Designing Better RPG Mysteries Part 1

Designing Better RPG Mysteries (Part 1) 

(This is the first of a series. You can also read Part 2.)

The “three clue rule” is clever. Gumshoe’s “you always get the clue” approach is useful to agilize mystery RPG scenarios. Both address a real problem in RPG scenarios with mysteries: players getting stuck because they missed a single die roll or detail.

But if all you do is follow a trail of clues, you’re not solving a mystery, at least not the kind of mystery Poirot or Sherlock would find worth their time.

In a good crime mystery novel, no single clue tells you anything decisive. In fact, most clues either lead nowhere or point to the wrong answer, and/or make no sense. Only when you combine them, using careful observation, abductive reasoning, and a bit of intuition, does the truth emerge.

We are going to explore how to make and run mystery scenarios better, be it in Vaesen, Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Call of Cthulhu, or Blade Runner. And for that we must look closer at the anatomy of an RPG mystery scenario.

Why We Ended Up with Crumb Trails?

I think there are three main reasons why most RPG mystery scenarios are designed as "crumb trails".

First, real-life investigations are crumb trails, and designing those is easy. Designing an Agatha Christie–grade puzzle is not. The false solutions have to be convincing. The true solution has to be non-obvious but logical. And most published RPG mysteries aren’t even internally consistent enough to survive serious scrutiny (some have glaring inconsistencies). Expecting craftsmanship at the level of a murder mystery is probably wishful thinking.

Second, a real Christie-level puzzle in an RPG will be too hard. I often play with experienced and dedicated players, and I’ve still seen obvious clues missed and plot details misunderstood. I’ve learned that you have to repeat important information, ideally in slightly different forms, because players forget or mishear details. Even with that, if you build a proper puzzle-box mystery, most tables will get stuck. 

I was trained by my father, who challenged me to guess the killer in every book he gave me, and made fun of me if I failed and, even with all that conditioning, I’m wrong at least 10% of the time (20% with Agatha Christie). 

In an RPG, such “great mysteries” would often translate into “frustrated players.”

Third, there’s a deep misunderstanding of what role a mystery plays in a roleplaying game, especially in horror. And that’s where the real trouble begins.

Crime Mysteries vs Horror Mysteries

A crime mystery story is a duel between author and reader. The author gives you the evidence, but dresses it up to mean something else. If the game is fair, every clue you need is there, just not in the way you think it is. The challenge is to see through the misdirection before the detective reveals the truth.

The climax of the narrative can go two ways. Either you’re proud you saw it coming, and have that "I've got it" feeling, or you’re impressed by a solution that was logical all along but hidden in plain sight. A good one makes you say: It was all right there, and I still missed it.

Once you train yourself to solve them, as I did under my father’s merciless quizzes (he used to point to me the page by which I had al the necessary evidence to solve the mystery), you start spotting the tricks earlier. You even learn to “meta” the author: look for the detail presented as unimportant that unlocks the whole plot.

Horror mysteries look similar on the surface: the body count rises, clues accumulate, and there’s a final reveal that makes sense of it all. But the purpose is completely different. The horror writer is not trying to outsmart you. They are trying to unsettle you. They are trying to scare you.

In Lovecraft or Poe, the clues are not misdirections. They are fragments of the truth, delivered slowly so that dread builds before you see the full picture. The shape of the horror becomes clearer with each step and more disturbing. By the time you understand it, it’s too late.

When I first read horror as a child, I was confused by how “obvious” the clues seemed. In Christie, a clue is bait to lead you astray. In Lovecraft, a clue is bait to keep you going, even though you already suspect where it leads. Often, in Lovecraft stories, you already got it and you even feel the narrator is dumb. 

But before you are too harsh on that apparent cluelessness of the narrator, consider that not only I was ignoring that, from a fictional perspective, the narrator often writes post factum, ie, he already knows what is going to happen, and has hindsight of the hidden truth, but the truth involves something supernatural, which we as readers of a weird tale are very ready to accept, but participants in the fiction, such as the narrator of a Lovecraft tale, are not.

In any case, that difference matters enormously in RPGs. In a crime mystery, once you know the culprit, the game is over. You call the police, you win. Or you make one of those meetings with the NPCs to explain your solution.

In a horror mystery, however, even if you know what’s behind it all, you still have to face it. The climax is often not the revelation, but the confrontation of the horror.

So, in summary:

One, Crime mysteries are puzzles to be solved. The climax is the moment of insight, and the challenge lies in combining clues to uncover a hidden truth.

Two, Horror mysteries are truths to be endured. The clues don’t mislead; they draw you forward, revealing the horror in stages and escalating the threat. The climax is not the revelation per se, it’s the confrontation.

In the next articles, I will discuss the design of these different types of mysteries in rpgs: Part 2) horror mysteries, Part 3) crime mysteries, Part 4) Hybrid mysteries (or: what most rpgs offer).

PS: Some readers remarked that they didn't think crime mystery novels are meant to be solved. Traditionally, they are. So much so that, in the Golden Age of Crime Mysteries, Ronald Knox compiled ten commandments which where supposed to guarantee that the mystery was solvable by the reader. A novel that followed these is called a fairplay crime novel. Morevover, the Ellery Queen novels had an explicit "Challenge to the Reader" that would mark the point in the novel where sufficient clues had been given to the reader as to enable them to solve the mystery.