Noir — Transcription

and I watched for the first time the Maltese Falcon, which while it has Maltese in its name,

I flipped you one as well.

41.

It was in the middle of the war.

I am assuming that our listeners will be quite familiar with some elements of noir,

right, because they have become so baked in to other elements.

So many spoofs like exist in the film world that draw on the tropes of noir.

Sometimes it's a deta-

So I think you've got to have like a,

your inciting event has to be relatively straightforward.

You know, go find this person or go recover this artifact or bring this person back to me.

Some something very similar, like almost fetch questy.

And then as soon as that kicks

But when you are only presented with partial information, it appears so tricky and complex.

So we're like the whole point of this story is the journey that you go on to piece together the things that are already happening in motion around you.

And I think that's another important part.

The story has to be evolving around the characters.

It's not a mystery that's already happened and you're piecing together the pieces after the fact.

Easter!

All right, jumping back to like, what else do you need?

So I think, I think you've also got a like.

This isn't strictly true of everything,

but it is one of my favorite ones.

You've got situations where the institutions aren't to be trusted.

So either the cops are on the take directly or the cops are protecting a institution or a public figure.

So whatever you as the private investigator come up with might be unsavory and you might not be able to go through like sanction channels to resolve the issue.

I think The Nice Guys is another real fun neo-noir film.

They're uncertain because they are lying outright to you.

And I think that's a really powerful one for stepping into this mode of fiction.

That isn't the baseline in most role playing games.

Like common GM advice that you'll find is don't lie to your players.

There's enough cognitive burden already.

And they're already drawing the wrong conclusions.

So I look forward to the next section where we actually start digging into,

Well, how do you?

So they're not just waiting for events to unfold at them.

They do a lot of setting things up themselves.

And they'll do a lot of like, meet me at this place because I want to extract this information from you, or I need to give an artifact, or I need to place something somewhere like that.

They can be super grounded stakes.

So when those events unfold,

if you haven't solved the mystery in time,

And life goes on.

I think that's a really important part of it.

Like it doesn't have to be a big one.

It could be a in three days,

the McGuffin disappears or something like that.

But there's all those little micro ones like, yeah,

they're getting on the train at seven and it's four now.

You have three hours, what are you gonna do?

You can miss that opportunity.

It doesn't ruin the whole story,

but you've always introduced this one little kick to get the players moving towards action and be like, well, I have to do something.

Yeah, it gives really good plausible structure for the story to progress forwards.

Now, one thing that I find kind of interesting here, often we start with like setting,

but here we've, we've talked entirely about structure of evolving story.

We've kind of taken it a little bit for granted in the discussion so far,

but the setting doesn't really matter as long as it's urban.

Like hot fuzz like the organized crime is the conspiracy for the tidy town. I'm so sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone here

You should watch that movie if you have it because it's exquisite

But yeah, it doesn't have no I take it all back it does

So where we're talking like you're on the phone, or you have a telegraph, or you have something that allows you to hit someone up so that you can proactively arrange a meeting.

And I think another element that often plays into it is some form of like mail system.

system's easy, but some form of communication system, I think, is...

And I actually want to disagree.

I think we're ready for next step,

which is how do we rebuild those into a gameable situation,

And if they piece it together a-

along the way, that's great for them.

But I really want them not to be looking for the tropes to begin with,

because the tropes often signal something in advance.

If they're familiar with the structure of it,

I don't want them to see the code in the matrix.

So if I was doing this in like a long running campaign and I'm like,

I'm just going to drop a cheeky noir in here.

It lets you flesh out quite a lot of the world in a little microcosm.

You can tell a very big implied story.

Everyone, when you arrive at the table tonight, we're doing noir investigators, you're hardboiled eggs and you're out there trying to find the truth.

Instead, I would do that scene setting up, that aesthetic of like, you know, she walks in, her legs are so long, she's still out the door while she's in the room.

She's standing in front of the window and she sparks up a cigarette.

