Whodunnit?

[The Grue]

Some good advice, thanks guys.

A word of warning: Eclipse Phase has some fairly ridiculous data mining and information synthesis compared to your average setting, and PCs can and will be set up so as to take advantage of this. I'd be worried that, without a fairly clever setup, the PCs would either (a) solve the problem reasonably easily - bad for obvious reasons - (b) constantly be running into blocks where capabilities that they expect don't function mysteriously, or provide small clues that they can't really investigate further for similarly mysterious reasons - which is frustrating in its own right - or (c) the adversary is skilled enough at cleaning up after themselves that they're left with an technical puzzle, and are simply waiting for their skill rolls to give them the answer without needing to do much brainwork as players themselves.

Excellent points. While the adventure I have in mind will take place with significantly limited external mesh access(shuttling between habs on a space bus, the idea being cut all mesh traffic once someone turns up dead to prevent the murderer from forking an infomorph and egocasting to safety), I'm making an effort to keep in mind the capabilities of PCs in the setting, and what steps a perpetrator might take to cover his tracks.

Also, the legal implications of being arrested for a crime your un-integrated fork comitted, or that you otherwise have no memory of, are interesting.

Adding on to that... how exactly are you killing a character in Eclipse Phase? Is this perma-death or just their current Ego dies and the cortical stack is lost/destroyed. Is there backup available. Murder Mysteries are kinda hard to run in a setting where one of the basic premises is that Death is a minor inconvenience. The basic problem is well... why does anyone care? So someone's Morph died. Ohh well. And if its a perma death a larger question comes about in how? Because that means you hit every backup that person has, killed them before they could backup again, then destroyed their stack.

And as Acatalepsy pointed out, remember that characters have access to a lot of information in Eclipse Phase, quite a lot.

Honestly the main problem I see here is I'm not really sure Murder Mystery and Eclipse Phase go together particularly well...

The victim is an extremely well-known bioconservative who makes a point of not backing up; figures there's no point because it "can't back up the soul". Bit of a fudge, I grant. Might change the premise to be a more plausible crime. I'm not married to the "murder" part of "murder mystery", the key element is that there's a mystery to solve and one of the passengers is guilty.

Even if the victim did keep regular backups, a "murder" is still willful destruction of property and the "murderer" liable to make financial restitution. The fact that the victim might be the one to press charges for his own murder doesn't make it less a crime, at least not in the inner system where the hypercorps are still trying to pretend that civilization works the way it did a century ago.