Locked Room Mysteries (GUMSHOE Any)

I recently watched a film I'd really wanted to see and came away dissatisfied. I shan't say which one, as this post might constitute spoilers. I'll just say CSI KYC and leave it at that, on the supposition that if you get the joke you've already seen the film and so spoilers mean nothing to you.

Part of my dissatisfaction is because it sets up a locked room mystery and then betrays the trope. The classic locked room is the Mary Celeste of mysteries. It sets up a situation that ought to be impossible, and then shows you not just that it's possible but takes you through the working until you see all the clues you missed along the way. It's called locked room because the classic example is the corpse found sealed away in a locked room, whose death seems inexplicable. Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is the original version, but there have been countless others since.

There have been a few real-life examples. The 2010 death of MI6 operative Gareth Williams, found padlocked inside a bag in his London apartment, is one. Williams, who might have been investigating Russian financial crime at the time of his death, went on leave and never came back. Nobody noticed he'd gone missing until his employers thought to make a welfare check, which is when his corpse was discovered. It's thought he went into the bag alive and the Metropolitan Police concluded his death was probably an accident, a sex game gone wrong. As a means of disposing of a body locking it inside a sports bag and leaving it in the flat seems unnecessarily theatrical, almost amateurish, especially if a professional espionage agency was involved. You'd think it'd be simpler to dump the bag in the Thames with weights wrapped round it. It's that Mary Celeste touch again - cups of coffee found still warm in the wardroom, everything apparently normal except there's no crew aboard.

The thing about a locked room is, it's never impossible. It's a puzzle box, and there's always a way to solve a puzzle box. The key is to disbelieve what's in front of you. The minute someone says 'judging by blood splatter, the only way it could have happened is ...' you know for a fact that, whatever else happened, the so-called only way is precisely how it didn't happen. A locked room works on magician's rules, and a magician's favorite trick is misdirection.

So if a corpse turns up in a burnt-out garage, for example, and dental records show that the corpse is Mister Bob Bingo who owed everyone a ton of money, then your first job is to look at those dental records and see if they're fake. Trust nothing, check everything.

As it's a puzzle the emotional satisfaction comes from solving the puzzle, and if the thing's badly designed or if the author cheats their way to a solution then the fun's lost.

Example from CSI KYC: at one point a poison's described as being lethal inside ten minutes. The characters go to a great deal of trouble to establish this. Then in another scene the same dose takes two hours, and even then the victim isn't dead. Which is it? 

In game, how would this work?

Remember this: once you introduce magic, or super-powers, or whatever it may be, the puzzle stops being a puzzle. The audience - the players - will assume magic did it. The problem switches from 'how does the puzzle work' to 'how do I show the solution isn't magic?' At which point you've probably lost the most important battle: capturing the audience's attention. 

So set the puzzle up in such a way that magic isn't the first or obvious answer. Maybe this is a Mutant City Blues game in which the necessary mutant abilities don't fit well into the Quade Diagram, or perhaps this happened during the day when vampires are powerless. Something quick, simple and obvious, so you can get on with the plot. This is why abilities like Night's Black Agents Vampirology are so useful, because one point spend will tell the agents 'a vampire couldn't have done it, at least not the way it was done,' without the Director jumping through hoops to show it wasn't vampire magic.

The best way to design a puzzle like this is to start with the solution and work backward. If you know who did it and how they did it then you should be able to come up with clues that show as much. Always remember this is a puzzle, and puzzles can be about anything. It doesn't have to be murder. It can be 'how did a virus get onto the system when it's not connected to the internet?" Or 'how did that burglar get into this hidden safe?'

Let's play with an example. Assume the setting is Night's Black Agents, modern day, so we're talking every conceivable current technology. Let's further assume that the crime takes place in an area patrolled by security robots which ought to have detected the intruder but did not. It doesn't matter what the crime is. The puzzle is how whoever did it foozled the security robots so they weren't detected carrying out the crime.

The software that operates the robots and monitors their activity reports no anomalies at the time of the crime. The incident reports show only that there was a brief interruption in patrol when a human employee fell ill. The robot stopped to monitor the situation and summoned a security guard, who confirmed that the person suffered a bad reaction to allergy meds. The sick person was escorted away and treated. 