Okay, this is like a racy pin up 1920s.

Leg jutting in from out of frame.

It's the descriptions that you have in your head when you're telling this to players. It's the structures of how information is transmitted.

It's the backbone of the story that allows vibe to fall out of it.

But just saying, powered by the apocalypse, doesn't give you the juice there.

Doesn't give anyone some actionable advice on how to turn that vibe from there.

A noir mystery is a little bit more tricky than your traditional--

all of the things have already happened,

and you're just picking up the pieces to figure out what it was because we're running events concurrently as the players are embroiled in them.

I don't think this works very-

very well for an open-ended mystery type, so like you carved from Brindlewood games, where there's no set ending to the mystery,

there's no conclusions that can be made because the players determine the conclusions as they go along,

I think for a noir, you have to prep ahead of time what the mystery is.

The Maltese Falcon, I think, would be a big old flop if actually we didn't know that the Maltese Falcon was in play the whole time.

Instead, we have...

...the mystery that's kind of set up ahead of time, like a scenario that is engaged ahead of time...

...we have all of the events already pre-recorded that have led to the inciting event occurring...

...and after that, I think we have a timeline of kicks that are going to occur.

So if the players don't intervene, this NPC dies and then that information is made available to them.

and if it progresses down to here, the bad guys move their headquarters from this place to that place.

And then the next step occurs.

So I think we know everything that's set in stone up until the first point where the femme fatale walks into the player's office,

which is our inciting node, our very first node.

And then after that, the players are the ones responsible for investigating.

Like you, you have three opportunities to play out a scene and then something will happen.

And then you have a few opportunities to play out a scene and then something will happen.

I think I would go a little more freeform and instead, if certainly this depends a little bit on the system, otherwise I'd want to make that available to players ahead of time,

the information of how much time a given activity will take.

So if it is like call up and set a meeting.

That, you know, that that'll take two hours for you to set up the meeting and get to the spot and then have the people arrive at the spot, something like that.

I'm I'm doing that because I like the idea that it it affords the players lots of different avenues to do things.

And I don't want to make it too punishing if they don't trigger interesting scenes through through no fault of their own.

They might just set themselves up for something that's a little bit flaccid.

like I can imagine straight up our players doing a like

So we've got to have like, if we've got our initial setup, and we've got the events that are going to occur, that lets us put clues that shove players into interesting places on those events.

So if it is the person, an NPC is shot and dies, you have like an artifact on their body from the last place that they were before.

They were at the crime scene location,

or they're carrying something with someone's phone number on there, or a box of matches.

It's an easy vector for a pointer clue.

And I think this is a bit--

I want to chat about three different types of clues that we can put down.

I use those ones interchangeably.

So it's something that occurs without the players having to see it first.

Yep, exactly that.

So if the players haven't done the right stuff in advance,

the NPC gets shot and they arrive at the crime scene.

There are pointer clues that tell them to go somewhere else that gives them a new avenue for information gathering.

If we don't have pointer clues, they can't use that to do anything new.

So a pointer clue straight up tells you to go to a person or a place or an event that's occurring, something like that.

Second type of clue, uh, is what I would call an outcome clue.

And that's something that allows you to deduce an outcome.

So something deductive, something that's like, um, you know, you see,

It's the shape of the person's.

Boot matches a footprint you saw earlier.

So it allows you to like put a person in a position at some point in time.

It allows you to make a conclusion about what is happening,

but doesn't necessarily tell your players to go anywhere or do something new.

It gives them information about what was happening,

but not where to go next.

And then the third type of clue is even more stripped of context,

and I call it a foreshadowing clue.

A foreshadowing clue is something

that makes sense in retrospect.

So if you've got like a hidden reveal at the end of this,

like at your climax node,

when you see that and you understand what's going on at last, that's when all of the little foreshadowing things make your players go,

"Oh, that's why they were wearing a green hat."

But in advance,

they just noticed that they're wearing a green hat and it doesn't actually point them towards a conclusion.

