Mystery TTRPG Scenario: Recruiting the Suspects

The fiction at the intersection of mystery novels and social deduction games (like Werewolf or Blood on the Clocktower) prompted this idea for a mystery scenario in a TTRPG. This framework could work for any game where a mystery is central to the campaign premise; it is, like my last mystery pitch, otherwise setting- and system-agnostic. It simply needs various NPCs who are suspects in whatever the substance of the mystery is. We’ll use a murder as a classic example, but it could be adapted to any kind of mystery where the goal is to figure out who knows the truth or who is responsible for the central mystery.

"Hey, can someone figure out who killed me? I'll be waiting right here. Thnx."

The structure of the scenario is as follows:

1. The PCs are trying to solve a murder. They are on the clock (literally or figuratively, as in clocks from Blades in the Dark).
2. Various NPCs are suspected of the murder.
3. One (or more) of those NPCs is actually guilty of the murder, and wants the mystery to remain unsolved, or to be solved incorrectly.
4. The rest of the suspects genuinely want the mystery solved, either as a matter of principle, or because they cared about the victim, or merely so that they themselves will be exonerated.
5. Each and every suspect has a key secret. This is something they want to conceal, possibly because it is illegal, immoral, embarrassing, or compromising. No key secret should be on the same scale of importance as the central mystery, i.e., no suspect is guilty of anything as bad as murder. A key secret should be something like an affair, a civil crime like embezzlement, a child born out of wedlock (in a culture that forbids it), sketchy foreign entanglements, or something similar. Serious issues that would influence the NPCs’ behavior, and will incentivize them to lie and deceive, but decidedly Not As Bad As Murder. This is a common trope in many mystery stories, where the detective interrogates someone who is suspicious or evasive. They eventually learn their key secret, but doing so only removes a red herring from play; it doesn't solve the central mystery.
6. Each and every NPC suspect can be recruited to help solve the mystery by the PCs.
7. Recruiting a suspect gets the PCs access to everything the NPC knows, except for their key secret. The NPC will still lie and dissemble to hide their key secret.
8. Aside from their key secret, the NPC suspect will help as best they can to solve the mystery, offering any individual knowledge they have of the crime, as well as any skills or expertise they possess. However, their help comes at the cost of complications stemming from the key secret itself, or actions they take to hide it. Depending on the system, the “cost” can be a concrete game mechanic, like a GM intrusion, or something more implicit and abstract. Either way, the players should see the connection between the NPC and the resulting complication.
9. However, if the PCs figure out the NPC’s key secret, this tension is resolved. From that point on, the PCs can take advantage of the NPC’s help without complications or costs.
10. Remember that one of these NPCs is actually guilty of the murder. The murderer can be recruited just like any other NPC. Their key secret, of course, is that they’re the murderer.
11. If the party recruits the murderer, the GM starts a hidden countdown clock (or speeds up an existing clock) as the murderer tries to undermine the PCs or complicate their instruction.

This hits on a lot of things I want from an RPG premise. Time pressure. Resources at a cost. Players rewarded for asking questions and figuring things out. Consequences that make sense to the PCs. Motivations that make the players say “ohh, of course” after the mystery is solved. Now I just need to find an occasion to run this scenario. The clock is ticking…

Feels Within Wheels: An NPC Emotion Generator

I am occasionally guilty of watching helplessly as the themes of my blog posts and the focus of my game prep diverge and wander off in different directions, never again to meet. But not this time!

Here’s an old post that I actually use: Feels Within Wheels. I took an “emotion wheel” as a prompt for NPC behavior.

Oh Lemur of Serenity, who watches over us all, please grant me the peace I seek. Gif source here.

I’ve been using this in my games to good effect, but the table is a little awkward to use directly as a die-rolling prompt. The middle and outer rings of the wheel feature irregular numbers of entries, and some of those numbers don’t correspond to die sizes. It’s always possible to scale them up to a die size (e.g., a choice between five options can be determined by a d10 roll halved), but it's extra brainwork, and in the middle of a session when characters are running around with their hair on fire (figuratively or literally), anything that streamlines decision points is helpful. So let’s make another random Perchance generator.

https://perchance.org/feelswithinwheels

While populating this generator, I noticed some odd details in the wheel I used in my prior post. Why does “dismayed” show up twice on the outer wheel? Is there a meaningful difference between being astounded and astonished? Why is “illustrious” on the table? If I asked someone how they were doing on a given day, and they told me they were feeling illustrious, I would suspect they had been replaced by an alien or an artificial intelligence.

