I Hate Drawing (RPG All)

 

OK, that might be exaggerated. Hear me out.

I'm not a visual thinker. If I want to describe a scene I don't picture the far-off hills or the shadowed forest paths. I suspect one of the reasons why I go for the Rule of 4 and Rome is that these rules force you to think about what goes into the soup, to create a recipe. That recipe can be made to fit different paradigms, but it's the same recipe. The recipe used to make tiramisu can be adapted to make ice cream. Theoretically the recipe used to make carbonara can also be adapted to make ice cream, but I make no promises as to taste. Eggy, though. Creamy. With a hit of salt and umami.

Drawing leaves me cold. Forcing the recipe to fit into a particular box is no fun. I appreciate the necessity. Not everyone thinks the way I do, and some people need the formula. 

Ratatouille 

Yes, there is a flow to the diagram. It directs along certain lines and paths. Theoretically you can refer to it when in need to provide a sense of plot direction. But because it's not how I work or think, I find this kind of thing frustrating. So long as your technique is on-point you should be able to flow with the recipe and embrace the end result. 

But!

Let's think about this from a design perspective. 

Let's say this is a murder mystery, It doesn't matter, for this example, whether it's a locked-room puzzle, a cozy, a whodunnit or some other kind of mystery. There is a body on the floor and our heroes have to find out how it got there, and why.

The body is the opening scene. Theoretically there can be a scene prior to this where the characters are introduced to the victim before they hit the floor, find out a little about them, what-have-you. But for purpose of this example the body is the opening scene.

From that scene, questions follow.

What did they die of?

How was the means of death administered?

When was the means of death administered?

Who had the opportunity, means or motive to administer the means of death?

Some of these questions can be answered in the opening scene. If the victim's head was bashed in, and there's a bloody crowbar lying nearby, safe to say you've found out what they died of and how means of death was administered. You may also have eliminated the weedy secretary from the list of suspects, since it would take significant upper-body strength to do what's been done and the secretary's arms are scrawny.

That said ... suppose the victim was poisoned first and lying on the ground. A toxicology report would show that one way or the other, as might blood splatter. The weedy secretary might be back in play, since it would be easier to do what's been done while the victim's lying face-down. In fact, since that's the only way the weedy secretary might have done it, and that's the way it was done, signs are beginning to point in a weedy direction ...

Point being, each of these questions can be a scene in and of themselves, which means they all need a spot on the diagram. What began with one box becomes many, with arrows pointing hither and thither. 

Let's start with two boxes.

One is the opening scene. The inciting incident. Call it what you will.

The other is the end scene. However the detectives get there, this is where they'll end up. The murderer revealed.

All those boxes in the middle? Some of them are set dressing, some red herrings. Notice in the drawing above that the boxes are color-coded and shaped in a particular way. That allows me to see at a glance which scenes are directly relevant to the plot and which not. 

There will always be something interesting to do in any scene. Whether or not the interesting thing is also plot-relevant ... well, Doctor Watson's in Sherlock Holmes for a reason. Without him, the stories would be a boring recitation. This-is-how-it-was-done. Yawn, But, with him, a plot-relevant character wanders in and out of intriguing situations, finding things out. Not all those things are as important as they seem at the time, but they all seem important at the time. Eye-catching.

So, to sum up: the diagram might look like a spaghetti nightmare. Nevertheless, it follows a recipe. It has the same rule of 4 and Rome as any other plot. Difference being, it fits those things and Rome into a skeleton which can be referred to, as needed, to give you a sense of plot direction. 

The important things remain the same, Something interesting to do must be in each and every scene, whether it's set dressing, a red herring, or something else.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some drawing to do.

 

Stuck for an Idea? (RPG All)

Designing a campaign, a scenario, even a scene, can be very difficult. You want it to be memorable, granted. You want the players to have fun. You want something unique, or at least reasonably unique - not a bunch of easily spotted tropes. At the same time you don't want to bust your head open searching when the game's on in a day or so and you really haven't the time to mess about.

