Parvum
2016-02-27, 02:33 PM
If you're that player of mine who browses the playground, turn your butt around or you'll ruin the game for yourself.
I'm going to run a little adventure, and I want to try to do a murder mystery with the players trying to track down the killer. I've got a few backups if it turns out I suck at it or the players aren't really feeling it, but ideally I'd rather just get it right the first time and give my players an engaging mystery that they solve through sleuthing and clue gathering.
So I'm asking for tips on how to leave clues, handle red herrings properly, and give the PCs enough information to keep them interested and engaged without spoonfeeding them the bad guy's lair.
I've been thinking of the scenario for a while, so I've got a clear idea of the villains motivations and murder methods... honestly, it might be getting overly complicated at this point. I'm kind of hoping that this might make it easier to leave clues? For most of the murders I've even got details of how the actual murder went, who saw what (in case the bodies are recovered for Speak with Dead) and the like. But I'm not sure how to organize clues, deal with what the players might think to search for, and generally handle something so player-driven.
That's the gist of it. Any general tips on clue creating are appreciated, but if anyone wants to offer context-specific help I'll put some details on the adventure below. The setting is high-magic and urban.
Quick summary:
Winona is a changeling (in the sense that her mother was a hag, not the eberron half-doppelganger) born to a loose coven of witches and hags. Her family was slaughtered by a band of adventurers when she was too young to remember, who took pity on the young girl and took her back to their home and placed her in an orphanage. Now Winona is a young woman, and the adventurers are mostly retired. The event is all but forgotten by everyone except for Tiriaq, the only hag who escaped the massacre with her life. She plans to resurrect the coven she once had, and she intends to do it with the only surviving member of her family, Winona. Enchanting her with druid magic and a silvered tongue, Tiriaq tells Winona about her past and convinces her that the Crusaders that killed her family are still coming for her, that they will slaughter Winona, Tiriaq, and every orphan that Winona has grown to care about simply for having sheltered her. She plans convince Winona to personally kill every member of the adventuring band that slaughtered her family, manipulating those around her to harden Winona to the act of murder and isolate her from everyone but Tiriaq. The final victim, kind Father Bernardo who sheltered and cared for Winona for most of her life, will be the sacrifice in a ritual to harness Winona's anguish, confusion and rage to transform her fully into an Annis Hag, a hulking magical brute bitter and hateful to all but Tiriaq.
There are eight victims, with three already murdered at the start of the adventure. The murders start a few months apart, getting closer and closer together. They speed up if it becomes clear anyone is on the bad guys' tail.
Proctor Chance, orc scholar.
Mercutio Deyes, retired veteran.
Maria Vasquez, homebody.
Brother Hiram, drunken preacher.
Julio, a fat fallen paladin.
Vica Aguerra, active crusader.
Jefe Gutierrez, nihilistic scoundrel.
Father Bernardo, owner of Sun Chapel Shelter, Winona’s orphanage.
Brief timeline without player intervention:
Proctor Chance is killed somewhat messily, baddies lay low for three months. Tuparnaaq picks up a hobby of hunting poor drifters in the slums, kills one. Deyes is killed, but Tiriaq has to recover the body from law enforcement when the pair forget to clean up. Maria is killed two months later, during those two months Tuparnaaq kills three more drifters. It is only one month later that Hiram is killed, two more weeks until Julio is targeted. Within the week Vica is led to Tuparnaaq’s lair and killed by the hazards there, where Tiriaq reanimates her as a slave and makes Vica attack the orphanage and kill Winona’s friends. Winona kills Vica with her own two hands, and demands the second last target from Tiriaq. She kills Jefe without shedding her skin and leaves the orphanage to live with Tiriaq. Tiriaq uses her as leverage to convince Father Bernardo to come to the lair, assuring Winona that the kind man she knew will surely be coming to kill her now that she has murdered all of his friends. She knocks Bernardo unconscious and claims he has a ward that protects him from full blooded hags, asking Winona to finish the deed. Unbeknownst to Winona, she has started a ritual that will be finished when Bernardo is sacrificed. Once completed, the ritual transforms Winona fully into an Annis Hag, and the confusion and feelings of betrayal makes Winona hateful and only willing to trust Tiriaq.
