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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkM" data-source="post: 8763095" data-attributes="member: 7025557">I forgot to finish this summary, and now the details fade a bit. We had some investigative time where each player paired up with a NPC, and that went fairly well for both investigations and some final character development. After that played out, they were gathered by for the big reveal. This was my biggest DM error of the adventure. I was very enamored of the mystery trope (or Scooby Doo) scene where all of the mysteries are finally revealed. My players had things mostly worked out and had narrowed the suspects to the actual murderer and another person or two, when Delkovich launched into his soliloquy of secrets about each guest illustrating their motives but then ultimately showing why they couldn't have been the killer. My thought was that this added detail (mostly confirming what the players had already figured out, but connecting all the dots) would be interesting, but I think most of my players felt "why did we do all this investigating if an NPC was going to just give us all the answers at the end anyway." If I did it again, I'd somehow encourage the player to do the detective reveal and then maybe have multiple NPCs add color, or perhaps have Delkovich do it but get something more obviously wrong so that the players could jump in and correct/challenge him. The fights at the end were fund and challenging, as first the players battled those who wanted to frame them and then the true killer. I beefed up the murderer to make him a bit more legendary and scary, but even though they were low on resources the players still took him down and captured him.I may have already said this, but my other piece of advice to future DMs is to somehow hint or signal that it might be a long night early in the adventure. My players assumed they would have at least one sleep in the middle, so a lot of them burned their spell slots or once/day abilities very early in the adventure on relatively minor things, then were just stuck doing cantrips the rest of the long adventure. Maybe there's a lesson somewhere there about making assumptions about when they will long rest, but it made big battles in the second half of the adventure less fun for them.  Overall I loved this adventure, and I think with some better DM execution at the end it would be a home run.</blockquote>

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