I've said before that folklore's the best resource for a Director in search of inspiration, say for cults or creatures. It's also very helpful to know your history, so you can pick out details that will be useful later. Say you want to put something interesting and mysterious in your steampunk fantasy city. You might spend an hour scratching your head and crossing out dud ideas, or you could insert the Crystal Palace. Stolen from history, reborn as - well, whatever you fancy.

But there's one other thing you can try, and that's to look at the very ordinary events and things around you, and play with them.

You already know, as Director, that the players are going to come into contact with certain things just in the course of their day-to-day. Exactly what those things are will depend on the circumstances of the game and the setting, but there are some assumptions that can be made. The characters will need to travel from place to place. They will need to eat and sleep. They may commit crimes, or protect people from them, in which case they will come into contact with the police, other criminals, and victims. Possibly also vigilantes, depending on the nature of the setting - and so on, and on.

The initial assumption is the basis for all the rest of the work, but underlying that initial assumption is another, more basic layer. So say this is a game about investigating mystic mysteries, everything from Templar treasures to the Bermuda Triangle. That initial assumption immediately suggests several things that you know the characters will encounter all the time: occultists, skeptics, believers, sites of mystic significance like haunted houses and stone circles. That in turn suggests that you, as Director, need to make some notes about all those things, for use in those moments when the characters need direction and you haven't got something more significant planned. Are the players at a loss? Maybe it's time to follow up on that tip they heard about the Winchester House. None of this has to be in-depth; it just has to have enough depth to occupy attention.

However that's the initial assumption, not the basic layer. The basic layer is simply this: the things the characters encounter all the time, whether they want to or not.  The characters will always want to eat, to sleep, to move around. They'll buy clothing, toys, game consoles. They will have needs and they'll want to fill them. At the same time there will be events happening around them regardless of whether or not the players are directly involved, because everyone else in the game world has needs to satisfy too. This is at the heart of every system, regardless of setting or mechanics, and you can play with this layer in many different ways - so long as you establish it first.

It's been a long time since I've played, but I loved Cyberpunk 2020 way back when, because it spent time on little details like that. The splatbooks told you what guns and chipware were for sale, but they also gave you a little nugget of information about the game world along with it. Jeweldecks are manufactured to order by Faberge of Switzerland. The customer collaborates with the company's designers on the design of the jewelry that the deck will be built into ... Survivable, capable and powerful - when the going gets tough, turn to Spinelli Autotech ... Leisurewear isn't about sports, it's about feeling like you're into sports. Our goal is to make everyone feel authentic, even if they're just sitting at home in front of the Netbox, knocking back Smash.

Look at those flavor comments. They establish the setting quickly and give context for what's going on, more clearly and more succinctly than any data dump. It's all about worldbuilding in the end, and the sooner you establish your world the better it will be for your campaign. Everything you do to make your world yours will encourage the players to explore and inhabit it. BioShock's a classic example; that undersea city wouldn't feel the same without its personalized vending machines, its peppy little sentry bots, its gloomy interiors split by flickering neon lights, the New Year's masks everyone wears, and those mournful, lethal Big Daddies in their diving suits. It's that world more than anything else that draws the player forward, to interact with the setting.

I started this by talking about inspiration, and how the basic layer can be a vital source of inspiration for the Director. By that I mean this: by considering what's in the basic layer, you can design upward and create something for the players to interact with. That's exactly what Cyberpunk did, exactly what BioShock did - they shaped everything in their worlds by playing with that basic layer, by considering the things the characters encounter all the time and then building on those things. The characters have needs and want to fill them. As Director, how you provide fulfilment for those needs shapes everything else in the game going forward.

Say this is a fantasy setting with Gods and their clerics, or similar. The basic layer is this: the trappings and dogmas of that religion. Its shrines may be everywhere - are they decorated with flowers, candles, incense, something else? Do its worshippers leave offerings, and if so of what? How are the dead treated? These are the questions you need to answer, and you need to pepper the game world with that answer as often as possible. After all, the characters would see these shrines every day; they've probably made offerings at them many times. But by ensuring these shrines have just a little bit of detail, you help to build the world.

