Lessons from Nettle & Bone

13 Jan, 2025

I'm currently reading T. Kingfisher's Nettle & Bone. I'm only about halfway through, but I'm really enjoying it.

Kingfisher uses a bold storytelling technique that I really like -- She draws out scenes of interpersonal drama or intense emotional experience, but she skips past scenes' worth (if not chapters' worth) of story content when it doesn't develop her main characters. Early in the book, our protagonist Marra faces off against a threat to her survival, in a land that's trying to kill or curse her. After a lengthy (and fascinating) flashback sequence, we come back to our protagonist... several days later, far from the cursed land and its threats. The confrontation we were left with earlier as a cliffhanger has been handwaved away as inconsequential. In so many other stories, I'd think dismissing your own dramatic setup like that shocking.

But now that I'm invested in Marra's story of personal emotional growth? I get it. I don't care about a violent farmer in cannibal country either, and instead I'm more excited to see where Marra goes next on her journey of self-discovery.

That's a lesson that can be applied to a lot of tabletop rpgs. It's primarily valuable for storytelling games, like Vampire: The Masquerade or Powered by the Apocalypse. In these games, character development is intentional. Individual players and the entire party work with their gamemaster to create scenes and scenarios that progress character arcs along prepared paths. Surprises and randomness create drama in terms of "how will X happen?" or "what will achieving X cost?".

Side note: This is a fiction-first approach in direct opposition to the OSR's fiction-first approach, which is to create visceral, grounded scenarios to test "Will the heroes X?". Character development in OSR games is consequential -- players risk an unsatisfying story in the hopes of earning an extremely satisfying one.

So when playing a storytelling rpg, take this lesson from Kingfisher. When you think, "this scene would naturally happen next," reexamine that thought. You don't want the next scene to be what happens next. Jump to the next scene that will leave a lasting impact on the characters. That could be a conversation among party members, or a confrontation with a villain, or even a climactic combat encounter! But if it doesn't push a character's personal journey forward, you can probably summarize the event with a few rolls of the dice and move on. Travel procedures? Random encounters? Dungeon crawling? Forget about it. Get to the next setpiece.¹

In playing an old-school game (or any other rpg), the lesson is still valuable! When resources are stressed and every fight carries deadly risk, things like travel procedures and random encounters carry much greater narrative weight -- they can alter the course of a character's story or snuff it out entirely. But we can still triage our gaming content in order to make our time at the table more impactful. A basic example is starting a dungeon-crawl adventure at the dungeon, rather than in a forgettable village two hexes away. Another example is skipping travel procedures when travelling along major roads; a road may not be perfectly safe, but it's safe enough that you can skip to the excitement of the next wilderness expedition.

Point-crawls are an adventure format with this lesson built into them. A good point-crawl recognizes that all the fun happens in adventure sites, so it minimizes the gameplay spent on overland travel. Ultraviolet Grasslands does this really well in the form of the Misfortunes table. For every week of overland travel, you roll for a single "misfortune" (sometimes you get fortunate). Most of the time your misfortune is nothing at all; when a misfortune does occur, it's essentially a whole scene from your adventuring life summarized into a line of text.

Injured foot on rusty magical pike head (-1d4 Life) and absorb a protective charm (spirits, vomes, and demons have [-] against hero for a few weeks).

You could play that out. Describe the scene. Check to see if anyone notices the pike head before stepping on it. Let characters treat the wound. Let them investigate the ominous magical glow absorbed by the injured character. Show them the nature of the charm with a minor combat encounter down the trail.

Or you can forget all that, read the line of text to your players, and skip to their exciting adventures at Three Sticks Lake.

In summary: Make sure you spend your time on scenes that will genuinely impact the player characters and shape their stories. What that means will depend on your style of game, but it's always good to keep the lesson in mind.

The other lesson here is: Read Nettle & Bone. It's a great story.