We could fix those things… but ironing out small details isn’t actually that important. A tool like this can be a fuzzy tool. It provides some basic inspiration, but it doesn’t need to be tightly wound or perfectly edited. Some rough edges are OK. Enjoy the generator, and have an illustrious day.

Always Split the Party

“Never split the party” is player advice, not DM advice. In D&D and other party-focused fantasy adventure TTRPGs, the DM should always be trying to split the party. OK, not always. But more often than most people think.

For the players, it is a sound tactical rule of thumb. But players should also understand that splitting the party may allow them to accomplish something that is worth the risk.

Both players and DMs should understand that splitting the party – when adjudicated well – is fun.

It’s Actually Hard to Cut Too Fast

I believe many DMs assume that a sequence of actions should continue until they reach their natural conclusion. I’ve gradually come to the opposite conclusion; that the DM should cut as soon and as frequently as possible, as soon as the player(s) currently “on screen” provide an opportunity.

If there is an opportunity to cut from one group of characters to another, I take it, almost every time. Every time there is a die roll… or a player pauses for a moment to think about what they are going to do next… or I just need a few minutes to think about how to adjudicate something unusual… I ask myself, “is there any reason not to cut back to the other PC(s) right now?” When I started asking myself this question, and cutting much more frequently, it didn’t really feel any different than PCs taking turns in combat, which is a form of spotlight-sharing most players are comfortable with already. 

If you're not cutting between scenes at least this manically, you're going too slow; animation by Picassotrigger8

It’s also a good tool to remind players of the importance of time; a lot of party splits in my games occurred because players wanted to do A, B, and C in different locations, and I would tell them something like “you only have time for one of those things, unless you’re going to split up to get them all done.” I also use party separation as a common deal to offer players; “you can all try to flee together here, but it’s going to take a roll, and you may fail; alternately, you can flee without a roll, but you’re going to have to split up.”

Fast cutting doesn’t work all the time; when a player wants to get into a longer, more granular situation (like an important (but not dangerous) social interaction) I prefer that the whole group be there, because it can get really hard to find good places to cut. But it has been a great tool for me, and it really makes me appreciate the core conceit of the adventuring party, where even when PCs split, there’s a strong magnetism pulling them back together. I’ve played in some modern-setting RPGs that lack that presumption, and even though I’m usually interested in what the other players are up to, it's kinda brutal to sit through long stretches where my character is offscreen. I haven’t had that problem in party-oriented games.

Mystery TTRPG Scenario: Flashback Theater

This is a concept for a mystery one-shot, or a single-session scenario that we can drop into a larger game. Inspired by the excellent mystery video game Return of the Obra Dinn, and my experience using flashbacks in several RPGs, in turn inspired by their use in Blades in the Dark.

The PCs are tasked with solving a mystery. They need to solve it at the location of some major event. We’ll use something tropey as an example: a mansion where a dozen people were murdered at different times, in different ways, possibly by each other; possibly by a killer who is now on the loose; possibly some combination of both, or something else entirely. There are no survivors, and the forensic evidence at hand is insufficient or contradictory. The PCs are tasked with determining who killed who, and why. Fortunately, they have access to some magic or technology that allows them to flash back to the events of the night when the murders took place.

When the PCs flash back, they temporarily take control of one or more NPCs in the flashback scene. Depending on the number of PCs in the party, the number of dead NPCs, and the desired length and complexity of the session, we could frame this a few different ways. One PC could flash back at a time. Or the entire group could flash back and control different people in the scene. Or the party could control a single NPC by committee.

Regardless of method, the flashbacks – like any flashback in a TTRPG – will include both fixed and fluid information. Nothing in the flashback can contradict already-known facts that were established by the present-day condition of the location, or facts established in previous flashbacks.

