Writing Encounters in Pairs
This is a follow-up to my last post, Encounter Table - Bandit Blood Swamp.
My goal for that post was to show that the Universal Encounter Table is flexible enough to portray an entire region. In writing out 12 statblocks in one go, a funny thing happened - I found that certain entries were speaking to one another.
Swampflies are a pest; the local Swampfolk try their best to keep them away. At the same time, they're big enough to make a meal for something, and the Root Snakes deploy cruel tactics to prey on them.
There are a few such pairs across the 12 statblocks. The interactive elements served as frameworks to write around. I'd written some region-specific tags to serve as inspiration for local creatures, but I found that writing creatures in partnership with one another - filling some sort of ecological niche - was far easier.
Writing in Pairs
I've realised that I unwittingly applied some advice from Sean McCoy. Sean recently wrote a cracking blogpost titled, Writing Rooms in Pairs, in which he says that writing rooms in pairs gives a nice setup/punchline dynamic, which is particularly useful for horror. "I found that every horror encounter should be preceded by two or three omen/aftermath rooms."
By applying this logic to the fauna of a region, we can connect different creatures to one another with different relationships. And we don't have to stop with pairs - by linking various elements with multiple others, we can make a more complex system. It doesn't take too many connections to sketch a recognisable ecology.
If you're building regions, you are probably doing this anyway - I started my Encounter Table with no plans to connect the statblocks. It was towards the end of the writing that I looked at it through this lens and retroactively applied the framework of pairing.
But next time I write a whole region, I'll be thinking about this from the start. As Sean says, "writing in pairs builds connectivity and halves the amount of work you have to do."
Connectivity Fosters Creativity
The same approach is already applied to social networks of NPCs in various games.
Spoiler for Sepulchre of Seven by hexagnome:
Or for Factions. Spoiler for Neverland by Andrew Kolb:
And it's the engine of character building in Fiasco, from which all the drama of the game flows.
I have a theory that it's this layering and connecting of information that makes RPGs such a delight to play (and such a chore to listen to someone's recap of). And I have a feeling that lurking around nearby there's a grand unified theory about leveraging connectivity in RPG writing. Perhaps it's just waiting to be written.