Hey all. Angry here…

Today marks the beginning of the end of my series of stupid narration tricks. At least for now. I’m sure I’ll come up with more eventually.

Unfortunately, though, I’ve had to split this last trick in two. I’m doing so partly because of time constraints and partly because of concerns over the length. Well, not really the length. Rather, I’m concerned about the density. I ended up expanding this into three smaller, but related tricks, plus an extra bonus thing about non-player characters. I don’t want to pack too many ideas into one feature.

Worse still, the time constraints are forcing me to make a very ugly split of it. Just kind of slice the article down the middle and say, “to be continued…” I hate doing that, but I think it’s for the best.

The Mysterious Pink Letter

There’s this great moment in the final book — so far — of the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons…

Actually, hold on…

We’ve had a bit of fun throughout this Stupid Narration Tricks series taking potshots at different authors; we had one last chance to get our shots in, and we declared peace. Or, at least, we declared a truce. It’s over and done. If you have opinions about G.R.R. Martin or whether the next book is ever happening, take them anywhere else. I’m actually kind of tired of this fandom war bullshit. I was trying to satirize it by being ridiculous, though I didn’t say anything I don’t personally believe, and that didn’t work. So now I’m just putting down a minefield and declaring this a demilitarized zone. Violate it at your peril.

Also, I don’t want to hear about the HBO series. I’m talking about the books.

Anyway, there’s this great moment in the fifth book of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. See, there’s this dude called Jon Snow. His entire story has been about what to do when your duty, what is right, and the desperate desires of your heart all pull you in different directions. As Martin once said, the core of drama is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Jon Snow gets this letter from a vile psychopath named Ramsay Bolton, who has become a dark, nasty reflection of Jon Snow. The letter puts Snow in a fury and, as a result, he impulsively abandons his oaths and duties to march on Ramsay Bolton.

Those are the highlights anyway.

What makes this moment great is that many readers, myself included, don’t think Ramsay Bolton sent the letter, nicknamed The Pink Letter, at all. We think it was sent by someone else who wanted to spur Jon Snow to action. Except he took the wrong action, and then he got executed for abandoning his command. It’s a whole big thing.

Now, on the surface, the text claims Ramsay Bolton sent the letter. There’s nothing explicit in the narrative to suggest otherwise. There’s no scene in which Melisandre and Stannis the Mannis say, “You know, I have a plan about how we can change Snow’s mind. Get me some parchment…” or anything like that. But there are clues. Subtle clues. Narrative clues.

Because Martin is a master of clever, careful word choice.

In A Dance with Dragons, we readers see three different examples of letters written by Ramsay Bolton. The first arrives as a “tightly rolled parchment” and is “sealed with a hard button of pink wax.” It’s “scrawled in a huge, spiky hand,” and it’s signed by Ramsay Bolton, “Lord of Winterfell,” and is witnessed by several members of his noble retinue. That’s from Chapter 26, The Wayward Bride, if you care.

In Chapter 28, we see that Ramsay sent another copy of the same letter to someone else. The details are repeated. Some verbatim. The phrase “hard button of pink wax” is repeated exactly.

That final letter, though? The Pink Letter? It’s sealed with a “smear of pink wax.”

You see it, right?

There’s actually a lot of details that are just slightly off in the third letter. The signature is different; there are some phrases and threats that don’t make sense coming from Ramsey; the letter isn’t explicitly written in flaky brown ink like dried blood, and so on. But it’s the repetition of the phrase, “hard button of pink wax” changing to “smear of pink wax” I want you to notice.

Martin chooses his words with deliberate care. He’s a true wordsmith. There are lots of examples of him using precisely repeated terms and phrases to connect different things or to reveal crucial details. He loves to foreshadow. He loves to build mysteries. He loves to mess with prophecy. So when he uses the same phrase twice and then changes it a third time, he’s not screwing up. He’s making a choice.

He’s also demonstrating three narrative tricks that, if you learn to master your own word choice and speak with care, you can use at your table to solve one of the oldest problems in Game Mastering.

Today, I want to end my Stupid Narration Trick series by discussing the art of the narrative scavenger hunt, the spotlight problem, and the making and breaking of patterns.