Tools of the Trade:
Winona has grown into a talented healer under Father Bernardo, but Tiriaq has taught her to turn that same magic towards destructive ends. In addition, her hag heritage manifests as claws that she trims each morning but have already grown to deadly sharpness by night.
Tiriaq has given her three gifts to help with the murders. The first is a fungus leshy named Tuparnaaq, a nature spirit given life that manifests as an assembly of plants in a tiny, studio ghibli-esque body. Tuparnaaq doubles as a magical moment that endears Tiriaq to Winona as well as an agent of Tiriaq that is almost always at Winona's side.
The second is a magic broom, which both allows her to make a quick getaway and keep the halls of the orphanage tidy.
The third gift is a ritual that lets Winona shed her skin, transferring her consciousness to it and allowing it to act on her behalf. It is able to squeeze through tiny spaces Winona could not and gives her other abilities of motion. It's primary purpose, however, is to distance Winona from the murders so she more readily takes a life. Though it is her mind, she (and her accomplices) refer to the skin construct as Quillac, Winona's birth name.
In addition, Tuparnaaq acquires a Cap of Human Guise after the first murder, a fairly common item that can disguise a small humanoid as a human child. He rarely removes it. He has a magic pistol that can track targets it wounds, as well as a dragon pistol (shotgun pistol) loaded with alchemical cartridges filled with his own vision-blurring spores.
The murders:
Winona and Tuparnaaq have settled into a routine for their murders. Tiriaq identifies the target and passes their address on to Tuparnaaq. He stakes out the house (disguised as an urchin) and begins to sneak in. Taking the shape of a large patch of mould, he tries to stay out of sight as he creeps into the house over the course of hours or days. Once inside, he examines the victim's house and routine for weaknesses. The process is slow and careful, and he can ultimately take several days before calling Quillac. When he feels the time is right and the victim is vulnerable, he finds an entry point for Quillac (ideally by cracking a window) and contacts Winona with a Sending Stone.
When Winona gets the call, she sheds her skin when the city goes dark, leaving her unconscious body under covers on her bed. Quillac then flies within a city block of the victim, walking and levitating the rest of the way. She is disguised, appearing as the next victim to be killed (after her current victim). She enters the house through the aperture and meets with Tuparnaaq. She then tries to tear the victim’s throat out with her claws while he supervises, Tuparnaaq intervening only if she cannot kill them instantly.
Once the victim is dead, they are stuffed into Tuparnaaq's Bag of Holding to be brought back to his lair, stuffed, and mounted. He also takes any firearms and any obviously magical items for himself.
Quillac leaves as soon as possible, waiting by her broom for Tuparnaaq to catch up. She then returns both of them to the orphanage.
Specific murders:
The murders haven’t all gone smoothly, even before the PCs start to intervene. In order of most recent killing:
Brother Hiram was waiting for his killers to arrive, refusing to sleep in his bed and pacing anxiously with a rifle in hand. All the windows in his house were boarded up along with his fireplace, and the doors were all barred from the inside. Eventually the sleepless nights got to him, and he nodded off while sitting in a chair with his back to the wall, watching the door. After days of posing as part of Hiram’s squalid home, Tuparnaaq finds a gap in the fireplace large enough for Quillac to squeeze through. Once she arrives, she rips out Hiram’s throat from the front, who wakes up and stays conscious long enough to squeeze the trigger of his rifle once, the bullet passing through Quillac as though through fabric. Once Hiram is dead he is loaded into Tuparnaaq’s bag and the pair of them pry off the boards over the fireplace so Tuparnaaq can fit through and Quillac can levitate them both away.
