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What The Palimpsest Trilogy Looked Like Before the Table Got Hold of It
Every designer thinks they know what their scenario is about. Then five people sit down and play it, and you find out what it's actually about.

The Palimpsest Trilogy went through more structural changes after play testing than in any previous revision pass I've done on a project. Not because the bones were wrong. The bones were fine. But there's a version of this trilogy that exists only on paper -- clean, logical, architecturally sound -- and then there's the version that survived contact with actual players. Those are two different products, and the second one is better in ways I couldn't have planned for.

Here's what changed, and why.

Marco Was Almost a Footnote
In early drafts of Deep Clean, Marco Diaz was a plot mechanic. He sent the text that got the crew to Kendrick Tower. He disappeared partway through. His erasure demonstrated the Pattern Engine's capabilities. He was functional. He was doing his job.

Then I watched a play test where two players spent ten minutes talking about Marco before anything went wrong. Not because I prompted them. Because the setup gave them space and they filled it. By the time he started disappearing from the sign-in sheet, one player had decided Sherry and Marco had worked together for six years. Another had him pegged as the kind of guy who always had snacks in his cart and shared them without being asked.

The Engine didn't erase a plot mechanic that night. It erased a person the table had built together.

I went back and rewrote every Marco beat with that in mind. The rules now say: you don't need stats for Marco. What you need is for the table to like him in the first ten minutes. The rest follows. That line came directly from watching what happened when players were given the room to care.

The Update Wave Was Too Fast
The centerpiece scene of The Missing Playback, the moment the city rewrites itself in real time while the investigators watch from a rooftop, ran about ninety seconds in the first two play tests. I described it, called for the rolls, moved on.

Both groups were polite about it. One player said afterwards that she felt like she'd blinked and missed it. She was right.

The third play test I slowed it down deliberately. I read the streetlights description beat by beat, with actual pauses between sentences. I let the silence sit after the people on the street kept walking with different coats and different bags and no idea anything had happened.

That play test, the same player who called the earlier version too fast grabbed the arm of the person next to her. Nobody told her to. The scene had earned it because I stopped rushing it to the next plot point.

The current draft has a specific Keeper note: this is the scenario's centerpiece. Read the pacing notes before you run it. That note exists because I learned, empirically, that the scene lives or dies in the seconds between sentences.

The Auditor Needed an Argument
Early versions of The Last Customer leaned hard on the Auditor as pure atmosphere. It was unsettling. It was cosmic. It compared soup cans. Players were appropriately unnerved.

They were also frustrated. Because they're investigators, which means they solve problems, and I had given them an entity that seemed fundamentally unsolvable. Two out of three early play tests ended with someone trying to physically remove the Auditor from the building and failing, which felt like a loss even when it was mechanically correct.

The problem wasn't the Auditor. The problem was that I hadn't given the players a genuine argument to make.

So I asked myself: what would actually satisfy this thing? And the answer was already in the design -- messy human reality is not efficiently auditable. That's the whole point of the trilogy. The investigators' messiness, their grief over Marco, their complicated choices in the edit suite, their names in a notebook that's been right every time -- that's the argument. That's what the Negotiate approach became.

The play test that cracked it was a group where one player, completely unprompted, started listing names. People the overlay had erased or changed or tried to erase. The shopkeeper. Jules. Marco. The person who hid in the Personal Cache. She made them real again, one by one, at Checkout 7, while the rest of her crew held the store together around her.

The Auditor's response: "Account status: disputed. Continuation authorized pending review."

The table cheered. I went home and rewrote the entire Act III resolution structure that night.

What Play testing Actually Teaches You
It teaches you where your gaps are. Not the logic gaps -- you can find those in editing. The human gaps. The places where you assumed the player would feel something you never actually earned, or assumed the Keeper would know something you never actually said.

It teaches you which lines you wrote for yourself and which ones land for a room full of people. Some of my favorite sentences in this trilogy got cut because they were doing work for me as a writer and none for the players as participants.

It teaches you that silence is a mechanic. That a receipt printer producing tomorrow's timestamp is scarier than most monsters I've ever written. That a wall of sticky notes with names half-erased will stop a table cold if you give it room to breathe.

And it teaches you, every single time, that the players will find something you didn't put there. A meaning you didn't intend. A connection you didn't plan. A moment of grief or humor or genuine human stubbornness that makes the whole scenario worthwhile.

The Palimpsest Trilogy is a product I designed. But the version that exists in this final document was built in collaboration with every group that sat down at a table and started cleaning a floor, or watching a film, or following a cart through a supermarket at 2 a.m.

They made it better. They always do.

The Palimpsest Trilogy will be available soon DriveThruRPG. Three modern-day Pulp Cthulhu scenarios, one city, and a ledger that doesn't quite close. Find out more at games.akapplegarth.us.

TTFN,

Keith

One of the design goals for The Palimpsest Trilogy was to make the investigators feel like human beings with bills, bad knees, and group chats—not just stat blocks that happen to be present when the Mythos shows up. That’s why I leaned hard into pregenerated characters built around night work: janitorial supervisors, stockers, cashiers, ex‑cops doing loss prevention, veteran medics picking up security shifts, and a scrappy videographer chasing stories nobody else cares about.

All six pregens are written for modern Pulp Cthulhu, so they’re tougher than classic CoC characters, with high Hit Points and pulp talents that push them toward bold action: Iron Woman shift leads, glitch‑obsessed stockers who notice reality edits, paramedics who refuse to go down while someone’s still breathing nearby. They come with baked‑in connections and a shared incident—the “Night of the False Drill”—that ties them all to NeonDyne and Palimpsest before the first session even starts.

You absolutely can bring your own investigators to the trilogy, but if you want to hit the ground running, the pregens are there to let you sit down, hand out character sheets, and dive straight into the storm. My hope is that, by the time the Auditor is pushing a cart full of their lives through SAVEMORE #347, those PCs feel like people your table cares about. If that resonates with how you like to run games, I think The Palimpsest Trilogy will give you a lot to play with.

GOING LIVE March 2, 2026

 The Palimpsest Trilogy on DriveThruRPG

Check out my other titles at: Applegarth Games

When I started writing what became The Palimpsest Trilogy, my plan was “just” a one‑shot about cleaners on a haunted tech floor. Somewhere around Act II, when rooms began vanishing from evacuation maps and a coworker started thinning out of memory, it became clear there was more story to tell. The Pattern Engine wanted to escape the building. Once I accepted that, the project quietly evolved into a three‑part mini‑campaign.

I still wrote each scenario as a self‑contained one‑shot—usable on its own for a convention slot or a pick‑up game—but I also baked in consequences. How the players deal with the Engine in Deep Clean (destroy it, weaponize it, or shut it down too late) changes how The Missing Playback presents the city. The ending of Playback then colors the tone of The Last Customer: is the audit evaluating a mostly restored reality, a weaponized city, or a jagged patchwork of half‑applied edits?

That’s my favorite part of the trilogy now: each session stands alone, but if you link them, the players can see their fingerprints on the world. They broke it, patched it, or aimed it—and the Auditor in the finale is there to talk about that, in its own inhuman way. If you’ve been looking for a short, modern‑day Pulp Cthulhu arc that your group can complete in three or four sessions, this is my attempt to scratch that itch.

Find out more about this title here: Applegarth Games

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