Mysteries in the Fuzzy Distance

I’m a start-small, prep-what-you-need, play-to-find-out DM. Minimize plot, lore, and history. The best stuff doesn’t come from elaborate DM plans unfolding before the players’ eyes, but rather the unexpected alchemy of the game sessions themselves.

So I had a challenge to confront when my players selected, as our next game, Strangers on a Train, which includes in its premise a central mystery – the characters have all awoken without memories on a moving locomotive. An implicit (but not obligatory) goal in the game is to figure out how and why this has happened.

A mystery, by its nature, suggests that there is an answer that can be learned. Things that are set up early should pay off later. The mystery has to be real and it has to be discoverable.

Unless we are running a game like Brindlewood Bay, which explicitly presupposes that the mystery is quantum, we want the mystery to be a fixed, concrete thing. The DM should not just listen to the players’ theories in the last session and pick whichever sounds coolest.

So how do we build a fixed mystery without constraining our prep and locking ourselves out of useful player input? I have attempted to do it through compartmentalization into three categories. 

The Big Far-Off Ideas 

The big ideas are fixed. These are the truths of the mystery. They are like Mount Everest, or the moon -- always visible, clearly important, but far away, and not well understood and truly known until after a difficult journey of discovery.

Close and In-Focus Details

The details of the present scenario are fixed. These are the NPCs the PCs meet, the clues they find, the places they visit. These are the ordinary things we create during prep for each session. We constantly keep the big ideas in mind as we create them. 

The Fuzzy Distance

Imagine the space between an object at hand and a distant mountain, across an open plain or desert. The middle distance is fuzzy and indistinct. We know even less about what is there than either what is close at hand, or what is on that distant mountain.

This intentional fuzziness means we can find a lot of different paths between the close details and the big ideas. We can incorporate player ideas. We can respond organically to developments in play. We don’t need to decide until it comes into focus.

As the players unravel the mystery, more and more fuzzy details will gradually come into focus and become fixed details. The fuzzy distance can never conflict with or change the Big Ideas. As the campaign nears an end, the fuzzy distance will disappear completely, as the players confront or understand the big ideas at the end of their journey.