How to Design Clues for a Murder Mystery (RPG Edition)
This article is part of a series about designing mysteries for RPGs. We first noted that there are different types of mysteries, and discussed the main characteristics of these. In this article, we talk specifically about clues in a Murder mystery — we will assume it to be a huis clos, or enclosed mystery (ie, a mystery with a closed environment where all the suspects are present and known from the beginning of the investigation).
A horror mystery reveals the truth clue by clue. The tension comes from watching the silhouette of something horrible slowly take shape.
A murder mystery is different. It invites the players to reason.
An important aspect is that the structure of the mystery is not so much chasing a trail of clues that lead to other clues and so on. That happens in a horror mystery or in a police procedural, but enclosed murder mysteries are certainly not like that. You rarely follow a clue to another clue. Clues are not signposts that lead to the next location. Clues paint a picture. Of the victim, of the criminal, of the crime itself. This has an important, meaningful consequence for RPGs.
One of the main fears in RPG mystery design is that the scenario gets stuck because the players don’t find the clue to the next scene/location (the whole GUMSHOE system is built around fixing this problem, and Jason Alexander owes much of his internet fame to the Three-Clue rule that addresses that same problem — although Jason has many interesting contributions).
But in an enclosed mystery, clues don’t point to other clues. There is no crumb trail. The structure is not that of a treasure hunt. Think of Horror on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile. The spatial setting is limited. The suspects and the investigator are trapped with each other. No clue is necessary to find who to speak with next or where to go. All suspects are available from the get go and yes, you must speak with all of them. Clues are not there to lead to other clues. They are there to be interpreted in the light of one another.
A single clue is rarely decisive. The solution only becomes visible when multiple pieces are combined. Collecting clues isn’t enough. They must be interpreted, cross-checked, doubted, and reinterpreted.
Most clues should not be designed as clues, but emerge naturally. They should be completely diegetic, come to be as a consequence of the established facts of the fiction. That said, you will likely need to think of and design one or two "key" clues. A key clue is a piece of information that doesn't fit in the more straightforward (and wrong) explanation of what happened.
Designing these requires also ensuring there are enough details that seem to confirm the wrong assumption. The corroborating evidence grows until there is a piece of evidence that appears and breaks it. And if you do it well, that piece of evidence breaks it in a subtle way.
Now, because RPG players don’t have the luxury of flipping back through pages, redundancy is essential. The three-clue rule of the Alexandrian is exactly about that: important facts that must be established should be ready to appear two or three times in front of the investigators through different courses of action — a witness statement here, a physical detail there, a timeline elsewhere. Redundancy isn’t about making things easy; it’s about ensuring the players get a fair chance. Success must be possible.
Another important point in an RPG , where player characters must be active, is that the delivery of clues matters. Every clue should come with tension or engagement: a social confrontation, a physical risk, a clever bit of sleuthing, a moment of suspense, or a reveal that changes how players feel about the mystery.
Here is an example of key clues for an enclosed mystery, a tidbit simplified and blunt, but I hope it will illustrate well what I mean.
A man has been murdered.
He had a younger wife, whom he forced to leave her career as an opera singer when they married.
He was very wealthy and she stands to inherit his fortune.
Moreover, she clearly resented the loss of her singing career and had openly complained about that at times, as told to the investigators by several of her acquaintances whenever they are interviewed.
The players manage to get a (seemingly) reticent maid in the house to tell them how she saw the young wife in a romantic tryst with a mysterious gentleman in a public park.
A friend of the family tells to the investigators how he is sure the wife has a lover because he overheard her on the telephone with a man the other day, she called him “my darling” and they seemed to be making plans together.
Here the investigators start believing the wife is the culprit. She has the motives, she can profit from the murder, and she may even have an accomplice (our mysterious gent).
Now, the investigators manage to sneak into the room of the young widow. Instead of corroborating evidence, they find a notebook with a set of love poems she was writing, explicitly dedicated to her husband.
Moreover, they find a receipt that they follow to a jewelry store. It turns out she bought an expensive gold watch engraved with "To Adam [the name of the husband], the love of my life, my one and only". The jeweler knows she was to offer it as a present for his birthday. The watch itself is kept in a safe and no-one in the family has seen it.
Now, these discoveries should give pause to the investigators. The notebook with the poems and the watch are not hard evidence, but they strongly suggest she cared immensely about her husband, even more so because these are not a public manifestations of affection, but hidden ones.
So, maybe, just maybe, the maid and the friend of the family lied or, more interestingly, may have misinterpreted what they thought they saw or heard? This is the sort of clue you want to have. Something that breaks the prevailing narrative, something that makes the investigators wonder whether their assumptions up to that point are correct. What the clue threatens is their whole interpretative model.
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