Big Mysteries, Small Mysteries PLUS!

This image composites two sleuths, one and the other, both from Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay, against an original background by Mike
I’ve been fortunate enough to write a number of very well-regarded articles on how to run mysteries in RPGs.
There was
- The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs (even WOTC linked to this one),
- The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, which builds on the earlier article,
- Delving Deeper Into Mystery, which revisits and expands on techniques and plot structures for creating and resolving satisfactory Mystery adventures,
- Ask The GMs: Penetrating the veil of mystery deals with the fundamental issue of writer’s block when it comes to mystery plotlines, but also has some general advice and links to more.
- Boundaries Of The Fantastic, which has some good general advice and expands the principles of ‘The Butler Did It’ to more specifically cover Fantasy games;
- Taking everyman skills to the next level: The Absence of an Alibi takes apart a truism of mysteries that is often overlooked – if you are going to commit a crime, you are probably going to try to appear to have an alibi. That alibi is often the greatest point of weakness in the whole crime, and breaking it down can be tantamount to proof of guilt. Logically, that means that anyone who doesn’t have an alibi is the least likely to commit a premeditated crime, and the stronger a purported alibi, the more suspicious it should be.
- Of, perhaps, less immediate value will be
Ghosts Of Blogs Past: An Air Of Mystery – Using an RPG to write mystery fiction.
Today (referring to when this article was first drafted), seemingly from nowhere, a stray thought suggested another, and that’s what today’s article is going to deliver.
Big Mysteries
I was reading something the other day about an extremely corrupt politician getting caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, and how he had brought his political party into disrepute, potentially costing them the next election or even more, and how some members of that party hated him even more than the members of the opposition did because they took what he had done so personally.
At the same time, this politician was refusing to lie down and go quietly, and the balance of voting was such that his party leadership didn’t really want him to go
And this morning, I thought to myself, it’s a good thing no-one killed him because there would be so many suspects that it might be almost impossible to get a guilty verdict.
We’re talking enemies and friends and victims and fruitcakes, all with good reason to want this joker six feet under. We could be dealing with a lone gunman or a massive conspiracy.
How would you go about investigating such a major case?
Means, Motive, And Opportunity
Detectives like to work from Motive because its the best way of identifying suspects and immediately points the investigation of those suspects in a direction that could lead to their quick exoneration through the other two factors. Starting with motive quickly narrows the focus of the investigation – at least, it does under normal circumstances.
With such a large suspect pool, that approach won’t work.
The only choice, then, is to focus on one of the other elements of guilt. The nature of the assault and the inferred means is probably as good a way of winnowing through the options as any, but this is far less precise than motive; there is always the possibility of someone acquiring the means through coincidence, accident, or opportunity, and none of those can be ruled out.
That means that you need to also approach the problem from the standpoint of opportunity, looking for where means and opportunity intersect.
Once you have a narrowed pool of suspects, you can look for corroborating evidence and circumstantial indicators that support the motive and how the suspect reacted to that motive, and so close in on the killer.
Be prepared for the fact that some people will never be convinced, one way or the other, by this evidence. It’s entirely possible that the case will never be solved to an evidentiary standard that would satisfy a court of law.
But the real value of such a sweeping mystery lies in the exposure and exposition of the background, and the level of nuance that can be imparted to the social and political fault lines it contains. This is a big-picture, broad-sweeping scenario, and it requires a commensurate effort in game prep.
That also makes it an ideal start-of-campaign adventure.
The Small Mystery
But that brought to mind a number of episodes of Columbo, and the way each shone a spotlight on a single small aspect of the world that he inhabited.
You start with the victim, and their interests and the social circles in which they moved as a result, including the immediate family with whom he was in contact; that is your initial suspect pool.
From this starting point, you seek to eliminate those suspects using one or more of the three elements. That means getting to know the social circle in question, what binds them together and what they do together, and the role that the deceased played in that society.
In some ways, this requires even more prep than the big mystery. Depiction of the society in question can’t be superficial, or the whole plot will ring hollow; so you need to do your research and understand that social circle clearly and in depth. Through exemplars and ‘guide characters’, often themselves suspects, you then need to communicate that research.
The fun comes when you contrast the game world with the real one within which you have conducted your research – how do those differences manifest in the activities of the social circle?
