Exchange of Realities

Dreamscapes. Such lovely things, when you want to try something new. This week, I got to apply them to my own game.

It had been coming for a while, after all. The group’s old worst enemy had cropped up in the head of a friend of theirs, something a lot stronger than a memory. He was useful, sure, but dangerous. So one of the players got the bright idea of extracting him from his host’s mind and making him into a talking paperweight, so they could still ask for advice but wouldn’t have to deal with him engaging in underhanded politics through his host when they weren’t looking.

Having discovered the joys of battle in dreamscapes in a game not long before (and driven my GM crazy in the process), I had but one solution to this: Get them into the host’s dreams and let them battle it out. So my group found themselves trekking through the mind of their young friend Nandin on the way to beat his passenger into a coherent and hopefully singular state.

The first thing I decided was that Nandin, being originally from a rather Sahara-esque desert, would have a desert for a dreamscape. Under the houserules we’d used in the other game, temperament determined dreamscape; Nandin’s would be comfortable, for a desert, reflecting his kind personality. So it was an expanse of white sand, glittering in the sun which shone down from a brilliant blue sky. There were landmarks, though not too many of them: the mountain which housed his dreamscape’s guardian, the oasis in which Nandin himself was hanging out, and the wall of haze that separated the Nandin!dreamscape from the Jalil!Dreamscape. It didn’t matter how far away they were, though; if the group intended to go somewhere, the group would get there: instantly in the case of the place that were Nandin’s, in five minutes to reach Jalil’s side. The guardian herself, whom the group visited first, ended up being a roc/phoenix/something blend with the voice of someone the group had never met and the mannerisms and text color of Nandin’s closest friend (and, for that matter, Luath’s older sister), Irayo.

Jalil’s, on the other hand, was different. It wasn’t just the terrain, though going from glittering white sand to a brownish-reddish sandstone can’t have hurt the contrast. It wasn’t just the occupants, though the sand-fleas and “cute innocent vicious rats” (basically what happened when I gave the little critters the outward appearance of kangaroo rats and the diet and tactics of piranhas) certainly made it seem more hostile. It was also the metaphysics. Nandin was pretty normal, and his dreamscape behaved about as one expected dreams to. Jalil, on the other hand…. messed with the laws of metaphysics a little. After all, when I’d designed him, he’d broken one of the Cardinal Laws of Endgame Bosses by having just about everything better than his physical stats. In life, this caused him issues. In existence as a dream figment in a place where people aimed with their manipulative ability, powered blows with their charisma, and resisted damage by being pretty, particularly where most of the group had been hamstrung by this little aspect of the dreamworld, he could be deadly.

Though I’d had some fun with some of the ideas I’d had for Jalil’s architecture, they didn’t get there. Last I saw them, they were being swarmed by the same rat-piranhas and another creature, and between one of them turning into a rolling ball of DOOM, another creating small-scale novas with his fist and not much else, my getting to have some fun with my own crazy dream action concepts…. I think I am remembering how to run a fight that I love to pieces. We had to end early, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it ends.

(As a side note: Happy Halloween to everyone! It finishes off a pretty exciting week; this blog hit the 500-post mark two days ago, and my birthday was four days past. Party!)

Some plot twists just can’t get themselves taken seriously; just mentioning that a story ends in one is enough to make a hefty portion of its audience look for something else. “All a dream” is one such, and quite possibly one of the most reviled of the offenders. But that doesn’t mean that the basic premise, that the scene that just happened was just a dream, isn’t still usable. It just means that you have to be clever.

The first rule of “All a dream” is that you shouldn’t use it at the very end unless you have a twist to that twist. What makes “All a dream” such a reviled ending, after all, is the combination of two factors: one, that it’s so common as to be cliché, and two, that it’s a waste of potential. Sacrifices? Gains? Losses? All those motions of emotional intensity that kept the readers hanging so much? Not real even by the story’s standards. That subplot that could have been interesting if it’d been taken to its logical conclusion? Never going to happen. The plots won’t go anywhere, the emotions didn’t matter in the end; what’s the point of it? If you’re clever enough to find a new way to play with it, they might go along with it, but it’s going to have to be some pretty good artistry.

The second rule is that the dream should in some way matter to the story, even if it was just a dream. Does it push the story forward? Is it hiding something else that’s going to matter to the plot later on? What purpose does it serve? A dream without a purpose will likely be seen as filler, or [scene that could only have been possible through the dream] for scene’s own sake. You don’t want that.