Unbeknownst to either of them, Tuparnaaq wasn’t the only one spying there. The next victim, Julio, has placed spies on most of his old crusader companions on the off chance that one of them committed the murders. There is a halfling spy who managed to see the murder, which looked to be the man who hired him (naked and eyeless) ripping out Hiram’s throat with the help of a small child and not even flinching after being shot in the stomach. Terrified, he hid until authorities found him and took him in for questioning, though he has refused to answer for fear of Julio’s retribution.
Maria was the simplest kill. Put at ease by Tiriaq in disguise (convincing her that all Maria’s troubles were behind her), she was sleeping when it happened but woke up in time to see Quillac, wearing Hiram’s face. The two murderers left with Maria’s body and were gone without a sound. Maria had the service of a maid who found the body next morning. Though it escaped her notice in light of the murder, the large patch of mould she had been fighting with for the past two days had completely vanished.
Mercutio Deyes’ murder was quick and efficient, he did not even wake up when attacked. However, the novice killers forgot to take the body with them. It was already in the hands of law enforcement before they could retrieve it, forcing Tiriaq to personally see to acquiring the corpse with forgery and deception before the other crusaders found out. She posed as a grieving relative, paying top dollar for quality forged documents and requesting that the body be released to her custody for imminent burial. The actual relative she was posing as was never made aware of this transaction.
The very first murder was the messiest. While Tuparnaaq’s infiltration went smoothly, Proctor woke up when Quillac entered his home gracelessly. Though she appeared to be Deyes, Proctor was not fooled for long and tried to incapacitate Quillac. She was unable to overpower him, and a frightened Tuparnaaq grabbed the nearest weapon- a magic pistol on display -and shot Proctor to death (this act started his interest in hunting humanoids). The murder was so loud and messy that Tiriaq intervened directly, entering the home to help stuff the body away and give Quillac and Tuparnaaq their flying broom to escape quickly. She herself left using Tree Stride in Proctor’s personal garden.
I'm going to run a little adventure, and I want to try to do a murder mystery with the players trying to track down the killer. I've got a few backups if it turns out I suck at it or the players aren't really feeling it, but ideally I'd rather just get it right the first time and give my players an engaging mystery that they solve through sleuthing and clue gathering.
So I'm asking for tips on how to leave clues, handle red herrings properly, and give the PCs enough information to keep them interested and engaged without spoonfeeding them the bad guy's lair.
I've been thinking of the scenario for a while, so I've got a clear idea of the villains motivations and murder methods... honestly, it might be getting overly complicated at this point. I'm kind of hoping that this might make it easier to leave clues? For most of the murders I've even got details of how the actual murder went, who saw what (in case the bodies are recovered for Speak with Dead) and the like. But I'm not sure how to organize clues, deal with what the players might think to search for, and generally handle something so player-driven.
That's the gist of it. Any general tips on clue creating are appreciated, but if anyone wants to offer context-specific help I'll put some details on the adventure below. The setting is high-magic and urban.
Quick summary:
Winona is a changeling (in the sense that her mother was a hag, not the eberron half-doppelganger) born to a loose coven of witches and hags. Her family was slaughtered by a band of adventurers when she was too young to remember, who took pity on the young girl and took her back to their home and placed her in an orphanage. Now Winona is a young woman, and the adventurers are mostly retired. The event is all but forgotten by everyone except for Tiriaq, the only hag who escaped the massacre with her life. She plans to resurrect the coven she once had, and she intends to do it with the only surviving member of her family, Winona. Enchanting her with druid magic and a silvered tongue, Tiriaq tells Winona about her past and convinces her that the Crusaders that killed her family are still coming for her, that they will slaughter Winona, Tiriaq, and every orphan that Winona has grown to care about simply for having sheltered her. She plans convince Winona to personally kill every member of the adventuring band that slaughtered her family, manipulating those around her to harden Winona to the act of murder and isolate her from everyone but Tiriaq. The final victim, kind Father Bernardo who sheltered and cared for Winona for most of her life, will be the sacrifice in a ritual to harness Winona's anguish, confusion and rage to transform her fully into an Annis Hag, a hulking magical brute bitter and hateful to all but Tiriaq.
