Week 6: Two ways to classify a clue

Week 6 — the guiding/revealing and literature/social/trace taxonomy alongside Blase's core/supporting/advantage framework.

29 March 2027

There’s more than one useful way to think about a clue, and this course teaches two of them side by side rather than picking a winner. This lecture introduces both before the studio applies them to your own draft.

Delivery format isn’t just flavour — each one carries a different practical risk. A literature clue, once a character starts looking, is close to a guaranteed find, which makes it the right place for your broadest, most load-bearing information rather than your best reveal. A social clue that’s hard-locked to a single NPC breaks the moment players don’t happen to talk to that NPC, so write it as something several NPCs could plausibly say instead. And a trace clue — a footprint, a smell, a scratch mark — is often the cheapest way to make a threat felt without staging a full encounter with it.

Clues split into two broad categories. Guiding clues give the player characters direction for where to explore and act next. Revealing clues cover everything else — the solution to a puzzle, information about the scenario’s Mythos content — mainly used to push the plot forward and explain it, while also working as a small reward for a player character who actively investigates. As for how clues actually get planted, there are three forms: literature-type clues, delivered through old books, specific documents, diaries or notes; social-type clues, obtained through talking with an NPC; and trace-type clues — physical evidence such as fingerprints, footprints, claw marks, bullets, documents, burned material, blood, saliva, hair, plant pollen, or a Deep One’s scales. Because pulling information straight out of a book is close to guaranteed, the broadest and most load-bearing clues should be set up this way; a social clue tied to one specific NPC can break the scenario if the players happen to miss that NPC, so it’s better to list out everything obtainable through NPC conversation and hand it out flexibly based on how the actual conversation goes.

Outline#

• function: does a clue guide players toward the next scene, or reveal what the truth actually means once they have it
• delivery: literature (documents, records), social (what an NPC says), or trace (physical evidence at a scene)
• a second lens: Blase’s core clues (needed to progress), supporting clues (context and colour) and advantage clues (reward careful play without gating it)
• why redundancy — more than one path to a core clue — matters more than which taxonomy you use to think about it
• why the three delivery formats matter beyond flavour: literature clues are close to guaranteed once a character looks, social clues should never hard-lock to one NPC, and trace clues let a threat register without staging a direct encounter