Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

@Ziggurat When putting a settlement on a map that you don’t expect the party to go anywhere near soon, you only really need three pieces of info (beyond its location, anyway):

Name
Size (city/town/village)
Product (apples, silk, sheep, etc.) or service (government, knowledge, trade hub, etc.)

Why a product or service? It helps establish how trade happens, gives the town a reputation for the group to hear, gives you a hook from which to improvise NPCs from there, and so on.

It’s not that he replaced it, it’s that he built on it. The Reverse Three Clue Rule used in his node-based design articles (“if the players have at least three clues, they’ll draw at least one conclusion”) is a corollary, not a refutation of his previous advice.

The main way it’s changed since he wrote this article (and since he wrote his Node-Based Design series, for that matter) is that he distinguishes between clues and leads, which he didn’t at the time.

@Atlas48 First off, know from the outset whether you want to run a genuine mystery scenario, with an actual truth under the hood where the point is to overcome the challenge of finding that truth, or engage in mystery-*shaped* storytelling where the goal is to end up with a tale that resembles a mystery from the outside while not actually taxing the players’ brains. Advice varies wildly depending on which you’re doing.