Under normal circumstances, the third rule is that it shouldn’t be a way to try to dodge the implications of something that happened within the part of the narrative that was designated as just a dream. For one thing, it’s seen as cheating, and for another, sometimes people want to see where the new situation would lead. But this isn’t always the case. In a game, for instance, everyone agreeing that a certain situation is in nobody’s best interest can be an excellent reason to declare it a dream and carry on from there; likewise, people in semi-collaborative works (expanded universes and comic series usually) often use this as a patch to deal with differences in author style. (It’s usually more acceptable when a character’s creator is trying to salvage a serious case of derailment.)

And of course, if it’s not trying to be a twist, you can get away with a situation that’s clearly a dream easily; the characters might even seek it out.

I’ve seen a game in which “All a dream” was done successfully (if inadvertently): the GM had run a rather major plot twist that just about all of the players had some sort of problem with (power level, playstyle, general improbability, and a few other things), and midway through it was adapted into a dream sequence and finished as such. It led to some interesting results; the GM had to actively think about why we got the dream in the first place, one character was influenced to what we called “the shortest betrayal ever”, and we were using bits and pieces of the sequence as clues to later people’s behavior pretty much until the end of the replacement story arc.

Was it all a dream? Think about it carefully; answering yes may well be plausible.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that everyone has the potential to use dreams as exposition or foreshadowing. Unfortunately, not everyone does it well. There are a number of pitfalls that come from leaning on dreams to serve vital roles in a story.

The biggest mistake, of course, is not balancing the level of information with the needs of the overall story, either by being too blatant or a little too subtle. Too blatant, and it’s all figured out ahead of time; too subtle, and nobody ever gets it. If it’s just foreshadowing, you can get away with making it more obscure, since it doesn’t matter if people get it or not. On the other hand, if the proper course of events depends on people being able to make sense of that dream, you need to make sure it can be made sense of—in a game situation, if they can’t get it themselves, they should at least be able to roll for some sort of hint.

Not knowing your own dream metaphysics is also a dangerous path. Granted, dreams are a lot more fluid than the ‘real’ world, so a law or two of physics slipping isn’t going to draw near the negative attention that a law of waking-world physics or magic would. But if something’s been established as impossible, and it happens anyway, there had better be a very good reason.

One thing that most people don’t recognize as the problem that it is is not signaling what kind of expository dream they’re seeing. I talked yesterday about prophetic dreams, backstory dreams, and characterization dreams; though you often see elements of each in any given dream sequence, there’s usually one that serves as the primary purpose. Now imagine you’ve embedded an important facet of a character in a dream, or a vital clue to his hitherto-unknown backstory, and you’re waiting for the payoff as your audience realizes what it means. But you hang out where they hang out, either physically or virtually, and all you see is discussion about the significance of the fact that one minor character appeared brandishing a peacock feather on a stick. They won’t let go of it, they keep waiting until you think it’s no longer an issue and then asking about it, and as far as you can tell they’re fully aware that something vital went on there but they won’t let go of this “feather on a stick” thing.

Overanalysis of symbolism is the most common problem; people get so tied up with the metaphorical aspects of whatever holds still long enough that they miss the literal ones. But there’s also the risk that a too-realistic prophetic dream gets interpreted as a memory, or that throwaway dream intended just to emphasize the character’s mindset comes off as a portent of things to come. Therefore, you will usually need to signal a dream’s purpose one way or another—making memories more grounded in what is and has been than prophetic dreams, showing clear evidence that a dream of the future hasn’t happened yet, not putting so much weight on a characterization dream that it seems vital. Unless, of course, part of the idea is to make a mystery out of what kind of dream the dream is, in which case you should plant a few clues, have a couple hints ready, and see what comes of it.

And then you have use of too much symbolism in a dream. Not only does it annoy the audience to have to put in that level of effort to get an accurate read, particularly if every single bit of it is vital to understanding the dream as a whole, but it often results in the opposite problem later, when everyone expects Every! Single! Thing! to be symbolic and you’re just trying to get a few major points and not set off a full dissection. Sometimes a peacock feather on a stick is just a peacock feather on a stick.

So be careful—it’s easy to make the mistakes that turn a character’s dream into a creator’s nightmare.

