Worked Example: Secrets and Clues for Blades '68

09 May, 2026

I have been running Triangle Agency¹ for the past year. This game requires Mission-focused prep: the players receive Missions from the Agency and then they perform those Missions. When I write a Triangle Agency Mission, I write dense interconnected Missions linked to a central Focus²; these Missions focus on detailed NPCs with a strong social context and easily-playable traits (along with more notional location keying). This detail gives Triangle Agency players lots of levers to pull when investigating Anomalous activity.

However, I have a problem, and that problem is Blades '68³. In Blades '68, the PCs exist in a tangled web of information and relationships. The focus of the game is action, not mystery. The information they gain, therefore, only matters if it relates to their course of action. In this context, prepping a dense mystery --- or even any particular location, NPC, or faction --- is often wasted effort. If that adventure element is not relevant to the crew's plans, why did I bother?

To help support my prep for this play context, I read Mike Shea's post about secrets and clues and decided to try his technique. A secret is a "tweet-sized bit of useful and interesting information" that was previously not known to the player characters. Shea argues that preparing a list of 10 floating secrets is the cornerstone to successful prep. The technique gives you something interesting to say when the players explore or ask questions. After all, even in the most freeform play structures, players still do things we don't expect!

Shea writes, "When we're writing our secrets down, we don't need to give them context. We don't know how the PCs will learn about the mad king's terrible rituals, only that they might uncover it somewhere." I did not like this technique on first read! I have been working in a very concrete mode of information preparation. NPCs have specific traits and specific knowledge; locations are keyed with bolded interactibles and connections to other locations; factions have mapped-out relationships, leaders, and assets. If this is floating information that is deployed in-world just in time for the players to find it, won't it feel strange and artificial? I decided to try it anyways, and here's what I came up with:

1. The Palace is watching Daybreak (the PC's crew) closely.
2. The Limmerfield Gang disposed of bodies in a hagfish farm.
3. Avrest is being kept safe in the New Dawn HQ in Six Towers.
4. Avrest killed Vestine Keel.
5. The Keel Gang knows Avrest killed Vestine.
6. Avrest was promised purity and salvation by New Dawn.
7. New Dawn stole a void key from the Premier.
8. Lady Bowmore's son, Harland, died in the care of New Dawn.
9. Blackthorn Park wants to foment chaos in Doskvol.
10. Blackthorn Park was tipped off that Vestine Keel had information on Xantara Pharm.

I realize this is a lot of proper nouns to parse. The key story here is that Avrest's murder of Vestine started off the campaign in our cold open, and the PCs have been wondering who was responsible. The remaining Proper Noun NPCs and Factions relate to the background situation in Crowfoot: the deployment of the Model Worker Initiative, a totalitarian system of worker control. Many of the particulars for this session were inspired by the results of the Trouble Engine, an a|state innovation that Tim Denee uses in Blades '68 to great effect.

Despite my stated misgivings, I found this tool very valuable! I saw two main benefits. First, thinking through what ten secrets could be just forced me to spend time thinking about the world and envisioning my version of Doskvol. This is valuable on its own. Second, it gave me huge inspiration for deciding the moments I showed in the Opening Titles (a structured montage suggested by Denee as part of Blades '68's procedures). I did not actually end up drawing on most of these secrets during play, but the secret "The Palace has an interest in Daybreak" drove the entire session.

For me, what works about this approach is that, despite Shea's suggestion that these secrets are context-free, thinking about secrets actually does invite me to think about the world in a concrete way. After all, it is just true that the Keel Gang now knows who killed their former leader! The PCs could encounter this fact in casual conversation with gang members, discover it through investigating New Dawn, and even leverage this fact to get in good with the Keels later on. I don't know what action they will take to discover this fact, but I have decided that is just fine by me. It feels less limiting than the three-clue approach which I find invites me to do a bunch of potentially-wasted prep.

I intend to use this in the future for both Stonetop and, perhaps surprisingly, for Triangle Agency. Stonetop is naturally suited to this technique, in addition to the fabulous prep techniques Jeremy lays out in the books⁴. But, I have also found that I want to spend more time in Triangle Agency on the freeform pre-Mission bits, where we actually see the characters interacting with the world outside of Agency control. Perhaps I will write on my experience with that in the future! For now, though, I expect my next post to be a walkthrough of how I use Stonetop's prep tools in practice, because they are amazing.

#rpgs #worked_examples