On Specificity
Or, on making the main thing the main thing
A few years ago, I read a post Chris McDowall wrote about Into the Odd where he wrote the concept "Make the Main Thing the Main Thing" 1. This is a very simple concept, but I think it trips people up when crafting adventures.
I'll relate this to some things I've been reading and watching lately. I recently began playing a video game (Final Fantasy 13) and also a novel (Witch King by Martha Wells), and in both, I was bombarded with unknown proper nouns, too many characters and disjointed incidents that I did not care about because the creator in both cases had given me no entryway to care or make choices.
In contrast: I decided to play Nier Replicant and the beginning of that game is: you are a young boy. Your sister is sick. Protect your sick sister. It then gradually builds out story around it, teasing it out over time.
The main thing is their relationship. The way the game is setup, it is the most important thing you are told in the very beginning and gives you as a player something to anchor you as you gradually learn about the world.
How This Can Apply to Adventure Writing
I'll relate this very briefly to my own work and some other stuff I'm reading right now by others. With Tannic, what I was going for was a tonally pastoral village. I used the festival encounters with their various hijinks to demonstrate that this is a place of relatively low conflict and violence, unsuspicious of strangers, and for the missing teenagers to be disruptive and scary for the elders. The main thing is: Help the innocent village recover their lost youth. I won't pretend Tannic is perfect, but a thing I could say I yearn for in fiction of any kind is specificity.
In You've Got a Job on the Garbage Barge by Amanda Lee Franck 2
I'm reading through You've Got a Job on the Garbage Barge by Amanda Lee Franck right now and something I like about it is that it is utterly committed to being weird. It is a bespoke, nearly non-euclidean metaphysical place. I'm running a play-by-post of it at the moment, snippet below.
You find yourselves on a small skiff paddled by a surly character who shunts you onto a dinky ladder that deposits you on the tugboat Irene. Silently glaring with dark eyes, the figure's small, raccoon-like hands deposit a handset radio in your hand before paddling back to the distant, foggy shore. The radio crackles and a grumpy female voice grunts to you with a twangy accent.
When I read Garbage Barge, what I get from it is, this is place is Outside and things like raccoons standing on each others shoulders paddling a boat like Charon are possible. The main thing is almost, to me: The Garbage Barge exists as its own universe where strange things thrive in the garbage.
I guess what I'm getting at is, I want narratives of any kind and adventures to commit to going for something very specific, to provide clear entry points for the reader or Referee/players and to show greater contexts after anchoring things that involve constant opportunities for player involvement and decision making.