The Art of the Narrative Scavenger Hunt

The Pink Letter Mystery is why I started this whole dumb series. It exemplifies what I’ve been striving to accomplish for years in my own narration. Because, while I don’t run mystery games, I love to include light mystery elements in my fantasy adventures. I love to hide details in plain sight. I love when my players figure shit out either just before the reveal or just after the reveal.

Remember, the best way for a reveal, betrayal, or reversal to come out at the game table is that the players figure it out right before the climax and act on it. The second best way is for it to blindside the players and then hear them say, “We should have seen that coming. All the clues were there.”

The problem is tabletop roleplaying games, as a medium, suck for this sort of thing. It’s down to the nature of narration. The players can’t see, hear, perceive, or know anything you don’t describe, so by describing something, you call attention to it. You flag it as important. Meanwhile, if you don’t describe something, you just end up blindsiding the players. They can’t see anything coming if you don’t describe it first.

When it comes to surprises, mysteries, reversals, and reveals, you want to give smart, attentive players a chance to see what’s coming. If they put the clues together before the surprise, that’s good gameplay. That’s winning. And note that I’m not casually blurring the distinction between player and character here. When I say players, I mean players. You don’t want to reduce solving a mystery or even noticing something is amiss down to a die roll.

Characters perceive; players deduce. Deduction is the gameplay.

Let’s say you’re doing the standard Doppelganger Gambit, right? An imposter has replaced one of the party’s trusted allies. You really don’t want to say, “Make an Intuition check,” followed by, “You realize this isn’t Grifty Steve at all. It’s some kind of pod person.” Or have Fake Grifty Steve roll repeated Deception checks in every conversation. Honestly, how you want to do this is really complicated, and adjusting the difficulty for the adventure you’re running is a really tricky issue. I could probably do a whole, dedicated thing about a proper Doppelganger Gambit adventure, but this is about narration, so let me just cut to the important point.

There must come a point in the adventure when the imposter’s actions are big enough to trigger a die-roll alarm bell. Managing the escalation of the Doppelganger Gambit is key. It has to be a long con. But by the time the escalation reaches plastic math rock levels, the players should already have some seeds of doubt in their heads. They should be thinking, “What’s up with Grifty Steve?” Assuming they’re smart and attentive.

But this goes beyond the Doppelganger Gambit and into something I call the Spotlight Problem. Your narration, as a Game Master, is basically a giant spotlight that you shine on things.

Let me state the Spotlight Problem in the clearest, simplest way I can…

How do you hide a key in a room such that attentive players might notice it and inattentive players might miss it? Or, at least, how do you hide it such that an attentive player says, “I bet if I take this action, I will find the key,” whereas an inattentive player might be left to ransack the whole room or else might not even think to look for a key in the room.

It’s a tricky question, right? If you mention the key or even mention the glint of metal in the soot of the fireplace, you’re basically just saying, “and hidden over there is the key you need.” If you don’t say anything, the players can’t find the key at all. Only the characters can. The players just hit the Search button over and over. That isn’t the same as a player thinking, “I’ll bet this specific action that I have noticed is an explicit possibility will lead me to the key I need.”

How do you hide a detail for the players to discover or act on when every word you say is a giant spotlight saying, “Hey, look over here!”

Hidden In Plain Verbal Sight

Martin’s prose demonstrates how to hide verbal details in plain, narrative sight. But before I explain, you have to understand this isn’t an easy trick to pull off. It takes practice and very careful control of your speech. It also takes a keen understanding of how you narrate. You, personally. Because everyone’s a little different.

See, narration actually doesn’t shine a spotlight on everything. Mine doesn’t, yours doesn’t, and even Martin’s doesn’t. Narration is full of innocuous details. Little bits of fluff and mood-setting and point-making and showing-not-telling. A lot of narration is just about making the world more vivid.

