Campaign Pitch: Revealing the Secrets of the Mystery in the Most Literal Way

You’re planning a game that revolves around a central mystery. It could be the location of the lost treasure, or the motives of the supernatural creatures hidden from mundane society, or the agenda of the aliens in first contact. Try approaching it like this. 

Create a document that lays out the answer to the whole mystery. It may be similar to your own GM notes, but more elaborate. It can include pictures and diagrams. Think of it like a spoiler-filled after-action report. It can be written in-voice, in diegetic language, but that’s not mandatory. It’s particularly easy to do diegeticly in a modern game like Delta Green, where solving a mystery could be expected to create a paper trail, but it could work in any setting.

Give the players access to the document… but hide literally everything with black redaction bars. This is obviously easiest to do electronically, although you could print out copies for at-the-table reference. When the game starts, the players can tell how long the document is, where the headers are, and how many images and diagrams there are, but that’s about it. They can’t see any of the actual text. Be sure to give them view-and-comment privileges, but not the ability to edit.

As the game proceeds, remove the redaction bars from anything that has been discovered in-game. This serves a few purposes. It formally acknowledges that they have found an undisputed truth of the mystery. It provides a common reference for important information that has already been established. And (for players who care about the distinction) it provides fixed information that was established before the GM knew what the players were going to do; in other words, it “proves” that the answer to the mystery is a fixed target, and not something that the GM is making up in response to player action.

But this particular application of redaction does something else. It lets the players see the shape and size of what they don't know. If the entire section under the “Abandoned Mine” heading is revealed, the players can reasonably assume there’s nothing else they need to know about the Abandoned Mine. But if there’s a single sentence still blacked out… well, that should make the players curious. If the players find a map or a photograph, and the GM un-redacts the map in the document, but not the text around it, that raises some interesting questions, right?

They could infer a lot from the organization and the “known unknowns” of what they cannot yet see. Imagine if a section of the revealed text included a hyperlink to an as-yet unrevealed section. Or if one section said “DANGER: Do not engage with [person/entity/object/location] without reviewing [other section that is still redacted]. 

This is probably enough to center the game’s mystery, but there’s room to make it more complex. The GM could tie revealing text to a mechanic, like experience and leveling up. Or give the players an in-game currency to “pay” to reveal certain parts of the text. It could even be a minigame where the players could choose a word and reveal every instance of that word throughout the document, creating a kind of game show word puzzle where they are rewarded for predicting what words might show up a lot, or in particularly important places.

Depending on the desired level of diegesis, it’s up to the group to determine if the characters literally have the document in question or not. At its most literal, it could be classified files or deciphered lore. For a less direct treatment, one could imagine the document as a historical account of the information associated with the adventure. But it’s also OK if it is purely a meta construct. As long as it piques the characters interest in the mystery, it’s doing its job.