Walking our own roads
Building 'In Search of Typhon', the Black Dog Tavern Way.
Every so often, it’s worth holding a mirror to your own work. Here at The Black Dog Tavern we’ve spent much of the last year writing about what makes a good game, how to structure a story, how to contain tension, how to build worlds that feel vast even when you can only glimpse a corner of them. But theory is only half the story. The other half lives at the table.
In Search of Typhon began as a design experiment, a way to see if the principles we’d been exploring in posts like Alien and the Art of Narrative Containment, Campaigns as Rock Operas, and Worldbuilding Through Restraint could survive contact with players, dice, and the messy energy of collaborative storytelling. It quickly became something larger: a proof of concept that tested the Tavern’s design philosophy. Does our insistence on intimacy, structure, and emotional authenticity hold its shape when tested by play?
From Theory to Practice
When we wrote Alien and the Art of Narrative Containment, the argument was simple: a story doesn’t need to be big to feel significant. It needs pressure, pacing, and a sense of boundaries that slowly close in. That post was as much about restraint as it was about fear.
In Search of Typhon we took that principle and ran with it. The opening Iterations (our term for discrete phases of play that link together like verses in a song) start narrow. The players’ view of the world is claustrophobic, not because the setting is small, but because their understanding is. Information trickles, never floods. Each new discovery redefines the shape of the unknown.
That’s containment at work: tension born not from what’s happening in front of you, but from what might be happening behind the curtain.
Structure as Music
In Campaigns as Rock Operas, we talked about building games with rhythm—about borrowing the language of albums to guide emotional structure. Every track should matter; every movement should resolve something while setting up what comes next.
That’s how Typhon is built. The campaign’s Iterations are written like tracks on a concept album. Each one has a distinct mood, pacing, and tone, but all feed a shared progression. The players move through crescendos of action into quieter interludes of discovery, grief, or reflection.
Instead of treating the campaign as a series of linear chapters, we treat it as a musical composition. This design choice demands more from the GM, but it should pay dividends. The emotional flow becomes organic, the transitions intentional, and the story arcs easier to shape around the group’s rhythm rather than a rigid script.
The Power of Restraint
Finally the post Worldbuilding Through Restraint argues that what you leave out of a world is often more important than what you put in. Mystery isn’t a lack of detail; it’s an invitation to explore.
Within In Search of Typhon, we’ve built that idea directly into the campaign’s architecture. The Tartarus campaign setting doesn’t give players a neatly drawn world (or worlds!). It offers fragments, locations half-remembered, maps annotated with contradictions, histories told in conflicting voices.
Similarly, we’ve built out an organic ‘clues’ system which resists exposition. Every piece of information is contextual. Nothing is delivered as pure fact. Each clue can be linked, misinterpreted, or contradicted through play, meaning that what the players “know” is always slightly unstable. We do love an unreliable narrator!
That tension between knowledge and uncertainty becomes the engine of the campaign. By refusing to explain everything, the world feels larger, stranger, and more alive.
Building Humanity into the Machinery
If there’s one through-line across all our posts starting with The Tavern Manifesto it’s that good RP games thrive through their human centre. Spectacle fades; connection lasts.
In Typhon, this principle guided how we wrote factions, NPCs, and moral dilemmas. Every major actor has a point of pain, a reason to exist beyond the mechanics. Even when the campaign touches on cosmic horror or metaphysical themes, the emotional stakes remain grounded: loyalty, guilt, duty, loss.
By giving every motive a human edge, we are looking to avoid cliche and abstraction. The story might stretch toward the mythic, but it’s anchored in choices players can understand and feel.
That’s also where the Iterations system earns its keep. Each new play segment forces characters to reconcile who they were with who they’re becoming. Every decision echoes forward, reshaping relationships and rewriting priorities. The design turns morality into motion.
Lessons the Table Taught Us
Designing In Search of Typhon wasn’t about proving that our theories were right. It was about testing how they break.
After all, narrative containment needs moments of release, or players start to turn inward. Musical structure works beautifully—until someone skips the track, and you learn to improvise harmony. Restraint is powerful, but too much can starve the table of agency.
Those lessons will feed into future writing. The campaign isn’t finished, in fact, only the opening has really been mapped out. Whilst the entire Tartarus sector will continue to unfold with or without the players actions, where the players go, which clues they absorb, or believe, will shape how the capaign unfolds. Hopefully to a sticky, alien filled finale.
The Black Dog Way
At the end of it all, In Search of Typhon is more than a campaign. It’s a living essay—a story that demonstrates what we believe about games: that structure can liberate creativity, that mystery can bind a table together, and that emotion is the truest form of worldbuilding.
Every article we’ve written, from Alien to Banks, was a step toward this project. Every word of advice has been put to work. And as Typhon continues to grow, it keeps reminding us of something simple: the best lessons are the ones you have to learn twice—once in theory, once in play.
Because at the Tavern, every idea must earn its place on the table. Every theory must survive the fire of the game.
And, in the end, isn’t that the Black Dog Tavern way?