Don't feel as if you have to kill yourself with detail. Grim Fandango, for example, never tells you a great deal about the world of the dead; its worldbuilding is established in a few little details, such as how florists become insane weaponsmiths because floral bullets are the way the dead are killed. A few little tricks like this make the world seem developed, perhaps more so than it actually is. Brief but informative should be your watchword, not unlike the one sentence description I've recommended for character archetypes.

However there's one other use for the basic layer, and to cover this final point I'm going to draw your attention to something I swiped from the magnificent garbage fire that is the internet:

Six thousand cell phones, lost each year. Over three thousand digital cameras, eighteen thousand hats, seven thousand five hundred autograph books, lost and gone in one theme park. Think about that for a moment, then go to the basic layer and ask yourself: in my campaign world, what happens to the lost and found?

Say this is a pre-industrial revolution setting, where much of it probably gets re-used, not because they were all eco-warriors back in the days of Camelot, but because they didn't have many resources to begin with so they had to stretch what they had. This is why we often find lost manuscripts and forgotten artworks hidden on the canvases and pages of classic paintings and old books; someone scraped the original clean, and started fresh. Absolutely everything gets used, which is why you could make a living in a medieval setting by scouring the streets for animal dung, and why even up to the Victorian period there'd be someone willing to cart off your 'night soil' - also known as feces.

So if this is a fantasy setting, and your character loses, say, a notebook - or worse yet, a wizard's spellbook - then now would be a good time to track down whoever it is that collects all this stuff for resale. Somewhere out there is a man with a cart and a vision, and he's got your spellbook in his pile. Alternatively, what happens if you scrape down a spellbook so you can write new spells in it? Who knows - but I bet you could have fun finding out.

There's also magical consequences to consider. In Japanese folklore there's an entity called the Tsukumo-gami, a wraith made up of the things we leave behind. Shoes, pots, chairs, umbrellas, telephones - everything has a spirit, and if slighted these items can become furious, stalking the night, attacking people. Guy de Maupassant once wrote of a very similar thing, in his short story Who Knows? in which a sinister, enormously fat furniture dealer may, or may not, have persuaded a man's entire house, beds, chairs, cabinets and all, to walk out the front door and into his shop.

When a thing becomes lost, is it really lost, or has it walked away? In Esoterrorists it may be possible for a notebook, a tablet, a camera to have a soul, and to express its disgust by escaping from its owner. In Bookhounds it's quite possible a grimoire might be alive. Or, if this is a Disney situation and all those items are lost each year in one place, what happens next to all that magical energy, bound up with nowhere to go? Are those sunglasses, cameras, cell phones used in some ritual, extracting mana from the lost and found to power - what, exactly? A ride? The lights in the Magic Castle? The ritual keeping Disney's frozen head viable?

With all that in mind, consider this scenario seed:

Let the player pick something valuable, which the character has lost. The character goes looking for it, and finds it - but before the character can pick it up, it's whisked away by something small, fast, and almost silent. What happened, and where is the item now?

1) Future tech: a cleaning robot assigned to this building grabbed the unattended item, and took it away to 'lost and found.' Except someone has reprogrammed this robot - and all the others like it - to bring lost items to a secret room hidden away in the building. The question is, who did it? Is there an actual person behind this, or have the robots developed a peculiar hive mind, and bring these items here in some form of religious worship?

2) 20th Century/Supernatural setting: the item was grabbed by a gremlin or similar, that wants to make a nest for its prospective mate. Getting it back means delving into the forgotten supernatural underbelly of the city, possibly even a pocket dimension in which everything seems like, yet is not like, the world in which we live. In a Cthulhu-esque setting, the gremlin could be an extension of a Great Old One, say the Brood of Elihort, and its reasons for wanting to collect the lost and found are bound to be malevolent.

