Gurps places of mystery pdf download

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No posts found. Title Hot Recent. Sort: Pg. Relationship: Periodical Articles Podcast Episodes. News Pyramide Issue 2 - May No lists found. RPG Item Rank:. Personal Comments:. Your informationmanagement problem is reduced to making sure that you feed the investigators a steady diet of interesting scenes, with enough connecting clues to make a narrative, until they get to the big payoff at the end.

But building the path connecting the two of them can be hard. Alternatively, the PCs are interrupted by seemingly unrelated crimes that later form a pattern. If they persist in a disfavored line of investigation, they are suspended or punished. Postscript, if needed, about trial and conviction of villain, minions, and others involved. The easiest way to think about this middle part is as a series of individual scenes.

Each scene should ideally take place in one location, and contain one or two NPCs, although both of those guidelines are flexible. Each scene should have a specific purpose in furthering the plot — this is your information-management strategy — and should be intended to smooth the way for one or more subsequent scenes.

This is a good time to remember the path of least resistance method p. Use this one sparingly. Books, and to a lesser extent movies and TV shows, can get away with being almost entirely one kind of scene. Cozies, for instance, are biased heavily toward talking scenes, while thrillers are filled with action scenes. Murders Investigation scenes showcase the detectives searching for clues, analyzing information, exploring a place, or using their forensic skills.

The primary investigation scene is the crime site, although you can have others as well. Investigation scenes should be meticulously planned out — the more detail, the better.

Fortunately, planning them is more time-consuming than difficult. Raymond Chandler once said that whenever he felt that the story was slowing down, he wrote a scene in which a man came into the room with a gun. In spite of the known merits of careful planning, you may have to take the same tactic: if your players are floundering, throw some trouble at them.

It can be a deliberate attempt by an NPC to feed the detectives false information, which tells them that that NPC has something to hide — this happens a lot in cozies. This can be hard to do in a story structure as tightly plotted as a mystery. Once again, to do it successfully, you need to think in terms of the information you want the PCs to have. If, on the other hand, dealing with the gunman gives the players the information that they need to move on — or makes them realize that they had that information already — you can get your plot unstuck.

Handling an investigation scene is usually equally simple. They tell you what they do; you tell them what they get. For that reason, you may want to consider using the path of least resistance principle p. One of the classic investigation scenes in all four formats is the second or third, or fourth murder.

Second murders very often come about because the victim knew something about the first murder. This scene works so well because it does several things: it heightens the tension by upping the stakes, it removes a potential suspect, and it gives the protagonists a whole new crime scene and set of circumstances to explore. The key to making action scenes work well in the adventure is to integrate them into your information management.

Typical mysteries use four basic kinds of action scenes: intimidation, fights, chases, and races. The intimidation scene is most common in hard-boiled stories, where the detective must stand up to the pressure of police and criminals. In a cozy, the detective is rarely in personal danger, and rarely tries to intimidate a witness with physical force; specialists almost never are intimidators.

Fight scenes often arise out of an intimidation. That trick never works, but villains never stop trying it. Brawls are better fight scenes than gunfights, because you can plausibly presume that they have no significant consequences. Gunshots attract the police to a private eye, at the risk of his license; police who fire weapons face an investigation.

Brawls, on the other hand, attract little attention, so long as neither party is badly hurt. Chases are more likely to be satisfying if you plan them in advance. Have a good idea of the ground to be covered, likely obstacles, monkey wrenches you can throw into the works, and the general likely courses the chase may take.

A race scene involves both the PCs and the NPC s trying to get to the same goal, with the prize going to whoever gets there first. In some cases the race is against an outside force, like a ticking clock, rather than against NPCs directly. You can use them occasionally in hard-boiled mysteries and procedurals, and even in cozies, as a way of building up tension.

