Closing out GLOGtober with a twist on the prompt 'Vampires'. Thanks for reading along this month!
Vampire: The Masquerade - The Imperfect Mysteries
One of the games I’ve run a lot of besides D&D is Vampire: The Masquerade, which is often boils down to being a game about a group of vampires investigating something. Often structured around ideas of Machiavellian plots and social drama, he players are frequently tasked with uncovering a dark scheme or digging up blackmail against their rivals.
In these games most vampires have something to hide, such as a lover across sect lines, or the aid they gave to the usurpers in the last coup. When constructing scenarios you often have one of these secrets as the focus, or at least in the line of fire, able to be dredged up if the players connect the right dots. Obviously making these secrets take work to uncover is natural, it shouldn’t be easy to uncover that the Brujah Primogen is actually just a Nosferatu who is in way too deep.
In writing the situations the necessary clues might be found, however I often find myself obfuscating lines of reasoning beyond what is useful or necessary. Surely as immortal centuries old monsters these kindred would know how to not get caught and employ the perfect cover up to avoid suspicion. Every single conceivable dead end can be covered, mind wiping everyone in the area and using six layers of middle men to get it done. Yet despite this potentially being the case, I’ve found when I do this it often detracts from the fun of the game.
Players need something to hook onto, something to drag them through the world as they pull on strings. You have to remember that you are their eyes that allow them to see these strings, and if you don’t give them anything things quickly dead end. For example I once had an assassin hired against the players, another kindred who was following orders from a mysterious superior in a cult. Yet I didn’t want to reveal this superior to be the Prince’s right hand so I created a convoluted chain of necromancy & telepathy that would make finding the mastermind impossible. Even if the players had followed the assassin back to their lair, subdued them and managed to pry out the meeting spot, they wouldn’t find anything of note there. It’d just be another dead end.
When you put up a wall like this in an investigation game, forcing players to waste time and backtrack it can lead to unsatisfying experiences. Instead remember that your suspects are flawed, they can’t be perfect and cover every single angle. The young neonate doesn’t know that the Toreador can read the history of the murder by simply touching the knife, while the jaded elder forgets the strength of familial bonds as his pawn can’t help but confess to her brother he did something terrible on the same night Elysium was bombed.
It’s through these flaws that the players can move forward. That doesn’t mean that every mystery has to be easy, but allow the plot to have weaknesses. Maybe in my example above the necromancer has to leave behind occult runes hidden beneath the rug. The Tremere in the coterie won’t be able to recognize the exact incantation due to their necrotic nature, but now they know they’re almost certainly looking for a member of the Cappadocians.
These days as I continue to write mysteries and work on improving my skills I’ll often take a step back as my brain comes up with a byzantine eight step plan to perfectly explain how the Archbishop was found staked in the middle of his haven. Reminding myself that this is for my friends I set that convoluted set up aside, finding a more straight forward plan that leaves at least something for the players to check out further.
No comments:
Post a Comment