Yesterday’s dreamscapes were pretty, but that’s only one narrative use for dreams, and one that practically requires lucid dreaming or a way to get into someone else’s head. Most worlds aren’t up to dealing with that, and even those that are sometimes want to do something else with their dreams. But just about everyone has the potential to use dreams as exposition, getting across important plot points or subtle foreshadowing.

Sometimes, this takes the form of prophetic dreams. A character sleeps, and they get something that might be a vision of the present or the future. It can be an explicit one, but it doesn’t have to be; in fact, people are likely to be more impressed with or at least more interested in the dreams that require significant interpretation. After all, it’s a chance to match wits with the creator, maybe show off their own skills a little, and it’s a sign that more thought was put into the dream sequence. When putting together a prophetic dream, it’s best to come at the subject somewhat obliquely, particularly if you want the characters or audience to have trouble figuring out what it means. I’m not going to say never use a direct reference when a symbolic allusion will do, and the symbolism shouldn’t always be as obscure as possible, but the important parts shouldn’t be too blatant; it makes it too obvious, and transparency isn’t a virtue unless you want people reacting to the dream immediately. If they don’t get it, the audience reserves the right to mock them.

On the other hand, a dream can clue in backstory by taking the form of a very vivid memory. This can be something the character knows that the audience hasn’t had a chance to learn, though it might also be something the character wasn’t aware of either—repressed, mindwiped, simply forgotten, the memory of a prior self who wants to make himself known, any of a number of excuses. In this case, you have every reason to be explicit; it’s not supposed to hide something, and there’s no reason why it has to be couched in obscure symbology. It can just be.

But why should every dream be Grand, Important Information? I think anyone who gets Big, Grand and Meaningful every time her head hits the pillow is going to go insane soon, particularly if she doesn’t repeat herself. Sometimes, a dream is just a dream, and the point is more to look at what it’s like than what it’s saying. Even without social relevance or plot importance, a summarized dream can say a thing or two about the character dreaming it—what kind of person they are, what they think about, what’s eating them, even what their favorite color is. One of my favorite dreams of this sort actually wasn’t a dream, but a PC’s improvisation for my game; pretending to wake from a fitful sleep, he shouted “No! Not the syrup! Put it down, I’ll deliver the antelope!” (Amusingly, he still managed to give me complete dream-context for this snippet, giving new meaning to “cover story”.) The symbols don’t mean anything, but it fits the character.

Some of the best dreams bear hints of most of the above. A prophetic element sneaks itself into a flashback, imagery reflects in little ways the mindset of the character.

So give it a try; let the dream push the story.

During yesterday’s riff on dreams, I mentioned the idea of a character’s dreamscape—a semi-constant world created by the typical dream-patterns of a single character. It’s one part alternate world, one part character exercise, and plenty of fun in its own right.

The first thing to consider is the dreamscape terrain; what’s a world if there’s nothing to stand on? For some dreamers, the terrain is a reflection of their history; you might see landmarks from their youth or places they might want to visit, and the landscape itself might resemble one they’re used to. Others can be based on personality; a character with a generally standoffish personality and a lot of emotional control may have a downright wintry dreamscape, while one who grew up on stories may have something downright fanciful.

Then there’s the question of what populates it. Sure, you can have normal people and creatures, but why stop there? The limit is in what the dreamer can imagine—do bits and pieces of the dreamer’s personality run around wearing her shape? Are there large numbers of creatures that seem as much like scenery as anything, like faceless ghosts or flocks of butterflies with leaves for wings? Some dreamscapes have their own guardians. These might be people or mythical creatures; they might draw from people the dreamer admires or fears, from legends, from the dreamer’s ideal self, from combinations of the above.

In some dreamscapes, even the laws of physics might vary with the dreamer’s personality. Imagine one where there is no gravity, or gravity is variable depending on where you are. What about a place where people’s physical abilities don’t matter, and it’s mental flexibility and force of personality that help you in a fight, because that’s what the dreamer values? Does it take a longer or shorter time to get from point A to point B? Might people be replaced by their shadows? Does conversation come out as music? In a sufficiently trippy dreamworld, who knows what might be possible? For a lesser version, people with more rigid minds might have harder dreamscapes to shape, and the more compassionate may have more habitable dreamscapes.

I had occasion to play with instant dreamscape creation last week, when my players were trying to learn how to function in my take on the dreamworld. I needed someone to let them practice in the mind of in a quick montage, and the logical choice seemed to be my hyper deathdealer, Ruby.

