# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 14 - Mystery tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 #game/rpg/starforged #game/rpg/swords-of-the-serpentine ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] Mysteries are hard, and I don't just mean in the sense that it is difficult to run a mystery in an RPG. That is also true, but mysteries in general, as storytelling, are challenging for everyone. Some people have a true gift for it, and some people really don't. Those who find it easy, find it very easy because, for whatever reason, they are good at creating a sense of implication in the audience. They are able to lead them to understand what the mystery is just before the creator reveals it, giving them that "aha, I'm very smart" moment of serotonin. There is an addictive aspect to being a mystery aficionado. Those who have a disaffinity for mysteries often have trouble communicating the clues to the audience without explicitly pointing at them and shouting, "Look, look, a clue!" because they can't lead the audience to the place they need to be at the right time. It often feels like the writer is cheating, just pulling an answer out of the air that there were no leads or clues about for the audience to pick up on, even if the protagonist didn't or had trouble doing so. Sometimes the writer is literally cheating and just pulling something right out of their ass in order to make the story happen. This is widely considered a mistake and something to be avoided. In RPGs, the problem is multiplied significantly. As a writer, you don't have to worry about the pressure of people staring at you expectantly and eager to solve the problem. Your eager audience is out of sight and sometimes out of mind. The players can get obsessed with one tiny element that has nothing to do with the mystery you planned to show them and hare off down an endless labyrinthine maze of rabbit holes, dragging you from narrative place to place with nothing to show for it. If they figure it out, they're frustrated that you let them. If you stop them, they're frustrated that you didn't let them lead the story. Then there's the problem of the prep, and this can really be a brutal problem for mysteries in general. It's only multiplied by games which seem to demand a lot of preparation. Classically, a mystery requires that you make sure that you have all the clues lined up beforehand, you have an idea of where things are going, you absolutely know whodunit, and you're ready for the players to be dropped into the middle of it and start hounding after the antagonist so that they can, at the last possible moment, reveal the malefactor and take credit. You're going to be sitting on a pile of stuff that never gets shown to the players because every clue has the ability not to be found, and every lead has the ability not to be chased or to be ignored. Mysteries are hard, yo. There is another element that comes up which we don't often talk about when it comes to mysteries in gaming, and that's that they often just aren't all that much fun. There's a thousand ways for them to fail and, as often presented, only one way for them to succeed. Mechanically, a mystery is hard to present. Does a skill roll matter? How much agency do the players actually have if they absolutely, positively need to have a skill that is successfully tested in order to get the clue, which is roadblocking the entire rest of the adventure? And if it doesn't, what does matter? Does the character matter at all? Of course, there are systems which have specifically been designed in order to pursue mysteries in ways that are reasonably mechanically elegant. The [*Gumshoe* system](https://pelgranepress.com/2018/02/14/gumshoe/), here represented by **[[Swords of the Serpentine]]**, but [there are many others covering multiple genres](https://pelgranepress.com/product-category/gumshoe/),[^1] is explicitly about chasing down mysteries, leads, and clues. Investigative skills and other skills can have points spent from pools represented by their levels in order to simply discover a clue if the character has the right investigative skill or can justify using it in a given context. It's harder to bottleneck all of the experience. Not impossible, but much harder. It still leaves the onus on the GM to come up with the mysteries, although there are some tools in the book which help with that part as well. What if you, like myself, don't *want* to play in a game with a GM? What if you want to be as surprised as everybody else at the table? Is it possible to run a mystery without anyone actually knowing what the clues are or planning the thing to death before you come to the table? Interestingly, it is. But you have to invert your normal expectations of what knowledge is that leads to a mystery. The gameplay loop ceases to be about players uncovering clues the GM has left; instead, the players' actions generate clues, which they then work to interpret. The players seek out these clues, which may be oracularly generated or may simply be dictated by the result of a successful action by a player. Then, as a pacing mechanism ticks up to completion, the players themselves begin tying the clues together in ways which may never have been considered by anyone at the table until they're spoken aloud. The fiction itself becomes the driver. When you have assembled enough clues, you begin to simply describe what the mystery is and tie all of those clues back into it, much like other GM-less play. It often depends on how well you can interpret the things that have been spoken into being already. There's less of a focus on trying to predict what the players will do, because that's impossible. There's no time at which you have any idea, and instead, the focus shifts to tying things together which are established truths or explaining why they were established, but false. For example, you can look at [[Day 13 - Darkness|yesterday's RPG a Day]] post from me. I didn't go into it with any idea of what I would find in the derelict. All that I had was a theme: *darkness* and a fistful of random tables. By the end of it, there is clearly a mystery. There are questions that are unanswered. Why are all those civilians on a cargo ship? Why did they seem to literally go mad and attack the crew? Were the people that actually fired on the ship pirates? Or is there something much darker and stranger going on? And who issued the contract to go salvage the thing anyway? As play proceeded, the questions became denser, and the hints began tying together. Starting from a blank slate, by the end, we knew there was something to find out, and we had some idea of how that could come to be if fate was kind.[^2] In the end, mystery hinges on the element of surprise. The audience must be surprised by the revelations that have occurred during the story. Not only that, they must be surprised at a pace that matches a sense of ratcheting intensity. Too fast, and things seem obvious and inevitable. There's no time for the clues to be misinterpreted and the leads to go off in strange directions. Too slow, and the mystery never seems to gel. Answers never come together. People, places, and things become fixed points rather than a mesh with an ever-changing set of edges that connect them.[^3] Mystery is hard. But it's not impossible. [^1]: **[The Esoterrorists](https://pelgranepress.com/product/the-esoterrorists-2nd-edition/)**, not just having one of the coolest titles in RPG history, but also being kind of interesting in and of itself, is a fine example. [^2]: Fate was not going to be kind. On the contrary, Fate was definitely putting a finger on the scale, and the finger was upraised: the *[digitus impudicus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_finger)*. [^3]: That's right. **[Lost](https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Lost)**, I'm looking at you. You and your crappy writing, your inability to move a plot forward without simply dropping random things out of the sky. One day I'll write a very long article which deconstructs everything I hate about **Lost**, but basically that would be an episode-by-episode retelling of it all. I have feelings.