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Once I knew I wanted sharper roles, the next question was: what makes an occupation worth a whole page? It’s easy to write a paragraph of flavor about a job. It’s harder to build a toolkit that keeps paying off once dice are on the table.

I ended up with three design pillars for every kit: tone, hooks, and tools.

Tone is the immediate pulp impression. If you only read the opening of a kit, you should know what kind of story this role belongs in. Is this someone who kicks doors in, someone who drags secrets into the light, someone who navigates institutions, someone who breaks systems from the inside? The kits are written to make that clear and usable, not buried.

Hooks are campaign gravity. Each occupation needed to bring relationships, institutions, and obligations with it. Who pays them? Who watches them? Who hates them? What do they owe, and to whom? If a kit doesn’t suggest recurring NPCs and factions, it’s not finished. The point is to make it easy for Keepers to say, “If someone picks this, here are three things I can start building the campaign around.”

The piece where tone and hooks come together is the Pulp Lens—the opening block of each kit. A bare job title doesn’t tell you enough. “Journalist” could be dozens of people; “special forces veteran” can mean several different careers and politics. The Pulp Lens is where the occupation stops being generic and becomes a specific kind of pulp protagonist.

When I write that lens, I ask:

• What kind of story is this role built for?
• How does this person naturally collide with the mythos?
• What does a typical day look like before anything weird happens?

Then I layer in pressures: bosses who expect results, sources who demand favors, institutions that will suffer if the truth gets out, enemies who don’t want this character near the truth. That’s what turns the lens from biography into pulp.

Practically, the Pulp Lens exists to do three things:

• Give the player a quick way to “see” their character before they pick anything else.
• Give the Keeper a ready‑made introduction for this role on‑screen.
• Suggest at least one way the mythos can kick down the door of this person’s everyday life.

The rest of each kit deepens that promise. Tone and hooks start in the Pulp Lens; everything else on the page is there to keep that promise session after session.

Find out more at Applegarth Games!

ttfn

Keith