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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 6638623" data-attributes="member: 12377">MAJOR SPOILERS!(And I'm not going to put it in a spoiler tag because you shouldn't be reading this thread if you don't want spoilers.)I ran it just a few days ago, and it worked great. My players are connoisseurs of mystery adventures, too, and like to pick apart adventure structure and figure out what makes a good mystery -- we take turns DMing and have all run mysteries for each other. The consensus is that this was a very engaging, classic, and well-done frame-job.What Worked Well:NPC personalities. Thaelond was a snob. Muruin was a demanding hard-nose, right from the start. Kendrin was a simpering coward, with a gambling problem. I introduced these NPCs before the mystery started. Strong, quirky personalities make people suspect in mysteries; a boring NPC is assumed to be irrelevant. (Like Thaelond's valet, Inconsequentialus, who accompanied him to Waterdeep and thus did not appear in the adventure.)Zhentarim intrigue. The players pretty much knew to expect shenanigans; in fact their first instinct was that Thaelond had set them up to be the hatchet-men taking down Muruin.Splitting up the party. Two PCs went to interrogate Kendrin about the note, and the other two ran for the strong-room, guessing (correctly) that it would be hit first.Extra clues. I threw in a lot of extra clues: - The pay chest in the strongroom had 500gp stolen from it, and the players were able to figure this out by looking at Thaelond's ledger back in his office. (The adventure says he has it with him and shows it when he gets back, but I let them find it right away because they looked.) This is relevant because only 300gp shows up in Muruin's room (the other 200gp is hidden in the attic). - Muruin's valet, Liilah, confirmed that Muruin had last worn her dress shirt a few weeks ago. The money and keys were hidden in Muruin's room under the wardrobe where the dress shirt was kept (so who-ever hid them could have also pulled a few buttons). - The handwriting on the notes stashed on Grendo and Kendrin looked dwarven. It matched Inglor's handwriting on the skeleton-key checkout sheet in Thaelond's office. - Dust on Inglor's boots -- a PC aced a Wisdom (Perception) check, so I made this up on the spot. It matched the dust in the attic, and the boots matched the footprints. Inglor also had a blue thread from Muruin's dress shirt in his pocket (it fell off a button). - Wax on the inside of the keyhole in Thaelond's office indicated someone had made a "mold" to reproduce a key (explaining how Inglor had gotten in and out of the office without anyone noticing him out there picking the lock -- he just opened the door with his replica key). This didn't help the PCs solve the puzzle, but it could have, if they had followed up on it earlier.What Could Have Worked Better:Introduce Inglor earlier. The players were getting the idea that Muruin had been framed, but they only pegged Inglor when they did handwriting analysis (a clue I made up, not in the adventure). It's a little bit lame for the real criminal to show up so late in the story.If I were introducing Inglor earlier, I'd also throw in a couple more NPC suspects with him. A good mystery adventure should give several suspects who get weeded out systematically. Each initially needs evidence both for and against them; but as clues mount, more evidence comes out pointing to the real culprit, and evidence pointing elsewhere gets explained away.Insight checks. I let the players make Wisdom (Insight) checks to detect if someone was lying. In hindsight, this makes a mystery adventure pretty damn easy. You can quickly eliminate suspects by asking, "Did you do it?" and then getting like a 19 on your Insight check.From now on I'm going to do it like this: You can roll Wisdom (Insight) vs. Charisma (Deception) to detect someone's real emotions: nervous, frightened, evasive, defensive, or having some emotional reaction that's not quite right (like they are too happy and trying to hide it). If you win by 10 or more, you detect whether or not they are lying. If someone is telling the truth and earnest in their emotions, it's a flat DC to detect lies, equal to 20 minus their Charisma (Persuasion) modifier. This leaves open the possibility of detecting lies, but makes it realistically hard, and not a good way to eliminate suspects -- it still may be useful for interrogating witnesses.Player motivation. At first the PCs were not sure they cared about any of this. They were only being paid 100gp to watch the Inn, and they didn't really see a problem with letting Muruin take the fall, since they didn't like her. But actually her being a hard-ass, and wanting to cut off Kendrin's head, led them to conclude that solving this mystery would spare innocent lives. By the end, they actually liked Muruin, who has decided she trusts the PCs and owes them a big favor.XP:I awarded 200 XP for clearing Muruin's name, 400 XP for convicting Inglor, and 10 XP for recovering the stolen gold, as described here: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?442930-Princes-of-the-Apocalypse-Quest-XP" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?442930-Princes-of-the-Apocalypse-Quest-XP</a>That's 610 XP per PC, so 2,440 XP altogether for my party of four 4th-level PCs. For a 4th-level party, that's roughly 2 1/2 "medium" encounter's worth of XP. Since this little mystery took about two hours to play through, that seems about right.</blockquote>

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