I recently wrote this on Discord and felt that it could have a more permanent home here, and maybe spark a discussion. I’m eventually going to blog about it, when I feel like I’ve worked more out:
After writing a couple of mysteries that players seem to have had fun with, multiple times, I’d say the easy way to run a mystery is to:
-
Make it something that’s ongoing, so not a post facto “Sherlock Holmes deduces from the facts what must have happened” mystery, but more of a “the serial killer is still killing” mystery.
-
Ensure that all of the ongoing mystery stuff is happening in a place where your PCs are going to be interacting already. So not The ABC Murders, where people are being killed all around the greater London area, but more like a village mystery (or apartment building mystery), where the PCs will learn about what’s going on and might run into it as they go about their investigations and other events.
All of that will naturally give a GM the structure needed to place things where they make sense, so you don’t have to screw up your head to figure out where to put clues. You just put stuff where it would make sense, and the PCs will likely stumble into it.
This is basically the “action mystery” that Dwiz mentions or what Jesse Burneko talks about in Unchained Mysteries. I think those two points boil down what you need.
1 Like
That does feel like a way to keep “mystery” lined up better with an archetypal adventuring party’s skills and interests
1 Like
I think it also means that you don’t need to worry about the Three-Clue Rule or anything like that, because things come up naturally.
I think this is kind of how I run mysteries now that I think about it. The two mystery games I am familiar with are Brindlewood Bay and Broken Tales. The first doesn’t feel as pertinent to the discussion because of the quantum clues and non-canonical whodunnit.
My approach to running the second feels kind of like what you describe. In the scenario, there is usually some sort of backstory, but there are also NPCs that have agendas and make things happen. I don’t usually think of clues beforehand beyond what the scenario suggests. Because in the moment, there are clues that just make sense to be there. I’ll have to look at those resources you mention. Maybe they could help me refine this method.
1 Like
Dwiz’s blogpost about it is here: A Knight at the Opera: Action Mysteries
Jesse Burneko’s way of describing it is in his book, Unchained Mysteries.
I do think I’ve narrowed things down to how what they describe works for me, but you may understand them differently, and I’d love to hear about that.
Sean McCoy wrote a short but neat article about investigation RPGs a while back. I highly recommend reading that if you want to explore mystery design!