There are eight victims, with three already murdered at the start of the adventure. The murders start a few months apart, getting closer and closer together. They speed up if it becomes clear anyone is on the bad guys' tail.
Proctor Chance, orc scholar.
Mercutio Deyes, retired veteran.
Maria Vasquez, homebody.
Brother Hiram, drunken preacher.
Julio, a fat fallen paladin.
Vica Aguerra, active crusader.
Jefe Gutierrez, nihilistic scoundrel.
Father Bernardo, owner of Sun Chapel Shelter, Winona’s orphanage.
Brief timeline without player intervention:
Proctor Chance is killed somewhat messily, baddies lay low for three months. Tuparnaaq picks up a hobby of hunting poor drifters in the slums, kills one. Deyes is killed, but Tiriaq has to recover the body from law enforcement when the pair forget to clean up. Maria is killed two months later, during those two months Tuparnaaq kills three more drifters. It is only one month later that Hiram is killed, two more weeks until Julio is targeted. Within the week Vica is led to Tuparnaaq’s lair and killed by the hazards there, where Tiriaq reanimates her as a slave and makes Vica attack the orphanage and kill Winona’s friends. Winona kills Vica with her own two hands, and demands the second last target from Tiriaq. She kills Jefe without shedding her skin and leaves the orphanage to live with Tiriaq. Tiriaq uses her as leverage to convince Father Bernardo to come to the lair, assuring Winona that the kind man she knew will surely be coming to kill her now that she has murdered all of his friends. She knocks Bernardo unconscious and claims he has a ward that protects him from full blooded hags, asking Winona to finish the deed. Unbeknownst to Winona, she has started a ritual that will be finished when Bernardo is sacrificed. Once completed, the ritual transforms Winona fully into an Annis Hag, and the confusion and feelings of betrayal makes Winona hateful and only willing to trust Tiriaq.
Tools of the Trade:
Winona has grown into a talented healer under Father Bernardo, but Tiriaq has taught her to turn that same magic towards destructive ends. In addition, her hag heritage manifests as claws that she trims each morning but have already grown to deadly sharpness by night.
Tiriaq has given her three gifts to help with the murders. The first is a fungus leshy named Tuparnaaq, a nature spirit given life that manifests as an assembly of plants in a tiny, studio ghibli-esque body. Tuparnaaq doubles as a magical moment that endears Tiriaq to Winona as well as an agent of Tiriaq that is almost always at Winona's side.
The second is a magic broom, which both allows her to make a quick getaway and keep the halls of the orphanage tidy.
The third gift is a ritual that lets Winona shed her skin, transferring her consciousness to it and allowing it to act on her behalf. It is able to squeeze through tiny spaces Winona could not and gives her other abilities of motion. It's primary purpose, however, is to distance Winona from the murders so she more readily takes a life. Though it is her mind, she (and her accomplices) refer to the skin construct as Quillac, Winona's birth name.
In addition, Tuparnaaq acquires a Cap of Human Guise after the first murder, a fairly common item that can disguise a small humanoid as a human child. He rarely removes it. He has a magic pistol that can track targets it wounds, as well as a dragon pistol (shotgun pistol) loaded with alchemical cartridges filled with his own vision-blurring spores.
The murders:
Winona and Tuparnaaq have settled into a routine for their murders. Tiriaq identifies the target and passes their address on to Tuparnaaq. He stakes out the house (disguised as an urchin) and begins to sneak in. Taking the shape of a large patch of mould, he tries to stay out of sight as he creeps into the house over the course of hours or days. Once inside, he examines the victim's house and routine for weaknesses. The process is slow and careful, and he can ultimately take several days before calling Quillac. When he feels the time is right and the victim is vulnerable, he finds an entry point for Quillac (ideally by cracking a window) and contacts Winona with a Sending Stone.