The hardware that runs the show is not connected to the internet or the outside world. It's a purely internal network whose sole purpose is to run the building. It does everything from monitor the security robots to adjust the HVAC and make sure the goldfish tank in the exec suite is operating smoothly. Employees are expressly forbidden from attaching their own devices to the network, or using company property like laptops outside the building. There's no indication (via internal monitoring) that anyone did connect an outside device to the network, whether on the day or at any time in the past. So there should be zero chance of a virus corrupting the system. The hardware is in a security room down on the ground floor that is constantly monitored by cameras, sensors and human security personnel. 

So how was it done?

A virus was introduced into the system that prevented the security robots from detecting the intruder, or anyone at all, after a certain point. The target room and the corridors immediately around that room became invisible zones; the security robots could not see humans while they were in those zones. The agents may become aware of this when they realize that the robots did not detect the CEO even when he was in an area where he ought to be detected. He was working late on a big project, which is why he was in the building. 

How was the virus introduced? By our old friend the fish tank. 

The thermostat was recently replaced on the CFO's authority. That thermostat was the Trojan Horse which introduced the virus to the system. The CFO is the employee who had the bad reaction to allergy meds, which coincidentally enough happened at about the same time as the incident. The CFO doesn't remember authorizing the thermostat switch.

The CFO didn't authorize the switch; her secretary did. Turns out the CFO was poisoned by her secretary to create a diversion so the secretary could carry out the crime. While security and the robots were diverted the secretary got into the invisible area. She used 'I'm going to get your meds' as an excuse to leave the CFO's side and carry out the crime. The whole thing took five minutes.

So how would you do it?

Enjoy!

Cuban Mysteries & Ladies Vanish

Once upon a time when the world was slightly saner than it is today, I mentioned a Cuban drama in which diplomats claimed to have fallen foul of a sonic superweapon. Incredibly, that story still has legs. Only this week the Guardian claimed a freedom of information victory, and got its hands on diplomatic cables and other official communications that, the paper claimed, shed light on the mystery.

Except … it kinda didn't. For all the fanfare, the released documents shed as much light as a snuffed-out candle. Nobody knows what happened. The Americans aren't in a hurry to find out. The Cubans, mightily pissed, are confident the whole thing's nonsense from beginning to end. There's some madcap Canadians who think the diplomats might have been unintentionally poisoned by insect spray.

The big, and probably unintentional, result is that diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US broke down, and frankly, given that the Jackass is currently disgracing the Presidency with his presence, those diplomatic relations were dead in the water. If it wasn't this, some other crisis would have come along and the GOP would have found an excuse to pull the plug. After all, the diplomatic rapprochement was an Obama administration policy, and the GOP's done its damndest to kill off every other Obama policy.

However the sonic superweapon got me thinking: what exactly do you need to design a spy thriller? High stakes? International locales? Femme fatales, or high-speed action sequences? Sinister superweapons? Diplomatic intrigue?

The answer to this question comes from Hitchcock, as you might expect.

Hitchcock made spy thrillers where ladies vanish on trains. Saboteurs send young children across London, with bombs hidden in film cans. Secrets that could change the course of world politics are whispered by dying men to total strangers. An ad executive meeting his mother for lunch is mistaken for a superspy. An American physicist defects to Moscow to steal rocketry secrets. Hitchcock knew the spy genre inside and out - and his spy thrillers were the simplest possible.

You need a McGuffin, one important enough to get people worked up. You need an interesting situation. You need tension. That's it.

Consider The Lady Vanishes (1938).

In that film, as is so often the case with Hitchcock, the McGuffin is never revealed, or even described. We know it's important, because everyone treats it as if it is important. Miss Froy, the elderly Englishwoman who has the McGuffin, vanishes - and it's as if she was never there. Miss Froy's chance companion, Iris Henderson, at first is puzzled, then horrified, as person after person says there is not, and never was, a Miss Froy - and it's her horror that propels her over the threshold and into the spy thriller. Who can she trust? Who's in the enemy camp? What happened to that dear old lady?

Hitchcock was a past master at building tension with very little, cinematic bricks without straw. A modern director uses flashy car chases and impossible parkour sequences; Hitchcock got the same result with two buses, one after the other, slowly traversing the countryside (Torn Curtain). This is where the interesting situation comes in, and Hitchcock was smart enough to realize that any situation can be interesting, under the right conditions.

With The Lady Vanishes, the interesting situation is the train journey. A few score strangers jammed together for hours, days at a time. A definite time limit - that train will eventually arrive at its destination, and once that happens, all chance of saving Miss Froy is gone. Mile after mile of unforgiving countryside, with nowhere to go, nowhere to turn for help.