3) Fantasy/Swords and Sorcery setting: a magical entity, possibly an archwizard, created a spell intended to help it find things it has lost. It wrote the spell down on a scroll and forgot about it, and now that scroll lies in a monastery, library or other archive. However spells have a way of reminding the world that they exist, and when this scroll realized it was due to be scraped clean so other things could be scribed on it, the spell began 'finding' things other people had 'lost' and moving them to the archive, so they could be scraped clean in its place. Of course, not all the items it 'finds' are scrolls, but it has no good way of picking the useful from the useless, so everything it gets ends up in the same place. Which would puzzle the monks/librarians no end, except the junior member meant to be cleaning up the archive each night has worked out, at least in part, what's going on, and is selling these 'lost' items at a premium discount, at the local tavern. All of which ticks off the local thieves' guild no end; after all, the guild's not getting its cut from all this unsanctioned thievery.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

The Facility (RPG Any. GUMSHOE)

The agents gather their forces and prepare to strike. The opposition won't know what hit them - or at least, that's the idea. But what are the agents assaulting, and how difficult will their task be?

Any organized group, whatever its objective, has assets of one kind or another. Often these assets are brick-and-mortar buildings, facilities whose efforts assist the group's goals. For the purpose of this discussion I'm going to use Esoterrorists as an example, but the concepts discussed here could apply across the board. It doesn't matter whether Vampires or Cultists are behind the latest threat to humanity; certain characteristics are shared.

The purpose of this segment is to give you, the Keeper/Director, some basic vocabulary to describe these facilities to the players. This will be particularly useful if you have to do this on the fly, without much prior preparation. This will most often happen in an improvisational game, in which the characters are likely to go off-script in search of adventure.

So what are these facilities?

They:

• Manufacture,
• Collect,
• Distribute, or
• Analyze.

A manufacturing facility makes something, a collection facility stores it, a distribution hub delivers it, and an analyzing facility investigates.

So to take an Esoterror cell devoted to weakening the membrane by any means necessary, that group has means by which it collects material to further its cause, makes that material, distributes it, or tries to find new ways to make, distribute or collect it. For purposes of this example it doesn't really matter what that material is - it's a pure McGuffin.

What do all these facilities have in common? They need:

• Security, and,
• Monitoring.

Someone has to keep the facility maintained and safe from prying eyes. This may mean a simple padlock on an important door, or a full-fledged electronic surveillance system. Also, someone has to monitor what's going on, whether the facility is doing as it should.

For purposes of gamification, the Security and Monitoring aspects of any facility ought to be given a basic rating, Low, Medium, or High. This determines the Difficulty of any given test against or within the facility.

So for example: this Collection facility has Low Security and Low Monitoring. It isn't very important to the grand design, or the cell doesn't have the resources to look after this and its other facilities too. This implies that any attempt to Infiltrate the facility, use Digital Intrusion to crack its online database, or really to attempt any test, is, at most, 3, assuming the Gumshoe default of Difficulty 4 for all tests.  

This implies that the Collection facility has only the most basic of security. Maybe there's a guard at the door, or a few badly placed, cheapo cameras. It also implies that the characters may be able to infiltrate the facility without being seen, and if they leave without blowing the place up or burning it down, their actions may not be noticed by the cell for some time, if ever. 

Thus Low = Difficulty 3, Medium = Difficulty 4, and High = Difficulty 5.

This doesn't just affect Difficulty. In Gumshoe, it also affects Investigative ability spends. A Low Security, Medium Monitoring facility implies:

• 0 point clues for anything involving Security, say Electronic Surveillance, and
• 1 point clues for anything involving Monitoring, say, Bureaucracy.  

The point being that a Low Security environment, say, is lax in all areas. The security cameras aren't properly positioned, the guards are rent-a-cops, the fences have holes in them. This isn't the time to make the agents spend points on Military Science to work out guard patterns. Whereas a Medium Monitoring environment has some functioning safeguards, so it shouldn't be a walk in the park when your forensic Accountant goes through its books.

High Security or Monitoring, on the other hand, implies extraordinary safeguards. That in turn suggests that more than one point, or perhaps a combination of points from different abilities, are needed.