This makes the small mystery a doorway into the consequences of the (possibly) hidden history and assumptions that underpin the game world. A magnifying glass with a singularly useful focus, as it were.
The smaller mystery
Murder, is – pretty much by definition – an extremely intensely-focussed mystery. The consequences are so extreme that a substantial passion is required to justify the act, and often those strong feelings are one of the first clues as to the guilty party.
Take that passion away, take that crime away, and you are left with smaller passions and motives, and ‘smaller’ crimes. Fraud, theft, deception, embezzlement…
These mysteries are almost always about relationships – be it between people, between employer and employee, family members, or whatever – and about some form of betrayal of that relationship.
Even a seemingly random theft puts pressure on all the relationships of those affected as they come under suspicion of involvement; even if that suspicion proves unfounded, the consequences of that pressure will remain.
Value
The smaller mystery is ideal for taking an even smaller element of society and shining a spotlight on it. Instead of factories of type X or businesses of type Y, the focus is on this specific example and on the relationships of the individuals who comprise it.
For example, let’s say we’re talking about a payroll robbery. The first thing the GM needs to do is make it distinctive enough to attract the attention of the PCs (and, more importantly, the players).
“Two men, calling each other ‘H’ and ‘C’ respectively, wearing ski masks, robbed the payroll of Dwight Pemberton and Co. as it was being delivered to the personnel office. Despite the payroll consisting of more than 15,000 Lucarnos, the thieves only took 1, 424 Lucarnos – and ‘H’ handed back 68 sublucarnos in change.”
So L 1423.32 were stolen, when the thieves could have taken 15,000? And one even went to the effort of giving change to reach that exact amount? How bizarre – and right away, you have the audience hooked.
From that beginning, you then need to sustain the interest. There are two methods of doing so: one is to pile improbability on unlikelihood, perpetuating the strange nature of the crime; this rarely works well, and needs to be handled expertly to succeed. It’s a pity, then, that this is often the first resort.
The alternative is to work hard at making the characters encountered interesting and compelling. This erects a framework around the mystery that holds it together when additional equally-bizarre information comes to light about the original crime.
Distinctive characterization, eccentricities, strong opinions, angels and demons and those who seem a mixture of both – those are what the GM should focus on when dealing with a Smaller Mystery (once the hook is in place, of course).
From the GM’s perspective, the benefit of the smallest mysteries is the way it takes the big picture and zooms in to show the impact on specific individuals. It’s one thing to say that “there has been a shift in the political winds, and the city has been quietly gearing up for war” – and quite another to actually make that political ‘reality’ come to life.
The Inflating Mystery
Finally, let’s turn our attention to a fourth class of mystery that we GMs can rarely do without. This category are mysteries that start small and grow to reveal themselves as but the tip of an enormous iceberg.
The prototypical example of this is the Watergate scandal. A break-in at the political headquarters of the opposition party as the country heads toward an election is undoubtedly news, but it’s not very important news. The editor assigns the story to a couple of relatively junior reporters because if that’s all their is to it, it’s not worth the time of anyone more seasoned. They write their story and that’s the end of it.
But wait, there’s an added human-interest dimension – it seems the would-be burgers were fairly inept, so a followup for a laugh or two seems worth the effort. And then there comes to light an additional political dimension when it is revealed that the apparent motivation was the planting of microphones in order to spy on that opposition.
And so it goes, revelation leading to denial leading to cover-up leading to investigation leading to hearings leading to recordings and supreme court hearings and the Senate at odds with the White House and – two years later, after the election itself is history – to the shock resignation of a President.
The story just kept getting bigger, better, and juicier, until the ultimate head was rolled because of it..And those junior reporters went from unknowns to two of the most prominent journalists on the planet – everyone (at the time) knew who Woodward and Burnstein were.
So much for the archetype. This sort of mystery starts small and grows, usually involving either a scandal, or a conspiracy, or both. They tend to have long fuses, taking a long time to explode, and that’s the GM’s first problem right there – games don’t have the playing time to take all that long, it’s usually necessary to compress such time spans.
Technique
One of the best approaches is for much of the early (slow) action to have happened off-camera, possibly completely unnoticed by the PCs. They then become one of the multitudes who get caught up in the plot as the mystery grows.
1. Someone [NPC] sees something they shouldn’t, at work. They think nothing of it, simply route it to where it was supposed to go in the first place.