When Winona gets the call, she sheds her skin when the city goes dark, leaving her unconscious body under covers on her bed. Quillac then flies within a city block of the victim, walking and levitating the rest of the way. She is disguised, appearing as the next victim to be killed (after her current victim). She enters the house through the aperture and meets with Tuparnaaq. She then tries to tear the victim’s throat out with her claws while he supervises, Tuparnaaq intervening only if she cannot kill them instantly.
Once the victim is dead, they are stuffed into Tuparnaaq's Bag of Holding to be brought back to his lair, stuffed, and mounted. He also takes any firearms and any obviously magical items for himself.
Quillac leaves as soon as possible, waiting by her broom for Tuparnaaq to catch up. She then returns both of them to the orphanage.
Specific murders:
The murders haven’t all gone smoothly, even before the PCs start to intervene. In order of most recent killing:
Brother Hiram was waiting for his killers to arrive, refusing to sleep in his bed and pacing anxiously with a rifle in hand. All the windows in his house were boarded up along with his fireplace, and the doors were all barred from the inside. Eventually the sleepless nights got to him, and he nodded off while sitting in a chair with his back to the wall, watching the door. After days of posing as part of Hiram’s squalid home, Tuparnaaq finds a gap in the fireplace large enough for Quillac to squeeze through. Once she arrives, she rips out Hiram’s throat from the front, who wakes up and stays conscious long enough to squeeze the trigger of his rifle once, the bullet passing through Quillac as though through fabric. Once Hiram is dead he is loaded into Tuparnaaq’s bag and the pair of them pry off the boards over the fireplace so Tuparnaaq can fit through and Quillac can levitate them both away.
Unbeknownst to either of them, Tuparnaaq wasn’t the only one spying there. The next victim, Julio, has placed spies on most of his old crusader companions on the off chance that one of them committed the murders. There is a halfling spy who managed to see the murder, which looked to be the man who hired him (naked and eyeless) ripping out Hiram’s throat with the help of a small child and not even flinching after being shot in the stomach. Terrified, he hid until authorities found him and took him in for questioning, though he has refused to answer for fear of Julio’s retribution.
Maria was the simplest kill. Put at ease by Tiriaq in disguise (convincing her that all Maria’s troubles were behind her), she was sleeping when it happened but woke up in time to see Quillac, wearing Hiram’s face. The two murderers left with Maria’s body and were gone without a sound. Maria had the service of a maid who found the body next morning. Though it escaped her notice in light of the murder, the large patch of mould she had been fighting with for the past two days had completely vanished.
Mercutio Deyes’ murder was quick and efficient, he did not even wake up when attacked. However, the novice killers forgot to take the body with them. It was already in the hands of law enforcement before they could retrieve it, forcing Tiriaq to personally see to acquiring the corpse with forgery and deception before the other crusaders found out. She posed as a grieving relative, paying top dollar for quality forged documents and requesting that the body be released to her custody for imminent burial. The actual relative she was posing as was never made aware of this transaction.
The very first murder was the messiest. While Tuparnaaq’s infiltration went smoothly, Proctor woke up when Quillac entered his home gracelessly. Though she appeared to be Deyes, Proctor was not fooled for long and tried to incapacitate Quillac. She was unable to overpower him, and a frightened Tuparnaaq grabbed the nearest weapon- a magic pistol on display -and shot Proctor to death (this act started his interest in hunting humanoids). The murder was so loud and messy that Tiriaq intervened directly, entering the home to help stuff the body away and give Quillac and Tuparnaaq their flying broom to escape quickly. She herself left using Tree Stride in Proctor’s personal garden.