It's unreasonable to assume that there's a wide spread between Security and Monitoring. A High Monitoring facility would never have Low Security. Nobody in their right mind puts the most important thing they own in a cardboard box by the side of the road. So a High Monitoring facility will have at least Medium Security. Similarly a Low Security facility is only ever going to have Medium Monitoring, and so on.

If you extend the gamification to transport between facilities, then there's an argument for saying there can be a wide spread between Security and Monitoring, for a very brief period while the McGuffins are in transport. However even then a wide spread isn't really likely. You don't see banks transporting cash in a tuk-tuk. 

OK, all that's the bare bones approach. So what happens when you want to go into more detail?

First, take a moment to think about what it is you're trying to describe. Security and Monitoring are common factors, granted. However there are other factors unique to the kind of facility you're designing. For example:

A Collection facility gathers McGuffins. What does it need?

It needs:

• Space, in which to safely store the McGuffins.
• Materials that are important to the McGuffins.
• Transport for the McGuffins.

Let's say the McGuffins are delicate, and need to be in a temperature controlled environment. This may be the case if the McGuffins are antiques, or bacteria, or high-end computer equipment. Then the facility needs Materials, equipment to maintain temperature, power for that equipment, and probably some kind of electronic monitoring system to ensure the equipment doesn't fail, or, if it does, that the appropriate monitoring body is immediately alerted.

This in turn suggests significant investment - some kind of HVAC, distribution vents, means to control waste runoff from the equipment, some kind of monitoring station either automated or with human personnel. This only gets more important if the facility is somewhere that complicates that process - if, say, this temperature controlled environment has to exist within a tropical biosphere.

Say that the Esoterror cell is operating a facility similar to InGen's Jurassic Park in Isla Nublar, Costa Rica. That environment is fairly harsh: hot, humid, probably lots of salt in the atmosphere since it's an island, subject to intense storms. It's reasonable to assume that any complex technical facility in that environment wages a constant battle against corrosion, and that providing even basic aircon is more difficult there than it would be, say, in Texas.

However it couldn't exist at all if it wasn't close to Costa Rica. Politically stable, with a democratic government since 1948, and economically developed, it permits the transport network a would-be InGen needs to move all the construction equipment, scientific McGuffins and other things required to create the facility in the first place.

Equally, satisfying those needs may give the agents clues as to the facility's purpose and importance. In Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, when the agency needs to work out whether or not a particular building, out in the middle of nowhere, is or is not a chemical weapons plant, the two things that give it away, from satellite imagery alone, are an abundance of guards, and high waste heat from the machinery it uses to produce its McGuffins. Satisfying needs meant that the facility gave its true nature away. 

A Distribution facility's needs are similar, but not the same. It needs:

• Space,
• Materials, and
• Transport.

But its need hierarchy is different.

If you were to map out a Collection facility's needs, its priority list would be Materials, then Space, then Transport. It absolutely needs to keep the McGuffins safe and viable, so it absolutely needs Materials. It needs Space, but that isn't as important as Materials, since it's reasonable to presume the McGuffins aren't staying forever. Finally, it needs transport links, but that isn't as important to it as the other two needs in the hierarchy.

So a Collection facility could be: out in an allegedly abandoned military base or missile silo. In a warehouse on the outskirts of a small town. In an old freighter anchored offshore. All these places are relatively remote and low-key, but they satisfy the need hierarchy. They offer Materials first and foremost, then Space, then Transport.

Whereas a Distribution facility's need hierarchy is: Transport, Materials, Space. Its purpose is to distribute, so it absolutely needs transport links to help it distribute. It needs to keep the McGuffins safe and viable for the limited time the McGuffins are within its care, so it needs Materials. It doesn't need Space as much as it needs the other two things, since the McGuffins aren't staying very long.

So a Distribution facility could be: a warehouse in a suburb near a major city. Container yards at or near a major port. Slaughterhouses on or near an important railway hub. A hotel at or near an airport. All these places are near the one thing it needs most, but in turn it means that the facility isn't as low-key. It needs some kind of profile, if only to blend in with everything else around it. Abandoned, decaying, marked with hazard warning signs - these are things you don't associate with important transport links. If it's a hotel right next to JFK airport in New York, it probably doesn't look like the hotel from Psycho. 

