What makes a good Anomaly?
Brought to you by Peter Elbow.
I'm deep in revisions for Triangle U and working through some thoughts on what makes a great Anomaly for play. I share those with you now!
An Anomaly acts on the world in the service of one thing only: the psychic impression that created it. It moves towards this feeling with drowning desperation. It reshapes the world such that its desires can be more easily fulfilled. Like we do. It just does this by warping Reality.
An Anomaly performs its Impulse in such a way that the Agency notices. A proper Anomalous event should be rich and interactive immediately. Someone to talk to, somewhere to go, something to do. This activity needs to balance being weird in the service of pursuing the Anomaly's Focus, but still comprehensible enough that the Agents can later exploit it.
I once wrote a bad Anomaly with the Focus "Delight at clouds". This Anomaly had a clear Impulse: create clouds in shapes a 5-year-old would enjoy. It had impact, I thought --- it was obviously Anomalous and the whole town could see it. And yet, it fell flat at the table and my players just Ripple Gunned it in confusion because they couldn't figure out where to go from there. The potential energy did not have a way to become kinetic.
An Anomaly often benefits from an active, escalating agenda. But this is not required. Potential energy in a Mission is okay as long as it is truly potential---when released, it should spring out into kineticism.
For example, consider a woodshed out back where a grieving daughter crafts a mannequin-memory of her father. Made out of carpentry tools, plywood, and chainsaws. Alive and speaking in his voice. This has potential energy. But, what is the fizzing kinetic spark that sets it off? The daughter is attacked and her father-figure lurches out to protect her in the way she always wished he would.
Anomalies also have personalities, like a good NPC. Are they tricksy? Stupid? Never mindless, but sometimes closer to an amoeba reaching for glucose than a dog chasing a car. What does it like? What does it hate? How will it lash out? What is it desperate for?
An Anomaly cannot stay satiated forever. It experiences the hedonic treadmill just like we do. Eventually, it will spread or Hollow. Maintaining an emotional state indefinitely is really hard!
Anomalies don't understand human emotion so take dramatic action without considering side effects. These misunderstandings are a fruitful way to allow the Agents to either satisfy or confound an Anomaly. Trapping a workplace in an everlasting Friday happy hour is all well and good until you realize Friday is only meaningful in the context of the rest of the week.
I often want a Mission to be layered --- it is good to have an obstacle between the initial weirdness and a direct confrontation. Anomalies leave traces. I'm starting to suspect a fruitful strategy for writing Missions is to start out with impressions. Moments and fragments. Clues and ideas that stand on their own. And make sense of them later. Almost like Brindlewood Bay. These traces --- independent from a coherent whole --- are the things that are of interest to the Agents. They will eventually connect back to the Focus and Impulse, but by starting with the clues themselves, you prevent the worst case scenario: writing an Anomaly with no impact on the world.