Hi everyone! We at Paizo love to do community creator shout-outs, and our friends over at Infinite have an amazing team we want to spotlight. So without further ado, we present the February Infinite Team+ spotlight!
Bringing The Flavor
What makes a good meal good? This is the direction from which you should approach any TTRPG writing. After all, it’s not far from the truth! You’re serving up a meal for people, and you have two goals to make sure it pleases your clientele.
First off, you have to make sure the meal doesn’t poison them and kill them. Dead clients will not buy your food again, nor will they try your homebrew, third-party publisher (3pp) work, or original writing! In our cooking metaphor, this is the role of mechanics; it’s what provides your meal/TTRPG writing with a healthy structure and makes it “good for you.” It is, fundamentally, the most important part of what you’re making. Without good balance, your feat, item, spell, or whatever it is that you’re making will fall apart. People will look at what it grants, say “this seems busted,” and make a snap judgment on whether the rest of the project is worth checking out. But is a passable structure enough?
Absolutely not. Adding something extra transforms a merely digestible offering into one that’s delicious. And that something extra in both the world of food and writing is flavor.
Flavor text is a crucial ingredient that often goes uncelebrated, but it makes the difference between incredible and bland. But to make the flavor pop, you need to know—what do people like? In this context, I’m going to speak from my personal experience. I write books for the Classes+ series, a line of 3pp books that focuses on expanding existing classes, like witches, clerics, magi, etc. I’ll talk about things I’ve found that have helped me write flavor text that keeps people coming back, and how to give them a go yourself.
First off, you want your flavor to be consistent. This goes for any piece of text, of course, but it’s one that’s often overlooked in fantasy TTRPGs. You want your content to fit into the world within which it’ll exist or most likely be used. For Pathfinder, a lot of people are either going to be playing in Golarion or in a homebrew world most likely based in fantasy tropes. That’s just the kind of setting that Pathfinder most easily lends itself to; the sword and sorcery aspects are the biggest selling point. So, when writing a new option, you want it to be something that can seamlessly fit into this world without breaking its established rules. For example, when writing Archetypes+, we wanted to create something that would expand existing options and add new ones too. One of the new archetypes we decided to make was a clown. This was difficult, because most people have one of two very specific ideas when it comes to clowns: a red-nosed guy in a funny wig, or a murderous slasher with smeared white makeup. While there are places where these could feasibly fit in Golarion, they don’t fit everywhere. Indeed, a standard party with a fighter, wizard, cleric, and then a classic clown might not look right. It’s noticeably “other,” and it had the potential to make people turn up their noses at the product and not include it in their game. So how did we lessen the otherness of it?
That’s where our next point comes into play. Research! This may come as a surprise, but you are not an infinite sponge of all knowledge ever. You need to look up what you’re writing on, give yourself a brief lesson on the topic, and then return to it. So, continuing with clowns: how did we make clowns fit? Pathfinder’s setting ranges from prehistoric times (with the Mammoth Kings) to 1800s-analogous Absalom. As it turns out, clowns have a long history between prehistoric times and the late 1800s! The first clowns were priest-clowns in Ancient Egypt, over 4,000 years ago. Then, throughout the medieval era, there were jesters, who acted as advisors to nobility. In the 16th century, commedia dell'arte was popularized in Italy. These theatrical sketch shows involved masked character archetypes like the daring Harlequin and the glum Pierrot. Finally, in the early 1800s, Joseph Grimaldi introduced face paint, colorful costumes, and all the tropes we associate with the common clown. Once we knew that clowns did exist during the timeframe that Pathfinder likes to play with, we could make something fitting for it! But now, the next question is… how did we make it unique?
One’s work needs to stand out on its own. Yes, the mechanics might be unique, but the dressing over the mechanics needs to be something unlike anything else the game has to offer presently… while, crucially, feeling exactly like something else the game has to offer. It’s extraordinarily easy to go overboard here and quickly go from “Here’s a fun idea” to “What if the clown can use three actions to become a clown elemental?” Mechanically, maybe that’s fine, but it’s a strange idea that breaks the existing lore of the world. The implication of an elemental plane of clown, while itself horrifying, also completely ignores the Golarion setting’s rules and, most likely, the rules of any other setting missing an elemental clown plane.
But then, what if you don’t go far enough? Perhaps clowns can pull tricks to inspire their allies in combat! But… that’s just the bard, another entertainment-focused character option. If you don’t go far enough, your writing will feel unsure of itself. You really need to solidly hit that middle ground. What’s something that’s like existing content, but not so similar as to lack identity, and not so different as to become nonsensical in most settings?
Clowns are meant to be ridiculous, so some of our ideas were naturally going to be a little more comedically toned, but we wanted them to fit most worlds. The feat Rubber Body is a good example of our process—it’s a feat that plays with the raw physicality of clownish performances, which often include over-the-top slapstick. The feat gives the clown resistance to damage as a reaction while also knocking them back 15 feet and rendering them prone. Another feat, Uncanny Legerdemain, allows clowns to seemingly magically transport items from one closed hand to another, or one sleeve to another. This feat not only allows a character to pull off classic magic tricks, it also offers good roleplay opportunities like smuggling, stealing, and otherwise storing items in an extradimensional space in a comical fashion. All of these fit the clown without being too out there, and without feeling exactly like anything presently in the game.
So, that’s what it comes down to. It seems like a daunting task—have the idea, make sure it fits into the world you’re writing for, research it, and then make sure it isn’t too much or too little. It’s not easy to pull off, but you need to be sure to put in the appropriate work here. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest mechanics in the world—dry oats may be healthy, but they don’t taste great. Thankfully, once you get used to writing flavor, it starts getting easier. It’s like standing in front of an oven and smelling the aroma of the food waft up to you; you’ll feel like there’s no stopping you, and pretty soon, you’ll have made something people won’t forget!
Derry Luttrell (they/he) is an animator, illustrator, and writer from Kildare, Ireland. They are the host of Dice Will Roll, an award-winning Pathfinder Second Edition podcast which has recently passed 400,000 downloads and started its 1970s-inspired run of Abomination Vaults, complete with synth music, VHS sounds, and classic dungeon crawling fun. It was while running Dice Will Roll that Derry decided to make a book of homebrew witch patrons. This eventually bloomed into Witches+, brought to life by an impromptu teamup between Derry and Tony Saunders. Thousands of sales later, Team+ is the most successful duo on Pathfinder Infinite—the first of their brand-new products to reach the mithral and platinum ranks. In Team+ projects, Derry largely tackles flavor and illustration. Their heavily stylized art decorates each release, inside and out. Derry is open for commissions; find them on Discord as @derryzumi.
In the next few months, Derry will be launching Safe Haven: A Weird West Tale, a 200-page book for Pathfinder Second Edition and D&D 5e, with a western-themed adventure that goes from Level 5 to Level 10 and features a setting splatbook for a world where magic has died and the age of the gunslinger is upon us.