You can assign a needs hierarchy to all the facility types. Manufacturing needs Space, Materials, Transport. An Analyzing facility needs Transport, Space, Materials. With this needs hierarchy comes the first indication of what a facility is actually like, which in turn helps you design it quickly.

All that said, let's consider an Esoterror Manufacturing facility. Let's also presume that this facility is important but not vital to the cell, so it has Medium Security and Monitoring.

Say for the sake of plot that this particular facility is involved in food production, that it makes chicken nuggets which are infected with a biological agent that, in a percentage of the population, results in a disease which causes brain death. This allows the newly dead brains to be taken over by an Outer Dark entity.

It's manufacturing, so it needs Space, Materials, Transport. Space in this instance implies a lot of space - after all, there are a lot of chickens - and given the nature of the facility there's a lot of waste disposal too, and equipment for processing - the Materials part of the equation. There will be some kind of loading bay or shipping point - the Transport. There's also a small amount of the McGuffin on site. There would be more if this was a High Monitoring or Security site, but we've already decided this is Medium.

When the McGuffins are transported out of the facility, Security drops by one level, from Medium to Low. This in turn suggests that if the agents choose to hit the transport rather than the facility, their odds of success improve.

Assuming there's anything here that might provoke a Stability or Sanity loss, then that loss is probably not enough to drive anyone crazy, but enough to be a concern. Minor, not major; if it were major, the facility would be more important to the cell, and have High levels of Security, Monitoring, or both.

Medium Security implies plenty of locked doors, some kind of electronic alarm system, maybe a minor Outer Dark entity on site depending on how pulp you intend to play it. Medium Monitoring implies that if something happens to the facility the cell will respond reasonably quickly. Within a day if that something is overt, like explosives or a fire, within a week if it's just a break-in.  It also implies that there are resources on site that the agents might want to look at - filing cabinets, computer databases, midlevel management to interrogate. Difficulty for all tests within the facility is 4. Investigative Ability spends are at least 1 point.

Already you have a fairly clear picture of the facility, and thus what the agents can hope to get from the facility. You also know, for gamification purposes, the Difficulty for all tests, and the point spend. Those are the most important things you'll need to know before running any scene within the facility. 

Of course, you'll want to go into more detail for truly important, campaign-relevant facilities. This is just for those emergency moments, when the need arises and you haven't anything planned. Take a breath, consider your options, and ...

Enjoy!

Exercising the Mind

A while back I talked about finding inspiration in the most unlikely of places. As a result, I wrote a mini scenario based around a restaurant in Athens, the To Treno. As you're probably aware by now, I also write short fiction, and I thought I'd use this time to demonstrate one way of structuring and creating short fiction.

Again I'm going to use one of the Guardian's Top Ten lists. This time it's ten of the best hidden bars in New York, which I'm going to use as a jumping-off point. There are all kinds of options here - I particularly like the Blind Barber - but I think I'm going to go with the No Name in Brooklyn. It has a lot of things I find attractive, particularly that anonymous door, the atmosphere, and that it's open all hours so it gets an eclectic crowd. You can just picture it on, say, a Monday night after the restaurants shut down, and there's no civilians on the streets, just the parade of night workers and after hours people who keep the city running. It works, as a setting, for the tale I want to tell.

Now, a short story usually has to be something around four to seven thousand words. Seven's actually a little high. Most of the outlets I've submitted for so far have insisted on a four thousand word cut-off. What that means is you need to get in there quick. You haven't got time to waste on establishing shots and sentences that go nowhere but look pretty. The focus has to be on getting the most done in the least amount of time.

What do you really need? Well, you need at least one protagonist. Supporting characters can be useful, but aren't essential. You need the setting, which we've already established is going to either be the No Name, or be very like the No Name. Then you need a problem, something to spur the protagonist to action. That action will drive the story forward.