2. That person starts having strange encounters with high-level personnel, stopping by to talk about, well nothing, really – but eventually getting around to asking about the something and how much of it the sacrificial lamb saw.
3. Accidents and strange events begin to occur around the sacrificial lamb, enough to scare them, The authorities discount any reports they may make, because a record of treatments for paranoid delusions has mysteriously appeared in the sacrificial lamb’s medical history.
4. The sacrificial lamb goes into hiding, and there’s a minor flurry of interest because of the accounts that had been earlier dismissed as paranoia.
5. Internal investigations reveal that someone had embezzled a non-trivial amount (but not enough to seriously damage the company). As the person who has vanished, suspicion naturally falls on the sacrificial lamb, whose reputation is now being completely trashed. Maybe they had better reason to flee than paranoid delusions, maybe that was just a cover story.
6. Someone tracks down the sacrificial lamb. There’s an attempt or two on their life. Some of the missing money is found where they were hiding out.
7. A friend of a friend of the sacrificial lamb asks the PCs for help. They are only moderately curious – until the friend of a friend is killed under suspicious circumstances
8+: And so on.
Analysis
Accidental discovery (1) leads to investigation (2) and an attempt to downplay the significance. When that doesn’t work because it’s clumsily done, (3) it leads to fear, and an initial attempt to damage the credibility of the discoverer while clumsy attempts are made to remove the discoverer. Things escalate in (4), leading to a more expert cover-up / distraction (5) and more serious attempts to silence the discoverer (6) and destroy any credibility they might have. There’s no smoke without fire, and (7) fills the room the PCs are in with (metaphoric) smoke, and bring about a new escalation in seriousness. This backstory can be told – with details – in only a few minutes, but there is clearly something rotten in the state of Denmark, as the saying goes.
More than simply exposing or examining some facet of the game society in which the PCs exist, this casts shadows (where there may have been none) and ultimately instigates change within that society. It can thrust the PCs into the spotlight of public awareness or provide more limited exposure as other people become the public face of the consequent investigation.
Another example of this is The Pelican Brief. But that’s a relatively slow build-up – in a movie, you can take that time. For a more suitable example for the pacing of a game version, there’s an episode of Scorpion that comes to mind, in which the ex-wife of their government handler is the sacrificial lamb in a plot fairly reminiscent of what I’ve described above (Season 1, episode 9, “Rogue Element”).
Mysteries, Big and Small
Because they can be difficult to do well, GMs sometimes avoid mystery plotlines. In doing so, they fail to see the value that can be added to a campaign using a mystery as a vehicle.
In the Star Trek: Next Generation episode, “Clues, {Season 4, Episode 14), the Enterprise crew awaken after an event that has a serious but trivial explanation. But clues begin to accumulate that all is not as it seems, creating a mystery – and, as Captain Picard later explains, human beings often find a mystery to be irresistible. We love to find, manufacture, or discover explanations for such events, be they big, small, or even trivial.
Your players are human beings, too – and just as susceptible to this allure. Harness it, and put it to work in the service of your campaigns – or, if you’re doing so already, use this article to sharpen your focus and improve your techniques.
The right mystery is out there, somewhere, waiting to illuminate some aspect or element of your campaign world while thrusting your players deep into immersion within your invented reality!
And now for something completely unrelated: A contest!
Evil Genius games are inviting the gaming community to participate in a contest relating to a planned reboot of Urban Arcana.
Participants are to pitch a magic setting for the Everyday Heroes core rules system, using 100 words* to explore “how magic exists in the modern world, the role of goodly races in society, and the state of monsters in this new world”.
*
The documents detailing the contest list a 200-word submission guideline. I’m not sure which one is correct, but 200 seems a lot better suited to the breadth of concept required than 100.
I can add that the 100-word limit comes from an early announcement, and the official web-page for the contest uses the 200-word limit.
So I would feel safe in advising you to do so, too.
UPDATE: I have been informed by Dave of Evil Genius that the initial limit was 100 but they decided to increase it before the contest began. So the 200-word limit is golden.
The winning pitch will be developed into a fully realized setting that will be included in the Everyday Arcana supplement, with the contest winner receiving full pay and credit for their contributions (my emphasis).
If you want to break into the ranks of the published gaming professionals, this could be your big break (but don’t expect to get rich off it alone, or even earn enough to give up your day job – it’s a starting point, not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow).
