Dugong
2014-01-04, 12:53 AM
Hi everyone,
I’ve been reading some Jack Reacher novels and I’ve noticed that its structure is very similar to a d&d adventure and I’m considering of making a murder mystery adventure with that basic structure. For those who don’t know Jack Reacher the basic structure of the books seems to be:
-Main character is a wandering traveller who gets caught up in a conspiracy in a small town.
-Plot hook is a murder that draws the main character in by either circumstantial evidence indicating that they’re is guilty (hence they tries to prove their innocence) or decides to help local law enforcement.
-After a few minor skirmishes with some thugs and getting some evidence from secondary characters the plot is eventually unravelled
-Usually ends with a climatic assault on the bad guys base (i.e. dungeon crawl with a time limit before the bad guys plans succeed, sometimes hostages)
Which can be easily converted to a d&d campaign, almost all of those elements are shared. The problem I’m having is that the party (and certainly the higher level npc’s) will be high enough to cast things like zone of truth, divination, scrying, commune, etc. Spells that take out the mystery very quickly.
My Question is assuming a TippyVerse like city (i.e, high population and up to lvl 16 npcs, no 9th level spells for the sake of sanity) and a party level about 10, how would a city police force work (investigating homicides)? Would all the investigators be clerics casting zone of truth, divination and commune? How would someone overcome this?
Some initial thoughts:
-Alibis would be pretty useless when people can teleport.
-Guilt of the murder might be able to be hidden with Atonement spell
-Zone of truth makes detecting outright lies easy, but Glibness can mislead easily.
-Divination and Commune can make solving cases easy, and Scrying easy to -find kidnapped people (get a hair sample from their family)
-Interviews probably have to be done in an AMF and have a max sense motive investigator do the interview (or have a cleric with extraordinary spell aim do it along with whatever spells they want)
-Antimagic shackles from BOED would be a thing to stop the many ways people can get out of them.
I’ve been reading some Jack Reacher novels and I’ve noticed that its structure is very similar to a d&d adventure and I’m considering of making a murder mystery adventure with that basic structure. For those who don’t know Jack Reacher the basic structure of the books seems to be:
-Main character is a wandering traveller who gets caught up in a conspiracy in a small town.
-Plot hook is a murder that draws the main character in by either circumstantial evidence indicating that they’re is guilty (hence they tries to prove their innocence) or decides to help local law enforcement.
-After a few minor skirmishes with some thugs and getting some evidence from secondary characters the plot is eventually unravelled
-Usually ends with a climatic assault on the bad guys base (i.e. dungeon crawl with a time limit before the bad guys plans succeed, sometimes hostages)
Which can be easily converted to a d&d campaign, almost all of those elements are shared. The problem I’m having is that the party (and certainly the higher level npc’s) will be high enough to cast things like zone of truth, divination, scrying, commune, etc. Spells that take out the mystery very quickly.
My Question is assuming a TippyVerse like city (i.e, high population and up to lvl 16 npcs, no 9th level spells for the sake of sanity) and a party level about 10, how would a city police force work (investigating homicides)? Would all the investigators be clerics casting zone of truth, divination and commune? How would someone overcome this?
Some initial thoughts:
-Alibis would be pretty useless when people can teleport.
-Guilt of the murder might be able to be hidden with Atonement spell
-Zone of truth makes detecting outright lies easy, but Glibness can mislead easily.
-Divination and Commune can make solving cases easy, and Scrying easy to -find kidnapped people (get a hair sample from their family)
-Interviews probably have to be done in an AMF and have a max sense motive investigator do the interview (or have a cleric with extraordinary spell aim do it along with whatever spells they want)
-Antimagic shackles from BOED would be a thing to stop the many ways people can get out of them.