A good questioner will ask very simple questions requiring short and simple answers and slowly increase the pace until when he throws a curve, the silence seems to last too long, and you feel a compulsion to give an answer quickly. Any answer. A good questioner will give you back your answers, twisted very slightly, and wait for the correction. If you can know and anticipate and deal with the skilled questioner, you slowly begin to realize that you are doing so much bobbing and weaving that, in itself, it becomes significant.

The characters will probably end up talking to each individual witness and suspect at least once, maybe more. Badly handled, these interview scenes will become dull and repetitive. Your challenge, then, is to make each individual interaction different, distinctive, and memorable.

From a story perspective, of course, the function of the interview scene is to give the investigator some piece of information that the witness knows. Also, you should avoid talking scenes with more than one or two NPCs; the more NPCs there are, the more likely it is that your players will lose track of who said what.

Be sure you have a good handle on exactly what information the detectives absolutely require from the scene, and what information would be useful but not critical. Think about how the NPC will react to the detectives, based on their appearance, race, class, and position. Think, also, about how the NPC will react to the various tactics the detectives employ. If they try bribery? If they try to be seductive? If they try subterfuge? Reward players who listen carefully to the NPCs. See pp.

Think about the setting. If he intends to approach the witness in an unofficial way, then he may meet the NPC on the street, or in a bar, or in any other appropriate location for the approach he has in mind. Think about ways that your investigators can verify the information they get.

Think, too, about how you can signal that an NPC is lying — either during the talking scene, or with another scene that comes later. Information that comes from multiple unrelated sources is more trustworthy than information from a single source, especially if that source has a reason to lie. Information that conflicts with the physical evidence is also suspicious.

The players expect that you and thus the NPCs will make a mistake when you have to react swiftly. If they do surprise you, you are not obliged to respond at once! This may be a good time to call a meal break while you think about how the NPCs should respond. The monkey wrench can be a problem for you, but it can also be an opportunity. If the adventure is stalled, you should think about exactly what information the PCs need, and use the monkey wrench to provide it.

Hardboiled detectives usually threaten to beat the suspect unless he cooperates. Police detectives can threaten to prosecute the suspect or someone he cares about for unrelated offenses, or threaten to leak word that the suspect is cooperating with them.

The target sees the shadow, gets nervous, and calls for help. Usually, the rough shadow is supported either by a hidden second shadow or a means to listen in on telephone calls. On occasion, the investigator presents himself as the person whom the target can go to for help. On the other hand, suspects are often willing to believe that an accomplice has betrayed them, or that they missed some important bit of physical evidence. This one happens quite a bit in hard-boiled stories — and also in procedurals, since this is a recognized police technique.

The more clues get slipped past the reader, the more satisfying the mystery. Remember, the writer wants the readers to be fooled; you want your players to be successful.

Most of the time, when you give the characters a piece of information, you want them to act on it. Or, at the very least, you want them to remember it, so that it can match up with another piece of information later. Keep it simple! You can conceal the perpetrator, the motive, the means, the time of the crime, the location, the true victim, or even the type of crime that was committed.

Of course, the more you do this, the greater the chance that someone will pick up on the clue, and short-circuit your plot. And if you do it in every adventure, your players will start looking for this trick. Remember, one clever trick per adventure is usually enough. Remember, also, that your objective is not to fool the players permanently — only to keep them in the dark until the right time. If you sneak a gimmick past them, you should also plan on giving them the clue that reveals the gimmick to them at the appropriate time.

This is perhaps the single most common rhetorical trick of mystery writers. Meta-game thinking — applying outof-game knowledge and assumptions to in-game play — works as well for the GM as meta-book thinking does for the mystery author.

Players, like readers, may have spent hundreds of hours reading or watching mystery stories before they come to your adventure. The real gimmick slipped past while they were congratulating themselves on their cleverness.

Red Herrings A red herring is a false clue — a piece of data that points away from the real villain and toward someone or someplace else. Used sparingly, the red herring can be your friend. Having an innocent NPC whom the PCs can suspect is a good way of keeping their attention away from the real criminal, at least for a while.

