Introducing a new tabletop system to people can be difficult, especially if it has mechanics that are unfamiliar to the people playing it. It hardly matters if they are easy to understand, easy to use, or improve game play, "new" is "new" and it takes a bit more time and effort for people to get into the flow of it. Anyone who picks up new games to see what they are like understands this first-hand.

One way to lower the bar and improve people's experience is to ensure there is an "onboarding" process that introduces the game bit by bit, providing a gentle slope up the learning curve with some hand-holding in the early stages. Video games have this pretty well figured out with intro play sequences, and I'm old enough to remember the days of every game coming with a paper manual, and being amazed and impressed when those were replaced with "let's learn the game by actually playing it".

The tabletop RPG space has, at least in theory, an equivalent: the "Starter Set". These "play this first" experiences are intended to introduce concepts to the people playing the game. Unlike video games, however, most tabletop RPGs do not have a Starter Set, there's just the expectation that you'll read the rules and piece together how to play yourself from there. That works OK for simple systems and games that are full of familiar mechanics, but even then it's a significant ask from the new player to get there on their own.

For games that do have Starter Sets, which is most of the bigger titles, few if any provide the same gentle on-ramp we know from video games: they rarely walk the players, let alone the person running the game for them, through the concepts in the game one at a time in a logical order, allowing them to discover individual aspects of the game one after the other and in a logical order. Part of this is probably down to the fact that tabletop RPGs are far more open-ended in terms of game play, and a forced early walk-through may be seen as antithetical to the game style, and putting players on a railroad would not be showing them how these games *really* work anyways.

There are some interesting "teaching dungeons" in the D&D-adjacents realm, such as Tomb of the Serpent King or Lair of the Lamb, and while they succeed to varying degrees in introducing players to the game ... the DM is still expected to know what they are doing. I've noticed this to be the case in nearly all Start Sets out there, including the big commercial ones from the likes of WotC.

This is something that's been gnawing away at my brain like some sort of alien parasite for a good long while now. To experiment in this direction, I am starting to deconstruct the play-test adventure for Crypto with the intent of putting it back together in "Start Set" form.  I'm trying to keep all of the above in mind while doing so, asking myself:

• How can new mechanics be revealed and demonstrated?
• How can these introductions be slowly fed in without turning the game into a railroad experience?
• What support can the person running the game be given such that a table with little tabletop RPG experience can have a successful game?

It's just three questions, but they are not easy ones to answer! I will be releasing Crypto's introductory module serially, piece-by-piece, over the coming months. It will be interesting to see how far I can get towards meeting the brief, and I'm very curious for the feedback from readers and play testers alike as it unfolds.