American Power Elite Factions in CRAWL-thulhu

My vision for the world of CRAWL-thulhu, is that it resembles our world in the 1920s and 30s, though obviously with some more menacing elements.

I imagine a world that never had a Great War, but is still roiled by factionalism and the looming threat of mass violence. There are sensitive people, I think, who can detect psychic vibrations or spiritual echoes or astral resonances, who know that their world is overdue for catastrophe and rebirth. This is a world of dreamers, and everyone's dream is to remake the world with their philosophy, their ideology ascendant, and all their competitors ground to dust. A thousand dystopian futures wait just beyond the horizon. Too few people want peace, too few appreciate the benefits of stability. Everyone wants the apocalypse to happen so that their preferred post-apocalyptic scenario can be the one to become reality.

Factions in CRAWL-thulhu serve two purposes, one pragmatic, the other thematic. At a practical level, I want adventures in CRAWL-thulhu to revolve around solving mysteries, and factions provide a gameable way to supply suspects. Each suspect represents a group, a faction, and it is their membership in the faction that makes them suspicious. I'm not interested - in this game at least - in mysteries that revolve around family relationships or inheritance or romantic infidelity. I don't want mysteries that are solved by blood or love or money. I want mysteries that revolve around a conflict between irreconcilable ideas and incompatible goals, and factions provide a way to make those conflicts larger than just the individual combatants. If everyone is a representative, everyone is an agent, then the personal becomes political, and solving the mystery, resolving the conflict, becomes a way to influence the future of the setting.

That is the thematic purpose of factions, as I see it. They provide a bridge that links the grandiose ideas, the apocalyptic plans, the dystopian ambitions that define the setting, on the one hand, and the player characters as individuals who are mostly interacting with a handful of NPCs in a relatively constrained space, on the other. Factions mean that the suspects are suspicious because of what they think, what they want to do, what they would do if they could, and catching the culprit means pushing doomsday a few minutes further off into the future.

The guilty faction in CRAWL-thulhu mysteries should, I think, be chosen randomly. A lot of people are both players and referees, and I want them to be able to have fun too. If I picked a single guilty party and wrote that down, then it would be possible to spoil the mystery. Either someone played this one before, or someone saw it when they were leafing through their copy of the zine, or some reviewer gave the solution away on the blog, or whatever. If I picked the answer, it would be possible for the players to know it without actually solving the mystery. But if the answer is selected at random from a list of possibilities, then it must be a surprise, and something that has to be solved.

One mystery I'm working on involves a series of lavish, luxurious house parties that span America. I know I want one in Gotham (my stand-in for Chicago) and another in Metropolis (my replacement for New York). I'm still deciding on some of the others. The house parties are mostly full of the rich, the famous, the people who control America's military and political and cultural power.

There should be obvious factions among them. Hollywood, Wall Street, the Ivory Tower. I also want there to be secret societies. These aren't announced. To recognize them, you have to talk to people, hear about the terrible, beautiful things they would do to the world if their faction were ascendant over all the others, and recognize an eerie sense of deja vu that tells you that in addition to whoever they say they're working for, they also serve another master. That seems more difficult for me to accomplish as a writer, and more difficult for the players to determine as part of their investigation, but hopefully more rewarding as well.

As an example, imagine a spy organization, mirroring the real world CIA, who has successfully bought the loyalties of Abstract Expressionist painters and Literary Fiction writers, who have a plan remake the ideology of the middle and upper classes by smuggling it to them via their most vaunted and elite artists and authors. That would be quite a thing to uncover, if you could recognize what you were seeing, if you could remember where you heard that turn of phrase before, if you could sus out the true loyalty of the people who say they belong to one group, but really owe their allegiance to another.

 

Advice on Campaign Mysteries from From the Sorcerer's Skull

A little while back, Trey from From the Sorcerer's Skull wrote about how he builds mysteries into his campaign settings, in response to a question I asked him. Ever since, I've been meaning to collect and share some of Trey's other advice about building a mystery-filled campaign.

I first noticed that From the Sorcerer's Skull had advice on campaign mysteries when Trey posted a list of six unknowns in his Land of Azurth campaign, and then a follow-up to check-in on how many his players had solved.

In The Cultivating and Care of Campaign Mysteries, Trey lays out five pieces of concrete advice for creating a mystery-filled campaign:

- Embed the mysteries at the time of setting creation
- Don't decide on all the answers
- Create recurring NPCs to encourage player interest
- Create treasures that connect to the mysteries
- Build on player ideas

The first bit of advice here seems obvious, but probably is worth pointing out explicitly. You need to decide on some secrets early in your setting design process, so that you'll be able to decide on hints and clues to get your players interested. "If you want the players interested in the mysterious background of your setting, it has to be there."

His second piece of advice seems to contradict the first, but I think the idea is that you should decide on questions, but shouldn't decide on all the answers. Some questions your players might never investigate, and so might never need an answer. Other questions, an answer better than what you might have originally thought of could emerge as a logical conclusion during play.

I feel like this relates to the advice to build on player ideas. By that, Trey means trying to connect the player character backstories to the campaign mysteries - giving the characters a stake in the mystery, or using elements of their backstory as clues. But I think building on player ideas can also mean building ideas that they propose while they're investigating. When they describe what they've learned so far, and what conclusion they draw from it, that might sound more correct than what you originally thought of, and that's okay.

Trey's other two recommendations here are to use NPCs and treasures to help get the players involved in the mysteries. NPCs who act suspiciously might suggest themselves as suspects. The search for a famous treasure might reveal clues that illuminate the setting's history. And both NPCs and treasures are things that players want to interact with and learn more about, making them a source for clues that players will want to learn.