And it doesn't point them to a new place to gather information.

So I think when we talk clues.

Breaking it down into like a clue that sends them somewhere new and lets them get more stuff is really important.

You can build an entire mystery out of just pointers, but it's pretty boring.

Seating the outcomes and the foreshadows actually makes it interesting and memorable and textural.

But if you only do those ones, it doesn't point them towards a conclusion at the end.

It's been around for a million years.

Justin Alexander has a fantastic write-up of it.

The three-clue rule, the inverted three-clue rule, and like, building revelation lists.

Excellent stuff.

Then I would dump, like, depending on what my interesting outcomes are, I would dump at least two, sometimes three. And for foreshadow,

you just go nuts, as many as you want.

Doesn't matter because you've stripped them all of context.

You can dot them anywhere. And unless you do like an overwhelming amount,

players won't typically be able to use them to see the future,

behind a dice roll. This one comes out in every gumshoe game. The structural elements of the mystery should always be known by the players. The outcomes are something that I think should be

on the edge, where maybe the players just piece it together themselves, and that's great. But they act as a perfect extra piece of information that if they want to roll for it or spend some resources,

That's when you introduce those.

The reward for risking something is you get to make this clue that complexifies your information space and lets you open up more avenues of action to take to further the mystery.

And when players are choosing to spend that,

that tells me that they are buying into the scenes in front of them.

Now, earlier you did say it's full of red herrings.

I wouldn't structurally deploy red herrings.

I deploy lies?

But in my mind, when I contextualize what a red herring is, it's where you end up finding the dead end.

So you get sent somewhere and it yields nothing valuable or like a wrong conclusion.

I think all the conclusions that they make should be valid because then you still end up like identifying someone's hidden agenda out the other side of it.

So like the lie can send you in a productive place but then it allows you to recontextualize what you've already engaged with.

I think a red herring is more of a like full stop.

It's a dead end.

It's a, I have nothing to,

I've had that one and like I find taking compliments from my players awkward at the best of times and a bit where they're like,

yeah, that was so memorable because it really sucked for us.

We've got a [INAUDIBLE]

story of things that have led up to this point.

We've got a calendar of when things are going to occur next if the players don't intervene to subvert them or gain that information ahead of time.

Each of the things that comes next has been prepped with at least a couple pointer clues to send the players to gather more information.

We've got pointer clues on all the other nodes of our mystery.

I'd want to have at least one initial node that's like a direct cold.

So, whatever the initial mystery is, it could be like, "Tail a person, find a thing, find a person, protect this thing," whatever it is. That is easily accomplished. But in the doing so, they go to do the thing. That's where story space opens up.

It sends them in multiple different directions that allows the players to choose where they're going to use the detecting time. And then we've got, you know, maybe they visit a couple of spots, and then the kick happens. And then the kick pushes the story forwards with pointers, and then puts them back into story space.

And we have a relatively small cast of characters that we've prepped ahead of time. So I would say something along the lines of three bad guys that aren't necessarily from the story.

Maybe it's like, one is the kingpin, one is the henchman that we always see, one is the femme fatale, and one is the, like, cop that you're evading along the way or something like that because you've been implicated.

And then each time, like, a kick happens or a significant revelation is made, it gives the opportunity to reinterrogate those nodes and reincorporate information that has happened before. And I think that's our play loop.

Each time we hit like a kick or a significant revelation, the same players come back into it and we complexify the information we already have access to. And then we have some sort of a showdown event at the end that may or may not happen because the players subvert it entirely. So if it's like the grand reveal of the Maltese Falcon, maybe if they're really clever they actually just get it and abscond with it and there's no like huge showdown with the boss but then you've got like a tailing end that they can

track you down in the future because I've been searching for it for 17 years.

So that means when I'm prepping, I'm going to be prepping out what are the significant revelations that are going to be made?

What are the big conclusions I want the players to come to?

And then from each of those, I got to tease out some, uh, like outcome clues.

