Sandbox Between Stoplights 4: The Cork Board Technique

Sandbox Between Stoplights 4: The Cork Board Technique

Hello, I'm Josh. After the last episode, I had my timeline, my tone, my inciting action (or chaos engine), and a scope. I also started sorting out my first visualizations from the universe, and I discussed how I use music to help key my memory.

Today, I want to start by talking about how I focus on one idea at a time, because that’s a little harder for me than it should be. I most often I get derailed when I get to a dependency question. To overcome that, I use a variation of a memory technique called “Method of Loci.” I simplify mine by just calling it “The Corkboard.”

Let’s say, for example, I want to spend some time figuring how the navy works. I want to know how big it is, how powerful it is, how many service members it has, all those details. But then, suddenly, I’ll think “I can’t figure out anything about the navy until I decide some things about the government!” Then, instead of doing what I actually wanted, I spend the rest of my drive thinking about the way the government works. That annoys me because I try to organize my thinking by narrative importance. My methodology is to suss out the most important stuff first, and how that stuff gets done second.

When I get distracted, I go in the wrong order. Using the Navy example again, I’ll start dwelling on “How can the government pay for this? They’ll need excise taxes. Would tobacco still be excised in a future where cancer has been eradicated? Ok, so if the governments budget is 80 trillion, and it costs about 100 million to build a frigate,. Wait, maybe the budget should be higher because they navy has a standing strength of 3 million service members, not including marines which have strength of 1 million....” I'll stop there, because I’m sure you can see how I quickly this becomes unproductive for me.

To stop the mental cow from detailing my train of thought, I imagine a cork board with a string of red yarn going down the middle. On the left side of the string at the top of the cork board, there’s a 3x5 index card labeled "Specific Things" in black sharpie. Underneath the index card, there are pictures of space barbarians, the alien invasion, and all the particulars of the setting.

On the right side of the string, is another 3x5 index card labeled "Placeholders." Under that card, I have mental pictures from a bunch of different media I draw inspiration from, like video games, books, movies, etc.

When I get to a distracting question on the “Specific Things” side, I pin something from the placeholders to it and move on.

I’ll give an example. We’ll stick with the navy because we’ve already been using it. Let’s say I want to think about what the navy needs to be able to do to help the story, but I come to a question about the government. Instead of diving down the rabbit hole, I pull up the cork board in my mind. I take a moment to reimagine all the details of the cork board; red sting, index cards, sharpie, everything.

I walk over to it in my mind, and I look at the placeholders side. I find a picture of the UN from the the Expanse tv show, and I imagine the act of removing it from the right side of the string, and using a thumb tack to pin it to the “Navy” concept on the left side. Now I know the government kind of works like that, whatever that means. Even though it’s unspecific, this enough to to resolve my immediate question in most cases. Method of Loci, the Cork Board, however you call it, takes practice but it works really well. If a cork board doesn’t work for you, there are versions where you may use a house, a road, a grocery store, or any other concept you enjoy. I’ll post a link in the show notes so you can see if this is a technique that you may want to use.

Now however, I'm going to apply my cork board technique to the aliens:

I want to come up with their nature before their appearance. But my brain keeps drifting to what they look like and how they kill because that's more titillating. So, I go to the placeholders side of the cork board, I pull off pictures of a Reaper from Mass Effect, an arachnid from Starship Troopers, and a xenomorph from Aliens. Then, I pin them to my "alien concept picture" on the other side of the red string.

This satisfies my bloody imagination, and I can start focusing on why the aliens do what they do.

One last important note before I move on: The pictures don’t need to make sense to anyone else, as long as I can remember what they mean to me, that’s all that matters.

Back to the aliens: Do I want the individuals to be the antagonists? Do I want to create a dreaded General  named Greelox and have it be a creature of immense intelligence, wearing an evil cape, and surveying complex battle plans? Do I even want a Dreaded General of any name at all?

No. I don't think so. I want to lean into the alien nature of these creatures, and conquest as a general goal is far too understandable to be terrifying.

I think the aliens need to be a force of chaos but also monolithic. When I think of authors that have made me feel the same sense of powerlessness that I want to evoke, I'm drawn to Erich Remarque, PD James, Sebastian Junger, maybe even some Lovecraft. Those authors masterfully wrote about using Powerful Forces as an antagonist. This makes me think the aliens shouldn't be individuals, they need to be a natural disaster.

This is exciting to me. If I handled this right, I could scrap the alien invasion, make the campaign about surviving a massive hurricane, and I would still be able to capture the same themes.

I’m not making this campaign about surviving a hurricane, and the downside of making a concept your antagonist is that I miss out on creating arch villains for my party play off. There’s no single person they can blame when their home gets attacked, and the campaign loses all the different stories that would come from that.

But, this is also keeping the symmetry my sandbox. Arch villains require a more plot driven story, so having a faceless enemy puts the spotlight back on the party and what they want to do. That’s really exciting to me, because it’ll give the players a chance to make their own enemies- *if* they want them.

So why do the aliens do what they do then? I'm going to look elsewhere for inspiration again. There's a great book series called the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, I'll put a link to its description in the show notes. The second book had an idea I hadn't encountered before I read it: The Dark Forest. I'm not going to rehash the plot here, but I am going to borrow the author's conception of a natively hostile universe.

To me, it apparent there needs to be some sort of development threshold before the aliens attack. If they just went after anyone they "heard" they would have found us centuries before the game because of all the radio signals we blast out into space. I’ve already used FTL as an important boundary for the structure of the campaign, so I think I'll also incorporate it into my metaplot. Once humanity starts to mess around with faster than light technological, the aliens will notice and begin their invasion. Kind of like a trip wire or a landmine.

Actually, the idea of them being a landmine was really cool to me. I explored that a bit and it eventually lead me to my first draft: The aliens that invade our solar system are artificially created, self reproducing, biomechanical weapons of war. Also known as “a  very complicated booby trap.” They were originally created by some looooong dead alien empire to control it's subjects.

Something happened to destroy the alien empire, but that was a million years before we learned to control fire so it probably doesn't matter anymore. What's left in the ruins, however, is their security system. One that is quietly watching the void to make sure none of its dead master's subjects get the ability to travel between stars. And, it believes everyone is one of its dead master’s subjects.

That spooky note is where I'm going to leave it today. I have an understanding of why these aliens do what they do, and how they act like a force of nature as a result. Next time, I'll start getting into their physiology and how they wage their war, I’ll also talk about what I'm planning for session zero and how I’ll get the players starting to care about the universe before Session One.

Thank you so much for listening and good luck this week.