Mystery adventures - a few tips

One of my major weak spots is that I'm less than stellar at writing and running mystery adventures. This isn't that surprising, considering that these kinds of adventures can be quite tricky. I have written a few other posts that touches upon the subject, but today I thought I'd just point you towards a couple of links that gives helpful advice.

First is a thread from rpg.net, where a player asks about help to run an murder-mystery-adventure.

My favorite from that thread was the "three methods (quoted from the thread):

The Agatha Christie method: The victim was a snot - Murder is murder, but the Victim was a genuinely nasty person who had it coming. Maybe Victim wasn't a criminal, but he/she made the lives of people around him/her absolute misery. Every NPC within Victim's circle (family, business, social) had an excellent reason to hate him/her and is a potential suspect. Solving the mystery involves unraveling the NPCs' relationships with Victim and each other to determine who hated Victim most and had the opportunity to do him/her in. Some of the NPCs will be openly bitter. Others may be sympathetic sufferers. Christie usually gave the culprit at least one kindly trait to throw readers off.

The Doc Savage method: The culprit comes after the PCs - The victim was probably a nice person, since he/she was a friend/associate/acquaintance of the PCs. The culprit is so sure that the adventurers will give him (or her) grief over the murder that he starts trying to off them as soon as the crime is committed. The PCs' friend was somehow tangled up in a much larger conspiracy; as they attempt to defend themselves against their assailants and investigate their friend's death, they'll uncover a web of clues that will inevitably lead to the villain.

The Sam Spade/Philip Marlow method: Never trust a client - No client or assignment is what he/it seems to be. The PCs are hired to watch or find somebody who doesn't want the attention. The more they pursue their quarry the more goons and corrupt officials come out of the woodwork, and the bodies start stacking up as not-nice parties with conflicting agendas "remove" people who have given/might give info to the PCs. They typically have to fend off/avoid the police while they hunt down the culprit(s). It's not unusual to have different victims slain by different villains, all of whom are trying to conceal the Big Secret that the heroes are threatening to uncover.

Another good place is an essay written by Justin Alexander where he (among other things) talks about the three-clue-rule, where he says that the GM should have at least three clues for piece of information he wants the players to find. Well worth a read!