Last time, I shared how to create a mystery one-shot. This time, I want to show you how to craft a longer mystery campaign that keeps the drama alive between sessions. The trick here is to have essentially a series of smaller, connected mysteries. Some people will want to make the whole campaign one holistic mystery, and I'm sure that there are elegant ways to do that. But for most groups, you'll be better served with an episodic framework, one that allows them to move from discovery to discovery, moving from a piece of information through its development of later information.
Let's start from the ground up. I'll use the mystery campaign I'm running now as an example. The basics: our three-person party is enlisted by the guards in a medium-sized city to help solve a murder. As they investigate the murder, they begin to realize that the motive for the murder stretches wider than just the identity of the victim. We're moving into session four soon, and at this point, the party knows that a local inventor's inventory has been raided by the same person who committed the murder. (I'll provide more detail when I recount the individual sessions later on.) I have an end goal in mind, but I thought I would keep those developments a secret for now for two reasons: (1) I want to show how to move from the simple beginning to the complex ending, and (2) I don't want my players to read here and find out the ending to the campaign. So with that in mind, let's talk about the unique challenges of a mystery campaign.
One beginning hurdle I faced as a DM with this premise was that one of my players had suggested a mechanic wherein the players have secrets they wish to keep from one another. I like this idea; it makes the mystery a two-headed issue in that the players must immerse themselves in information to progress, but must also keep information about themselves close to the chest. I developed a mechanic for this--for every session the players keep their secrets, they get a small stat boost. For completing the first session with their secrets intact, they each received a permanent +1 Investigation bonus, which can be a considerable boon in a mystery campaign where Investigation is one of the main skills they use to progress through the story. (We're running this adventure in 5e, but you can easily adapt this to whatever edition you're playing.) I offered the same boost for the second session, and will offer their choice of a +1 in either Persuasion or Insight at the completion of the third session. This mechanic allows the players to increase their efficacy incrementally without relying on spaced-out level ups. It also gives them incentive to roleplay keeping their secrets. The result of that has been that each character is suspicious of the rest of the party while being paranoid about their own secrets, which I think contributes well to the mystery genre.
So what kinds of secrets are we talking about here? Again, I don't want to share them directly lest they be discovered here by my players, but I'll summarize them this way: "My character committed a serious crime in the past that still haunts them." It's good pulpy detective stuff all around, which helps the players get into the mystery of it all. So far, the players have simply kept themselves from getting too close to the other detectives, but by the end of the third session, they've begun to get more personal and address each other as people, and not just teammates. It's only a matter of time until the group inevitably gets closer and closer to each other's secrets.
But that isn't enough for me. I want additional pressure on their secrets. So I created a rival detective NPC who would be interested in investigating the party in their own right. As a joke about Fallout 4's Nick Valentine, I named this detective Dirk St. Patrick, and to soften the edge of him as a saboteur to the party's progress, I gave him the silly habit of doing film noir narration out loud while he's with people. "The smell of booze on my breath wasn't as powerful as my sense these detectives had something to hide," he would say as though no one could hear him, "but it was close." In my experience, adding some humor to an antagonist can be really helpful for dramatic energy manipulation. If St. Patrick is monologuing in a ridiculous fashion for a minute and then asks some cutting question about the party's pasts, the players are taken a little bit more off-guard by the dramatic question. So this detective NPC puts pressure on the player's secrets even when they're allowing each other the space to keep those secrets.
So what about the actual mystery? Our first session was structured so that the first piece of information the group had to gather was a description of the murderer. The party had to question people to see if anyone had seen the murder occur. Using the three clue rule again, I created three NPCs who had witnessed the murder with the stipulation that the party needed to confirm any information they discovered with a second source. But of course the party will always think of things the DM does not. For instance, I designed the three NPCs who had information for the party, but one of the players thought to use "Speak with Plants" to interrogate a dandelion in the alleyway where the murder had been committed. I had in no way accounted for this. This is how, even though I'm asking the party for two accounts to confirm information, the three clue rule still applied. I can assume they'll come up with something I wouldn't, which means there are at least four possibilities for those two accounts--still allowing them to miss two options and still progress.
The form of these clues is relatively easy to write. Each witness should have slightly different information than the last, but generally keep the same story going. Here are the clues for the first session:
Tavern keeper (Baldwin Weams, 29 human) testifies that a purple turban-wearing figure fled the alleyway this morning. He saw on the way to work.
Night watch (Darla Oakfort, 67 halfling) saw a purple turban-wearing figure run from the direction of the alley with blood on their hands.
