The Hundred-Clue Rule
How do we handle investigation and research in a more freeform way? Especially at the beginning of the session, when the players don’t have a lot of information and don’t know where to start?
Justin Alexander has his famous Three-Clue Rule. For any conclusion the player wants to draw, make sure you leave them at least three clues.
He’s right and this is a good place to start.
An open question with the scenarios in the Mystery Manual is, how much or how little prep work do you want to do? Easy in mystery games to spend hours preparing an elaborate sequence of clues, only to have the players completely overlook it and veer off in another direction entirely. As is their right to do.
We want to avoid this. How?
My first principle is that research is about talking to people. That’s what the Connections stat is for. The best and most interesting place to get a clue is through a conversation. In particular it seems useful to make one of the PCs an ex-cop or private detective w/ a specialty in law enforcement, so you can always ask the cops what they know.
My second principle is that people are by default willing to talk. Give your players too much information, rather than too little. Don’t actively try to hide things from them unless your NPCs have a good in-story reason for wanting to keep a secret.
In the real world most murderers get caught immediately. This is because it’s actually very hard to conceal the fact that you have done a murder. People see you, there’s bloodstains and a whole body you have to hide. The average person is opposed to crime and has a strong incentive to prevent it. Plus, they like talking to detectives, it makes them feel important.
My third principle is that investigation is not the central activity of the game. Even when you work out exactly what’s going on, you still end up with a complex OSR-style problem to solve.
I haven’t played enough CoC to be sure but it seems like the old modules are designed on the assumption that you get to the end and just die. Or you call the police, or burn down the house that the ritual is being conducted in. Strange Aeons mysteries should be more skill testing than that.
Having incomplete information and needing to get more of it is part of the problem you have to solve. It’s not the entire story.
Strange Aeons is not really a horror game, to be honest. It’s not a slow build-up of tension and then you go mad. The PCs are confronted with hard problems but they have a lot of tools at their disposal and they’re supposed to be able to use them to win. Empowering the PCs is underrated - let them feel strong, their enemies are ancient gods so it’s not like they can become OP.
The Hundred-Clue Rule.
Information should be everywhere. The bad guys’ scheme is not that hard to figure out. Your players are not Poirot and you can’t plan their line of thinking in advance so you have to make it a lot easier for them than it would be for Poirot.
Think about every possible second-order effect the central mystery would create.
Take the prison break in The Emperor Of Crime. Okay, five hundred criminals have been released into Paris by hypnotised guards. Are one or two guards still alive? Where are they being held? Can you talk to them? What was going on in the prison before the breakout? Who would know? The prison staff and their families? Can you find them?
What about the Fantômas angle? It’s public knowledge that he was executed outside the prison and later buried. Who witnessed the execution? What about the funeral? Can you talk to the gravedigger? What did he see?
Can you identify the masked pallbearers? Have the police already tried? What did they physically look like? Two were women right? Is there some set of six people, two of whom are women, that are connected to Fantômas?
The prisoners themselves - where did they end up? Five hundred of them. Probably a lot were immediately recaptured in the nearest pub. Or they robbed a store, or stabbed a random guy in the street. Where are they being held? Can you talk to them? The police are run off their feet so can you help recapture some of these guys?
The cleverer ones will have hidden. How would they do this? Who in Paris can help you escape the police? Where do they hide out? How can you learn? Do you have underworld connections? What would you do if you were them?
A lot of people would have heard about all the weird shit happening in Paris criminal circles. Police, journalists, beggars, artists who hang out in dodgy bars because they think it’s cool. Where do you start asking? What kind of activity is actually going on and how do you trace it back to its source? Could you get recruited by one of the crime gangs yourself?
I don’t want to try to cover this stuff definitively in the mysteries I’ve written. Seems too hard. The idea is more to give a useful prompt that would have a lot of knock-on effects and throw it over to you to do some of your own prep work. And work with whatever the players come up with. It’s their responsibility to figure out how to approach the problem.
The good thing about a real-world setting is that all the complex worldbuilding is already prepared for you. Google Maps and Wikipedia are your friend.
What about books? I like books, books are cool. The Academic skill is presumably not useless. Do your players spend much time in the library?
What kind of information can be usefully extracted from books? Historical background. You need to know what you’re looking for first, though.
So in The Emperor Of Crime, once you’ve found out that criminals are bidding on the Marquis de Sade’s diaries, you can try to find out more about him. Probably there’s a book somewhere that talks about his occult studies and shares the legends that he had the same demonic mentor as Gilles de Rais.
This information should be useful. You need to think about what the PCs can do with it. Maybe here it teaches the PCs that you have to impress the Devil with sadistic crimes, which brings them closer to the idea of a crime audition and helps them anticipate their enemies’ plans.
Historical connections are also great as prompts for new adventures. Maybe the PCs decide they’re going to investigate Gilles de Rais’ castle in Machecoul in western France. Okay, this is now a rotting dungeon in the Breton marshes, full of creepy Frankenstein experiments, w/ sinister peasants, and some of the criminals are hiding out there.
Plant a reward. It’s the recipe for the Elixir of Crime. Virgin tears and mandrake root. Now you can stop Pierrot le Fou from getting the things he needs to brew it, and throw the bad guys’ whole schedule into disarray.
Get the players to tell you their plans at the end of the session, so you can prepare for the next. It’s cool if they want to go completely off book but make sure they give you space to flesh it out. Harvest details from Wikipedia and local history blogs, it’s crazy how useful these things are.
I do want to give you a whole long list of d100 books to read and d100 random NPCs to talk to. Saves you from having to make them up every single time. A lot of the basic “man on the street” character types are likely to be repeated.