Week 5 Studio: Locations, scenes and nodes

Turning a structure into a concrete chain of scenes — what's discoverable in each, and what changes if the players linger.

22 March 2027

A structure is a shape; scenes are what actually gets built inside it. A short scenario can run on as few as three or four scenes as long as each one earns its place — a location that provides no new information and no new pressure is decoration, not a scene.

Blase’s scenario design guide (source #5) breaks a location that “changes play” into five parts, which is a stricter version of the card format this studio uses: immediate impression (what an investigator notices on arrival), question (what can actually be learned or accomplished here), evidence (the clues, objects, or people present), pressure (what makes staying or returning costly), and connection (where the evidence here leads next). A card that’s missing “pressure” or “connection” isn’t wrong, but it’s usually the sign of a scene doing decoration rather than work — those two are what stop a location from being a dead end once the players have looked at it once.

Before the session#

List every location your truth and structure imply — where the antagonist has been, where evidence still exists, where a confrontation could happen. Don’t detail them yet.

In the session#

One card per node: what’s visible on arrival, what a thorough search reveals, and what changes if the players stay too long or make noise. Arrange the cards to check the chain actually connects — a card nobody can reach from another card is a scene that will never get used.

Afterwards#

This map is what week 6 and 7 attach clues and puzzles to. A thin map now means thin content later, so it’s worth spending real time on before moving on.