That are going to point towards those revelations, things that answer the question, why.

Right.

Point to clues, answer the question of where, as in where to go next outcomes,

answer the question of, well, why were they there or what were they doing?

Why were they doing that?

So prep a bunch of those for the revelations and then seed them out.

and it really does stop it when your players, you know, go back and try all the same dialogue options again and hope to get something new. That's where you attach a clue that isn't bound to a certain origin point, but does point somewhere else to be like, okay, you guys really stuck.

You know what, the second time you went back to interrogate that guy, he told you that this This location is where he was and he said it.

And I was like, okay, we now have an ability to go to that spot.

It's like a gimme in a way, where you're like, I just need to,

Look, I, by and large, agree with that.

So if there's no easy way to be like the phone rings cause you're all at the office, because for some reason you're just always out, you have the character be like, "Hey, someone called for you."

You don't, we're broke.

I like setting the mood, maybe even like a, you know, like a four line opening scene setter that I'd have written in advance so I don't drop the occasional "ah" or "ah" as I'm like, she walks into the office.

It's one leg after another.

Alright, we've got ourselves a structure. We've got ourselves the prep stuff.

We have the vibes that we want to be dropping in.

So if it's the pointer clues and they're like, "Oh, I want to check the body," and I'll just straight up say, "You find a matchbox that has the address of a hotel to go check out and like a room number written in it."

And then if they say, "Have I been to this hotel before?"

That's when I might ask for a role.

It won't necessarily mention that there's a boot print in the mud nearby unless someone goes looking for the boot print in the mud.

Now there are some things that I would want to be wary of if I was to run this in a 5e And that's when you have just like abilities that.

Strip away any of the fun in there.

And the perfect example of this is your zone of truth.

The femme fatale walks into the bar.

The players recognize they're in a noir mystery.

The femme fatale says, I need you to go tail this guy.

I think he's abducted my sister.

And then the paladin goes, stand over here in this cone for a moment and then say it again.

And you're like, actually, I'm looking for the Maltese Falcon that I betrayed my partner for.

Like there are ways around it, but it's not super fun.

I think if you're--

if you've got those just like straight up plot negator devices,

then I think you need to have a little bit more care spent in the structure of your mystery,

such that maybe it all occurs on the same day and the paladin only has a couple of spell slots so they can blow a few of them and quote-unquote ruin a reveal. The player has earned that by taking that spell but you haven't uh you haven't thrown the baby out with the bath water by just designing something that could easily be overcome by knowing one of these revolutions.

I don't think works super well for this because normally you'd be riffing.

Like it doesn't tell mystery stories as well as it tells high stories.

So you'd be riffing and dropping clues and telling players to go to places on the fly, but there's a, like the character ability for the slide is you unerringly know whenever someone is lying and that's, that's not, you know,

what the truth is it's now, you know, that the thing you should be applying

your efforts to is catching them out in their lie.

Um, you know, you're, you're more call Cthulhu esque investigation games work really well.

And I think the ones that are absolutely made for this are the gumshoe family.

Like the gumshoe family of games, first of all, exquisite GM advice for running mysteries that explicitly built around that night's black agents.

Right at the start, he's trying to like track a guy who has left his car and he's sitting there staking out the car and the guy just doesn't come back for ages.

So he gets bored and he just pulls out a box of little pocket watches and sticks one under the wheel of the car.

So as soon as the car reverses, it destroys the watch and that's the time that they left.

So he's like at some point he learns that they did leave and it was this time when they did.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure that's in the Knights of Black Agents book and I'm like that's so clever, so smart.

So having something like that, I think as a GM, you can run it in just about anything.

Some things will run it better, but you may also need to help your players to be proactive in setting up their own investigation nodes, especially if they haven't experienced this before.

like you want to model that behavior.

Like, yeah, you've got all of these options.

How are you going to set up a meeting with this person and maybe give them, like, the gentle lead-in to encourage that proactive behavior?

Some players awesome at doing this straight off the bat.