This piece ties in well with some of Trey's other advice about campaign setting creation. Adventure Time and Campaign Construction is a defense and explanation of making some of it up as you go along, rather than making it all up in advance. Setting History Should Do Something is a more general discussion of what kind of setting material is most (and least!) useful to make up, regardless of when you do it.

Trey explains his reasoning for not creating too much of your setting in advance:
- The campaign should start simple to make it accessible
- Seeing what the players like and respond to can help guide your setting creation
- The setting should only be revealed a little a time, in ways that connect to the adventure

A lot of the idea here is to slow down the pace at which you invent setting details to help enforce a slower pace of revelation. You don't want to overwhelm your players with too much detail before they even start playing, and if you haven't written the details yet, then you can't over-share them.

In addition to your players proposing ideas and theories at the table, what they're interested in (and what they're not) can help guide you to only create the things they want and you need. Again, you don't want to reveal too much detail during each gaming session; leaving things undecided prevents you from revealing more than you should.

And again, Trey suggests using monsters, NPCs, and treasures as like "hooks" to try to attract player interest and to show you what they care about. When they start tugging on a string, it's time for you to start fleshing out whatever's at the end of it.

The idea here isn't that you make it all up along the way, but rather, you start with a strong foundation and build it as you go, rather than starting with the entire edifice (or starting with nothing!)

When you are writing some backstory for your campaign, Trey recommends that backstory should:
- Reinforce the themes, flavor, or mood of the setting
- Establish constraints or parameters for adventures
- Provide obstacles for players overcome or toys for them to play with
- Avoid describing events that are repetitive or don't directly impact the present day setting

One way to think about this advice is to not write setting material that isn't actually important to your setting; another is to make sure to let your players interact with whatever is important.

Eberron is a bit guilty of violating Trey's suggestions here, with its ten-thousand year backstory, its series of highly similar apocalyptic invasions by varieties of reality-warping demons, and its setting-defining war that's finished before the campaign starts. Carcosa suffers from this too - there are psychic powers you'll never roll high enough to receive, cool alien artifacts you can't use, rituals you're (supposedly) not supposed to perform, and even a titular city that isn't really even there to visit.

Even the core rulebooks of most editions of D&D are guilty of this is in a way - playing the way the rules suggest, by starting at 1st level and likely dying multiple times while trying to level up, the books are filled with class features you'll never receive, spells you'll never be high enough level to cast, monsters you'll never have enough hp to fight, and artifacts you'll never find as treasure. That's not just because there's too much stuff to include it all, but because so much of the coolest stuff is explicitly walled off where most players will never get to it without breaking the rules. (Plus NPCs who sound suspiciously like Gary and his friends - they're more powerful than any PC, and either you'll never meet them, or they'll totally overshadow you if your paths ever cross.)

The way I interpret Trey's advice here is, basically, don't do that. Whether you're laying the foundation for your setting before the first game or adding details mid-campaign, figure out what's supposed to be important, and give the players the opportunity to encounter it right away. Whether that's as clues they keep running into, rumors they keep hearing - or as monsters, treasures, NPCs, or adventuring sites they actually get to see - give them the good stuff. (Because if you don't, a corollary of this idea is that whatever you DO give them is what your campaign is actually about - no matter what you intended.)

In a mystery campaign, presumably that means foregrounding the mysteries, the hints that lead you to wonder about them, and the clues that help you solve them. If you built mysteries into the backstory of your campaign, but the players never learn about, or find any evidence to help unravel them, then they're essentially dormant, and whatever your campaign's actually about, it isn't about solving those (unknown, unrealized) mysteries.



Azurth isn't a sandbox, it's got an episodic, mission-based campaign structure that gives Trey a bit more control over which part of the setting his players are interacting with each session. But he does have some ideas for building a setting where they player are more free to wander around looking for secrets. In The Weird Town: Investigative Sandbox, he offers some ideas for creating a compact setting where almost every major site holds a mystery.

- The town has many distinct secrets to investigate
- The town itself is weird and mysterious (not just a neutral site where crime coincidentally occurs)
- The player characters might be outsiders, but have a connection to town that gives the investigation some urgency



Finally, Trey also has some concrete advice for GMs to use to keep their players' investigations moving along. In The Simple Art of Mystery, he offers seven tips for GMs so they can facilitate (rather than hindering) their players' attempts to solve mysteries:

- Make sure the players want to solve a mystery
- Have a plan but leave some things open
- Always let the players find the most important clues
- Repeated interactions with the same NPCs always reveals new information
- If the players reach an impasse, an NPC will always react to their investigation so far
- Every NPC has a secret
- The players can solve mysteries without being Sherlock Holmes

The first piece of advice here is another bit that seems obvious but bears mentioning, which seems to be Trey's hallmark for starting off these pieces. Make sure your players know they're solving mysteries, and make sure they're on board to do that.

The next piece of advice here is another hallmark, you need a strong foundation in order to leave meaningful clues, but don't fill in every single detail in advance. Your players' guesses about what's going on might supply ideas worth including in the canon, and their actions during the game might cause you to invent details you couldn't have planned to include. When this works, it creates a sense that the players have discovered something true that even the gamemaster didn't realize before. But for that to work, these discoveries probably shouldn't contradict information you planned but never revealed.

Trey places a lot of importance on NPC interactions, which feels appropriate. Your players can search a room and find all the physical objects in it (and if any of those objects are clues, Trey recommends letting them find the object, rather than risking failure with a skill check) - but figuring out the meaning of those objects is probably going to require talking to NPCs. Just like every building in the mystery town houses its own weirdness, every NPC has their own secret. In addition to solving your main mystery, you can also make progress by figuring out what each person is hiding.

