Home

Today I'm launching The Palimpsest Trilogy, a set of three linked, modern‑day Pulp Cthulhu one‑shots about a city being quietly "optimized" out of existence by corporate logic gone cosmic.

If you've been following along here, you've seen bits and pieces of this project over the past few months. The core premise started simple: what if a janitorial night crew showed up to clean an office floor, and the building decided to help by erasing rooms, records, and eventually people? That became Deep Clean. Then I asked what would happen if the machine's logic escaped into the wider city, and The Missing Playback was born—a rough‑cut documentary that starts rewriting neighborhoods every time it's watched. By the time I got to The Last Customer, the question had shifted to "what shows up to audit a reality that's been edited this many times?" and the answer was: something that treats timelines like ledgers and cities like balance sheets.

Each scenario can be run on its own as a standalone one‑shot for a convention slot, a pick‑up game, or a break between campaigns. But if you chain them into a short mini‑campaign, the consequences from one session visibly warp the next: destroy the Pattern Engine and pieces of its logic escape; weaponize it and the city overlay becomes a precision tool; shut it down too late and you're left with a patchwork reality already flagged for cosmic audit. Your players' choices echo forward, and by the time the graveyard shift at SAVEMORE #347 rolls around, the Auditor is there to talk about what they've done.

I built the whole trilogy for modern Pulp Cthulhu—tougher PCs, more stunts, and danger that comes from environments turning hostile rather than from bad dice rolls. You get six blue‑collar pregens (supervisor, stocker, cashier, ex‑cop, medic, videographer), a shared backstory hook that ties them all to NeonDyne before the first session, and NPC support designed to let you sit down and run without a ton of prep.

This is a one‑person project from start to finish—writing, design, layout, the whole thing—so if you pick it up, run it for your group, and tell me how the audit went, that genuinely makes my week. You can grab The Palimpsest Trilogy now on DriveThruRPG, and I'd love to hear what your players did to the city, and whether the Auditor let them keep it.

Thanks for being here, and happy haunting.

The Palimpsest Trilogy on DriveThruRPG!

You finished writing. You did the layout. The PDF exports cleanly and it looks genuinely good. The temptation at that point is enormous — just post it. You've been staring at this thing for weeks.

Don't. Not yet.

I just finished a full editorial run on The Palimpsest Trilogy before it goes up on the Miskatonic Repository, and the process reminded me how many layers of wrong can live in a document that feels done. Here's what I actually caught and what I check for now on everything I publish.

The Duplicate That Hides in Plain Sight
The most embarrassing error in any document is duplicated content — a full scene, a stat block section, a paragraph that appears twice because of a copy-paste during layout. It looks fine in the TOC. It reads fine when you're skimming. It only becomes obvious when someone is running the scenario at the table and hits the same text twice in a row.

On this project, a full scene appeared twice in the body copy of the first scenario. The TOC had been corrected, so it only showed up once there. The body still had both copies sitting next to each other. A global read-through is the only way to catch this. Skimming won't do it.

Your Table of Contents Is a Separate Document
This sounds obvious, but your TOC and your actual content are two different things, and they can drift apart every time you move or rename a section. Check that every scene heading in the body exists in the TOC with the correct page number. Check the reverse too — every TOC entry should have a matching heading in the body. On this project, one scene existed in the body text across every version but never made it into the TOC. It took five editorial passes to finally catch and fix it.

The Stat Block Checklist
NPC stat blocks are where small errors cluster because there are so many fields and Keepers actually use every one of them. Before you publish, run every stat block against this quick check:

All eight characteristics present (STR, CON, SIZ, DEX, INT, POW, APP, EDU)
HP calculated correctly and listed
MOV listed
Damage Bonus and Build both listed — not just one of them
At least a short skill list
Consistent formatting across all NPCs
On this project, the same two fields — DB and Build — were missing from multiple NPC blocks across multiple versions. It's easy to add the first six fields and then just stop.

Design Notes Are Not Published Text
When you're writing, you leave yourself notes inside stat blocks and talent descriptions. Things like "I'd suggest MOV 8 for balance but the rules would allow 9" or "maybe 1D3 or one step, decide with your Keeper." Those are working notes. They need to come out before publication. Read every stat block and every mechanical description looking for parenthetical asides that are still talking to yourself rather than your reader. Commit to a number. Cut the rest.

The Article Error That Survives Everything
Do a global find for "a Investigator" and "a Encounter" and "a NPC." Words starting with vowels need "an," not "a." This error is invisible when you're reading for meaning and it somehow survives spell check because neither word is misspelled. It will be in your document. It is in almost every document. Search specifically for it.

Possessives at the End of a Name
If you have a character whose name ends in a vowel or a soft consonant, check every possessive. On this project, one character's name appeared with a dangling apostrophe and no S across a dozen connection entries — Casey' instead of Casey's — in almost every version, including ones where it had been specifically flagged. The reason it kept surviving is that the eye reads the name and moves on. A targeted find-and-replace on the exact string "Casey'" followed by a space is the only thing that actually catches all of them.

Read Your Front Matter Last
Copyright page, credits, blog URLs, legal boilerplate — these get written early and then never touched again. That's where the errors live. On this project the blog URL was missing both "to" and "a" in the same sentence for several versions running. Read your front matter out loud, slowly, as if you've never seen it before. You'll catch things you've been walking past for weeks.

One Last Pass After Every Fix
Every time you fix something, you introduce the possibility of a new error. Paste operations can duplicate text. Find-and-replace can hit the wrong instance. A corrected stat block can accidentally drop a field that was there before. After any significant correction pass, do a targeted check of the sections you touched. Not the whole document — just the pages you changed.

The goal isn't a perfect document. The goal is a document where nothing pulls a Keeper out of the scenario at the table. A typo mid-read-aloud is recoverable. A missing stat block field during a fight is a real problem. That's the standard to aim for — ready to run, not just ready to read.

The Palimpsest Trilogy hits the Miskatonic Repository soon. More on that when it's live.

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