This is not going to be a surprising revelation. I am writing it down because otherwise I will keep forgetting and being surprised when I remember it and so on and so forth. Sometimes I’m slow.
The other day I was noodling on a Frontier Scum one-shot I want to run at Con of the North, because I want to start running more games at conventions and Frontier Scum looks really easy to run and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Westerns in the last year. (I will playtest it before I run it in public, no worries.) And I had a great concept about a bunch of scum who get caught between the law and a bunch of people who are even scummier than them, but it wasn’t solidifying. It was a few frames of film in my mind and a couple of NPCs and then… what?
So I sat down with a stack of index cards and a pen and wrote down “Caleb Heartwright” on one of them, and underneath that I wrote “Sheriff.” Subtlety is for cowards. Then I picked up another one and wrote down “Ibix Tremble,” and “Taxidermist.” Those were the two NPCs I had in mind already. Then I wrote “The Trembling Hand, Taxidermy and Curiosity Shop” on a new card, and put it down next to Ibix. Then I wrote down “Missus Pettiwhistle” on another card, thought for like half a second, and wrote down “Pettiwhistle Saloon” on the next one. Then I went back to Missus Pettiwhistle’s card and wrote down “Mr. Pettiwhistle is dead; some say she killed him.”
And I kept going from there, without forcing myself into any constraints. I had no idea if or how Missus Pettiwhistle fit into the idea I had but there she was, because you’ve got to have a saloon and someone has to own it. About fifteen minutes later I had a pile of cards in some kind of rough arrangement and I had a Big Bad’s card sitting above the pile leering over the messy Western town like a deceased vulture who’s too dumb to realize he’s dead.
I’m not done yet but I’m past the blockage. I have also transcribed the cards into an Obsidian canvas which is… not ideal but I don’t have a great computer tool for this. I should pick up my old copy of Scrivener again. I would not use the computer up front, because slinging cards around with my pink little hands is part of what makes it work, but I would like to have a good transcription method. Obsidian will do well enough for now.
Just use fucking index cards, Bryant, it’s part of why you bought a bunch of them.