The projects I write tend to spiral out of control. Whenever I find a glimmer that gets me excited, I add in a note that says something to the effect of: Who else in the world cares about this?

It looks like this. I’m writing about a small frontier city, and there’s a town square. I don’t abide having cities without people so I decide to place a travelling marketplace there. Just a few — 1d6 merchants — who might be there at a given time. When you pass through, you’ll perhaps see a new merchant.

I google what kind of merchants would frequent the type of city I’m thinking of, and I’m reminded of silk road merchants: Spices, incense, rugs, dyes, those types of things. And of course, there’ll be street food before too. And before long I have a coffee vendor, a roti vendor, an incense merchant, tattoo artist, kohl merchant, and some urchins playing. Some of these are northerners come south for riches and some are locals earning bread.

But why do these people matter? That’s the intratextuality. They all have to matter. That’s how your game has meaning. Now, do they all need wants and desires, so they all need to be DNA fleshed out NPCs? No. But, now they exist, someone else in the world needs that baklava at the coffee shop. A puzzle must requires incense to be solved. The roti must be used to feed someone hungry. The urchins must have gossip to provide.

So now, I must write those encounters. If I’m lucky “Oh! Of course the manticore encounter needed incense!” If I’m lucky, my 3 C’s of Challenges are begging for a rug-seller to bring a breadth of options to solve challenges. But often, I have to create those encounters and locations and NPCs to make the kohl seller meaningful.

And this is why my projects so often expand outside of their original scope. Intratextuality demands it. Everything should have meaning in the text, or at least be intrinsically capable of having meaning.

People are like Nova, your writing is too dense, and yeah, sure. I need not to apologise for it. This is why.

I don’t have a process for creating an more intertextual module, except for my actually writing process: I almost always write a massive outline with most of the rooms and outlines, haphazardly filled with my initial major ideas, but with headings for the stuff that I’ll need — perhaps it just says “timeline” or “rules for chases” or “how to generate a random city building” or “The castle”, whatever I think I’ll need. Whenever I write, I start at the top and read from the top until I find a thing I haven’t written, and I write that thing. And when I finish writing that thing, I make a note — I highlight it yellow normally —saying something like “The key mentioned here needs to be in the Keep somewhere”, or “This person should be related to the blacksmith” or “1d6 people regularly have coffee at the cafe”. And then I move on, leaving highlighter in my wake. And I also highlight stuff I haven’t finished, like the last three entries on the roti menu, or I’m not sure what crime they committed or whatever. And then I keep writing and these highlighted sections give me short discrete things to solve when I open the manuscript next time.

Which means, the more I do this, the more I’m leaving myself discrete chunks to write — I can do it on my phone while I’m waiting to pick up the kids or at the playground. And that’s a huge asset to me. Starting a project is hard because I need a document, but the more of that document I wrote, the less effort it takes to add to it.

Does this complexity get too much? Oh, yeah, definitely, as a creator. Like, it’s taking me forever to finish the Tragedy of Grimsby-Almaz because I decided that most of those connections will be social ones that connect to mystery-solving. But the complexity in Bridewell and Hiss absolutely pack play with hooks and points and people of interest, so I think it’s worth it as a player or a referee.

So, yeah: The takeaway: It’s cool to link your text together. Make modules like Chekov’s Toolbox: Everything you see and everyone you meet is important down the line.

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