Mystery Campaigns

I read a short article a while back about tips for running a mystery campaign, and it inspired me to try my hand at it. Here's a link: the Three Clue Rule. It's worth reading the article itself, but the long and short of it is that your players cannot be counted on to find exactly what you're hoping they'll find, so you need to create possible routes for them to get there without dead-ending them. This is great advice. Any veteran GM knows that players will never act in accordance with how you expect or want them to, so it's vital to ensure that there are multiple paths to success. Hence the three clue rule: give them three options to progress from point A to point B, and they will probably find one of them. This does mean more work for the GM, but that's the price of a story which follows mystery conventions, allows player freedom, and includes a strong enough narrative to be interesting as a mystery. 

The linked article includes some examples of clues, and I like their examples, but I think they can be a little open to interpretation. When I designed my first mystery one-shot for a party made up of my brother, sister, and mom, I was aware that at least one of my players was playing for the very first time. I wanted to pad the adventure a bit with some safety rails to ensure that there were no moments where the party is floundering to find direction and I would have to perform some kind of GM intervention to get them on track again. So I opted for a compromise: rather than clues that lead to information about the mystery, I created clues that lead to different locations. I also included some flavor information that contributed to the mystery overall; I'll give illustrating examples below. But the key for me was keeping the adventure moving at all times. 

I adopted the three clue rule for each location the players arrived at. When they show up to a scene, there would be three distinct clues, each leading to a different location. I wanted five total locations in the one-shot, which I predicted pretty accurately would be an appropriate number of scenes for a one-shot. The result was a Choose Your Own Adventure-style outline, which I made more navigable by drafting the material in a Word document and using the headings feature to be able to click easily between branches of the story. (If you format a bit of text as a heading, there will be a link on the left side of the screen that allows you to jump to it; this allows you to move between clues and resulting scenes with a single click rather than scanning and scrolling.) Using this method, I had three beginning clues and 60 possible paths. That probably sounds daunting, but I used a shortcut: any clue that wasn't found or followed in a scene appears in a similar form later on, so I only had to create about 8 total clues which could then be reordered to reach the final scene. 

For example, the opening scene of the one-shot was that the player characters (all female) awoke in the middle of the night to find all the male members of their small town in comas. The three clues they could find were (1) a trail of magical energy leading out of town to a clearing in the woods, (2) a burned book with a stamp from the local library, and (3) the detail that each of the men in comas had a star-and-moon symbol on their eyes. Clue 1 leads the party out to the clearing, clue 2 leads them to the library, and clue 3 leads them to a nearby mausoleum which also has the star-and-moon symbol on it. So assuming that the party adopts clue 1 and heads to the clearing, they have the potential to find three clues: (1) a circle of plants with magic runes on them, with arrows within the runes pointing in the direction of a nearby shrine, (2) a group of animals, all male, in comas with star-and-moon symbols on their eyes, and (3) a burned book with the stamp of the local library on it. As you can see, the two options the players did not notice/pursue reappear as options. For the players, this will either be a second chance to notice a clue, or a deepening suspicion of the reappearing clue. In either case, we were able to move from scene to scene without writing 60 total clues; we just have to be crafty about how we use our clues. 

Other clues used in this adventure include tracks leading from one scene to another; a collection of burnt herbs, all of which can be found in a grove nearby; a collection of bound letters between the Big Bad (a witch named Anisha the Merciless) and the mayor of a nearby town, leading to Anisha's house; a dead half-elven woman with a map leading to Anisha's house; and missing pages from a spellbook which discuss sleep spells, with the antidote being jasmine, which grows nearby. Each of these clues includes information about the content of the mystery--as you can tell from the summary of clues, Anisha has emerged from her resting place in a mausoleum and cast a broad sleep spell on men from a book she found at the library; an adventurer tried to stop her but failed, and the party must collect herbs and jasmine to remedy the problem. 

When we played this adventure, it went very much according to plan. My family followed clues, went through the possible paths towards discovering the truth, and ultimately confronted Anisha at her home in the woods. It was perhaps the most prepared I have been for a single D&D session (up until the Cats one-shot last week), and it paid off. All I really had to do was create my outline of steps beforehand, then improvise details to keep the momentum going in between scenes. The mystery format is helpful that way: the movement between clues and the finale are pretty much set in stone, so connective tissue is all you need to GM. My normal style is to rely on improvisation so that players can be free to explore whatever routes they choose, but a mystery is closed in nature, so you can write and follow steps without it seeming forced. 

It's worth noting that I didn't really rely much on player rolls in this one-shot. If the players collectively fail all the rolls to notice each of the three clues in a scene, they're basically stuck. I don't find that narratively interesting or very satisfying to play, so I made the DCs for each roll relatively low (never more than 15, usually closer to 12), and I allowed players to find clues based on their descriptions of their actions rather than via rolling. In effect, this was much more a narrative game than a strategic game (which shouldn't be a surprise, since my emphasis is always storytelling over strategy). And for people new to D&D (like my mom, for instance), it was a great way to gently try out the TRPG world without being overwhelmed by rules and mechanics. I think mysteries lend themselves to this kind of play, so use these tips to easily introduce people to gaming. 

It's also worth noting that the one-shot ended up becoming the first session in a longer campaign. I wrote a more open-ended mystery for the second session, this one about a man who used Anisha's ability to cast spells across an entire area to lower the intelligence of people in the PC's town. For the third session, the players had decided to take the man back to his home town for his community to punish him, only to find that most of them had magically-lowered intelligence and that he basically ruled the town. As you can see, the net has grown wider and wider; I started with a closely-scripted mystery, moved into a looser mystery, and then into the players being more self-directed. This is a natural progression of campaigns without emphasized stories, and in the fourth session, I plan to introduce a more overarching but still optional storyline about how Anisha and the man from the second and third sessions have been corrupted by an ancient artifact which they must recover before a nearby ruler gets it. 

I'm also running a more focused mystery campaign currently, which begins with the murder of an innocent and grows in scope until the whole city is affected. I'll talk more about that next time, along with campaign notes and how to keep a mystery campaign moving even when the individual clues are connected to a much larger framework than the story I've described here. 

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