What's the best kind of protagonist for this sort of story? Well, bars need bartenders. This person could be a talented mixologist, the kind of person who wins awards and acclaim. He could be a flair bartender, the sort you might have seen in the movies.It can be fascinating to watch; I dread to think how many bottles are sacrificed to the floor paving in order make a talent like that.

Designing a character can be relatively simple. In fact we've discussed this before, when I talked about villain design, and campaign planning. The same tactics that work there, work here. We don't have as much time here to flesh out every least detail, so rather than answer every possible question I intend to focus on the basics:

• What is the character’s name, age, ethnicity and gender?
• Name three physical attributes.
• What is a problem the character faces?
• What is a secret the character hopes nobody finds out about?

Since I've been on a bit of a Dracula Dossier kick, I think this time the protagonist will be Romanian, a recent arrival in the US. Female, early twenties, and since the Dossier's kind enough to give some name options, she'll be Timea Barbu.

Tall, muscular, and dark hair that she secretly hates, for physical attributes. She's tried dye jobs, but they never work the way she'd like.

Her problem is that one of her least favorite customers has come in the wrong door of the bar. See below for more information about that.

Her secret is that she hopes nobody finds out she's a vampire hunter. She's trying to get out of the life, which is why she left Romania and why she's working as a bartender now.

That brings us to the problem that the character faces, which I alluded to earlier. That problem will spur her to action, which in turn drives the plot. Now, one of the simpler ways of structuring this kind of story is by giving her what amounts to a series of problems, each of which feeds into the other, in the same way that one scene feeds into another in a Night's Black Agents game. The point being that her initial action moves her forward by further complicating the initial problem. Each attempt she makes to solve her difficulty drives her further and further into the plot.

Generally speaking, you can allow for up to three steps in a short story. The initial obstacle, and her proposed solution, drives us to the second obstacle, which in turn leads to a proposed solution. That solution drives us to the third obstacle, and resolution. Obviously in a longer story you can develop this further, but this is short fiction, and we don't have the time for that.

As a rule of thumb, you can perhaps allow as much as a thousand words to establish the setting and the initial problem. The next thousand can deal with her first proposed solution, and so on. Since we've got a cap of about four thousand words, there's only so many times you can get away with that before you run out of words.

With that in mind, the structure is:

• Initial thousand establishes the bar, Timea, and the problem.
• The No Name has two doors, each of which is marked only by an antique knocker, no sign. The difference is that one door is used exclusively by normals, ordinary humans. The other is used exclusively by the spirits, undead, and other unnaturals, also out for a good time. So long as they all stick to their own doors, normals can't 'see' specials, and vice versa. Tonight, one of the normals has decided to break the rules. Well, decided probably isn't the best way of putting it; he's drunk as two skunks, and managed to find the wrong door handle by accident.
• Proposed solution: get him out the door, quick. Unfortunately one of the specials spots him, and decides to keep him in the bar, as a kind of mascot. Or maybe a snack.

• OK, if Timea can't get the normal out of the bar, she needs to keep the special occupied. If he's not paying attention to the normal because Timea's putting on a show, then maybe the normal can slip out. Or maybe Timea's bar-back can help out by getting the normal outside.  
• That didn't go so well. Sure, the special's attention is occupied, but so is the normal, which means he isn't leaving. Plus the bar-back, a Penanggalan, scares him silly. Normal's beginning to sober up, which could be very bad for everyone.

• New plan. Keep the normal drinking, or he'll sober up, and if he sobers up he'll start to question what he's seeing. Also, keep the special drinking, because that way the special won't have the wherewithal to do anything drastic.
• Ah, nuts. The normal's settling down, after the Penanggalan scare, but the special's just getting belligerent. 

• Final option. It's closing time, folks. Timea offers to walk the normal home. At least that way the special won't eat him. Except the special really, really wants to eat him ...
• Resolution! One way or the other ...

There you have it! Once this story is finished it will appear on my Patreon. If I can finish it before the 20th, it will appear this month; if not, then it will appear next month, and something else will fill the slot.

I hope you found this entertaining!