April 21, 2015
MarkBernstein.org
 

Planning A Conspiracy

I’m toying with an odd fiction project that, if all goes well, will generate some useful background material for Tinderbox 6.3 while perhaps being interesting (or amusing) for its own sake.

It’s going to be a quick and dirty thriller. To get things rolling, I need to lay down the bones of the conspiracy our protagonist will eventually discover, a conspiracy that’s going to ruin her April. That means keeping the players straight.

Planning A Conspiracy

Nothing very profound here; it's just a quick sketch. Usually, I just keep a list of the characters in outline view for fast reference, but here we’ve got to manage all sorts of shadowy and undisclosed relationships (and at least one double agent).

Green people work for us; light green people are contractors. Red people work, perhaps indirectly, for the bad guys; at this point, I know less about the Opposition than I do about our hero. That’s one reason for this exercise.

Of course, lots of brainstorming, “mind mapping,” or diagramming tools could do this well enough. What’s nice here is that we can seamlessly extend this to add background to characters, change their associates, perhaps use some rules to keep all this organized.