Page 113 - Chronicles of Darkness

Try to avoid using more than one statement from
each player. You don’t want to write out a huge biogra-
phy of the missing person; you simply want a framework
to connect to and some tantalizing ideas to build from.

What the Questions Really Answer
Why a disappearance and not a murder? A missing
person leaves more questions in the mind than a dead
body. After all, a body tells you “this person is dead,
their story is at an end.” With a missing person, though,
ambiguity of mood and tone means you can do a lot
more with it as a story. A missing person is a story
with, potentially, no ending. The story might act as a
background element: sad, hopeless, and flavoring the
rest of your chronicle. Conversely, it might be a tense
emergency as the missing person is sick, needs medica-
tion, is a child, or any other ticking time bomb about
to go off at any moment.
Crime Scenes

From where is she missing? Where did you see him
last, and when? What spaces did you share with the
missing person? Did you and the missing person go to
the same coffee shop every Sunday at the same time
for the last three months, and it’s only now that he’s
missing that you’ve even noticed how frequently you saw
one another? Did you see her last in your apartment,
as she threw on her jacket and told you to never call
her again? Where did you both go, but never actually
crossed paths? The missing person lived in the same
reality as your characters, whether in their town, block,
or school. Whatever the scope of your chronicle, this
missing person lived within it just as your characters
do, and you’re better off anchoring all the characters
in real, shared spaces.
Putting it on Paper

At some point while you’re building your chronicle
map, each player should put down a location that will
matter to the story. Start out with the idea that these
locations are all tied to the missing person, but they
must also each somehow tie to the player characters.
This might be a place the missing person was terrified
of, and your character needs to go daily, for example,
or a place where you used to live together.
These locations should also act as go-to locations
when setting a scene or shaking up the storyline.
Any one of these locations can be a great place for
the Storyteller to trigger more action or sow seeds for
character-driven plot as well. Sometimes simply starting
a scene by saying, “Meanwhile, in the graveyard, some-
thing is stirring, something unnamed and forgotten,”
can get things going. These set-piece locations should
have a name, a one-sentence description, and a sentence
describing both how the player character relates to

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