Somehow, the training ends up being in her mind. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since she was known not to have any Dark Secrets, Confidential Information or particularly disturbing bits of history that might crop up in there. On the other hand, attempting to practice fighting when surrounded by small fluffy things with melting eyes and six-inch fangs and occasionally in the distance seeing an enormous flaming squid frolicking in a tranquil sea, not to mention the almost blindingly bright color scheme, the perpetual clouds of butterflies, and the near-diabetic sweetness of a lot of it, was a bit… jarring.

Says a certain amount about Ruby herself, doesn’t it? That’s half the fun of a dreamscape; along with being an excuse to describe wonders that wouldn’t occur in the waking world, you can also sneak a little character exposition into your design. Have you given it a shot?

They’ve been used as setting exposition, foreshadowing, characterization, an excuse to play with the laws of physics, a way to cop out of a story that people couldn’t tell because of its ramifications to the setting and timeline, a visualization for mind-affecting magic, a place to ambush enemies, a way of delivering messages without worrying too much about the lag time, and a source of parallel worlds. And for all this, they exist in the real world, and we usually don’t care about them enough to keep close track when they happen to us. What are they?

They’re dreams: a valuable tool, though likely to veer into cliché if not carefully used.

In fantasy, the uses of dreams tend to run wild. People get prophetic dreams, dreams sent by magic to give them messages, dreams chock full of symbols. Characters with mind magic sometimes monitor people’s dreams to see what they’re like, shape the dreams to give a message, or even enter the dreams themselves for their own purposes. If roles are passed through reincarnation or metaphysical transfer of importance, it’s quite possible that a current character who needs to fill a previous character’s shoes will have a dream of that prior character and follow its instructions.

And then there are dreamworlds. Sometimes, they’re individualized, the interior landscape of one mind. Others, like Lovecraft’s Dreamlands and its many RPG imitations, are worlds comprised of the combined dreams of all of a species/civilization/other. If they’re individualized, their appearances often reflect the mental processes, loves, hates and concerns of the dreamer; when generalized, expect them to include manifestations of both the greatest common ideals and greatest common fears of those who dream the world. Sometimes, these are changeable, representing the dreamer’s subconscious control over her own mind, or boast improbable physics; some dreamscapes even do both at once.

But just because something isn’t in a fantasy setting doesn’t mean dreams can’t have their uses. As most psychologists will tell you, analyzing dream imagery can tell you a great deal about a person’s mindset and mental issues. Need to get across something that happened to a person in the past, and don’t want to deal with a flashback? Have them dream about it. Want to explore a couple ways a certain decision could go? Dreams. And if you don’t mind most experienced readers/gamers throwing rotten tomatoes at you (or if you and the group agree that something just doesn’t work as a plot twist and you need to get out cleanly), there’s always the old “it was all a dream” cop-out.

In short, for a bunch of random neurons firing, it’s a pretty powerful tool. But then again, isn’t our job as creators of stories, collaborative or single-narrative, to cause our own firing of somewhat less random neurons? I find rather little difference between a very immersive story and a strong dream.

This week, I’m going to be looking into some of the more amusing uses of dreams in stories and games. Come dream with me; who knows what you might learn?

Michael, on behalf of General Tor, asks:

Never thought it’d come to this, but I’m in a bit of a desperate situation so I thought I’d come to you for advice. Right now I’ve got a group of human intruders running loose in my base. I set my best assassin on them, and he never came back. I asked the court weaponmaster to take care of them, only you know how it is, conventions of honour and all that, he insisted on fighting them one by one in a fair fight, and that meant when they beat him he had to join them. I even ambushed them with a security robot, and they reduced it to scrap metal. Now there’s nothing left I can do except order my entire army to man the bulkhead these so-called heroes are trying to get past, and if somehow they get past that, I’ll have no choice but to send my ultimate warrior into the field. Something I don’t like to do, because if she fails then it’s game over.

So, where did it all go wrong? At what point should I have realised that it was time to stop notching the challenge up gradually and throw everything and the kitchen sink at them at once? It’s not like I can afford to do that for just any old human who manages to sneak into the base; but how do you distinguish the real heroes from the wannabes?

Part of your problem is in your last sentence: “It’s not like I can afford to do that for just any old human who manages to sneak into the base.” This is your base you’re talking here, one of your last lines of defense. Why is your security lax enough that getting into the base alone isn’t evidence that you’re dealing with a credible threat?