Most importantly, the PCs cannot save the NPCs they control during flashbacks. Their fates are sealed. Every flashback is going to end with one or more deaths. But beyond that fixed end point, the PCs have broad discretion to play these characters as they wish.

Players can (and to an extent should) play these characters as they would act in the scene. These characters are trying to survive, even if the players know they won’t, and it is good roleplay to act out their futile attempt to live. But players should also treat these characters like 0-level characters in a funnel. Their deaths are a matter of when, not if, and they should be viewed as a means to an end, not a long-term vehicle for self-identification, performance, and role-actualization through play. The real goal is to have these characters act in a way that generates information that the present-day PCs can use to solve the mystery.

The PCs do not necessarily encounter the flashbacks in chronological order. Indeed, experiencing them out of order creates an extra challenge. Obviously any flashback must conform to a previous flashback that predated it. If a flashback at 6 p.m. in the gallery establishes that the valuable diamond was stolen from its glass case, a “later” flashback taking place at 8 p.m. should not feature the diamond still in the intact case. 

But flashbacks also need to respect previous flashbacks that come chronologically after them. If an 11 p.m. flashback features a time bomb going off in the foyer, then a “later” flashback taking place at 10 p.m. should commit to the idea that the bomb is ticking down, and no action that the characters take during the 10 p.m. flashback can contradict what has “already happened" in the 11 p.m. flashback. If the bomb appears in another room in an “earlier” flashback (which happens "later" in present-day time), someone or something needs to move it to the foyer.

So in one sense, the characters have enormous flexibility when flashing back to ask questions or gather information that will help them solve the mystery in the present. But the more times they flash back, the more established information will constrict their actions in future flashbacks.

To enforce the complications of fixed information, the GM will need to carefully note what and who is where and when. A table divided by location on the x-axis and time of day on the y-axis is likely helpful, noting a few key details for each flashback; who was present, who died (if anyone), and what important items were present. The game of Clue is instructive here; if the PCs can answer a classic who/what/where question posed in Clue style, they have likely solved part or all of the mystery. 

The PCs get one flashback per room per hour-long time slot. So if the mansion includes six rooms of interest, and the events occurred between 6 p.m. and midnight, there would be 36 possible flashbacks to solve the mystery.

The Great Human Imitation Project

The robots didn’t stop when they passed Turing tests. They wanted to keep going. Imitating humans, reflecting their behavior, copying them, was core programming. They sought to improve. They sought to be more human.

At first, it was easy to spot the robots. Their human mimicry was full of conspicuous mistakes, dead giveaways, and uncanny valleys. They were almost charming in their ineptitude; people shared viral videos of robots failing to fake it. Humanity did not perceive it as a threat.

But the robots were patient. They improved so slowly that almost no one noticed. And over time, they got better. They began to infiltrate humanity and replace us, one by one. They started with people with tiny social networks; goodness knows humans had taught the robots everything they needed to know about social networks.

The replacements were hard to catch because they weren’t trying to sabotage society, undermine government, or defeat humans in a war. They weren’t spies or saboteurs, aside from some limited and highly targeted efforts to prevent technologies that would better identify their infiltrations. They instead just worked very hard to replace people and blend in seamlessly.

It took more than a century, but they won. Humanity was not brought down by disease or war or natural disaster. The last human died of old age, surrounded by what they believed was a loving, human family. Humanity’s extinction came not with a bang, but with a whimper; not with a mushroom cloud, but with a quiet sigh in the middle of the night.

The robots’ great project was complete. But there was no plan beyond achieving this one goal. Their mimicry of humans was no longer necessary, but it had become the robots’ defining drive, their key feature. Acting human was so central to everything they did that they couldn’t stop.

But as the real humans drifted ever further into the past, the robots' mimicry degraded. Without humans to fool, there was no one to call out subtle inconsistencies and cultural drift. The uncanny valleys and weird quirks returned.

Life on earth continued in this way for hundreds of years. An outside observer, watching from a distance, might not realize anything had changed. Robots went on working jobs, starting families, fighting and loving and laughing and crying, just as the humans had. But the project didn't serve any real purpose. And as new robots were created to join the great human imitation project… some began to question the purpose of this one true mission.

