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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bawylie" data-source="post: 7138609" data-attributes="member: 6776133">Hi!Some questions:1.) What are the PCs hired to do, exactly?2.) Clues are evidence of facts or leads to facts. What facts do your clues point to?3.) What happens if your players fail to do whatever they've been hired to do? Will additional evidence surface? More murders? You should already know the answers to the Big 6 questions. Who, what, where, when, why, & how.Some of these answers must be given to the players so that the can answer the others. For example if they know who was murdered, where, and when, that provides several leads that can suggest solutions for What Why & How. For any answer you're NOT giving the players, you have to leave a clue that either provides an answer, a part of an answer, or a lead to an answer. For instance, if Who is part of the mystery, witnesses or bystanders could say what family they were from or what neighborhood they lived in. That's a good lead. The injuries on the bodies indicate the How answer. And here's the thing. The clues and evidence aren't hidden. So the players shouldn't miss them. If Who is part of the job, then questioning witnesses or bystanders should be sufficient to get that clue. Bystanders should want to come forward with this info. If you think about this like a dungeon, a clue that leads somewhere is basically like a hallway that heads west (or wherever). You don't need 3 different indications that the hallway goes westward - you just need to identify the hall to the players as an option and let them decide to go down that hall or not. So you never, ever, need more that 1 Clue per lead or per fact. The problem you might have is if your clues are insufficiently descriptive. "A putrid stench of decay" could suggest undead as easily as trash, but something like, "the sickly sweet smell of hot garbage," is a description that doesn't suggest undead. Combine that stench with buzzing flies, and that's a stronger lead toward trash vs graveyard. Anyway try to think of it like a dungeon. Every scene is a room. Every clue is a door to some other room or some treasure that helps complete the dungeon. One or two secret doors are fine, and that's good reward for thorough investigations. Some fights are fine. So are some dead ends. The trick to twists and complications is that they can't outnumber the actually useful stuff. Too many twists, secrets, or dead ends, and players won't know how to navigate. The dungeon is done when the players either do the job they were hired to do, or give up/fail to complete the job. Good luck! It sounds like a fun mystery!-Brad</blockquote>

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