Presenting mysteries like Uketsu

I recently read Strange Buildings by Uketsu. I'm used to mystery stories that writers try to embed in a realistic setting. They'll add some drama around the mystery - a family traumatised by loss, an investigator losing everything because of their single-mindedness, mismatched partners struggling to work together. Uketsu instead seems to say, "If you're here for mystery, I'll give you 11 case files, each with multiple questions, and with overarching connections." The heightened reality where all of these questions exist is game-like. How could all these weird things be going on? Well, we're here to solve mysteries so we have a stack of them.

As a GM, I'm wondering what I can take away from this book. This is what I'm come up with.

1. The GM can also be a note taker.

2. List the unanswered questions. 

3. NPCs have their own theories. 

4. Have multiple mysteries. 

5. Leave room for a second interpretation.

The GM can also be a note taker

Uketsu includes diagrams in his mysteries. He repeats them and highlights different aspects. When the investigator is trying to work out the order of events, he often uses little boxes with flow diagrams like this:

At first glance this may seem like spoon feeding information to the reader, but I think of it more as an invitation to try to solve the puzzle. The mystery is tough enough without scattering the key elements across multiple paragraphs.

In an RPG, the facts are spread across conversation. Details are easily missed. Many players make notes and share them. Here I'm suggesting the GM writes or draws simple snippets at the table. For my group, I think that would quickly become a shared note, with the GM and players all adding to it.

The important information is shared in conversation, but so is a lot of flavour and chit chat. Writing a quick shared note highlights the importance of information. Character names. Where they were at certain times. Known grievances between them.

Solving the mystery isn't just collecting puzzle pieces. That's just step one and, crucially, if investigators don't get that right it's hard to progress. So why not make it collaborative?

List the unanswered questions

This is pretty basic, but - what is the mystery?

Uketsu states the questions clearly. If there's any ambiguity about it that will be a big stumbling block. I usually play RPGs where players choose their own goals. Stating the central questions of a mystery is more about saying "This is what is unknown here" rather than "This is your objective here".

NPCs have their own theories

Uketsu's supporting characters frequently have their own explanations for events, even as they ask an investigator for help. That seems very natural. If they're invested in the solution they should already be trying to work it out. It's also a secondary source of information: What biases and grudges are exposed by their theories?

Have multiple mysteries

Consider a party of PCs trying to cross a river and finding the ferryman murdered. If they're inclined to investigate, the obvious question is "Who killed the ferryman?" Taking a lesson from Uketsu, I'd try to add further questions:

"Why is there a sign next to the crossing STRICTLY NO CATS ON BOARD?"

"Who painted the exquisite portrait of the ferryman hanging in his cabin?"

"Why did he choose this place for the crossing, when there is a narrower section of the river nearby?"

These individual mysteries may be related to the murder or they may be independent. If related, they help break the challenge up into increments. If unrelated, they still may have some reward, or may just be red herrings. Misdirection may sound like a frustration in an RPG, but for investigative play the decision making is focused on which leads to pursue in what order. As long as the cul-de-sacs aren't too time-consuming, they allow for variation in outcomes. If all leads are successes, where are the meaningful choices?

The other benefit of adding additional questions is that there is no guarantee that the players will solve everything. If they solve part of a mystery, it gives them some sense of achievement.

Leave room for a second interpretation

This might be the trickiest lesson to pull into a game. I'm thinking here about investigations that are closed, the solution seeming to fit all the evidence, and then a small doubt is raised - Is there something more?

A classic version of this is where the killer is identified, but then it is revealed that the accused is covering for someone else, taking the fall on their behalf. It is sometimes a darker twist to the events, something even worse than was initially revealed. This extra element can be the icing on the cake of a mystery.

Running RPG mysteries, we tend to worry "Will the players be able to solve this?" Building a mystery with (at least) two valid solutions and expecting them to find both seems like a stretch. But I think a better question is not "Will they solve it?" but rather "Will this be a good experience in play?" which may be closely linked to "Will this feel fair?" It feels fair if you had all the required pieces, and you understand now how they fit together in a logical way. It feels unfair if clues were never revealed, or if the solution is overly elaborate such that you would never have arrived at it.

I think there's probably more RPG tips to glean from Strange Buildings than I have done here. (I haven't even discussed the maps, of which there are many.) But with Uketsu's work it seems fitting to leave some loose ends to follow.

Being online

Among Cats and Books' Death of a Hobby (and the linked posts at the end of it) prompted me to think about my own relationship with creativity and being online.

