Mark’s article on Graffiti he gave us a very important bit of advice:



“…if the only tapestry in the castle is the one that hides the secret door, it’s a bit obvious; but if there are tapestries on every wall, players will stop looking.”



One of the hardest parts about adding details to an RPG setting is getting the players to attach the right mount of concern/interest to the right things. That’s not to say we want to strong-arm our players into following our clues, but it can be difficult to drop subtle hints. When it comes to writing, be it graffiti or high school chemistry books, one way to lend a hint of plot importance to text is to change the language it’s written in.



Let’s take Mark’s graffiti as our example. If we have a dwarven stronghold in which the players find some occasional information carved on the walls, and then they discover some written in an ancient elvish dialect instead of dwarven or orcish as they’ve been seeing before - we suddenly add importance to the information. Is it a clue? Is it simply a mark from another elvish adventurer? You can hear the party asking around “Who can read elvish?” as they try to determine the meaning of the words.



Using alternate or strange languages is the easiest way to make text stand out for players. If all the bad guys books are in Latin except for one that is in Hebrew, chances are the players will look into the Hebrew text. Differences that stand out are great clue identifiers.



Another, more subtle and sneaky way is to change the tone and/or writing style of the text.



In one of my Vampire games the players came across some papers that were found at the residence of a mortal vampire hunter. They had slain the hunter and were now trying to find out what info he had. They were specifically looking for clues that might uncover the recent string of rather exceptional violence that they were experiencing.



In the hunter’s papers they found his journal and some letters to newspapers that he wrote but never mailed. Nothing of obvious interest, it all pointed to a lone hunter bent on vengeance against vampires. One player didn’t buy it though. He offered to go over these texts with a fine toothed comb to see if he could dredge up something that the group may have missed the first time around.



“Anything written in Latin, ancient Greek or German?” (some of the languages they’d run into in the recent past linked with some bad folks)



“No, everything is in English.”



“I’m going to spend the whole night looking over these papers – something’s not right. I can taste it.”



I went on with the rest of the party for a bit, about 15 minutes or so, and then came back to the player and said: “You notice that one page is actually a poem. The reason it sticks out is that there is no other poetry.”



“Really? What’s it about?”



The key here wasn’t a different language, but that there was a tone/writing style change. The hunter had no other poetry except this one page. To add further import to the poem, I told the player it was written in an obviously different hand. The poem was upgraded to Clue status and I gave the player a handout with the poem on it so he could further analyze it.



I could have very well just given the players the poem right off the bat and told them “This poem strikes you as unique as it’s the only bit of poetry in the papers you found, and it appears to be written by someone else.” But that’s not nearly sneaky enough, and I like sneaky.



If the player hadn’t told me he planned to search the papers, and if he had failed the skill check I asked him to make, I wouldn’t have told him anything about the poem. He or another player could always go back and re-check the papers, but he might have struck out the first time. Research is like that sometimes.



Once the players understand that such small nuances are important in your games, they’ll begin to specifically ask for details when they find writings. Sure, they may strike out or go down the wrong path sometimes, but they’ll learn that the details are important - And that sometimes graffiti is just graffiti.



-Brett J.B.