Cat burglar (Maeve Bobbin Torat Wekall, 122 gnome) was on top of the building by the alley and saw the entire attack: the turban-wearing figure (Maeve is colorblind) pulled out a dagger and stabbed Hildy to death. Maeve knew Hildy and is sad that she has passed. Maeve can be noticed about to break into someone’s second story.
As it played out, the first account was satisfied by the players speaking to the dandelion (whose name was Derek). So when the players interrogated Baldwin Weams immediately afterward, I observed that the investigation was moving very quickly--they would have collected both clues within a short amount of time, too soon to wrap up a session. So Weams no longer witnessed the suspect fleeing, but has heard that a cat burglar saw something. He refers the party to Maeve, who was now sitting in Weams' bar. This increased the length of the session, but also added some intrigue. Rather than simply telling her story, Maeve required some coaxing from the party. This made the party feel like they had to struggle to get ahead, which is the mark of a good, challenging story. But however you go about pacing your adventure, it's important to remember that each possible path to finding the next clue should be within reach of your players. There are a lot of variables involved in moving from clue to clue, and you want your players to have options. When writing clues, think about how you might reasonably find witnesses and plan for those, but be ready for your players to think of something else.
When the party gathered its confirmed accounts of the suspect, they returned to the guard who had assigned them the case and reported their findings. I had the guard direct them to investigate the next step of the mystery: responding to a report that someone matching the description of the suspect was seen fleeing from a nearby intersection where an inventor's laboratory had been broken into. You'll notice the mystery moves in small increments: simply a description being one session and another being based around tracking their previous movements. This may seem counter-intuitive. You might assume that players want to make large, sweeping advances in the story. But mystery stories don't work that way. Mysteries take small information and magnify it into more meaningful pieces of information. It also help keep party from derailing accidentally when one mistaken supposition takes them far in the wrong direction.
Some people probably reject the concept of simply collecting the same story from each witness. Why not give conflicting stories that the players have to sort through to get to the bottom of things? I refer you back to the article I linked to last time, which argues against red herrings. A piece of misinformation seems just as attractive to players as a piece of genuine information, and they'll chase it endlessly. As an example, I had placed a dropped coinpurse on the roof near the alley where the murder victim was found. I intended it to have been dropped by Maeve the cat burglar; this way, the party would know someone was nearby and potentially saw the murder. But even two sessions later, the party was interrogating the found owner of the coinpurse as though he had committed the murder. I didn't mean this as a red herring (I wanted it to be supporting evidence more than anything), but it functioned as a red herring. You want your story to keep the players moving steadily forward, not taking them in the wrong direction. So keep the information consistent; just make the information a challenge to get to.
Finally, a little bit of background and one more DM choice that influences how the mystery progresses. Our party is made up of some characters who've never met each other: we have Beor, a dwarven werebear barbarian/druid who's been living alone in the woods for decades, visiting town for supplies; Ais, a tiefling rogue/wizard tinkerer who deals with racism in the city on a daily basis; and Montana, a half-orc bard country singer and private investigator who travels the countryside performing. To start, I provided each a bit of individualized introduction to the town and directed them all into the same part of town. Once assembled, a guard called them over and, because they were outsiders and therefore could not be trusted, insisted that they finish investigating the murder which had occurred in the nearby alley, which the guards were spread too thin to do themselves. And here's the twist: in order to keep this party (with the same players as the Eastweald campaign, who love to do solo adventuring) together, the guard cast a complex spell on the group. Should any of the party be more than 50 feet apart from one another, all three fall immediately unconscious. This creates interesting narrative developments, like when the group strayed too far from one another and were knocked out inside the guard headquarters, or when the party later stayed strategically close while still trying to perform tasks separately. But it also keeps the emphasis on party dynamics rather than on individual side quests. I thought this would be important for two reasons: (1) the mystery is the focus of the story this way; the adventurers are united by trying to free themselves of each other, so they need to cooperate, and (2) it places additional pressure on the secret-keeping element of the campaign. It's harder to keep people from finding out about your dark past when you can't get more than a few steps away from them. These effects are worth the challenge of keeping everyone close, and it definitely helps keep the narrative moving along.
So in review, the mystery should be incremental; keep the party moving towards the next step only when you can be sure that they're moving together and with the right information. I'll share more soon on how I've designed the overall plot and how the party is working through it. But next time is a tool I find very useful for DMing: a list of NPCs to drop into any situation. Need a random person to inhabit for whatever reason? Use one of these people and forget having to come up with all that information on the spot. See you next time.
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