Imagine for a moment a Night's Black Agents sequence where the agents are on the London Underground. They know there's an enemy agent on the train who wants to kill them, but they don't know who that agent is. It could be any one of the twenty-odd people in the carriage. So they wait. At Westbourne Park three people get off, two get on. The agents wait. Several more leave at Latimer Road. They wait. More get off at Shepherd's Bush, and now there are only half a dozen suspects left from the twenty-odd who were on board at Paddington. Of course, the agents could provoke a confrontation, but if they get it wrong then their cover's blown to no purpose. In the worst case, they might get a civilian killed. Hammersmith's coming up, the end of the line. If they wait till then, they may have a much better chance of telling the assassin from the commuters - but Hammersmith could be what the assassin's waiting for. They could get off the train before Hammersmith - but what if the assassin follows, mingling with the other passengers?

All this aboard an ordinary Hammersmith underground train. The Hammersmith and City runs hundreds of times a day, pretty much every day God sends. It takes about an hour. Imagine running a full hour of a game session where the agents have nothing to do but wonder - is it that kid? The old man? The woman with the baby carriage? Or, since it's vampires we're talking about, is the bastard hanging onto the roof waiting for me to get off?

A McGuffin. A situation. All that's wanted is tension, and we're off to the races. That tension, those thrills, don't have to come from gunfights or explosions. They can come from something as simple as a boy walking across London with a film cannister under his arm. What matters is, there are stakes - the explosion - and a definite timetable. If X doesn't happen by Y, then ...

Enjoy!

Twisting Christie (GUMSHOE All)

When constructing a mystery scenario - say for BubbleGumshoe - the Director/Keeper will want to keep the players on their toes. Everyone loves a plot twist. It's practically mandatory. The problem is, how to keep players from guessing the twist halfway through?

In some settings, guessing the twist is half the fun. The Dracula Dossier, for instance, provides three possible ways for any person, place or thing to develop; as an innocent, or unconnected plot point, as an Edom-friendly plot point, or as Dracula's puppet. That way the Director can adjust things on the fly, and account for unwise player mutterings like, 'God, we would be so, so hosed if the Journalist turned out to be one of Dracula's minions.' The twist is baked in.

That said, the Dracula Dossier is huge. Over 360 pages of unrelenting evil. When writing your own stuff, you may not want to spend time making sure every single person, place or thing the players might encounter has three different aspects. So what to do?

Author Karen Woodward has this to say about mystery maven Agatha Christie:

Christie often (though not always) had three distinct threads interwoven throughout most of her plots. Let's call these the A story, the B story and the C story.

A Story --> the murder (the whodunit)

B Story --> a romance

C Story --> a touch of evil

The A story is the main story, the story of the murder. The B story is a subplot that includes one of the main characters in a romance. The C story is another subplot, one about a character who has malign intentions toward one of the other characters. These intentions aren't related to the murder--perhaps this is suspected but, in the end, the 'touch of evil' character will not be intimately connected with it.

In Death In The Clouds, for example, the A plot is the murder of blackmailer and moneylender Madame Giselle. The B plot is the romance between ingénue Jane Grey and dentist Norman Gale. The C plot revolves around crime novelist Mister Clancy, who may or may not be the murderer. 

Yet a typical scenario often has only an A plot: one clear objective, which the agents or investigators have to shoot for or die in the attempt. Seldom is there a B plot, and almost never a C. However the disentanglement of A from B and C is what makes the twist a twist. It's because the reader can't be sure that A won't turn into C at the last minute, or vice versa, that the denouement becomes a denouement, and not just a rubber mask removal.

Now, it's unreasonable to have a romance B plot in every single scenario. Christie liked them, but you're trying to get a plot out every other week, where she's aiming to get a novel out every six months or so. Equally, in a TV series where there's a romance subplot, the romance isn't part of every single episode. Flirting, yes, but not the full-blown will-they-won't-they stuff. The audience gets tired if you return to the same plot points in every scenario, whether it's romance or some other thing.

However a B plot that adds some non-threatening drama is perfectly reasonable. Even better if it includes something the characters can relate to, but what that thing is will depend largely on the setting. In Bookhounds of London, the obvious target is the store itself. In Dreamhounds of Paris, it could be a proposed art showing, possibly even the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. In settings where there are character hooks baked into the setting - like Night's Black Agents with its Sources of Stability - there are other possibilities.

