NaGaDeMon 2024 - Establishing story

1 - Front Cover

2 - Table of Contents, Credits, and Legal Stuff

3-4 - Further context to the intended game setting with explanations for who the characters are, why they've been awakened, and what they need to do in the world. 

5-7 - The process of following the four act structure of Scarecrow stories, what should generally happen at what times, how things ramp up, how things can go awry, and how to get things back on track.   

8-9 - This is the "centre-spread" of the zine. This will basically be the narrator's play-mat indicating where to put tokens, and how the tracking of these tokens reflects the events of the night and the flow of the narrative.

10-13 - Creating spirits, hunters, and variant antagonists for the scarecrows.

14-15 - Rituals and variant powers that might be used by scarecrows or ther antagonsists to help drive the story.

16 - Back Cover 

Looking at that layout, what do I have so far? I don't need to worry too much about front cover and table of contents, so pages 1 and 2 are fine.

I've had some ideas for pages 10-13, which is all about creating ntagpnists for the characters...but I'll be refining that before everything goes together. Some of my previous posts touched on that, but need refinement with the game as it currently stands (see here and here). 

The centre spread (pages 8-9) is something that I worked on back in the origins of the game,and can be found back in one of those early posts from the beginning of the year.  (This might be subject to change depending on how the page count is utilised.)

The Rituals (pages 14-15) were intended to be powers that combined the mystical energies of two or more scarecrows who shared the same season. I culled them from the core game becuase they started to seem a bit complicated, but I still like the idea and that's why I'm thinking of bringing it back now.

That basically leaves pages 3 to 7 needing to be written up, and the remaining pages to have their text cleaned up and laid out. 

The key factor here is explaining a few "whys" and giving some examples, because the main rules just didn't have space to do this. 

The story works on a 4 act structure: context, complication, climax, conclusion. The key is to understand how those acts differ and how they weave a coherent story while the characters make choices that don't feel railroaded. I've been doing this for years, but it's hard to put instinctive actions into words.

I'm probably going to limit each act's desccription to half a page in that "chapter" of pages 5 to 7. This gives only half a page of intro and half a page at the end to describe how the acts fit together, how time flows in the game (because time is a limited resource), and how threats are introduced. Maybe I should throw in a QR code or two which links to the relevant parts of this blog to expand the ideas. I don't really want to do that, as I'd rather have everything self-contained in the booklet, but the option is there. It might be time to just overflow this part of the book into the centre spread and take out the playsheet to be printed as a separate game component. 

More thinking to do...