You probably learn as much from a clue-object directly as you're going to learn the first time you look closely at it (at least within the game!) - but you can always learn new information by talking to NPCs, even the same NPCs you talked to last time. If you have new questions, they have new answers. If you don't have new questions, because you've hit some kind of impasse, then it's time for an NPC to do something that generates new information. The mystery shouldn't exactly solve itself with no input from the players - remember, they're supposed to want to be here doing this - but it's a classic trope of the genre that having nosy kids start poking around spooks the villain into reacting. Canny investigators sometimes do things simply to provoke a reaction that will reveal a vital clue. Arguably, in fact, those villain reactions should happen with some regularity, even before the players have exhausted all their current leads. Just make sure that however the villain reacts, it actually does generate new questions to ask, new NPCs to talk to, or new places to look for clues.

Which is why Sherlock Holmes is probably a poor model for mystery solving in RPGs. In the popular imagination at least, Holmes is a guy who finds some ash from pipe tobacco on the ground, tastes the ashes, then calls on his voluminous memory of varieties of tobacco and where each type is sold across town and combines that with his vast experience with licking ashtrays to produce a list of tobacconist shops the villain must be a regular at. His shtick is that stuff that you'd normally need a crime lab for, he can do in his head.

But that's not how mystery solving goes at the RPG table. For obvious reasons, the players can't analyze the clues that way in their own heads. What they can do is ask the gamemaster "hey, would my character know which shop sold the tobacco that produced this ash?" But that's not nearly as interesting as getting the same answer by finding the genius perfumer who can discern the tasting notes by sniffing the ashes, then taking their findings to the blustering and self-important tobacco sommelier who knows all the shops in the city. In both cases, the players ask the gamemaster a question and get an answer, but it's so much more interesting if the answer comes out of the mouth of a fascinating NPC than if the GM simply states "sure, your character's a chain-smoker with pica, here's the address." In a game that's not about solving mysteries, maybe it makes sense to do a skill check, get the information, and move on, but if your purpose for being there at the game table is to enjoy the process of the investigation, then I think Trey's right, Holmes isn't a very good model for how that should go.

Landmark, Hidden, Secret

There are three ways I think about information in roleplaying games. Information can be landmark, or hidden, or it can be secret.

This division can apply to locations on an overland maps, objects within dungeon rooms, and even to details about locations and objects that the players encounter.
 
 

A landmark in Super Metroid
Closer inspection reveals something, hidden or secret, underneath

 
Landmark information is automatic and free. Players hear landmark information the first time without asking, and if they ask, they can be reminded of it as freely as they heard it at first. Learning landmark information doesn't take up any fictional time and doesn't pose any risks.

In a hexcrawl, the keyed encounter is a landmark, but so is the type of terrain. In a dungeon, the main contents of the room is free information, but also the shape of the room and its dimensions. You don't have to ask to be told these things - being told them is what defines a context in which you can ask meaningful questions. It's what defines the start of the turn, what sets the stage where the next act of the game will take place. If your adventure includes read-aloud text, that's landmark information.

An ordinary exit door is an example of a landmark. The judge tells the players the door is there during the initial description of the room. Later, if a player asks, the judge can describe the door in detail again, as though the character is glancing across the room, or recalling it from memory.
 
 

Most chozo statues holds a treasure, but to collect, you must risk approaching
One statue will carry you to safety, another will fight you to the death

 
Hidden information isn't automatic - players have to ask to learn it. And it often isn't free - there is often some fictional cost that must be paid to learn hidden information. However, unlike secret information, there is no chance of failure. If the players ask the question and pay the cost, they will learn the hidden information.

Landmark information is free because the characters can learn it from a distance, simply by looking at the surface of a thing. Hidden information is more expensive because it's more intimate. To learn it, a character must be close enough to touch the thing, must interact with it directly. Landmark information is received passively. Hidden information is actively obtained.

There are two costs to learning hidden information. The first cost, which is possible but not mandatory, is time. If your game keeps track of time, then it's possible that learning hidden information will require allowing some to pass. A turn passes, a clock moves one tick, wandering monsters are checked for, the encounter dice rolls.

The second cost is risk. What's hidden might not be beneficial, or might include both benefits and harms. What's hidden might be a hazard, an ambush, a trap. Discovering what's hidden doesn't always mean being harmed, but it does always mean making your character vulnerable to harm. There's no way to learn what's hidden without taking that risk.

The contents of every treasure chest are hidden information, every cabinet, every closet, every safe. Everything under or behind or inside is hidden. Seeking out and finding hidden information is one of the main goals of the game. Our characters don't simply look at the most obvious features of each room before moving on to the next. They explore.

A door concealed behind a curtain is an example of something hidden. The curtains themselves are a landmark, but the judge doesn't announce what's behind them. To find the door, a player must ask what's behind the curtains, must place their character at risk to push them aside.
 
 

Samus Aran's x-ray scope reveals secrets, if she makes the choice to use it
Some walls can be destroyed with the correct weapon ...

Secret information has no guarantees at all. It is the opposite of automatic, and it's always expensive. It's not just that players have to ask for secret information, as they do with hidden; there is also a chance the judge will continue to withhold the information, unlike any previous type. To learn secret information, players must roll the dice and win. That extra risk, not just of injury but of failure, is what makes secret information more costly than hidden.

Whether players can even learn the existence of secret information is something I think judges disagree about. Some judges would say that proving the existence of a secret and revealing the information should be accomplished as a single step - if you can't reveal the information, then you can't know if there even is a secret there to be revealed. Other judges would say that proving there's a secret and learning what the secret is are two separate steps requiring two different skills. Both those approaches seem to agree on one thing though - the existence of a secret is a secret itself.

