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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