolt if their ruler doesn’t help them.

There are always second and third order effects to anything, it’s just down to you to think of them.

How the very devil do you play a superintelligent villain (or other magnificently intelligent NPC) with only your own pedestrian intellect to go on?

Well, there’s two or three things you can do to simulate someone smarter than yourself.

The Wisdom of Crowds

If you have some other friends who don’t play in your games (or at least aren’t playing in this one), you can get in touch with them and lay out the situation. You can then get their input on what’s going on and their suggestions for diabolical schemes and contingencies.

Unfortunately, groups of advisors also tend to ‘go off on one’, in much the same way that players do when coming up with their own plans. It can get wild, crazy and amusing, but isn’t necessarily useful exactly.

Prep Time

Include the Big Bad Evil Guy’s sceheming in your prep time for the game. Take the time to consider how they might set things up to favour themselves, what sort of fallbacks and escape plans they might have. Try and anticipate the players, their spells and powers, what they’re likely to do and what precautions the BBEG is likely to take. Right down to the choice of henchmen to pair off against each adventurer to the best effect (EG: Spell resistant creatures to attack spellcasters).

Make a note of the plans and the triggers that will set off the BBEG’s adaptation and keep them in mind. BBEGs don’t fight fair, and just that outlook can make a big different to an encounter.

Cheating

There’s no way you can prepare for everything, but a superintelligent BBEG certainly can. So what you can do is wait for the players to enact their scheme, and then have the villain have the perfect counter because they anticipated that.

To give it a little structure and to make it a little more fair, give the BBEG the opportunity to make an Intelligence Save (in D&D terms) to have a contingency you didn’t think of, but the villain did. Each time they make the save to counter something, increase the DC by 5. When they fail they’re out of plans.

Sorted.

There’s a saying that the medium is the message, which is a slight overstatement, but one with a great deal of truth to it. The form in which information is conveyed affects both the message itself, and the way in which it is percieved.

Take a book, for example. A book can be incredibly thick, incredibly long, be packed with small text and we can dip in and out of it as much as we want and take our time with it. If you translate that book into a film, you have to stay within a certain runtime, even if you turn it into a trilogy it will have to be made in three similarly long chunks. In a similar way, a short book can end up stretched to fill the amount of time needed for one or more movies.

DVRs have enabled people to watch films in a way more like the consumption of books. People can skip around, or go through things frame by frame to pick up on hints, clues, fanservice and references in a way they never could before.

RPGs have often been compared to oral tradition, sitting around a hearth and telling stories in a small group, sharing heritage and myth and creating a common – small – culture.

RPGs aren’t really that, they’re interactive story creation, not story telling. Even more than with computer games, normal forms of analysis fail, whether they’re normal literary analytical techniques or inherently subjective and biased critical analyses.

RPGs are made up of the text of the boos, the rules in the books, interpretations thereof, on the fly rulings, the storyline the GM has in mind, the storyline the players have in mind and the intersection of all of these. Increasingly in more modern times we also have increased amounts of online play, which affects the way games are played and how they’re presented (maps, tokens, built-in systems and options). Additionally we now have games as performative, where it’s not just the players who are the audience, but there is also a passive audience.

There’s always been a gaming community, in the sense of ‘people with a common interest’, but every table, every group was its own subculture. With enhanced communication and shared experience online the sense of a, singular ‘community’ has become stronger. This isn’t necessarily good, it has damaged the sense of a plurality, a community of communities, and has led to many people trying to impose their own, personal community values on the broader community, and making assumptions about the other sub communities. Insulting, judgemental ones, even revising history to reframe games as something bad, something ‘unsafe’, that needs ‘fixing’.

We lose something when there’s a single, stifling culture. Whatever its values are. We lose something more, we’ve lost something more, when subcultures no longer have room to breathe. People take it personally when you crush them, crush the things they enjoy and reframe them – unjustly – as villains.

This has been enabled my the media changing. The rise of social media and the emergence of this ‘broadcast’ version of roleplaying, a ‘community’ that is more singular and ruthlessly enforced. We can’t change it back, so what can we do to re-emphasise the more accepting and open historical version of RPGs? The broad church, where the game was more important than anything else?

I don’t know, honestly. The Indie Scene would seem to be the way to do it, but it tends to just create a ghetto with its own stifling culture, whether that be the OSR or the old Indie scene that is now afflicting the mainstream.

Evolve or die, but evolution and change just isn’t that predictable.

What do you think comes next?