Whew! NEW BLOOD is here! It's been... spilled?  Is it old now? Hm, none of that seems quite right. Maybe next time I'll name my project something that lends itself more easily to puns (and perhaps seo). As it happens, I managed to just race Dagger in the Heart to "publication," and, just from a peek, it seems like there's maybe a difference in design-thinking between the two! I thought it could be fun to outline what I was thinking about and aiming for, and how I tried to accomplish that through something like narrative design.

Let's start with the basics. I think the big conundrum at the heart of writing modules like this is "how much is just right?" I think most people can agree that there's a point at which the module is telling you "too much" - that it's specifying too much of what will happen, and not leaving enough room for playing to find out. I personally lean pretty far towards the "play" side of the spectrum. I simply do not care about set pieces. I don't like to read out a big long paragraph about finding the evil vizier in the throne room and his big monologue. So for me, and for NEW BLOOD, the goal is to create a vague outline that presents an exciting scenario for readers and players to run with, and then support that outline with specifics that can be dropped in with little effort. That's the goal - an enticing story & set-up, pushed along by a bunch of people and places with imminently gameable hooks.

Design Story

The other nice thing about this structure (start vague, fill with fun details) was that it matched very nicely the process of actually writing! I went in with a few things my heart was set on. I knew I wanted to do something very weird, and my favorite kind of horror is the biological kind, so I settled fairly quickly on my premise - new creatures, of strange biology, are threatening the Heart. Where did they come from? What do they want? How can they be stopped? I liked this premise because it's immediately actionable ("go out and find some monsters!"), it has pretty clear stakes ("your favorite haven will be destroyed if you don't!"), leaves room for mystery ("say, what's up with these monsters anyway...?"), and just about everyone the player characters meet can be affected by it, and will have opinions/quests/plans.

The premise was easy! And I think that's why I don't put very much stock in modules whose primary offering is the "story" - I like coming up with big picture stories! I even like coming up with the little details, the "what happens next...?" -s! More than that I like to do it, since I liked writing just about all of it, this process comes naturally to me - I like thinking about stories and how they work, and I think I have a pretty good sense of what I like about them. The slightly more work-intensive part is coming up with all the pieces, determining how they're tied together, and then filling them with the kinds of details that players (including the GM) will get excited about.

The first step for me was just coming up a list of places that seemed fun and weird and like they could support an adventure or two figuring out their deal. I came in with very few ideas set in stone - I knew I wanted a "home base" kind of haven, and I knew I wanted at least one Vermissian station, and I had an idea for the end, but most everything in the middle was up for grabs. I opted to make the locations not super obviously tied into the plot thematically, but instead opportunistically. Here's an example of what I mean - an early landmark players can visit is a weird little forest with a lich's tomb. The lich wasn't involved with creating the monsters - but now that they've moved in, the lich wants them gone! I generally prefer this kind of thing, because to me it makes the world feel more lived in, less narrow. The flip side is that the story is a little diffuse!

Previously published adventures for Heart have been fairly linear - the plot has you go from point A to point B to point C. I knew that I wanted something a little less linear, but not quite the full hexcrawl experience. My thinking there is that Heart is a little time-limited; you only have so long before you hit your Zenith beat and then that's it for that character. Having a whole huge hexmap to explore runs the risk of burning out before the end, which I think is probably less desirable than "finishing" the campaign and finding that you still have a little juice in the tank. The structure I settled on was a pretty simple path, but with a few options for how to proceed each time.

Armed with some goals and a general sense of the structure, it's time to brainstorm landmarks! Most of them had fairly different inspirations or motivations. There's a mushroom apocalypse zone because I wanted more mushrooms and to use the Desolate domain; the horrible blood swamp Squelch is me trying to be my absolutely grossest (and channel soulslike poison swamps); I realized I didn't have a lot of Warrens, and I knew I wanted some bugs, so I made a bug pit; I don't know when I came up with the town-inside-a-worm idea but it was very early and basically never left. 

The next, and one of the longest, pieces of design was connecting all of these places. Heart's delves, the journeys between landmarks, seem like they should be slam dunks - I love the idea of them! But I hear a lot of people say that they can wind up falling a little flat - kind of dull dice rolling, disconnected to the fun part of the game. On the one hand - what a shame! I think delves are a really great idea, a way to structure travel, which often can feel unimportant, because there's no structure to highlight how it works. On the other hand - yeah, making something a procedure to follow can kind of suck the game out of it, huh? If all the delve is is rolling dice until the numbers add up, then... why bother "playing"? Just roll the dice and save the time. 

My solution was to treat the delves basically the same as I treated the landmarks - they should be fun and weird and have stuff going on to hook players! They should have details, enough for GMs to pull stuff out of and make feel important; player choice on these delves should matter.

And actually coming up with the delves themselves went pretty quickly! It's fun to imagine the way two places are connected, especially when you can get weird with it. I got to make another horrible swamp (TWO poison swamps, just like Elden Ring baby); the "path" connecting two Havens I made into a suburban hellscape / greater metropolitan post apocalypse; the deeper connections, to the lowest tier where reality is coming undone got to be weird in ways that were quite fun to write (and hopefully fun to use). A few delves also were chances to specifically show the world as lived-in - I really love the delve that's a pilgrimage road, even though the things it connects are no longer exactly what the pilgrims would have been traveling to or from.