Don’t send your entries to me and Don’t post them as comments below – I’m not judging this contest / opportunity, I’m just telling you about it!
Submissions are open now, and will close on April 20th, 2023.
Everyday Heroes, the core
In February 2022, just over a year ago, at the conclusion of the main text of Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, I promoted the Kickstarter campaign for the core rules around which this contest is to be oriented. This should serve as a quick introduction to the context and system core. It’s your starting point, in other words, if you’ve never read the rules themselves.
And, of course, it has a link to that Kickstarter page, even though the project came to fruition long ago, which will deepen your knowledge of the core concepts embedded within.
Urban Arcana, the setting
The Urban Arcana setting is “a magical world set in modern times, complete with the origin of magic and the fate of elder races such as elves, dwarves, and halflings.
“Imagine a world where magic is real, and the impossible becomes possible. But how did this magic come into existence? Was it a gift from the gods, or the result of a long-forgotten experiment that went awry? Your proposal should delve into the origins of magic and how it has shaped the world we know today, as well as explore its effects on the modern world and its people.
“The elder races, with their centuries-old wisdom and knowledge, have their own story to tell. How have they adapted to a world that has changed beyond recognition, and what role do they play in the present day? Your proposal should explore the struggles and triumphs of these ancient beings and their relationship with the world they now live in.”
Even with 200 words, there’s barely enough space to posit a general concept. Submissions are going to have to be lean and efficient.
Semi-finals
Ten semi-finalists will be invited to write a 1,000-word proposal expanding on their pitch. The semi-finalists will be announced on May 5, 2023.
These 1,000 word submissions will be accepted from May 8th to June 9th, at midnight EST.
Semi-finalists will be paid for this submission.
Finalists
From the submitted semi-finalists, three finalists will be chosen. These will be announced on June 26th, 2023.
These will then be judged in a public vote, which will run from June 26th through to Midnight EST of July 14th.
Winner!
The winner will be announced on August 3rd, 2023. That winner will be hired by Evil Genius to transform their 1,000 word submission into a 50,000-word history of the magical world of Everyday Heroes.
Restrictions, Terms, and Conditions
Anyone who wants to enter should read Section 9 of Evil Genius Gaming’s Terms and Conditions page.
Most of it should be obvious, but it needs to be pointed out anyway.
Content
The intention is for this to be a serious reboot, with no constraints deriving from older versions. “We are looking for someone with an inspiration for what direction to take the world in. We don’t have many preconceptions other than the general notion of fantasy content in a modern setting.”
Your Rivals
So far, over 300 interested parties have made contact with Evil Genius. So there will be plenty of competition. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
It’s bad if you get dispirited, decide that you have no chance of winning, and give up without even trying.
It’s good if this spurs you on, knowing that if you do get the nod as a semi-finalist, your creation will have earned serious credibility – and some of that glory will be reflected back onto you.
Campaign Mastery’s Advice on your best chance of success
Some of this is going to be mutually contradictory. Make of it what you will, this is strictly my personal opinions.
You have to impress whoever is judging the contest at Evil Genius Games. That means your entry has to be original, interesting, innovative, and easily-grasped – not necessarily in that order. It has to fit the overall core concepts of the Everyday Heroes system.
You also have to impress, and appeal to, and interest, the voting public. That means it has to be original, interesting, innovative, enticing, distinctive, and possessing of vision and scope, while still having traditional values and scope (and you thought the first part was hard!) – again, not necessarily in that order.
On top of that, you will need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with minimal wasted verbiage (which probably puts me out of the running, ha ha). Conveying color will be vital, but never at the expense of clarity – or even delaying that clarity.
Don’t waste a single word of your 200 words. Don’t waste a single word of your 1,000 words, if you get that far!
Very, very few will be able to tick all of those boxes. That means that most of the rival submissions won’t do so, either.
Finally, inconsistencies and logical holes can always be papered over – but only if you get the chance. Better by far to weed these out before anyone else gets to read word one of your concept. Not that you have a lot of words to waste on them to start with!
More Information
Evil Genius will make more details available for those that sign up to get info.
To do so, head for this web page and scroll down to the big red button. Or you can click on the image at the start of this announcement.
And yes, I have an idea for an entry of my own…
The best of luck to anyone who enters! Again, though:
Don’t send your entries to me and Don’t post them as comments below!
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