Murder Mystery in Urban Setting - HELP! Ideas!

[Jürgen Hubert]

Build an interesting villain with clear (at least from your point of view) motivations and resources. When you can imagine him well enough to know how he would act in new situations without having to think about it for too long, your work is done.

Ideally, the whole investigation shouldn't be a simple gathering of clues. Clues work well in mystery novels when the author already knows who did it and how his protagonist will ferret out the guilty party.

Your typical group of PCs, on the other hand, will ignore the most blatant clues, while creating the most complex conspiracy theories. I say you can build on that.

Ideally, the whole affair should be a game of wits between the PCs and the villain. If the PCs get to close to the truth, the villain will do his best to throw them off the track, or maybe even discredit him. In the end, this will only make the PCs hate him more, which will make the final confrontation more memorable. On the other hand, if the PCs just stumble around without getting anywhere, the villain might become overconfident and make mistakes - maybe kill one person too many.

Ideally, the PCs should get enough pieces of the puzzle in the end to make some kind of sense of the whole affair, even if they don't understand everything. If they manage to catch the villain, they will have their satisfaction. On the other hand, if the villain escapes, they should be able to realize with hindsight that this was their own fault for being negligent and not pursuing the right paths and not asking the right questions. In this case, you have a recurring villain the PCs can hunt until the ends of the Earth...

In any case, keep the basic adventure structure flexible to adjust it to the PCs' actions...

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

For ideas concerning murder mysteries, if you can find it (most likely on EBay), locate an old 1e module called "The Assassin's Knot."

Actually, "The Assassin's Knot" has been a free download on the WotC site for some time now, it's just difficult to find:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/dx20001229b

It's a pretty good module, especially considering that it was one of the first to leave the dungeon and actually try to inject a plot into the adventure. The mystery may be a bit simplistic for experienced players or characters, so you may want to tweak things a bit. This should be done for all prepackaged modules anyhow, I can only think of one or two that I've run as-is.

I agree with a lot of Wayne's suggestions- in particular, the PCs should definately have a vested interest in the murder. If they're just sitting around the tavern, someone comes in and announces the murder of a person they don't know, they're likely to just shrug and go back to their drinks.

As for divination spells- you won't be able to do this until just before the module, but be sure you know what the PCs have access to so that you can be prepared. There's a fine line to tread between giving them enough information to work with, and restricting things so that they don't solve the entire plot just by casting a commune. The best way to do this have the murder or conspirators have access to some masking magics, just enough to give the pcs more clues but still make them work for it. It needn't be all that complex, really- simple spells like misdirection can block a whole lot of detection magics....

 

[Zappo]

Hey, you're lucky! I've just run one of those, and it was good, though not for the faint of heart.

Here's the cast:
Fritz, an eccentric and sex-crazed noble. His family tolerates him as long as he stays out of sight and doesn't get into serious trouble.
Eric, Fritz's serious brother.
Elyna, a young lesbian girl, forced to prostitution. She dreams of being a man.
An Unnamed Assassin, female.

Fritz's corpse is found in a grove outside town. Divination reveals that An Unnamed Assassin killed him, but is otherwise fairly confused. Movent is unknown. What's worse, Resurrection attempts are consistently failing!
Eric contacts the PCs. He wants them to find out why his brother was murdered, how come that he can't get Fritz resurrected, and to fix the things.
The PCs eventually find the Unnamed Assassin, and get told that she was paid a large sum of money by a common prostitute to seduce and kill Fritz. She hasn't done anything particular that would prevent resurrection.

So what's the knot?
Fritz - who maybe is something more than eccentric - wanted to try a woman's body for a while, and so, after finding a willing woman, he has hired a psionicist to use Mind Switch multiple times to get his soul inside Elyna's body and vice versa. Problem is, he enjoyed it a bit too much and decided to get his (her?) old body killed so that he would retain the new one for good. So that's why Raise Dead doesn't work and the divinations are ambiguous - Fritz isn't really dead!

There are a few loose ends which you can iron out according to your campaign (for example, IMC Fritz had other motivations too), and you need a bit more complexity to make it into a long adventure AND a bit more fleshing out to make the characters interesting. Unfortunately, I didn't write the whole thing down, but that's the skeleton.

 

[hammymchamham]

Just a friendly bump, in case anyone has any more ideas, and so I can find this thread later tonight when I write some of this down