The longest part of delve writing was crafting the discoveries. This was an idea that I was mulling over, and slasherepochprompted me to think more about! She and I are both playing in a game of Wolves Upon the Coast, and discovery is a huge part of that game. Filling locations with rumors, things to investigate, and secrets is all well and good - but how do you make that legible to GMs and players? The system I wound up settling on was to use Heart's beats! Landmarks and Delves all got a list of beats, that players can choose from before the session - but some of the beats are kept secret! So when players come up against something, the GM can say "would you like to take this secret beat?" - pointing the players to the idea that "OH there's something happening here!" Coming up with all of these wound up being kind of time intensive, but I think it was well worth it.

There are a few other things to discover. There are a handful of new adversaries, but writing those was fairly simple! In some ways it feels fairly similar to, like, my understanding of OSR design. There are numbers that you can tweak to make things more difficult, but you don't need to really worry about getting it exact - scary things can be made scary with "numbers" but it's really the scenario in which you're encountering them that makes the situation dire or not. I actually think that coming up with some unique fallouts was more impactful to my imagination of various landmarks and delves than adversaries (and while there are not too many new fallouts, I think they're all pretty fun). The other major kind of thing to discover in the campaign are the extra advances! I'll talk about those in their own post, but they were quite fun to write.

While the discoveries were percolating, I also was iterating on the very final landmark/s (and delve/s). I'd saved these for last, partly out of pragmatism, but also a little bit of fear - endings carry a lot of weight! The trick for me wasn't so much in making the "setpieces" of these last locations, but instead in making sure that they were thematically resonant - so the major task was in editing, to go back through the rest of the text and see if things were aligned (or else, how I could tweak that alignment). I also wanted them to be weird! To hit a kind of strangeness, even though the core book and my writing is already kind of shot through with strangeness. I like where they wound up.

Mechanical Considerations

You probably know by now that what I mean by "mechanical" is maybe a little particular! In this case, here are a handful of "mechanical" decisions I was considering; How many beats is enough per delve/landmark? can you have too many?; how regularly interspersed should haunts (places to heal fallout) be? should certain kinds of haunts be rarer than others?; are these resource dice too small? If I make a lot of small resources in a row, is that annoying or useful?

Most of those questions did not take me very long (probably 3 or so beats per location, plus secrets, but I didn't worry about too many; I opted for "rarely", thinking that 1. haunts are easy to improvise and 2. it seemed fun to me to backtrack to get healed and see how things were changing; I like lots of small resources - I think they're fun to collect, and it makes paying for stuff matter). Other questions were ones I wasn't too bothered about getting "perfect" - as mentioned before, adversary numbers I am pretty fine with using as a "rough tool." Not to imply that I endorse fudging (you do you ofc) but just that I do not ultimately think it matters if a guardian chimera has 2 more resistance than a large heartsblooded beast or 3.

Some I'm still not sure on - "how long should a delve be?" is a question I never quite answered to my satisfaction, since the question is really "how long do players enjoy being on a delve?" it's variable! I found ~10 to be pretty good for online pbps, and mostly scaled up for delves that I wanted to feel scarier.

Believe it or not, the last category I'm counting as "mechanical" here is about writing the NPCs - and I don't mean the ones with stats! I spent a long time thinking about where clues and pieces of information could be found about the big mystery, and how the text should help GMs think about when to reveal those pieces. Each landmark has a "Leads" section which lays out pretty directly what threads the players could be pulling on, how they could connect to them, and where those threads might lead. I count it as a "mechanic" because it's text that's trying to insert itself into the procedure of playing the game - it has the weight of "rules" or something like it. Anyway, I took my time with them. I wanted them to be useful, to point to interesting ways the "plot" could develop, and to push "solving" the mystery front and center - these are the things the players should learn about! Don't hide them - that's not what makes a mystery interesting. Mysteries are interesting because we get clues, we just don't know how they all go together. I liked how it turned out as a "system" but next time I think I'd want to do even more, and make more rumors, make more and more things feel connected.

Favorite Text

I'm skipping over "inspirations" because there are a lot and this has already run quite long! There's a lot of text to choose from, so I'll reward myself with favorites from each of the different parts:

- Favorite Landmark text: I think I have to give it to Taste's, the fungal superorganism that's taken over Rotgrave: "the possessive is intentional - this is the organism that belongs to Taste."

- Favorite Delve text: Writing delve actions, little prompts to GMs and Players about what might be helpful to get through the delve, all of those were a lot of fun. But my favorite probably is this one in Scab Country: "Speedrun a fleshling through suburban ennui until it becomes sapient: Compel + Haven"

- Favorite Adversary text: I was surprised by how hard this was to choose! I'll punt and say it isn't my favorite, but it does never fail to make me smile. On the names of rampaging construction vehicles: Sometimes written on their side, scuffed, something like EXTRUDER or CRUSH ‘EM! or CATHERINE

- Favorite Fallout text: The only reason this was easier to pick is that there are fewer of them, and many of them are connected to each other. I really enjoy this from ALTERNATED - "An alternate version of you has started peeking through the cracks of your skin. One of your minor abilities is replaced with one from a different class - you pick the class, and the GM picks the ability."

Congratulations to anyone who made it this far! I hope this is an interesting look at the design thinking that went into making a "campaign." Next time I'll talk about the extra advances (and that will probably/hopefully be shorter)!