I would say that the existence of a secret should be hidden information. I would say that players should be able to prove there is a secret by asking a question and taking a risk. Actually learning the secret should require rolling the dice, but discovering that there IS a secret there to be learned should not be a secret unto itself.

One thing that's useful about this hierarchy I've established is that it helps me think about how players should learn information. You discover hidden information by examining landmarks. You learn secrets by examining hidden information.

There is one comfort for players whose judges make the existence of a secret a secret itself. A player can always suspect the existence of secret information, even if their character can't prove it. This is more or less what some judges mean when they talk about "player skill".

A device that causes a bookshelf to rotate out of the way, revealing a doorway when a particular combination of books are tilted at specific angles, is an example of a secret. The bookshelf is a landmark. The existence of the device is hidden, but any character who inspects it closely will notice that the bookshelf is perfectly flush with the wall, and that the floor is scratched and scuffed in a half-circle in front of it. The operation of the device, however, is a secret. It's not enough to spend time trying to activate the device. There is a chance the characters will try but still fail.
 
 

... some floors destroy themselves at the slightest touch
The most dangerous secrets are the ones you never thought to look for

 
I think there are two benefits to thinking about information this way. Thinking about the difference between landmarks and hidden information helps write and tell better descriptions. Thinking about the difference between hidden information and secrets helps decide how to resolve player actions.

The difference between landmark information and hidden information isn't just the difference between what you say when players first enter a room and what they have to ask you to find out. It's also the difference between information that is free and information that comes at a cost.

You actually don't have to give a detailed description of everything the characters can see when they first enter a room. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Down that road lies madness, and ten-minute long read-aloud text. It's probably better if your initial description is short and evocative, if it sets the mood and lists the items available to investigate, and then gets out of the way. That doesn't mean all the other information is hidden. For many items on that list, your additional description should be free, and should be as detailed as the player would like. But it does mean that some information is hidden, and you should know which information is free, and which information takes time or involves risk to learn.

It also helps to think about those occasions when information shouldn't be free. When a character is unfamiliar with a work of technology or magic, they should get a description that makes what's familiar to the player strange to the character. When it's dark, perhaps all that characters can learn for free is the shape and size of objects, perhaps under those conditions more information should be hidden and risky. Total darkness is boring. But instead, think of those moments in children's books about not being afraid of the dark, the moments when you realize the "intruder" is just a hat atop a coatrack, or the "monster" is just a pile of clothes in a chair. Those moments happen all the time in fiction, and hardly ever in games. If applied to more interesting objects than coatracks and laundry, they might add a certain feeling of wonder and mystery to experience of exploring in the dark. Total darkness is a total lack of information. Not everything should be hidden. But having some information require extra effort to collect makes that information stand out. Its very difficulty highlights it, and makes it dear.

The difference between hidden information and secret information is that hidden information only requires getting close and only requires that the character spend time on the task. Secret information requires something more, something extra. Ideally, it requires applying a skill that can't - or can't easily - be modeled by player description. In my example of the secret door earlier, if it was just one tilted book that activated the device instead of a combination, it would probably only be a hidden door. All that takes is time, and there's no chance of failure. To guess a combination though, takes too much time, more time than the characters have, and there's plenty of opportunity to guess wrong. So it makes sense to roll the dice.

If all a search requires is time, and the characters have enough time, then what they're searching for is simply hidden, and they can find it without needing to roll the dice. Checking all the burial niches in a funerary crypt where the dead are interred as though in a vault of unlocked safety deposit boxes, digging up a grave, breaking down a false wall or a bricked-over doorway: these all take time - and sometimes make noise - but they require no particular skill, involve no particular risk of making a mistake or overlooking something.

Something can become secret simply because there's not enough time to find it. A methodical all-day search might be certain to turn up what you're looking for - but to uncover it in a single, 10 minute exploration turn requires luck or insight or skill. It requires rolling the dice. For there to be not enough time there has to be some kind of time pressure, some kind of countdown or deadline, either narrative or mechanical, some kind of reason the characters can't just spend all day. Remember, for the players, that search only takes as long as they need to say they agree to it.

There can also be not enough time because of the skill required to make the search. Not all problems have easy solutions. Trying to solve them just by spending time might require, not hours, but years, centuries. Knowing how to solve a problem like that quickly is a skill. It's special knowledge that not everyone - not every character - possesses. And even if a character has the right skill, there's still a chance that they'll fail. So roll the dice. Roll the dice, because the alternative is to make the players try to act out their characters' searches. Roll the dice because while the characters might have all day, the players don't, and their time, your time, is worth more than trying to devise and explain the correct search algorithm.

Again, not everything that isn't a landmark should be a secret. Some things can simply be hidden. Having to explicitly request to look closer is already a barrier to discovery. The additional barrier of a dice roll is appropriate in some situations, but not every situation.. But before rolling the dice, decide if the information is secret or just hidden - decide what it would mean for the characters to be able to fail in their search. If you don't think they even could fail, then it's not really a secret, and you don't need to roll the dice.

Some games include conditional information that is halfway between hidden and secret. Like secret information, it can't simply be found by every character who looks. But under the right conditions, it can be found, with no chance of failure, like hidden information. Skills in Trail of Cthulhu and its sister games work like that. If you have the right skill and you search for a clue, you will find it. But if you don't have the skill, you simply can't find it. Equipment in a lot of video games works this way. In A Link to the Past, if Link has the right magic gloves, he can lift boulders to clear a path, but without them, the path remains blocked. In Super Metroid, Samus needs specific ammunition to shoot down specific doors; without the right ammo, the doors remain closed.

A final note is that some games have only secrets, with no hidden information that can be learned without making a skill test. In the earliest dungeons, you can't even open a door without passing a skill test. I think how difficult it is to gain information should be based on its importance to the game.