They may follow the suspect, search his room, run background checks on him, even assault him. One red herring per adventure is usually enough. Make the false lead convincing enough that the PCs have to keep it in mind, but not so overwhelmingly convincing that they get fixated on it to the exclusion of other possibilities. Murderer produces gun, points same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it.

Thus wasting a lot of valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it. They always manage to spoil it. You have been building up to this one scene; the hardest, most vital scene in your adventure. You need to help the PCs carry it off. Order is restored; justice is done. The PCs should understand the who, the why, and the how of the crime.

There may be a few twists during the final scene, but avoid entirely new revelations. If the investigators have missed some vital clue, you may want to have an NPC supervisor or assistant remind them of it. Armed with that knowledge, they must confront the offender, establish his guilt to the satisfaction of all, and prevent him from escaping. Traditionally, the police are waiting in an adjoining room to arrest the offender before he can menace the detective or escape.

This is a very difficult scene to arrange in an RPG. In a roleplaying game, on the other hand, the PCs and you should both know the answer. Ergo, no tension. This can confuse the scene, and lead to an anticlimax. Suggest that if the PCs want to stage the drawing-room scene, they agree among themselves who will speak and what is being said first.

You may want to give them some time alone to plan to provide some tension in the scene. A variation on this scene is a personal confrontation between the investigator and the perpetrator. The investigator might offer a sympathetic villain a deal. He may give the villain the face-saving option of dying rather than being publicly exposed as a murderer.

In The 28 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for instance, Poirot gives the guilty man a chance to spare his family the shame of his trial and commit suicide.

In Murder Must Advertise, Wimsey suggests that the villain allow himself to be killed by his criminal associates rather than expose his family to the shame of exposure or suicide. Alternatively, the investigator may offer to conceal a family secret or another NPCs misdeeds to a point if the NPC villain confesses to police.

If the investigators believe that the crime was justified, they may decide not to punish the criminals at all. Legally, many of these resolutions make the investigator an accomplice to the crime.

The consequences of this rarely arise in mystery fiction, but being an accomplice to a murder may not sit well with some members of a group of investigators. If the party is inclined toward this resolution, make sure they are all agreed upon it — an argument between the detectives in front of the villain is unlikely to make the scene work.

Another variation is to have someone outside the party stage the drawingroom scene. This variant forces the PCs to out-argue the NPC and convince the police that their solution is the correct one. This is the kind of scene the heroes may be more comfortable with.

Thriller confrontations are usually free of moral ambiguity and often highly cinematic, too. Hard-boiled confrontations may not be so clear-cut. He may, for instance, have to decide whether to protect his client by leaving some of the truth unrevealed. Or the offender may be someone he liked and respected.

Or he may have to make an ugly bargain with a criminal in order to catch a bigger criminal. In one common variant of this scene, the investigators have proof that the villain has betrayed one or more of his men. In In the Best Families, for example, the criminal mastermind is too wealthy, powerful, and well connected for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin to merely expose him to the police.

Instead, they trick his accomplice into shooting him. The accomplice is then shot in turn by a henchman.

Justice triumphs and the wicked are punished, but not in a public way. The detective, constrained by Miranda and other rules, must get the villain to confess by any legal means. Tactics vary. Appeals to morality, family responsibility, and religious values can also work. The key to the procedural confrontation is hope — persuading the villain that he can win his freedom and go home if only he cooperates with the detective. Once the villain has been confronted with the proof of his guilt, he may try to explain or lie.

The investigators should respond with hard fact after hard fact that seals his fate. If they do not have sufficient evidence of guilt, they may try to brazen it out and trick the villain by claiming they have evidence and convincing him to confess as all is lost — if he confesses he can hope for lenience. Another classic approach is to set a trap for the villain. Here, the investigators let information slip to several suspects that they have some proof that the villain might be able to destroy if he moves quickly enough.

