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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8921583" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Writing a murder mystery adventure is rather different from writing a murder mystery story. Because, in a story, you're in control of the detective, and thus the truth will come out however you intend it--the trick is to make the truth obvious once the lines have been connected and nearly invisible when they haven't.For an adventure, you need to do several things very differently:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">There need to be more clues than the players actually "need" in order to solve the case. The rule of three is useful here: for every clue the adventurers truly do actually need, provide (at least) three alternate paths to reach it, or three distinct sources, etc. That way it's pretty unlikely that they'll miss all three chances, and if they do, well, that's probably to some extent actually their responsibility.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You must actually entice the adventurers to want to solve the mystery. Most detectives are brought onto a case because detecting is what they do, or because they love the craft, or because they're hired/paid (e.g. actual police detectives.) Adventurers, not so much. Either you need to pull on an intrinsic motive for at least one of the PCs, or you need to provide a compelling extrinsic motive (political favor, big payoff, shiny loot, aid with something they really need help with, etc.) such that they'll stick to it and not peel off if they lose interest or things get tough.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The final verdict needs to be open to the possibility of failure/wrong conclusions. This is probably the single biggest divergence from the mystery-novel format. The players need to have the ability to be wrong, or else it can all feel really perfunctory and wasteful. Being able to tolerate and respond to flawed or even outright wrong deductions is critical, and yet all the pieces need to be there to find if the players are perceptive and methodical.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You have to prepare lots and lots of sensory details and descriptions of scenes, but you want to avoid just putting a signpost on everything the players need to know. This is possibly the hardest part of all of this, because the previous three things are mostly just a matter of "do more/better prep work." In order to pull off a "give lots of details but don't give the game away" scenario, you have to be really careful about how you prime your players and what information you let slip easily vs what takes active investigation. Further, you have to consider both the conclusions that the players can easily make, and what the character would know/conclude. E.g., the Bard in our party is explicitly a healer with both formal and informal anatomy experience, played by someone with a physical anthropology degree. As a result, I know that both player and character can draw conclusions from knowing that (for example) a body has developed rigor mortis (which must mean it is at least so-and-so hours old, but no more than yadda-yadda hours.)</li> </ol>Sometimes, it can be useful to consider things in terms of scenes, e.g. a time for interviewing suspects, for examining the crime scene, a time for examining the body, a time for a momentous reveal, etc.</blockquote>

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