If the players have to know some information, it should be landmark. This is true of all the visual description needed to create a shared image of the game world in everyone's imagination.

If information is really important, it should probably be landmark or hidden. No player wants their judge to "fudge" and lie about the result of a dice roll, or to "railroad" and seize control of the characters to make them do something ... but no one wants to cancel their expedition and spend the rest of the session hastily putting together a back-up delve just because they couldn't find the one secret door that revealed the rest of the dungeon either.

Information can safely be made secret under one of two conditions. The first is if that information is truly optional. It might be very nice for the players to find it, but the game won't come to a complete halt if they can't. The second condition is if there are a variety of ways to learn the information. If there are at least three ways to learn a piece of information, and the characters botch every attempt, then perhaps it's okay to let them fail. No one wants the entire group's game to end for the night because of one bad dice roll, but three bad dice rolls, accompanied by three rounds of planning and three narrative descriptions of the attempt mean that failure hasn't stopped the game - watching the characters fail has become the game, at least for this night and this secret.

A Mechanic for Misinformation

Okay, so your player characters are trying to gather information.

Maybe they're detectives on a case, or chthonic investigators looking for clues, maybe they're picaros out rumormongering, buying drinks for the house, trying to loose some rival adventuring party's tongues, or vagabonds accumulating a collection of bardic lore.

What have you. There's information, and they're trying to gather it.

Okay, so you assign a Difficulty Class or a Target Number or whatever, and you ask them to roll the dice, and they roll too low.

What happens next?

Well, you could just decide that they failed to gather any information. Or, you could roll on the Random Misinformation Table, below.
 

 
RANDOM MISINFORMATION TABLE

1 Dangerous Rumor - Not just a lie, you learn something like the opposite of the truth. Acting on this rumor will put your life in danger. If you're directed to another site, the place is a deathtrap or ambush.

2 Wild Goose Chase - No information, but you're directed to another site, which will supply more random misinformation.

3 Harmless Rumor - A lie, but incorrect without being dangerous. Acting on this rumor will inconvenience you.

4 Trivia - No information, or at least not what you're looking for. But at least you know that you don't know.

5 Treasure Map - No information, but you're directed to another site, which will supply the information you're looking for.

6 Partial Clue - The truth, or at least part of it. The information might be incomplete or cryptic, but it's correct, and might combine with other clues or partial clues. If you're directed to another site, you'll learn more than you were originally asking for.
 

 
You could also assign these results their own DCs or TNs, or you could break them up to create subtables corresponding to different degrees of misinformation.

I would assign results 1-2 to a critical miss, 3-4 to a miss, and 5-6 to a partial hit in a system with three degrees of failure, and assign 1-3 to a miss and 4-6 to a partial hit in a system with two degrees. Considering the alternatives, "no information" is a beneficial outcome.

The results of receiving random misinformation tend to be action-focused, so that even if your players didn't learn what they wanted to know, they probably at least know what they're doing next.

The problem with "no information" as a result is that it can kill any forward momentum. (This could also be a problem with a partial clue.) Reducing the frequency of that outcome should reduce the risk of your players getting stuck. If they do seem stymied, encourage them to think of their other possible leads and follow up on one of those instead.

I generally roll most dice out in the open, but I suspect this will work better if the players don't know in advance what type of misinformation they're receiving.

Investigations in DCC

I mentioned before that I'm going to be taking over as the head writer for Discerning Dhole's CRAWL-thulhu zine. I haven't made many decisions about the future direction of the zine yet, but I know I want it to be set in a fictionalized Gilded Age (encompassing roughly the period from 1880-1945) and I know I want it to focus on mystery investigations.

Which has got me thinking more generally about the question, how do you conduct investigations in DCC? How do you handle skills? How do you handle clues?

Zine by John Potts, cover and interior art by Todd McGowan

CRAWL-thulhu issue 1 has a mystery investigation adventure, but basically everyone is willing to talk to you, and all the clues are laying out in the open. The core mysteries arise from the fact that a key witness is dead and a key source of danger is invisible. Essentially any character should be equally likely to solve the mystery - deciding where to go, what to look at, who to talk to are all tests of player skill instead.

But often in mystery investigation games, there's an element of character skill involved instead. The basic idea being that not every character should be able to find every clue. Even in Trail of Cthulhu (and related games) where any character with the right skill can find a clue automatically just by asking for it, they still have to have the skill, and they still have to ask if there's a clue. In the original Call of Cthulhu, you not only need to have the skill and ask to use it, you also have to roll the dice to see if you succeed at finding it. This introduces an element of ambiguity - was there really no clue there? or was there a clue but you failed to find it? (I'll talk about some possible solutions to the "what if they don't find ANY of the clues?" problem at the end. Dungeon Crawl Classics HAS a skill system that involves rolling dice already - so I'm NOT going to propose adopting Trail of Cthulhu's diceless skills.)

CRAWL-thulhu issue 2 introduces skills, and the list would look pretty familiar to players of both D&D and Call of Cthulhu.

There are a few other people who've written rules for conducting investigations in DCC, so I'm going to look at Brent Ault's Cyber Sprawl Classics, Stephen Bean's Bloody Hound character class for Julian Bernick's Nowhere City Nights, and Paul Wolfe's Dark Seas. Luckily for us, these are all freely available online, so they're very easy to look at.

In DCC, there are two types of skills - the named, formal skills practiced by Thieves, and the unnamed, informal skills that every character learns from their zero-level occupation. A Thief's formal skills can usually be substituted by an ability score check - although the Thief might roll against a lower DC, and always benefits from a bonus determined by her alignment and level. The informal occupational skills are considered either "trained" or "untrained" - and about a dozen occupations are likely to be considered "trained" for any particular task. Untrained characters roll a d10 to attempt the skill, while trained characters roll a d20. So using a trained skill in DCC is basically the same as making an ability score check.

