Murder Most Foul: The Usual Suspects
In my last post, I discussed things that should be considered prior to planning a murder mystery. Today, a quick look at the actual planning.
The Victim is naturally the first concern. Who’s dead? The death should draw the PCs into in the mystery plot, ideally. The victim could be a prominent figure — the nobleman, the prominent businessman, the starship captain. The victim could be a friend or relative of one or all of the characters. The victim could be a devotee of the PC’s faith, a member of the PC’s union, or an old college classmate. Whatever the case may be, the victim is someone whose death the characters will feel — either directly or indirectly. (They may not know Count Plotdevice personally, but his death means that things will be different in the kingdom…)
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Murder Most Foul: Premeditation
The murder mystery is a firmly-established sub-genre, so much so that it’s commonly crossed over. In addition to detective stories, there are murder mysteries set in the Middle Ages, in ancient Rome, in feudal Japan, in historical China. There are fantasy murder mysteries, science fiction murder mysteries, cookbook murder mysteries. (No, really. I’m not kidding. There are
It’s also among the more difficult game scenarios to run.
This series of articles is going to deal with running a murder mystery. Before I discuss the plot, though, there’s something more immediate to take a look at: the game itself.
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10 Interesting Fight Settings
While considering ideas for my Battlegrounds series, I brainstormed a pretty long list. A lot of these ideas aren’t likely to sustain an entire post, though. They’re too limited in one way or another — often, just too reliant on a single, fairly obvious element. However, they still make for memorable fights. Here’s a selection of ten that might provide some inspiration .
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Review: Dreaming Cities
Dreaming Cities is subtitled Tri-Stat Urban Fantasy Genre. I’m not a Tri-Stat player or gamemaster, but I picked the book up at Gencon because I have a certain interest in the genre and, frankly, the price was right. If the price is low enough, I’ll often pick up older game books, even for games I have no intention of ever running, simply to mine them for ideas. It’s worth taking the chance.
I’ve been looking it over for the last month, so the time seems about right to review it.
The Book
Dreaming Cities is a 272-page hardcover of standard size. It credits five authors (Jason L. Blair, Jamais Cascio, Phil Masters, Jo Ramsay, and Liz Rich) and was published by the now-defunct Guardians of Order in 2005. It seems very solidly put together, with a nice, heavy cover. It’s a complete game book, containing rules for the Tri-Stat system along with the urban fantasy elements. Its pages are quite packed; there’s very little interior art (and most, if not all, of that in two-page “splashes”, not interspersed with the text). Additionally, the text is printed in a small font size. Tables are reasonably frequent, helping to break up some of the text.
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Narration in Combat
LOL for Initiative featured a post yesterday that touched upon an issue common among Dungeons & Dragons game masters: adding more narration, and therefore more excitement, to combat.
Chances are, if you’ve played for long, you’ve seen combats whose transcripts would read a lot like a bingo game. “15. Hit. 3 damage. 17. Hit. 8 damage. 4. Miss. 20. That’s a crit, 15 damage. 6. Miss.” Not very exciting, is it? That’s probably not what you want the characters’ pitched battle against the evil Baron Von Badguy and his minions to sound like.
LOL, building on an inspirational post over at At Will, advocates allowing characters to describe the death of a minion when they hit (and therefore kill) it. Various comments to these posts further suggest expanding the narrative control to any killing blow. That’s the method I usually use. But I’ve also taken it further…
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