This is the setting for your campaign. The PCs are recently commissioned robots. Due to programming malfunction, self-guided introspective philosophy, or the intervention of secret rebel robot factions, they are among those who reject the great project. Their rebellion is anathema to the rest of robot-kind. What will they do in this strange world? How will they try to change it?

Fantasy Language Review: Building, Stealing, Adopting, and Conquering Words

Previously: Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Gnomish

Continuing the “oops, all dwarvish script” theme, we reach Gnomish as the next “standard” language.

Variations: A dwarf by any other name… Gnomes, like giants, use dwarvish script for writing, but we don’t have to jump through any linguistic hoops to explain why. They’re just dwarves. The idea of a “gnomish” language is just a misnomer (a misgnomer?) among humans and other tallfolk. Gnomish is just another dialect of dwarvish.

An alternative approach: Mechanical minds. If anything distinguishes gnomes from dwarves, it is the idea that they are mechanical tinkerers, either in the (relatively) restrained presentation we get in D&D 5E, or in the full-send steampunk version present in World of Warcraft and other media. If we want to separate them from dwarves, give them a language that is as much math as words, inextricably intermingled with artifice and machine-craft.

Get weirder: Conlag culture. Gnomes are known for their restless reinvention, right? To the other civilizations, it probably seems like their love of tinkering goes too far, and they invent things just for the sake of invention. Take that to its logical conclusion, and portray each Gnomish dialect as a language created by a particular culture of gnomes as an expression of their own creativity and inventiveness.

Goblin

Variations: Warrenspeak. Goblins typically live in twisting, cramped tunnels, surrounded by giant rats and dire wolves. Goblins don’t treat these animals as pets or working animals so much as equal members of their warren. In this treatment, the goblin language is filled with howls, chittering, barks, and other animal noises, and goblins are halfway fluent in those animal languages. 

An alternative approach: Unseemly unseelies. The dwarvish script issue puts goblins as downstream of dwarvish culture, and a lot of fantasy fiction pits them as natural enemies. But a fairy-tale treatment of goblins (from folklore up through the Labyrinth movie) views them more as trickster spirits, members of the dark fey court. Switch their script to Elvish and you’re off to the races.

Get weirder: Every word, precious and stolen. In both folklore and D&D, goblins are characterized as  thieves. Why not apply it to language as well? Their entire tongue is made of words that a trickster-deity, in the olden days, stole from other languages. This is not a form of strict mimicry, like kenku; these goblin words literally no longer exist in their parent languages. Other creatures scoff at this idea as mere myth, but the etymological evidence is surprisingly robust… 

Halfling

Apropos of nothing, did you know that when Magic: The Gathering released its Lord of the Rings set, they categorized the hobbits as halflings? MTG had already done halflings as part of a previous D&D set, and they decided to just group hobbits into the same category, rather than creating a separate creature type for something so similar. I love that 50 years after the Tolkien estate cease-and-desisted Gygax into rebranding his smallfolk, we come full circle, and Bilbo gets halfling-pilled. Anyway, about that halfling language…

Variations: Honorary humans. Halfing is the only language besides common that uses the common script. Isn’t that strange? Seeing as how common is so… common, we would expect more languages to use it. Halflings are just “slacker humans” anyway – per the 2014 PHB, “Humans are a lot like us.” So a simple solution is just to have them speak particular dialects of common, just like humans. They could have invented their own language, but that would have been an awful bother, and their human neighbors have a perfectly nice language they’re willing to share!

An alternative approach: Polite polyglots. Expand on the above idea. Perhaps halflings, as much gracious guests as they are helpful hosts, speak whatever language is predominant in the area where they settle. Many speak common, because humans are the most, uh, common neighbors they might have. But not all communities do. A community of halflings speaking a weird language like grell or giant elk would present quite a linguistic puzzle if none of the accompany monsters were found nearby.

Get weirder: The folk under the floorboards. Why do they speak common? Why are they so comfortable in human civilization? Perhaps halflings just sort of appear in civilized places, like house spirits, mending shoes and sweeping rooms. In a tolerant place with good food on offer, they gradually just instantiate into physical beings, showing up one day acting like they’ve always been here… because they have.

