claude-config/skills/rpg/references/craft.md

Scenario Craft

Distilled from the best published design writing (The Alexandrian, GUMSHOE/Robin Laws, Sly Flourish, Sean McCoy's Mothership layout school, convention-GM guides by Katrina Ostrander and Burn After Running). These are the field's proven rules; the house structure in convention-one-shot.md already embodies most of them — use this file when making design decisions or debugging a draft that isn't working.

Situations, not plots (The Alexandrian)

• Prep situations (locations, NPCs with goals and resources, available information), never event chains — a scripted plot is a chain of potential points of failure.
• Write goal-oriented opponents: what the antagonist is trying to do, on what timetable, with what tools (squads, safehouses, informants). Improvise their reactions; never script them.
• Always write the adversary timeline: what happens if the PCs do nothing. (House form: The Countdown.)

Clues and mystery (Three Clue Rule + GUMSHOE)

• The Alexandrian's Three Clue Rule (three independent routes to every necessary conclusion) is implemented as the house standard in convention-one-shot.md: automatic-on-right-approach + written fallback + Countdown event. Apply that standard; this section explains the why.
• Never gate progress behind a die roll to notice something. Finding core clues is automatic for the right approach in the right scene; rolls buy extra information. The game is interpreting clues, not finding them.
• A core clue points to another scene. Test: if it's not worth writing in a player's notes, it isn't a core clue. Write each scene with lead-ins and lead-outs.
• Don't author red herrings — players manufacture their own false leads for free. Over-provision true information instead; the sorting is the gameplay.
• Design backwards from the truth: write what actually happened and what the villain does next, then lay the trail from the trigger event.
• Keep a revelation checklist (the 8–12 things players must eventually learn), abstracted from where they're discovered — any scene can deliver a homeless revelation. Carry undiscovered ones forward. (Sly Flourish's "secrets and clues".)
• Unstick tools, in order: fallback delivery of the missed clue → proactive antagonist event (a new death, the opposition strikes) → invent a new core clue on the spot. Structures serve the table, not vice versa.

Pacing (convention wisdom)

• One substantive scene per hour of real play; a 3h30 slot holds ~5. The critical path should fill only about half the slot — deliberation, rules, and jokes eat the rest. (Total planned content ≈ 3:15 against the 3:30 budget, per the house cut discipline.)
• Dice roll within the first 20 minutes. Open in motion (in medias res or pressure-adjacent) and let introductions surface during the action, not as round-the-table monologues.
• Premise formula for pitches: "When [disruptive event], will [adjective] [group] manage to [verb] the [thing]?"
• Introduce mechanics when first needed, not in a front-loaded rules lecture.
• Spotlight is a resource: track who hasn't had a meaningful roll or scene and aim the next beat at them.
• Personal Agendas (Free League cinematic model): per-act secret goals on the pregens are a drama engine — quiet tension in Acts One–Two, open confrontation fuel in Act Three. The house "Private box" is the single-arc version; use per-act agendas when the scenario needs PvP-adjacent heat.

Structural skeletons worth stealing

• Five Room Dungeon (any genre): Guardian/Entrance → Puzzle or Social → Trick/Setback → Climax → Revelation/Reward. Good emergency skeleton for a short slot or a side episode.
• Fronts and progress clocks (see campaign.md): the Countdown is the wall-clock variant; use segment clocks when antagonist triggers are event-driven rather than time-driven.

Writing for the running GM (McCoy / OSR layout school)

• The cascade: can this prose be bullets? the bullets a table? the table a diagram? Always compress downward.
• Tell the GM the truth on page one — mystery is for players, never for the reader. (House form: Plot Summary before any scene.)
• Read-aloud text: players disengage after ~two sentences. Keep boxed text short and sensory, or replace with a bullet list of details the GM voices in their own words.
• No mid-scene page-flips: stat lines live next to their encounter, maps next to their key, cross-references carry explicit pointers.
• Immediate impression first, then interactables, then hidden things — in every location key.
• Expressive terseness: telegram-minimal strips usable flavour; purple prose buries the one fact that matters in paragraph three. One evocative detail per element, load-bearing words in bold.