Writing Moves & Love Letters

Writing moves Writing love letters

Player moves are little blocks of rules. Each move kicks in at certain times and says what happens. Between "standard" moves like Defy Danger and Seasons Change, playbook moves, arcana, and all the custom moves in Book II, Stonetop has hundreds of player moves.

And yet, you might write new player moves for a variety of reasons!

You might write custom moves as part of your prep, as a way to resolve a specific situation that you expect to come up in play, or as part of writing up a threat, a site, a danger, or a discovery.

You might write moves as new options, like as a new move that a specific PC can take when they Level Up, or as part of a new insert or arcanum. You might even write a whole new playbook!

You might write or modify moves to change how the game works for you and your table, to match your preferences or to meet your specific needs.

You might also write love letters, singleuse moves addressed to a specific PC, used to gloss over certain events and/or frame new situations. See Writing for details.

Before you endeavor to write new moves, study the game's existing moves. You should be familiar with the moves that are already in play, how they work and how they work together. You should have a sense of what moves can look like and what they can do.

If you're thinking about making a new playbook, insert, or major arcanum, then you should actually play or run a lot of Stonetop, or at least games like it. You need to understand the flow of the game, and how moves fit into and shape that flow, before you make something big.

Creating new moves is an artform. They take time, effort, and practice to write well. You might take to it naturally, or need lots of practice to develop your craft. Some moves you write will be clunky, or even bad! Many will be serviceable. But some of them, a blessed few, will be like poems—polished gems of language and rules, sparkling with potential play.