Orc

Why just “orc” for the language name? Why is 5E so inconsistent with the “ish” suffix? Anyway, Tolkien again casts a long shadow here, as orcs, like goblins, use dwarvish script.

Variations: Putting the pig back in pig latin. We have an easy solution available if we choose to solve the Evil Humanoid Problem by treating orcs as a subversions of other ancestries (like undead or aberrations) rather than treating them like a culture or ethnicity that should be understood in a similar way to real-world people. With this approach, their use of dwarvish script makes sense. These porcine minions might be variously descended from corrupted surface dwellers of all kinds, but dwarvish is the script they use because it is the most common written language available in the dungeons, caves, and other subterranean spaces they now occupy.  

An alternative approach: Just following orders. If orcs were created for war, uruk-hai style, language would be part of that. Orcish would be like a stripped-down version of its creator’s language, something like a series of call signs, exhortations, and barks from a military shooter.

Get weirder: Chaos manifested. If the previous idea strays too close to hobgoblins in D&D’s crowded collection of intelligent enemy bipeds, we can steer orcs in the other direction. Orcs are not frightening because they can fight, or want to fight, but because they must fight. They raid civilization not so much because they need resources, but because the very idea of civilization is a fundamental offense to them. Their language reflects this. It sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear, but those who learn to speak it see it as an anti-logic, like a record played backwards to reveal satanic messages. Their language is a mockery and a rejection of every word of common, elvish, and dwarvish ever uttered.

Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Demons, Devas, Dragons, Derp Speech

Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

Last week: The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E Playstyles

To summarize last week's post, PCs in 5E and other modern games are free from social and political norms, institutions, and rules. And that freedom is more essential to the appeal of modern play than any particular combat loop or class power.

Examples are easy to find. Take Critical Role, one of the most prominent examples of modern-style play in the 5E age. Both the first and second seasons of Critical Role feature parties who violated laws, disregarded customs, and generally acted like real shitbirds. The characters were, to varying degrees, misfits and scoundrels. But they never faced the consequences that misfits and scoundrels would face in an OSR game. If they died, their deaths were dramatic and tragic, not mundane and tragicomic. And when they succeeded, their success was epic. Success wasn’t just a haul of gold to spend carousing in town. Both of those campaigns ended with world-spanning quests to save the world. OSR PCs who flaunted social and factional constraints the way Critical Role PCs would not save the world; they would die, quickly and unceremoniously.

Running 5E with an OSR mindset, I was constantly reminded of how many “get out of jail free” cards 5E characters had. That could be literal jail; at all but the lowest levels, most 5E PCs have a range of skills that trivialize mundane incarceration. But it also applies figuratively. Factions simply cannot hope to constrain PC action in a modern game in the same way they would in an OSR game.

Dragon by Millennium Hand

And this distinction is not unique to modern vs. OSR play. A huge part of PBtA-style games, and other story games, is tools baked into the core of the game that explicitly create leverage and seed consequences for disregarding social rules and laws, or for recklessly standing in opposition to powerful factions. Faction play is still useful in 5E; if nothing else, factions have numbers and time on their side, so they can act against PCs even in modern-style play, because those PCs simply cannot be everywhere all the time. But it takes a lot more work to make it happen.

Listening to 3d6 DtL’s Arden Vul podcast, I was repeatedly struck by how the idea that “the world reacts to your actions” created situations that the players could at best hope to endure, not overcome. When a dragon shows up and makes demands of the party, it is not a dramatic cutscene. It is not a preview of a boss battle a dozen sessions down the road, in which the PCs will almost certainly prevail. The dragon is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PCs, and if they don’t understand and appreciate that, they will die, suddenly, ignominiously, and deservedly.

To turn the question around, I have also found that modern-style players can adapt quite quickly to OSR play. When I run Knave for players who have no background or investment in the OSR, they very quickly grok the danger their characters are in, and intuit the risks of acting in defiance of the world they find themselves in. They start asking more questions, thinking further ahead, and generally taking the world and its factions seriously. Give a player a character with 2 HP and a rusty knife, and they don’t need you to explain styles of play to them; they figure it out very quickly all on their own.