The House of Nerdery and Curios

Jason Cordova’s The Between introduces a gameplay mechanic that is quite inspirational and might just be completely original – the Unscene.

The Unscene is essentially a setpiece in which the players narrate a scene that is running in parallel and not connected, to the scenes in which the characters are making decisions and impacting play. The GM bounces back and forth between the Unscene and the player scenes, possibly connecting them thematically, but always staying focused on painting a more vivid picture of the game setting (in the case of The Between, Victorian London). The result, ideally, is a cinematic experience—like watching a compelling, well-crafted episode of television unfold in real time.

The structure of the Unscene is highly prescriptive and always the same. It consists of a scene-setting paragraph that describes a location or event in the life of the city of London at night. This is followed by four question prompts, that provide an opportunity for the players to build on the scene by adding additional narrative. The players’ goals during the Unscene are to bring evocative details about the city to life, so the prompts should provide an opportunity for creativity and atmosphere. (Mechanically, it also serves as an in-game timer and pacing mechanism, but that is less significant that the evocative contributions to tone and atmosphere).

It’s absolutely brilliant, it works at the table, and I find is a creative constraint that deeply assists in structuring my game prep. I’ve been trying to incorporate Unscenes in my Blades in the Dark campaign, where the setting and structure of the game aligns closely with the intention of the game.

The Unscene demonstrates that uniquely Jason Cordova quality of game mechanics – that they are recognisably derived from specific genre conventions from the medium of television. More precisely, his games draw deeply from the structure and rhythms of 1980s and 1990s family and genre TV, with ensemble casts (and special guest stars), serialised storytelling, and narrative devices like montages and flashbacks.

Cordova’s mechanics deliberately mirror these tropes. His games often incorporate techniques like cut scenes, episode recaps, and montages, which feel immediately familiar to players steeped in the shared media landscape of the late 20th century. This shared cultural reference point functions as a kind of lingua franca, allowing players to intuitively understand pacing, tone shifts, and emotional beats without the need for over-explanation.

The Unscene, in particular, draws on the tradition of the side plot: the moment when the focus shifts away from the main characters to something happening elsewhere: atmospheric, symbolic, or tangentially related. While it doesn’t involve the player characters directly, the Unscene serves to move the story forward in thematic and tonal terms. It provides texture, breath, and a sense of a larger world in motion, creating a cinematic experience that elevates the overall game narrative and echoes the storytelling logic of television.

How to write an unscene?

The video below is a recording of a writer’s workshop, hosted by Jason Cordova, for the “Shrouded London” writing contest, where people were invited to submit Unscenes and locations for The Between, with the chance to have those published as part of the larger kickstarter campaign. Highly recommended – it is full of good writing advice generally, but in particular gives important insights into the way that Cordova approaches game writing and GMing.

Here’s a handful of takeaways from the workshop, with specific application to writing Unscenes, but generally important reflections for collaborative storytelling and gaming storycraft generally:

• By design, the Unscene is not connected by plot or characters to the players’ immediate storylines, but it echoes them in tone, theme, and sensory detail. Mechanically, narratively, and aesthetically, the Unscene acts as a cinematic device—deepening atmosphere, sharpening pacing, and enriching the game’s psychological and symbolic depth.
• By shifting the camera lens away from the PCs, the Unscene offers glimpses into the broader setting itself —its unseen lives, private rituals, and in the case of The Between, its penny dreadfuls and gothic horrors. These scenes flesh out the setting as a living, breathing environment and elevating it to the level of a character in its own right.
• Several common formats work especially well: Follow a Character (e.g., a midwife hurrying to a birth in the slums), a montage (mudlarkers scavenging along the Thames), a Story Within a Story (a play, a cryptic tarot reading, a traveling puppet show). Study the structure of the published Unscenes, which have an identifiable tone, pacing, and structure.
• Even if the Unscene is fragmented or montage-based, ensure there is a progression—a quiet arc. The final prompt should feel conclusive: a death, a departure, the first light of dawn. This signals closure and frames the phase with narrative weight.
• The most powerful function of the Unscene, and the hardest to execute when writing, is the way it creates symbolic resonance. Cordova refers to moments as Echoes in the Night where an image, sound, gesture appears later in a player scene that connects the Unscene with the game proper. For example, a character in the Unscene might cough blood into a porcelain bowl; later, a hunter notices red camellias arranged in a similar bowl. These parallels weave connections between disparate stories and reinforcing the game’s themes and tone.
• Use the Unscene to reinforce or foreshadow themes developing in the player-character storylines, and trust the table to engage with subtlety. Unscenes are often more felt than understood.

The Unscene is an imminently adaptable mechanic in TTRPG design, a formal narrative structure that elevates group storytelling from procedural to cinematic storytelling experience. Players are given permission to think like filmmakers and poets, and by decentering the protagonists and shifting focus to the periphery, the Unscene widens the narrative lens, creating a haunting, living world.

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