The Essence of a Character: Facts, Clues and Secrets

For character-driven stories, I think it is essential to flesh out the NPCs such that they really "jump off th page". At the same time, the GM needs to be able to get a quick overview over each NPC. I hope I have found the solution that allows me to reach both goals, namely to preface each NPC description with a sidebar that provides essential information: facts, clues, and secrets.

Sly Flourish's Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master talks a lot about "Secrets and Clues":

A secret or clue is a single sentence that encapsulates a piece of your game world, its history, or the current story. It’s a piece of information the characters can discover as they explore the world and interact with its inhabitants. But secrets and clues are never trivial. They contain information that matters to the characters. They might be pieces of history that give the characters and the players a better view of why things are happening. They might be leads and hints that allow the characters to discover special locations or powerful items. They might be information about NPCs that the
characters didn’t already know.

For the purpose of laying out an adventure in a way that aids the GM, I add the category fact, which is information that the GM needs to know about in order to run the adventure. For example, the fact that an NPC the characters meet is a dwarf, will not be a clue or secret, because it is going to be blindingly obvious. But the GM needs to know this fact when running the encounter, therefore it needs to go into the section on facts, clues, and secrets about the NPC.

This way, I think I can make it possible for the GM to get a quick overview but still am able to provide detailed background if I want. If the GM is interested into the detailed background (either because she enjoys reading it or she wants to have more material to work with when running the game), she can read all the details she wants. Otherwise, she can learn all she needs to know from the Facts, Clues & Secrets sidebar.

So here is an example:

Let me point out the following:

1. The "Facts, Clues & Secrets" sidebar contains all essential information --
   the GM can easily skim read the adventure.
2. Each fact/clue/secret appearing in the text is emphasized (adding
   purple ink dropplets linking the text to the purple-colored sidebar)

The statblock for the NPC (number 3) appears in a different kind of
sidebar - more about that in a future post!