CRAWL-thulhu's skills build on this framework. All skills start out untrained, and you can roll a d10 to attempt them. You get one trained skill from your occupation, and you can roll a d20 for that. As you gain levels, you earn "skill points" that you can either use to train in untrained skills, or to improve your training in a trained skill - becoming an expert who rolls a d24 or a master who rolls a d30.

There are two really basic ways to find clues in a mystery investigation - talking to people, and finding / analyzing objects.

There are also two really basic dangers to designing skills for a mystery investigation. The first is having too few skills - most people would agree that a single "Clue" skill is too few, and likewise that a "People" skill and an "Objects" skill is still not enough. The second danger is having too many skills. Consider the question of talking to people - if each PC occupation could only talk to NPCs in the same occupation, then surely having 100 different "Talk to Person of the Same Occupation" skills is too many. (A third basic danger is making the skill tests too difficult, which is related to the "what if they don't find ANY of the clues?" problem I'll discuss at the end.)

Zine by Brent Ault, Cover art by Korotitskiy Igor

In Cyber Sprawl Classics (CSC), player characters know Etiquettes that help them talk to NPCs. CSC treats Etiquettes a bit like foreign languages - everyone knows the common tongue, but you need a positive Intelligence modifier, a Lucky Sign, or a class feature in order to learn an Etiquette. If you are smart or lucky enough to know an Etiquette, you get to roll a d24 when speaking to the relevant NPCs, instead of the standard d20. So in this game, everyone is "trained" to talk to everyone else, but if you know the relevant "foreign language," then you become a bit of an expert.

There are seven Etiquettes - Academic (for talking to scientists and doctors), Corporate (for talking to CEOs and white-collar workers), Gang (for talking to criminals), Security (for talking to police and military), Runner (for talking to hackers), Socialite (for talking to "industrialists" and "the elite"), and Street (for talking to blue-collar workers and people who provide services to criminals.)

If that list sounds familiar to you, it's probably because it's so similar to the list of backgrounds available in 5e and the GLOG. Before looking at what other DCC writers were doing, I made a list of the way I would divide up Gilded Age society, and CSC's list is very similar to what I came up with. It's probably very similar to the list you would come up with, if you were thinking about how to divide virtually any Western society.

If I were to alter CSC's list, I think I would combine the Corporate and Socialite Etiquettes. In the Gilded Age, "society" was basically synonymous with the corporate elite and their families. That might be different in a cyberpunk game - indeed, in such a game, it might even make sense to have two skills for talking to the same person in two different environments, at work and at leisure. I might also do away with the Runner Etiquette, or combine it with Gang, since there isn't really any group analogous to hackers in a Gilded Age setting, and since the motives of any analogous individuals would be essentially criminal.

I like "etiquette" as the name for this kind of skill though. I'd thought of calling them "interaction skills," but I think "etiquette skills" might sound better.

There's also a question of how common these skills should be among characters. In 5e and the GLOG, essentially every character starts with one Etiquette due to their background. In CSC, only a fraction of characters know any Etiquettes. In the heroic fantasy of 5e, character backgrounds are mostly relevant for receiving material support from NPCs, and the support most NPCs provide is food and shelter, and perhaps friendship with a specific faction. In CSC, Etiquettes might have many uses, but they're optional, a bonus. You get along fine without them, you just get along better if you have them. But "etiquette skills" could be treated as a skill like any other, a skill that you could either be "untrained" or "trained" in - but doing that changes something else fundamental about how social skills work though.

If everyone has an "etiquette skill" (or, what amounts to the same thing, if not everyone has one, but nobody needs one) then it's possible to have other social skills as well - separate skills for persuading people, for tricking them, or for intimidating them. Those are the kinds of social skills we're pretty used to seeing. But, if not everyone starts the game with an "etiquette skill" and every NPC needs you to have one, then I don't think you can have separate "traditional" social skills as well. If the party wants to blackmail a robber baron, I think it's too much to ask for them to have both a "corporate etiquette" and a "blackmail skill."

So the question becomes, which is more interesting for a mystery investigation game? Is it more interesting if you have a skill to interact with corporate types in whatever way you please? Or is it more interesting if you have a skill to blackmail any NPC you come across? Which leads to more interesting dilemmas if you don't have the skill? Is it more interesting if you have "academic etiquette" and you have to try to find a scientist who can talk to the robber baron for you? Or is it more interesting if you have "intimidation skill" and you have to find someone you can bully into setting up the blackmail?

Roleplaying games, including D&D, including Call of Cthulhu, have traditionally answered the latter - that it's more interesting to use character skills to define a particular approach and then let the PC use that approach on any kind of NPC they want. But part of me wonders if it might not be interesting to try the former. Perhaps it's more interesting to use skills to define a kind of NPC and then let the players use whatever approach is situationally appropriate - but only on the correct kind of NPC. At least for a mystery investigation game, where (paradoxically) the whole point of skills is to not let every character find every clue. To misquote Maslow, if all you have is a Seduction skill, every NPC looks like a nail. But if the only kind of NPCs you can talk to are workers, then perhaps it forces you to get creative to figure out what happened inside that share-holders meeting.

Nowhere City Nights by Julian Bernick, Bloody Hound by Steven Bean

The "Bloody Hound" character class (BH) is an investigator character that Steven Bean wrote for Nowhere City Nights and published in the 2017 Gongfarmer's Almanac, volume 7. BH includes six skills for mystery investigations. The Bloody Hound character class gets all six, every other character gets a single skill based on their background.