But leaving that little slip aside, let’s turn this into a slightly different question. You want to know how to find heroes, and I’ve got a few notes on them specifically, both on knowing who the protagonists are and understanding how they think. What you’re asking is how to determine whether an opponent is a credible threat—and that’s an even more vital skill than being able to spot protagonists specifically, as it’ll also help alert you to rivals, problems within your organization, the occasional overly dark antihero…. you get the idea.

Most of the time, we locate credible threats, when, as your adversaries have done, they do something that makes it clear that they aren’t just any old human. When we’re lucky, it’s against someone else, and we can hear about it ahead of time. (Which brings us to an important note: if you are not the only Hand of Darkness operating in your region, keep a close eye on what happens with whatever others are present. If they choose to strike against you, you’ll know how; if they get taken out by a bunch of unlikely heroes, you’ll know who, or at least have enough idea that you can start investigating who.) But often, it’s against us, and then we’re in trouble.

There’s a certain something we have around us—for lack of a better term, let’s call it a personal threat bubble. Usually, once someone else makes it into the bubble, they need to be dealt with now, like your intruders. So our job is to make sure that we can tell whether anything that gets into the bubble is a credible threat—and the best way to tell that is to make sure that it’s next to impossible for anyone who isn’t a credible threat to get into the bubble. Which means you put challenges on the road, challenges in finding you—and, as I pointed out earlier, make your base itself into a challenge. Train up your minions, experiment away the weaknesses in your weaponry… in essence, you want to be at the point where, as soon as something’s tripping your alarms, you know that you can and should go after it with everything you have. Sure, you might hit the wrong thing a time or two, but you don’t have to worry about wasting your resources on a nothing.

And don’t discount the value of looking at your own weaknesses. Repeat after me: “I am not invincible.” All of us have chinks in our armor—maybe a kind of magic we’re vulnerable to, or an approach to power we can’t comprehend, or even an emotion we can’t stand proximity to. And we can either assume they aren’t the problem they are (bad idea!) or we can recognize that they’re a potential problem and mitigate them, look at anyone who has them and gets too close as a possible threat, or do both just to be safe.

Recognizing credible threats is a vital skill for any Hand of Darkness. Keep that in mind.

Difficulties? Questions? Schemes apt to go awry? Ask the Generic Villain!

I’d been going to carry on with my work on subtext, but then I realized just how many spoilers that was going to involve. But since I’ve got several PCs with nominal means of employment, I have plenty of experience running the job in the background, so let’s look at that.

For one of my PCs, who decided to take a teacher’s role, I focused mostly on the students: I needed to introduce these characters anyway, and this was a perfect opportunity to do so. So for him, it was most a description of the regulars he had to deal with, and a bit about where they were from and what they were like, like the “petite woman who was completely ladylike during work hours but afterward swore like a sailor and could drink most of her colleagues under the table”, or the “young girl who’d come to class and focus on the material like it was the answer to everything she’d ever wondered about.” Occasionally, who these people were would be extended to what kinds of things they did in class.

Another ended up serving as a translator for the riddle-speech of the god of prophecy. For him, I had two foci: events, and his ever-enigmatic boss. The events were mostly amusing little details, with occasional things that could serve as setting detail or might spawn plot arcs later thrown in—I talked about his mediation between Lysha and the god of the fortune cookies, and had a throwaway line about “nine different people asking for signs that the Overlord of Brazen Trickery was up to something, not the least of which being that the Overlord of Brazen Trickery is always up to something”. When not doing that, I gave him a sense of the god itself, including its weakness for palmier and a little of its emotional vocabulary—enough so that, the one time he came to the boss for help with a question, he understood exactly what it meant when Lysha asked him to do something, then gave him the last palmier when he agreed.

Then there was the last, who sort of followed his mentor into her job making sure the world did what it was supposed to. His was a more alien job than the others’, so I focused instead on what kinds of things happened during it, and the oddities that came out of coworker talk; this was a guy who at one point was sent off to polish glass in a certain place, and another time had to make sure a puppy ran down one alley and not another. I tried to use his job as a way to seed hints to him about which way to go, which sometimes worked , sometimes didn’t. Sometimes it even did both: one time, he went chasing after someone he was just supposed to decide was worth investigating with the rest of the group and got himself and his mentor captured for his troubles. And then there was the time he came back to hear about a crisis that had befallen one of his coworkers….

In short, the jobs are part of the background, and occasionally part of the story. They’ve worked out well.

What is the most important word in gaming?

