A little backstory first.

My home game is 1st edition 7th Sea and my players are going through a homage to "The Amazing Race". Basically, a race around the known world doing tasks & obstacles. Right now, they're in Vodacce -- which for those who know the game world is a rather sexist & classist country.

Well, they're in the city of Laurentia (Caligari territory), where I throw a curveball in the form of someone's been going around killing people ala "Don't Look Now". Since they're heroes, they decide to investigate for a day. The evidence strongly implies that the killer is a 10 year old (which she is). There's been 4 deaths in order: a vagrant, a wine merchant, a jenny (low-class prostitute) and a priest.

What the players haven't figured out yet is why these murders have happened, with one player even asking "Why this particular order?" Which there is a valid reason: the vagrant was killed first because she wanted to see if she could kill -- no one would in theory miss a vagrant.

The murders of the wine merchant and the jenny make things murky/lean towards "justifiable homicide". The jenny was the murderer's abusive mother and the wine merchant was one of her equally abusive clients.

The 4th murder wasn't planned. As a good Vaticine, the child gave confession to the priest. The priest did not react well to said confession, so the troubled child then killed him too because she didn't want to be "punished".

4 murders -- 2 where the victims probably had it comin', but 2 where the victims were innocent. I don't want it where all the victims ended up being abusive So-and-Sos who deserved to die, it would make things too neat and unbelievable.

OOC, the players suspect the kid did it, but IC, they haven't put the pieces together. In fact, they want to take her along on the Race with them! One player wants to teach her how to box and turn her into Hit-Girl. Another player, the quietest one who is finally taking some initiative so that's something I'd like to keep encouraging, is saying that there's a supernatural reason/the kid's possessed (there isn't). A third player is a former child psychologist in real life so his mind is already jumping to the worst case scenario with all the victims.

And the 4th player is my husband -- who knows how much of a true crime fan I am, but can't quite convince the others that this might not be a Good Idea.

The kid isn't a good liar. Nor is she very smart. She is, after all, only 10 years old. They are aware that she's being evasive. I tried to give them an out in the form of a nun and her abbey that maybe they could find sanctuary for her, but they don't wanna take it.

I don't want to go all murderhobo here with her -- she's damaged but she's guilty, but now that her abusers are dead, there's a good chance she can be rehabilitated. But two of her victims didn't deserve to die -- and the country she did her crimes in probably doesn't care she's only 10 years old and was abused. She's a girl and she's poor -- that's already two strikes against her in Vodacce.

Thoughts...?