Places to Go, People to Be has translated two more of my essays into French. This time it’s Don’t Prep Plots and Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy.

Interesting factoid about Don’t Prep Plots: It includes the summary of a plotted adventure. After presenting that brief summary, I included this note:

(This is derived from an actual, published adventure. Names and milieu have been changed to protect the innocent. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify the original source.)

I actually expected that someone would quickly twig to the identity of the published adventure I was talking about and identify it. But no one ever has.

Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy, on the other hand, was the first Patreon-sponsored post here on the Alexandrian. As always, my appreciation goes out to all of the amazing Patrons of the Alexandrian, without whom this site would be a more barren place and PTGPTB would have fewer things to translate.

Previous translations from PTGPTB include Three Clue Rule and Node-Based Scenario Design.

Here’s a quick miscellanea of some Alexandrian-related material that you can find around the internet at the moment.

Martin Tegelj has posted the latest installment of the RPG campaign he’s developing based on my pitch for Doctor Who: The Temporal Masters. There are currently six adventures in the series. Although only some of them are directly related to the Temporal Masters, I recommend checking out all of them:

A Conversion Before Christmas
Something Old, Something New
Dawn of the Temporal Masters
The Riot
(Prelude: Donna)
Fugue State
Alliance of the Daleks

Jose Manuel Real has translated the Three Clue Rule into Spanish as La regla de las tres pistas. I’m not fluent in Spanish, but if you do, you should check it out.

Hebrew is another language I am completely illiterate in, but Oded Deutch has also translated the Three Clue Rule into his native tongue as כלל שלושת הרמזים.

The Three Clue Rule has proven to be something of a “gateway drug” for better GMing, so I’m always excited to see it getting out in front of a larger audience. Thank you to Martin, Jose, and Oded for being awesome!

Last week I posted Diplomacy: The Alexander Rules, an effort to revise the rules of Diplomacy to coherently eliminate the ambiguities and paradoxes which still linger in its strategically rich depths.

In an act of synchronicity, shortly after posting the Alexander Rules, I promptly discovered that Archive.org has assembled a truly massive collection of Diplomacy zines. Hundreds — possibly thousands — of fan publications drawn from across four decades of activity, including Diplomacy World, Comrades in Arms, Graustark, Spring Offensive, and dozens of others.

It’s an astonishing treasure trove of historical curiosity, nascent game theory, and actual game play that stands as a testimony to the incredible legacy of Allan B. Calhamer’s classic game.

Martin Tegelj has posted the third installment in his ambitious adaptation of Doctor Who: The Temporal Masters. Check it out:

Part 3: Dawn of the Temporal Masters

Check out Samhaine’s Player Tricks: Solving RPG Mysteries. It makes a fantastic companion piece to the Three Clue Rule.

Basically, Samhaine gives you a great overview of techniques players in an RPG can use to solve the mysteries presented to them by the GM. Broadly speaking, he breaks the solving of a mystery into three categories:

Deduction is the one most players are familiar with, particularly from published scenarios, where the players assemble so many clues that there is legitimately only one conclusion that can be drawn from them. The GM doles out unmissable clues as the game progresses (faster or slower depending on how aggressive you are, how your skill checks go, and whether you make bad decisions), and eventually you have enough puzzle pieces that the missing one is completely obvious. Even at its fastest, waiting for clues until you can work up a deduction tends to be really slow.

Induction is most useful at the mid-ranges of an investigation, because you take incomplete evidence and try to extrapolate something that explains it (but which might not be the only thing that explains it). Often, it’s the trick you use for figuring out if there are any other things you need to check before deciding you’ve got it all figured out. It’s your main way to generate falsifiable theories: we know a bunch of things, and it seems likely that X would explain them, but something else could explain them. Let’s figure out how we can prove and disprove X; if we disprove it, we need to think about these other clues in a different way.

Abduction in this context really means brainstorming to come up with logical explanations for clues based on known rules, which give you immediate things to check (such as whether those known rules don’t apply in this case). This is the thing you do when you don’t know much at all yet to try to figure out more things. Abduction is where RPG mysteries really diverge from scripted ones: you can jump the clue sequence pretty much whenever you want by working backwards along what seems like the simplest explanation. “The murderer got into the house somehow. One of the ways he could have gotten into the house was the nearby window. Thus, we can check to see if that’s how he got in!” Hopefully your GM has prepared enough for a lot of this tactic, because it basically means trying to skip straight to the solution using common sense and hoping proving or disproving your theories will at least narrow down the idea space you should be looking at.

And then he drills down into those categories to explore specific tips, consequences, and general fallout. It’s incredibly clever, broadly useful, and very much worth your time.