Brevity in Writing, Gythora's Rest

I've been obsessed with Zedeck Siew's terse, evocative writing style recently.

Reading through A Thousand Thousand Islands, his South-East Asian RPG zine on itch.io, I've been struck by the extent to which he takes sentences to write what other modules would do in paragraphs. There's reams of world-building condensed here.

Take, for example, the entirety of this NPC entry in the Upper Heleng collection:

All of these are also up as sample pages on itch.io, so I figure I'm ok to share them

SRI JAHISHA, ITINERANT SWORDFISH

She struck a deal with Sahong, the fisherman who caught her. She would lend him
magic. In return, he would serve as steed and squire.

Fed a diet of swordfish vomit, Sahong is one of the strongest men alive. The pair roam
the uplands; Sri Jahisha wishes to see the un-oceaned world.

That's it. There's that lovely illustration of a man in a sarong shouldering a massive, garlanded swordfish, but that's all the text. Yet there's so much here.

1. Swordfish can talk
2. Swordfish have a knightly class, or they are knights
3. Swordfish are magic
4. Swordfish vomit makes you strong
5. This NPC pair is up for adventure and exploration. Lots of Don Quixote / Sancho Panza vibes

That's 5 discrete ideas in about 280 characters. Here's another:



AR-YM-SR, ARCHAEOLOGIST

A famous adventurer, now retired – the demon idols of the interior took too many of
his limbs. Will send you on missions.

“Six days east, following the Goldfish Canal, there’s a fort. Red walls, too smooth to
climb, no entrance.” He chuckles, a predatory grumble. “Thankfully I’ve got this keg
of blasting sulfur!”

Ar-Ym-Sr buys books and artefacts to destroy them. He locks such things in his under-
water treasury, where they rot in the river’s cleansing flow.

1. Crocodiles are NPCs.
2. Demons live in the interior, but there's treasure
3. There's a dungeon hook
4. Someone was building forts around here
5. You could rob this guy maybe
6. Someone might hire you to 'rescue' an artefact from his treasury

I love it. Go get Thousand Thousand Islands, also because more South-East-Asian fantasy is always a good thing.

All this is in contrast with Hot Springs Island, which I picked up recently and was reading through. There's so much text there: the faction summaries take up pages and pages, and if you forget anything at the table, you have to pause the game and spend time skimming. Now, it's a little churlish of me to complain about this, because Thousand Thousand Islands isn't a hexcrawl, and doesn't aim to provide the same kind of tools that Hot Spring Islands does... but I found reading the former a lot easier and enjoyable than making my way through the latter.

My point is just that this brevity in RPG writing is so useful. Let's talk about some advantages/features of good RPG hooks.

1. Readability
The number one. Short text is easy to read, easy to refer to, easy to look up. Modules with chunks and chunks of text are a pain to run on the fly. We're so used to this that it's standard advice to go through a module with a highlighter before you try to run it: that's always a sign that things aren't designed for play at the table

2. Freedom to Move
Terseness of writing = gaps = space where the GM is free to improvise. The mania for exhaustive detail in RPG writing can be debilitating: there's no space for the GM to make the world theirs. You're trying to replicate someone else's brain-space. See Luka Rejec's anti-canon

3. Evokes Discovery
OSR play leans heavily on Discovery as one of the modes of play. Typically, discovery is reserved for the PCs: the GM maps everything out, the PCs explore. Random tables go some way towards alleviating this. Terse, well-written prose that leaves room for imaginative speculation can do this too.

4. Disequilibrium / Instability
This one's more from Apocalypse World. A good hook suggests instability: something will change here, very soon, and PC intervention will only determine the shape and outcome of that change, not whether change happens. The world is a stack of slipping plates, and the PCs enter a chaotic system. Terse writing can leave room for possibility. (not a given, but I'm just putting this here anyway)

5. Approaches Poetry
Nobody really cares about this but me, I think, but that's ok. Treating RPG hooks as a form of poetry, with its own rhythms and movement, is a fun little thing to do.

Let's try this out. I knocked together a short series of prompts for a competition over the weekend. The prompt was to design or detail a waystation, inn or interstitial travelling space.