I first built a website to share my writing in the 90's. Since then, I've had a bunch of different projects ‐ fiction, essays, poetry, videos, podcasts, games, comics. Shared in different ways, not linked to each other (mostly). In most cases, I didn't sign the work or identify myself. In some cases I had numbers to look at, and could see how many people looked at the work. In other cases, I didn't have that.

I'm proud of most of the stuff I made. Much of it isn't online anymore, but I have my own copies backed up. I sometimes feel a pang of regret that I don't have all this gathered together, showcasing everything, with my name on top inside a <blink> tag. And sometimes I am relieved that I chose not to do that.

I've been on and off social media sporadically. Again, sometimes with my full name published and other times without.

I'm a private person. I also like to make things and share them. There's a strange tension there.

Also, and this is one of the hard parts of social media, a part of me gets too caught up in engagement numbers. I try not to pay attention to that. I have used (and really liked) a browser plugin that hid all those numbers on social media. Everything was just "a thing someone said", rather than "a thing someone said with 10,000 up-blorps and 2,000 re-blorps". But ultimately, I think blogging and other slowly produced work suit me better.

I have been active on Discord to varying degrees. The best outcome of that has been making genuine friends who I have played games with and collaborated with, one of whom I met recently and others I'll hopefully be meeting later this year. Though most of my activity on Discord has been chatting to strangers who I may never interact with again, often taking part in a recurring conversation about an aspect of a game. Sure, there's a blog post somewhere that says most of whatever needs to be said on the topic of the recurring conversation but (a) it is not particularly easy to find blog posts and (2) people want to connect - they want to feel like they talked it over rather than just read it. I get that.

Years ago, I was involved in a meditation group. I attended twice a week for a long time, and it was really good for me. One interesting aspect of that time, was that once I became a regular attendee, I began to see patterns in how other people attended. Some people would come to meditation (a valuable and worthy past time which is also frustrating and boring) in need of a tool to deal with an immediate problem. A quick fix. They might attend only once, and often with intense enthusiasm before and after the session. And then they'd be gone.

If you hang around an RPG Discord long enough, you also see people coming and going, extremely excited about games and their plans to play. Maybe talking about play (rather than contending with organising a group, scheduling, risking sessions that may disappoint) is the quick fix solution to wanting to play. I've certainty spent time and energy talking about play, prompted by wanting to play.

I think the Internet is too quick for some things. Some experiences are naturally slow, and don't really fit the acceleration that the Internet applies to all things.

This post is in danger of sounding like advice. I don't mean it to. I sometimes struggle with being online, and knowing how much to engage. I'm working these things out for myself and I wish the best to anyone else trying to navigate this stuff.

✌️❤️🎲

Regicide and the travel campaign

As mentioned in the last Smiling Fox episode, I've been travelling this summer. The trip has been amazing but we're here to talk about games 🎲🎲

I got into Regicide shortly before leaving, playing a few games solo and a few 2-player games. I was instantly impressed with how the standard 52-card deck could be used for this type of game. I grew up on card games with rules like "the 5 of hearts is the best card, unless someone has played a club" where there is little or no mnemonic support for players. And yet the royals present some obvious characters, and the suits (numbering only four, and with fairly evocative designs) can be easily associated to memorable concepts. Regicide takes this idea and runs with it beautifully - the rules are a little tricky at first, but the familiar designs of the cards support learning and remembering them. And even without a strong narrative element, the feeling of defeating the Jacks and then seeing the Queens deployed hits the mark just right. Also worth mentioning - the scoring in Regicide is straightforward to track, but there's also a companion app that offloads the arithmetic and is very well designed.

My wife and I are traveling together, and it has been such a nice addition, having a coop game along with us that we can easily break out and play. On top of that, we haven't won a single game. (This is a good thing!) Each game of Regicide is separate. There's no campaign play (though that might be a cool hack), and yet it is so natural to want to beat this thing before we end the trip. Even between games, we'll be walking around an unfamiliar town discussing when is best to play hearts, the only suit without an immediate payoff. I'll be on the lookout in future for other games which are (1) coop, (2) quick to play a full game, (3) tough to beat.

On the roleplaying front, I've been playing a solo game of Midnight of the Century on the trip too. It's been a nice change of pace to play a modern setting (I am old enough to not think of the 1990s as ancient history). I'll write a post about that when my investigator catches the killer (or falls prey to them...)

I should have an episode of Luck Roll out soon after I get back. It is recorded and mostly edited. Looking forward to getting back to Knotte and co.