I have a beef with chonky source books that say ‘changelings do this’, and ‘always describe the traps, don’t just say 1D6 trap-damage’, and then expecting the reader to create the world in adherence to these principles.

“How about you do your job and write this into the adventure modules?”, I find myself thinking. “How about you stop telling me that every chronicle needs a theme and actually put one into the published chronicles, White Wolf?”[1]

About a year ago, I started thinking the same thing about BIND. I’ve written a world, but the two introduction modules don’t show much of it; all the guilds and the structure of the baileys is only in the main campaign-book (a mammoth tome), which seems like a massive buy-in for someone who just wants to start a game without any homework. So I’ve begun the gradual process of writing new modules, and thinking of the easiest ways to introduce the principles I want to have.

And I’ve started to wonder how far I can stretch this principle of ‘show, don’t tell’. How much of the world and its history can I tell, only through modules?

Examples

Instead a random treasure table, each NPC comes with random equipment printed on their statblocks. Some have rare and strange items, like ‘a hexagonal coin from the North’, others have ornate jewellery like a serpent-shaped ring. NPCs also have specific food-items listed, like ‘auroch tongue’, and ‘salted basilisk strips’. This should tell the players two things: they will need to track their rations, and people in Fenestra eat basilisks.

BIND’s Book of Judgement has all the details about Guilds, but the information shouldn’t be necessary to run a game. Instead, the short modules introduce NPCs who work for a guild. The nature, structure, and culture of each guild appears through those NPCs directly.

As for the Temple of Beasts (which the PCs start in), the modules simply begin in a broch as someone plays pipes to try to attract a monster, or the PCs begin on the road, guarding a caravan.

Instead of rolling random encounters, and trying to craft an encounter, the Judge can just print off the Almanac, with pre-made encounters. Now, as I write this, Fenestra lies under a bed of snow, and the basilisks have entered hibernation, so the Almanac shows many days passing between encounters with monsters, and has no basilisk encounters. In a week or so, the Almanac will look different. It has around fifty encounters, each written for specific times of the year, so the Judge should be able to just open the little booklet and say ‘the ground cracks open and a toothy maw snaps for your right leg’.

Creatures adjust a little to the seasons as well. During warmer cycles, raknids receive +1 to their Speed Attribute, representing the extra energy that cold-blooded creatures receive from warmth.

Modules don’t use random tables of D6 rumours. They have specific rumours, written in order, or attached to an NPC.

Nothing uses random name generators for NPCs, taverns, or towns. Instead, when players ask about purchasing equipment, they receive a sheet of paper with local shops listed, along with the name of the proprietor.

Food should become more expensive over the frosty Cycle known as ‘Sables’ (Fenestra’s Winter). But the books never mention that fact - the market handouts simply raise the prices for rations.

The markets also tell the players about who their characters are. A few shops will offer to buy ‘Ingredients’ for a high price, which will (hopefully) prompt the question ‘what are these ingredients this shopkeeper wants?’. The Judge will have found the answer to that question already on the first page of the Almanac; these Ingredients come from harvesting the bodies of monsters. The description of harvesting monster-bodies lists only the monsters in that particular Almanac, so if the only encounters are with bears and griffins, then the Almanac only notes how to harvest a bear’s heart and a griffin’s wings.

The markets also have weapons, so players don’t need to look up weapons in order to buy them. Instead, they have a short list of weapons to choose from only when they enter a market.

Players can find another strange item in the markets called a ‘dawn dolly’. People wave this doll-on-a-stick outside their front door each morning, in case some creature has sat on their roof overnight, waiting for them to exit.

Instead of describing what elves do in the abstract, one module shows two elven territories. It describes the territories and their wildly different cultures with a series of encounters with the people who live there.

Players don’t need to follow a process to create their characters; each module comes with pre-made characters for the game. If the character can cast spells, they receive a spell-book - an actual booklet with spells listed in full.

If players want to design their own character, they can spend one of their five Story Points to introduce an ally, and spend some points to buy whatever Skills they want. The books have no need to plead with players to make a character which fits into Fenestra, and neither does the Judge. By the time players notice they have ‘Story Points’ on the character sheets, and introduce an ally, they will have seen a fair bit of Fenestra, and they can only spend the Story Point by explaining how their current character met with that ally in the first place.

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[ii]

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[1] If I still had my copy of New York by Night[i], I would do a long dissection of that book and how it seems to show a world, without actually handing over enough concrete, gameable things to do. The material is all there, but it somehow expects you to just riff off of it, live, and jump through the pages to find statblocks (which aren’t blocks - each one is a page long).