Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

It's very obvious that the book was compiled from his blog, and so the arrangement of the information is sometimes topical, but sometimes really haphazard. The most egregious example is the "extra credit" section in the back, which is about 1/5 of the length of the book and is very higgledy-piggledy. Most of it could have been better integrated into the topical sections earlier in the book, as evidenced by the frequent cross-references and links to earlier sections there.

And because some of the information that's related to certain topics isn't actually near those topics, I had to do a lot of flipping back and forth, which on an e-reader in particular is just terrible (even with internal links). So I wound up actually ordering a physical book after purchasing the e-book because it was so hard to get back and forth between the sections.

Besides clearer internal organization, I would have greatly appreciated a set of summary tables, flowcharts, or checklists at the back of the book that summarize some of the more nuanced procedures in the book. For example, Alexander outlines a very detailed set of procedures for running different encounter types (say a heist) that actually look pretty cool and have a lot of good information in them. Sometimes he includes a quick summary of these steps in the section, sometimes not. It would have been very helpful to have a section at the back with all of those summary steps for the different procedures (whether in a checklist or flowchart form) so a reader could run through them without having to flip through the book to either find the existing summaries or reconstruct the ideas by re-reading five or ten pages of text.

Finally, he frequently misses the chance to create an overarching conceptual framework by either burying organizing concepts in sidebars about specific scenario types or at the back of the book in the extra credit section. The book would've greatly benefited from an overarching "concepts" type chapter either at the very beginning or immediately following the early parts of the dungeon chapter.

As an example, Alexander presents all of these different flavors of scenario design as really fundamentally different ways of approaching things, as clear alternatives. He talks about raids and dungeons and mysteries and hex crawls and point crawls, but really all of those scenario designs, every single one of them, are just a series of connected nodes. They just differ in the number of connections and in the rules for moving between nodes. You can schematize any of these scenarios as a flowchart, although some modes (e.g. a hexcrawl) would have very busy diagrams.

And that idea is not new, I remember encountering the idea in the 90's in a magazine or supplement and formulated as something like "everything is a dungeon." The idea was ultimately incorporated into the scenario design advice in the 3rd Edition D&D Dungeon Master's Guide in 2000,¹ and the idea has periodically resurfaced in the intervening decades. The pitch was that a dungeon is just a set of interconnected nodes with special rules about moving between those nodes (i.e. hallways), and every RPG scenario, whether it be social encounters, wilderness encounters, all of it, is just a set of interconnected nodes with specialized rules about how the nodes connect or how to travel between nodes.

And Alexander gets frustratingly close to engaging directly with this idea. For example, he sets up the parallel between dungeons and interconnected nodes as a quick aside in a nice segment on node-based design that is, predictably, buried in a chapter about running mystery scenarios more than 200 pages into the book. And then after teasing the idea the book never really returns to it.

The book would've been much stronger and easier to follow if he had introduced that idea as an organizing concept either at the very beginning, or perhaps right after the early parts of the dungeon chapter so that a reader could have that conceptual framework to hang all these different scenario types on. He could set up the core concept and then lay out all the specific permutations and explain how to build out from that. Instead, all the permutations are presented as separate, atomic modalities that are essentially distinct (except to the extent that you might want to run a heist inside your dungeon), which feels like a missed opportunity to create greater internal coherence in the book.

I suspect this stems from the author's conviction that these modalities really are separate and distinct and that the idea that all scenarios are interconnected nodes is too reductive, but that seems like both a failure of imagination and a failure of pedagogy. Present the rule and then handle the eaches; don't present the whole topic as a mess of irreducible complexity (unless the complexity is truly irreducible).

These organizational issues are especially frustrating because, as noted above, the author presents boatloads of really good procedures and useful information that I think are valuable, but this is a very long book and I don't know how I would actually refer back to any of it. Reading the book straight through, I couldn't build up a good schema of the book's structure in my mind (was that section on layer cakes and funnels with the point crawls? Or with the heists? Or the mysteries?). After reading the entire book with plausible care, I just don't feel like I could open the book and use it on the fly at the gaming table.

So if I want to actually use the procedures in the book, I'm going to need to read the book a second time and make an outline. And that seems like a relatively big ask for a 500-page book. To be clear, I may just do it, because there's that much good information in the book! But with a little more care given to organization I wouldn't need to. This could have been a really excellent book. As it is, it's merely a very good book.