#RPGADAY 20 Investigate

Because for much of my roleplaying career I considered myself far too grown up and serious a role player to play dungeons I’ve run very many investigative scenarios often in the supers or police / espionage space.

Increasingly of the opinion grown up and serious are oxymoronic

Theres been done interesting developments in this space. Gunshoe and cthulhuhack both look to turn clue discovery from a matter of success and failure to resource management. I like that to some extent but I’m not sure it’s a problem that always needs to solved. If a scenario features an ocean of clues pointing to leads the competency route can with success and failure give different routes to reveals.

Another cool tool is the conspyramid from Nights Black Agents while designed to map a vampire led organisation on Ken Hite’s sky’sbashing bloodsuckers game I can see it’s uses:

Judge Dredd for tracking sector organised crime
Gangbusters for Prohibition agents mapping bootlegger organisations (or rival bootleggers uncovering their rivals organisation & corrupt coppers in it.)
Fantasy games for the tentacles of a thieves guild or cults
Speaking of cults – Cuthulhu or Delta Green for cult influence
Boot Hill for a robber, cattle baron or mining company grip on a town your trying to clean up
Flashing Blades for a Spanish espionage ring or hidden Protestant conspiracy

Obviously you could overuse the tool but say 1 campaign in 4 it could be a useful graphic tool.

As stated while running terror of trollmarsh I think for NPC rich investigate scenarios images say of actors for NPCs are really useful to help player memories. I also want to see about a virtual white board to see if players could use that to store notes etc in game removing the note taking burden from that one player abc making it more collaborative.

An example may be to port maps (even if abstract) in an allow PCs to attach notes to locations that reflect points on the conspyramid or other pages of the white board,

Have you had shy experience using tools like this in investigative scenarios ? How has it worked ?

Kehaar's Blog