BH's skills are Search Scene (for finding clues within a crime scene), Analyze Physical Evidence (for learning information from objects), Analyze Medical Evidence (for learning information from dead bodies, primarily), Interrogate - Charm (for making people want to talk to you), Interrogate - Intimidate (for making people talk to you even though they don't want to), and Conduct Surveillance (for staking out a person or location to see what happens.)

In terms of the effects of skills, BH distinguishes between finding a clue (with a "clue" here meaning an fact from an interrogation or an object discovered at a crime scene), making a deduction (which means analyzing the fact/object to learn what it tells you), and discovering an answer (which refers to piecing together several deductions to solve the mystery, or at least an important part of it.) So for example, finding a shell casing next to a murder victim would be "finding a clue," figuring out what kind of gun fired that bullet would be "making a deduction," and realizing who the shooter is would be "discovering an answer." Note that to discover the answer, you would need another strand of the investigation that tells you what type of gun a specific person has, so that you could later discover that that person is the shooter. BH also awards XP for each of these activities.

So BH makes a few key distinctions. First, it distinguishes between finding a clue and learning something from the clue. Those are two separate steps, and it's important for anyone adopting this approach to keep in mind that adding a step increases the chance of failure, especially if adding a step means adding a dice roll. Difficulty Classes that look intuitively too low individually can easily become too high collectively if you make ultimate success contingent on succeeding each roll in sequence.

Second, BH distinguishes between clues from objects and clues from talking to people. It does this in two ways. First the obvious - you use one set of skills to find and analyze objects, and a second set to learn information from NPCs. But second, and less obviously, you only have deductive skills related to objects. You make one roll to find an object at a crime scene, and a second roll to learn something from it. But when conducting an interrogation, you make one roll to learn a fact, and then ... It's possible that you make a second roll on the same interrogation skill to get the person to tell you what you deduce from the clue. It's also possible that making deductions from verbal clues is a player skill, and not a character skill.

I agree that "discovering an answer" - that is, finally solving the mystery - should be a player skill that doesn't rely on rolling the dice. I'm not sure if I agree that "making a deduction" should be a player skill, or at least, not always. Some information NPCs give you is going to be clearly useful. It will either already be a deduction, or it will clearly point to a deduction that the players can make. But if an NPC tells the players something, and they just have no idea what to do with that information, it seems like it might be nice to have some mechanism in place to let them ask the judge for help. The danger of that is players relying on that mechanism instead of their own thinking, or judges insisting on that mechanism even when the players are able to deduce on their own. If you don't create such a mechanism, then no one can abuse it. But also, no one can use it in a real emergency. I guess it's the same problem you run into with traps in D&D, where it's inherently ambiguous whether you should find them with player skill or character skill, and where any GM hoping to rely on player skill is at the mercy of the adventure writer to provide enough detail to make that possible. (Although we're veering into "what happens if they don't find ANY of the clues?" territory here, so let's come back to this.)

What I find especially useful in the "Bloody Hound" class description is the idea that learning from clues in a mystery investigation is a two-step process, and that it might be profitable to separate those steps.

Dark Seas by Paul Wolfe

Dark Seas (DS) is a mini-setting with it's own fairly complete set of rules modifications that Paul Wolfe wrote and published in the 2017 Gongfarmer's Almanac, volume 4. 2017 was a good year for DCC mysteries! DS doesn't have any specialized skills for investigation, but what it does have is a really excellent interpretation of clues and how to use them.

Let me start with what I consider to be the key takeaway, and then back up. Every clue is an object. You might find some clues by talking to people and other clues by looking around the environment, but what you GET when you find a clue, what you KEEP once you have it, is a physical object. Like any other object, it goes in your character inventory.

But what that means for a mystery game, is that when you want to take stock of your investigation so far, you don't have to wrack your brain trying to remember every detail, you just look through your inventory and see which clue-objects are there. If you need help remembering what a particular clue told you, you just ask the GM to describe the object again. All this is probably easier than tracking ephemeral bits of information that are untethered from any specific reminder. I think this is brilliant, and I definitely plan to take Paul's advice.

So technically, in DS, Paul doesn't talk about "clues" but rather about Secrets. As mentioned, each secret takes the form of a physical object. Players collect Fragments like treasures as they explore - and 10 fragments combine to form one secret. In the example adventure, characters can collect fragments by doing things like searching a dead body, gathering rumors in a bar, inspecting magic items, questioning NPCs, they can be acquired like treasure from defeated monsters, and they're a reward for finding islands. The number of fragments acquired at one time is generally random, and is usually somewhere on the order of 1d10 fragments per investigative activity (although sometimes you get a full secret at one go).

I don't know if I would use this approach, but it encourages players to search as many places as possible, and it means that you don't need to know the meaning of every fragment, only the meaning of the final secret (clue) once it's assembled. And, you get to pick which secret you give them, which could maybe avoid the problem of finding a lot of clues hinting at one thing, while missing all the clues hinting at something else. Some examples of secrets in DS are port reports and charts of the sea, but also ghost stories and chess moves. Each character begins the game with a "starting secret" that grants them one boon, so for example you can have a political pamphlet that gives you an NPC contact, a last will and testament that gives you money, or a racy novel that gives you a bonus on certain saving throws.

I'm not completely convinced the experience system in DS would really work in practice the way Paul seems to want it to. When characters find fragments, they divvy them up, each character gets their own secret at 10 fragments. Characters earn XP for secrets - although not for finding them, but rather for divulging them to an NPC confessor. I think you're supposed to need a new NPC for each secret, although that could add up quickly. Raising 4 PCs from 0th level to 1st level would take 40 secrets and 40 NPCs ... which feels like kind of a lot. Starting secrets also need to be divulged in order to earn their benefit, which seems more appropriate. I'm quibbling over details at this point though - the big takeaway that every clue is an object is still absolutely brill.
 