Imagine, for instance, that I’m describing this little cottage the heroes are visiting for reasons. As they approach the door, I describe it as friendly and inviting. Clearly, I’m doing the whole mood-setting thing. Or maybe I’m characterizing the apple-cheeked halfling that lives there. It doesn’t matter. After I state that the cottage looks friendly, in a fit of show-don’t-tell, I rattle off three quick details to make the point. Maybe I say that the cobbled path is free of weeds, the porch is swept, and there’s even a mat welcoming visitors in front of the door.

Imagine now that you’re one of my hapless players. You knock; there’s no answer. You try the door; it’s locked. What next? What next if you’re not a rogue, you don’t know the knock spell, and you don’t have a battering ram in your pants?

Did you check under the mat? I’ll bet lots of you did. I know because lots of actual players actually do. I’m betting some of you didn’t, though. Lots of actual players actually don’t. Especially because it’s way less obvious when I do it at the table. Especially with my practiced delivery.

Like many Game Masters, I tend to rattle off a few innocuous supporting details to characterize scenes when I set them. I might list a few furniture items that exist to make the point that it’s a bedroom. Or maybe I’ll rattle off a few items visible in the larder. Or maybe I’ll mention a few of the many images carved on the temple’s wall. To players, it all sounds like fluffy details. They hear them, but they don’t really hear them. Often, that’s all it is. I’m just improvising. “It’s a larder, right? So there’s sacks of flour, some wheels of cheese, a couple of those garlic braids hanging from the ceiling, stuff like that. Whatever.”

But sometimes, I sneak in something important like, “a sealed clay jar behind some cabbages on a shelf.”

Of course, if the players ransack the whole room and make a whole big Search check of it, they can find the jar, but it’ll have the normal dice rolls and game costs and consequences associated with room ransacking. But attentive players who say, “Wait. What was that about a sealed jar? I want to check that out,” get to skip the mechanical rigmarole.

But the actual, proper handling of spotting, searching, and ransacking is a whole other feature for a whole other day.

My point is that, because every bit of narration is a mix of key details and innocuous, fluffy embellishment, you actually can hide things in plain, narrative sight to make actual gameplay out of spotting stuff in the environment.

But, as I said above, this takes some practice. It’s a technique you have to work on, and there are two basic ways to do it. First, you can pay careful attention to your own narration and figure out how you, personally, deliver key details and embellish with innocuous fluff. Once you learn your own naturally narrative patterns, you know where the hiding places are, and you can start putting doormats and hidden potions and glints of metal in them.

Alternatively, you can purposely practice a standard narrative pattern until you have it down. For example, you can use mine. Make a statement and then provide a list of three, casual-sounding, supporting details. It’s basically just Tell then Show mixed with the Rule of Three. Mine even comes with difficulty knobs.

Want to make something more noticeable? Give it a longer name, an extra detail, or put it last in the list. Want to make something harder to spot? Shorten the name, limit the details, put it in the middle of the list, or add a fourth item to the list. I shit you not. Those are the legitimate difficulty sliders for hiding details in lists of innocuous fluff.

I also want to note that you don’t have to be perfect about this. You don’t have to obsess about it. I’m not fully on my best narrative game in every encounter, scene, and session. I race through narration sometimes, I gloss over things, I stammer and stutter, I’m a human. I narrate like a human. But I do tend to rattle off lists of innocuous supporting fluff in a lot of my scene-setting a lot of the time. My players are used to it. Unconsciously anyway. So when it is important for me to be on my game and get it right so I can hide a detail in plain narrative sight, it doesn’t sound any different. It just sounds like one of the encounters I’m a little more locked-in for.

Even the players who’ve been at my table for years don’t spot everything. That said, even newbies can pick up on my hidden details. That’s how I know I’ve nailed the technique. It works often, but not always, regardless of how long I’ve been running for a particular player.

To Be Continued…

So now you know how to overcome the Spotlight Problem and hide details in plain narrative sight. In theory, anyway. Because it’s gonna take some practice to get it right. But Hiding Details in Plain Narrative Sight is really just the first of three feats in this particular feat tree. I don’t want to pile on too much in one lesson, though. What’s say you take the week to practice your narration game and then come back so we can talk about the power of repetition and the making and breaking of patterns. Then, you’ll be able to pull off a narrative Pink Letter Mystery of your very own.

See ya.