Here's what I made. It's not perfect: the intro para could probably be tightened, and some entries (eg, Location 4) could do with clearer stakes. But it's good enough, for my purposes.

------

By Arthur Haas

GYTHORA’S REST

Four days trek through the lush, alien growths of the lowlands, then another day’s climb up the hard carapace. There are handholds, crude walkways made of chitin and scabbing. A luminous sign, mounted with a sticky residue to the side of a jagged hole that still has traces of dark ichor.  It’s humid inside, and warm, but the clientele doesn’t mind. The barkeep scuttles down from the ceiling, cleaning his limbs.

1d6 Fixtures and Patrons

1 Kybbir the Barkeep
Cheerful, almost manic. His life-cycle is almost up: already the half-grown successor-head droops from his torso. Kybbir has 24 hours left to live and is desperate to leave some trace. He’s heard how some beings ‘paint’: pigments arranged on a rigid body, pregnant with meaning. Can you teach him?

2 Jorvi, Low-Gut Diver
Enthusiastic greetings. ‘Jorvi! Where’ve you been? Come sit by me!’ Jorvi is being piloted by a gutworm parasite living in his skull cavity, and is looking for somewhere to lay eggs. Another warm body will do.

3 Bartlett, Memory-carrier
Guileless, loudly lamenting. A scout from one of the upper hives, Bartlett is very far from home and doesn’t know how to get back. His memory sacs are bulging: eat one, and you’ll know the location of a precious, profitable chamber of untouched biomass. A scavenger-gang has taken note.

4 Plotts, Wallstrider Merchant
Pleasantly buzzed. ’Ah, you look a tough sort! Listen: I’m going Up-Gut in a few hours, and I could use someone like you along for safety!’ Offers a Wallstrider in payment. The Wallstrider in question is sick with Fungal Rot, and will suddenly drop dead in 1d4 days while climbing a vertical surface. 

5 Trill and Trull, Itinerant Missionaries
Intense, speaking in staccato-harmony. Two heads emerging from a half-split torso, preaching the message of Binary Fission. Offers to take you to the Caves of Multiplicity, where you can be plunged in the Holy Pools to begin the divine process of splitting.

6 Diane, Expert Haruspex
Distracted, terse. An expert navigator with a man-sized retractor strapped to her back for forcing tight crawl-spaces. Knows all the signs of gut-quake, parasite-swarm, gas-surge. Last night, she dreamt she drowned to death in a pus-flood. She knows this is the last journey she’ll ever undertake.

Adrian Smith

1d6 Points of Interest

1 Enzyme Pools
Past a thin membrane, someone’s drilled a hole in the soft wall, and installed a tap: pools of digestive enzymes, mixed with glow-root and hard-flower, the house-special. There’s competitors that would kill to get theirs hands on a gourd of raw enzyme.

2 Grub Tunnels
Multi-limbed crawler-urchins squeeze through the tunnels, hunting for bar-grubs to serve to the patrons. One of them is stuck and calls for help. Unknown to everyone, a rogue antibody has gotten in the tunnels. Its blind lamprey-mouth seeks warm prey.

3 Barman’s Nest
Clusters of wasp-like eggs, stuck to the walls and ceilings. If left to hatch, this could be the start of a brand new colony. The largest town in the Gut has put the word out: none of those eggs must be allowed to hatch. A spy is already casing the bar, insinuating herself with the other patrons.

4 Nutrient Intake
A slurping, greedy nozzle like an elephant’s trunk drinks from a nutrient-vat. The Bar itself has to be regularly fed, for everything to work as it should. Kybbir’s running out of nutrient-slop, and will pay well for more.

5 Lookout Point
A short climb up through bone-laced tunnels, to a sudden drop. A stunning view of the Gut-Swamps far below, dimly lit by methane flares. A faint cry, on a lower ridge just out of sight. ‘Help! Help me!’ A deceitful mimic-fluke waits for fresh prey.

6 Empty side-chamber
A faint pulsing, felt through the floor. If you dig, a passageway leads to a chamber with a secondary brain, with a psychic null-lance still embedded in it from long ago. The null-lance is a valuable artefact, but if removed, a deep rumble: the slumbering Gythora himself starts to wake, his titanic limbs stir.

From the British Library's Public Collection