Zine by John Potts, cover and interior art by Todd McGowan

 
Finally, as promised, let's address the question "what happens if they don't find ANY of the clues?" How are you supposed to run a mystery if there's a chance that the players won't find, or won't be able to interpret, ANY of the clues that are left for them?

1) First, and most obvious, give lots of of clues. The Alexandrian famously recommends including a minimum of 3 clues for any conclusion you want your players to draw.

The point is that in order for there to be ENOUGH clues for the players, there need to be what feels like TOO MANY clues from the perspective of the judge. The judge can see everything, the players will only ever experience a fraction of it. The judge also knows all the answers from the outset, and so can instantly see how each clue points to each conclusion. The players are assembling a mental image piece-by-piece, and it's not always immediately clear where each piece goes.

2) Second, provide multiple sites of investigation. Give the players several distinct places to go look for clues. Following the Alexandrian's advice again, at every site, leave clues pointing to the final solution AND clues pointing to the other investigative sites.

Realizing that there's another place to go look can feel like a discovery in itself, and leaving one site to go to another can feel like forward progress is being accomplished. Movement between sites also passes some time that gives the players a chance to think, and creates opportunities for new information to become available.

3) Third, use the random encounter table to provide breaks in the case. Mysteries don't necessarily need wandering monsters the way other D&D adventures do, but random encounters are still useful for pacing and for marking the passage of in-game time.

Each day that passes with no solution to the mystery, allow events to be in motion. Maybe the criminal keeps committing similar crimes. Maybe the criminal gets spooked and engages in some kind of cover-up. Maybe new witnesses come forward. Maybe new sites for investigation are revealed. Maybe an NPC investigator got killed but left a diary behind. These random events provide verisimilitude, they can be a way to just GIVE the players a clue they might need, and they should almost always open up some new avenue for investigation that wasn't available before.

4) Fourth, speaking of just giving the players clues, sometimes just GIVE the players clues. Sometimes don't require a skill check. Sometimes just let the clue be sitting right out in the open, so all the players have to do is say they want to look at it. Sometimes let the witness be perfectly willing to talk, so all the players have to do is say they want to talk to them. Sometimes, the barrier of the players having to notice that they want to look at something or talk to someone is going to be enough without getting the dice involved at all.

Alternatively, if you're going to require a skill check to find the clue, then consider just TELLING the players what it means. You want to be a little careful with this, because you don't want to rob your players of the chance to exercise their player skill at solving mysteries, BUT if you're going to require a skill check to FIND the clue in the first place, then maybe don't require a second check to discover the meaning of the clue.

Always be careful not to set your skill check DCs too high, and be DOUBLY careful not to make the checks too difficult by requiring multiple rolls to succeed. What sounds like "this is an appropriate test of skill" to a person just READING the adventure will often turn out to be too difficult to people actually playing through it. What sounds like "this is way too easy" to someone who's just reading will often turn out to be appropriately difficult for actual players. Set your DCs for players, not for readers. And wherever you set your DCs, make the reward proportionate to the difficulty. If you need one check to find the clue and another to research it, then the reward for those paired successes had better be a REALLY GOOD CLUE so that the players' efforts are worthwhile.

5) Fifth, give the players multiple opportunities to find and interpret each clue. If they fail once, give them a second try. If one approach comes up short, let them attempt another.

Use these multiple attempts to create the narrative of the adventure. Maybe the first time the PCs search a room, they try just looking around very carefully during a house party. If that fails, they can try searching a second time, but they have to try a different approach. Perhaps they try breaking in and tearing the room apart looking for secrets. Perhaps they hire a professional burglar to search the room for them. Make sure there are narrative consequences for whatever approach they choose. The first attempt requires getting invited to the house party and roleplaying interactions with the other guests. The second attempt is sure to tip off the house owner that somebody's on to them. Hiring a burglar is going to require using criminal etiquette to make contact with the local underworld.

If a character can't interpret the meaning of a clue, let them try again if they can get access to a library or a lab. Or let them find an NPC who can interpret it for them. NPCs don't need to make skill checks. Picking the right NPC to ask, and using your etiquette skill to ask them, is difficult enough. There's no reason to add another chance of failure by making the NPC roll the dice as well.

The point is, failing once shouldn't mean failing forever. Players should have multiple clues they could find, multiple ways to get information out of each clue, and multiple ways to "get help" if they find they can't do it alone.

6) And finally, what happens if they can't find any of the clues? Let them fail. Give the whole mystery some kind of time limit. Create consequences for failing to solve it. And if the players fail, let them fail. The killer keeps on killing. The burglar pulls of their heist. The sorcerer summons the monster. The monster destroys the city and slinks back into the ocean.

If you've provided lots of clues, made them easy to find and easy to interpret, allowed second chances for anything the players want to try again at? Then let them fail. Just make sure their failure is legible. At least let them understand the solution to the mystery when they see what happens as a result of them not stopping it. Nothing's going to be less satisfying than having the mystery end and STILL not understanding what happened. If the players don't stop the villain, then at least let them watch the villain take their mask off, or gloat in triumph, or commit one final crime right before their eyes.

At that point, you've created a recurring villain, and a chance for your players to shout "I'll get you next time, my pretty!" When the villain DOES recur, the players have a much better shot at stopping them the second time around. Or, if they're very proactive, they can start planning to bring the pain directly to the villain's doorstep. Either way, failure in one case can be made to simply raise the stakes and make another case more interesting.