The person who tries to destroy the evidence is the villain. When confronted with enough proof of guilt, the perpetrator frequently confesses. Give your offender something interesting to do in this scene. Have him justify himself. Have his justification include some minor revelation or twist — nothing that changes what the detectives have figured out, but perhaps something that explains some clue that had puzzled them for a while. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor.

Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut. Written mysteries, even series fiction, tie up the loose ends at the end of each book. Television detective series are also episodic: each adventure stands alone. Explain anything that still needs explaining. If the investigators have questions about a clue or an NPC, resolve them.

Your secondary and tertiary NPCs can reappear, perhaps to be reused in other adventures. The exception is the thriller, in which vanquished villains or their followers frequently show up, longing for revenge, in a sequel. This is one of those places where the genre diverges from reality: knowing the truth solves the problem, period.

Introducing evidence that clears the villain in a later adventure may give your PCs an interesting ethical dilemma, but it will also make them more hesitant and indecisive in later adventures.

The resolution is also the place to handle any serious mistakes the detectives made. Official investigators may be chastised by their superiors; private investigators may be threatened with the loss of their licenses; interfering private citizens can be shamed in the newspapers or even sued.

Finally, the resolution is the time to give the PCs their rewards for a job well done. Typical rewards may include reputation, money, favors, patrons, and new contacts, in addition to experience point awards. Contacts may become more available to the investigators, or more reliable. Clients or superiors may help bury the evidence of any minor misdeeds the investigators may have committed. You can also give them intangible rewards, like flattering stories in the media that provide only temporary fame.

Observation tells me that you have a little reddish mould adhering to your instep. Just opposite the Wigmore Street Office they have taken up the pavement and thrown up some earth, which lies in such a way that it is difficult to avoid treading in it in entering. The earth is of this peculiar reddish tint which is found, as far as I know, nowhere else in the neighborhood.

I knew that you had not written a letter, since I sat opposite to you all morning. I see also in your open desk there that you have a sheet of stamps and a thick bundle of postcards. What could you go to the post-office for, then, but to send a wire? Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.

This chapter gives GMs and players an introduction to modern forensic science. GMs can use this chapter to generate useful clues. Players can use it for ideas about the kind of things they might discover at a crime scene and what they mean. Some of this information may be seem familiar to those who read or watch mysteries. It is repeated here to ensure that everyone at the game table is working with consistent facts, drawn from forensic texts, to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.

Even in those situations, the GM will want to make sure that the obvious details are consistent with modern knowledge so the players, and thus their characters, are not misled by what they might know about basic forensic science.

How much forensics affects an adventure depends on what kind of adventure it is and who the investigators are. In a cozy, the gory details of death are often glossed over. The scene focuses on clues left in and around the area. Genius and amateur detectives, the most common investigators in a cozy, frequently rely on NPC experts to provide basic information about time and cause of death.

However, it is more likely that they will find their answers through questioning suspects and noticing unusual things than from trace evidence and fingerprints. In a hardboiled story, the private investigator often does not have access to the primary crime scene. He learns about it if he can gain access to the police reports.

During the course of the story, the private investigator may come across other crime scenes, but he often does not have time for a detailed examination. At minimum, he would be delayed by their questions. At worst, he might be accused of committing the crime.

In reading reports or surveying the scene, detectives may ask questions that the GM was not anticipating but which should logically be in the report. Here, as in the cozy, it is more likely that the key clues will come from questioning and intimidating witnesses than from forensic analysis. The police procedural story often involves detailed descriptions of the crime scene and the body.

The GM should be prepared for detailed questions about the crime scene and have consistent, logical answers ready.

A template-based character generation system for iconic investigators, including the genius detective, the hardboiled shamus, police detectives, investigating magicians, even "that darn kid. Expanded rules for questioning and interacting with NPCs. GURPS Cops — Recreate your favorite cop show with details about police forces through history, different sorts of police jobs, what investigations are like in the real world.

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