Grimtina
2014-08-12, 07:04 AM
A while ago, my table players asked to play a modern game for a change, and I got a rather long list of mysteries/urban legends etc they wanted to investigate. Their chars were not to be any special people, just part of an international group attempting to solve such things.
There are two different kinds of things on the list I got. First, there are those yet unexplained/unresolved things like the Roanoke island colony or recently Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, or even who the Zodiak killers was, and second there are already solved riddles, like the magnetic hill optical illusions or the Marie Celeste. I'm rather sure I can come up with some fantastic ideas of what could have happened, the issue I have with some of those ideas is that they are far in the past.
I would need a reasonable way to interact with a past time with sometimes little in the way of documents other than time travel. The group investigating shouldn't have any unusual abilities beyond their specialty. The idea is to create the wonder/mysterious feeling by letting more or less ordinary people discover the truth behind the unusual (which doesn't always have to be mystic).
I've come up with nothing much but weak plot devices like letting them find documentation after all after some long puzzling searches. I am not sure that makes for much of a fun game. Some action is required. In a few cases, I could maybe introduce some decendant of someone involved in the original happenings who wants to protect some sort of secret, but that gets lame in repetition.
Any ideas?
There are two different kinds of things on the list I got. First, there are those yet unexplained/unresolved things like the Roanoke island colony or recently Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, or even who the Zodiak killers was, and second there are already solved riddles, like the magnetic hill optical illusions or the Marie Celeste. I'm rather sure I can come up with some fantastic ideas of what could have happened, the issue I have with some of those ideas is that they are far in the past.
I would need a reasonable way to interact with a past time with sometimes little in the way of documents other than time travel. The group investigating shouldn't have any unusual abilities beyond their specialty. The idea is to create the wonder/mysterious feeling by letting more or less ordinary people discover the truth behind the unusual (which doesn't always have to be mystic).
I've come up with nothing much but weak plot devices like letting them find documentation after all after some long puzzling searches. I am not sure that makes for much of a fun game. Some action is required. In a few cases, I could maybe introduce some decendant of someone involved in the original happenings who wants to protect some sort of secret, but that gets lame in repetition.
Any ideas?