Provide information readily and freely to facilitate critical thinking and clever play.
Elicit questions from players and give them direct answers.
The weird and their mysteries should be layered, leading players ever downward into the unknown.
Secrets
Leverage the themes of dread, forbidden knowledge, and fear of the unknown.
Provide information on the physical and tangible reality to players but keep the true nature of things beyond reach.
Slowly give investigators opportunities to pull at threads, drawing them deeper into the weird.
The scale of what the PCs face is incomprehensible. True understanding is unattainable.
Preparation
Make the world alive, allow it to change and grow because of your players’ actions.
Be flexible in your preparation. Create situations and possibilities. Plot and story should not be predefined.
Give NPCs and factions motivations, flaws and drives. Have NPCs react accordingly to their principles, on and off screen. NPCs should always have a drive to survive.
Play to find out what happens.
Difficulty
Realism and fictional positioning are a good starting place for setting difficulty.
Choices should have consequences and all failure should be interesting.
Saves cover various scenarios of uncertainty and risk. If there is neither, do not call for a roll.
Reward cleverness and ingenuity.
Danger
The risk is great for lasting harm, fallout from stress and overwhelming danger of encountering the Old Powers or their progeny.
Present the potential of danger clearly for players and give them the opportunity to react.
Increasing the amount of stress will increase the rate investigators are enveloped by the corruption of the Old Powers.
Characters die.
Choice
Offer tough choices.
All situations should have multiple outcomes.
Clarify player intent before dice are rolled to make sure players have all information that would be obvious to their character.
The influence of the Old Powers bends and breaks reality, making the full scope of some outcomes obscured.
Every action should leave an impact on the world in some way.
Failure
Failure should push the story forward.
Foster a table where success and failure are equally exciting.
It is encouraged to elicit complications or twists from players.
Die of Fate
Sometimes randomness is required. Roll 1d6 to consult the die of fate
6: Good result/ 4-5: Mixed result/ 1-3: Bad result