Running a Mystery Adventure

I've already mentioned having run my mystery adventure, The Web of Wavemeet, and the fact that much of my inspiration in how I laid out the adventure came from the Alexandrian's Node Based Scenario Design. In this way, I was able to lay out the adventure such that each location, or node, had different clues pointing at other locations, or nodes, so that the players always had something to do. Here are some other pieces of advice on running a mystery adventure.


1. Complicated, but Not Too Complicated.
In one of my previous posts, I talked about running Heist Adventures, and I mentioned that players tend to make things more complex than we, as game masters, expect them to. This is true with heists, it's true with mysteries. (It's often even true with straightforward hack and slash dungeons, but that's not what we're talking about right now).


With a mystery, there is a delicate balance. If the characters are solving a crime (which is not the only type of mystery), you want there to be multiple suspects and you don't want it to be immediately obvious who did it. At the same time, you don't want the players to go off the rails looking into the deep details of the lives of people who you planned on being just background NPCs.


2. Clues, Clues, Clues-Give them Clues
Having lots of clues is really useful. Not necessarily clues that point to the direct end, but clues that can lead to places deeper into the mystery. Any place that the players go to should have multiple clues (at least three, based on the Alexandrian's three clue rule which is described in the post linked above). These clues can all lead to the same conclusion, or they can lead to different places to find more clues.


But the important thing is that there are clues, that the clues are obviously clues, and that the players find them. If finding a clue is reliant on players making a perception check or asking the right questions or noticing something minute in your description...there's a decent chance your players will miss it. If that clue is the only way of solving the mystery, then the players will get stuck and you'll either have to change the adventure or have them fail it. You can have clues that are miss-able, but there should be more clues that are easily found and the miss-able ones shouldn't be essential.


3. Different Ways to the Same Conclusion
With a large number of clues, it is good to have different sets of clues or paths that can get to the ending. This way, players feel more clever when the path they chose reaches the right conclusion (even if the other path or paths would have brought them to the same place.)


4. Motivations
A lot of the stereotypical RPG characters would walk away from a situation when they found that there was a mystery about. Unless the team is built around solving mysteries, it's important to make sure they have a motivation to seek out answers.


In The Web of Wavemeet, the players are smugglers whose contact fails to meet them. Many smugglers might then turn around, so when I designed the characters, I made sure that each of them had a reason for wanting to seek more answers. Maybe a character wanted to complete the deal for a sense of honor. Maybe one had personal ties to the contact. Maybe the contact had made an individual deal with one of the PCs that was more important than just the deal at hand...


With pre-made characters, it's easy to design a motive into their backstory/personality layout. For a one-shot adventure, this is recommended. If you're trying to work a mystery into a longer campaign, it can be more complicated. However, in a campaign, players tend to get connected to different characters and things in the game world. Look for motivations in the ongoing connections that the PCs have formed thus far in the campaign.


Conclusion

What are your thoughts? Do you have any other suggestions for people looking to run a mystery adventure? If you have run a mystery adventure, what did you find worked/didn't work?