Small Crimes started, marrow told us, as a joke about how every city in a fantasy story seems to have exactly one crime boss and no middle management. "I wanted to play someone who was villainous the way a small business is villainous. Petty, local, mostly just trying to make rent."
The scenario opens with your character picking a nemesis, a gimmick, and — this is the part players didn't expect — a tailor. "The tailor was supposed to be one line of flavor text. I wrote it as a joke about costume budgets for a two-bit villain, and then people kept coming back to it every session. Eventually the storyteller just ran with it, and now half the playthroughs I've seen have an entire relationship with their tailor that I never planned."
That's the part marrow keeps coming back to when we asked what surprised them most about building for MythSmith rather than a branching-dialogue tool: the tailor isn't a scripted character. There's no tailor quest line sitting in a file somewhere. The story card just pins down that the tailor exists and has opinions about your costume choices, and the AI has run with that detail in wildly different directions depending on who's playing.
"With a normal RPG maker, if I want the tailor subplot to matter, I have to write it — every branch, every outcome. Here I wrote one card and then just watched what happened. Some players ended up owing the tailor money. One got married to them. I didn't plan either of those."
Small Crimes is live on the community shelf now. If you play it, marrow's one request: keep the tailor.