Yes.

Most of us already know that if the group or one of its members comes up with some improbable plan and asks if it’s possible, the proper answer (unless you have Very Good Metaphysical Reasons Why It Cannot Possibly Work) is yes. Granted, it’s yes with strings attached, a lot of strings, but it’s still a yes; they’re more interesting than just saying no.

But there are other uses, or should we say other yeses?

Want to avoid a line of questioning? Take that whole “Do you know…?” or “Can you tell me…?” or anything of that sort—the kinds of things that are intended to bring on a proper answer, and respond, “Yes.”

And with “X or y?” questions, whatever they happen to be. “Which one did you mean?” “Do you want this or that?” “Are we dealing with one of these, or one of those?”

 “Yes.” Extra credit if the question was about Something Bad Happening.

What about tempting fate, with questions like “He’s standing behind me, isn’t he?”, “She’s still alive, isn’t she?” and “We’re in trouble, right?”

Yes. Where else would they be?

It doesn’t always have to be to their detriment, even if it’s more amusing watching them squirm. “Do we get to find out more about this story element?” “Are we ever going to see this character again?” “You think I might be able to explore this hook point I left dangling from the character so conveniently so you’d take it and run with it?” “Does anyone in this city try to talk to me?” “Is there a chance that I could find someone who could teach me to do [insert Really Nifty Thing here]?”

Yes.

Then there’s the prosaic. “Does this roll make it?”

Yes. (Assuming the roll actually does, anyway. Not that certain systems don’t occasionally let you succeed anyway and just make the rest of life awkward for you.)

And knowing when to stop at yes has its own power. Someone asks a question that’s heavily loaded with potential trouble, something they’re bound to want supporting explanation on, to expect it, but all they ask is “Is this happening?” or the like. Sure, what they want to hear is a full-on explanation. But what’s all you need to say?

Yes.

It’s a word for every occasion, one with every meaning, helpful and frustrating and a relief and a cause for concern all at the same time. It’s almost as short as they come, but can say far more than should fit into one syllable. And no matter who they are, all GMs should keep it in their vocabulary.

Have you had any other uses for the word?

A little over a year ago, I talked about heroes/adventurers and their day jobs; not everyone can support themselves by adventuring, and not everyone wants to. The problem with these sorts of jobs is that many people just don’t find them interesting; they might take time away from a game group, seem “too much like real life” (yes, I’ve had complaints about this), or just be hard to come up with decent events for. But if you don’t do something with them, they may as well not be there, right?

The answer, then, is to come up with just enough detail to make it a worthy background. Here are some things you might need.

What exactly is the job? If you can’t summarize it, it’s hard to get it across, whether it’s being a doctor, teaching, serving as the translator for the God of Prophecy (irregular hours, but the pay’s good). Which leads to three simple questions: what does the character do, when does he do it, and who does he do it for? (In some cases, “How does he do it?” may also be applicable.

What are the people around him like? Just about any workplace is going to have at least one standout personality. Usually, it’s the boss, since everyone pretty much has to know who the boss is; likewise, it might be a similar-ranked coworker, or someone responsible for the character’s training—basically, someone whose name, position or personality sticks out. Once that’s established, occasional references to that person doing that-person-ish things can give a feel without actually requiring being there.

Are there any interesting tasks it involves, that fit with the job but are outside its norm and thus notable for the character? Try slipping in references to those while summing up downtime. Take my library job. There’s not much point talking about standard situations, since libraries are pretty universal. But on the other hand, if your first time meeting the commanding general is when she walks in unannounced one Saturday morning when you’re the most senior employee on duty, and you’re having to figure out how you’re supposed to act and how you tell her she’s got a book overdue, it’s something you’re not likely to forget. An offhand summary of a situation like that can say a lot about the job without having to spend time on it.

Then there are the situations that happen at work but aren’t necessarily work-related—or at least, not related to the character’s work. They don’t say as much about the job specifically, but they say something about what can happen there, a little something about the world, and a bit about the people, particularly in how they react to it. “The boss locked his keys in his car and wigged out about it, and now we’re all stressed” or “One of the patrons told me a story about nearly being recruited by the CIA, and I had most of a blog post on it by the time I left” is one thing; seeing a coworker who was missing and possibly confirmed dead at lunch the next morning and everyone acting normal about this is something else entirely.

So what is it like working for these people or in this position? You don’t need to write or play out half the workday just to get it across.