With that in mind, and using a Bookhounds scenario idea I've described in the past, let's do some brainstorming and see where the B and C plots might be.

Lucy Ainsworth is the second daughter of wealthy shipping magnate Peter Ainsworth. Her eldest sister is married to minor nobility, and lives in Kensington. She and her younger sister Elanor still live in the family home in Wimbledon; both parents are dead.

Years of simmering hatred and jealousy have turned Lucy into a werewolf. She sees herself as the guardian of the Ainsworth legacy, defending it - and the Wimbledon house she and her sister Elanor share - against intruders. So far her activities haven't attracted attention, but her restraint is slipping. Sooner or later something will happen that will shatter their peaceful home life for good.

So the A plot is Lucy, and what to do about the ravening werewolf she's become. We're now looking for B and C plots that can be tied into A.

B is meant to be the non-threatening plot. It may or may not be the cheerful plot. When Christie plots her B level romances, they don't always end well. C is the touch of evil plot, the character that draws focus away from the real villain. C may or may not be a threat, but C certainly looks like a threat.

Since this is Bookhounds, the store is in play. There may be other, character-related hooks that are equally viable, but when writing for a group not your own you can't guarantee those hooks are there or, if they are, whether they're useful.

So let's make the B plot store-relevant. If the store is actually in Wimbledon, even better, though again when writing for a group not your own you can't order things the way you'd like them.

The main plot is about jealousy and rage, so it would be good if the B plot could also be about jealousy and rage. This helps tie everything together, thematically, reinforcing the scenario's central concept.

So: one of the store's rivals, fed up at the store's perceived success, hires Chester Riley, an amateur actor down on his luck, to do them foul. Chester, who thinks he's a master of disguise, keeps coming back to the store again and again to cause trouble. Maybe this time he'll make himself obnoxious while customers are in the shop. Or loudly argue with the staff about the price of a book. Or say he wants to return a book, since it was damaged when he bought it and he wants his money back. Of course he's doing that in front of a crowd of would-be customers.

In order to deal with the B plot the characters need to work out who Chester is, and why he's doing what he's doing.

Note that the B plot has little relevance to the main plot. It's a distraction, a thing the characters don't have to worry about too much, but can't entirely ignore since it does affect their lives and livelihood.

It could have been different, of course. Given the relationship between Lucy, Elanor, and anyone who pays any kind of attention to Eloise, a romance B plot is doable. The difficulty is how to involve the characters. Either they have to be the object of someone's affection, or they have to willingly pursue it. Willingly pursue is fun, if a player can be persuaded, but the Keeper can't rely on that every time. Alternatively Elanor - or possibly Lucy - might develop a fixation, but then you run the risk of it being short-lived if the player decides to negate the idea.

That, and ideally you want to involve all the players, otherwise one character's getting a lot of spotlight time for no other reason than that the plot says they must. You want to avoid 'the plot says, therefore you must' as often as you can, whether for B plots or any other reason.

One further possibility is to have an NPC be the lover and an NPC - presumably Elanor - be the object of affection. However that means two NPCs are basically having their own plot with no player input. Again, this is something to be avoided if at all possible.

Onward to C.

The C plot is the touch of evil plot. It needs to feature someone, or thing, that seems to be a threat but in fact is not. Since this is a horror game, that C plot probably needs to feature something supernatural-ish - heavy on the ish.

It also needs to be relevant to the main plot, unlike the B plot. The B plot can afford to be a little oddball, and so long as it affects the characters it doesn't matter if it isn't 100% plot relevant. In the same sense, the romance between Jane Grey and Norman Gale isn't 100% plot relevant, though the reader becomes invested anyway.

So we need a touch of evil character who is related to the A plot but not a central part of it. We already have a maddened werewolf and her trapped sister. We also have another sister, married, who lives in Kensington. We haven't specified who the sister married.

Let's say that the sister married Algernon Parker, a no-good snake in the grass who married sister Helen for her money. Thanks to unwise speculation that money's almost gone, though you'd never know it to look at their lifestyle. Algernon knows that Lucy and Elanor are still sitting on the bulk of their trust funds, and thinks that, if they wrote wills at all, they probably left everything to their sibling. After all, why wouldn't they?

Algernon's scheme is to get rid of Lucy and Elanor, so Helen can inherit the lot. However he wasn't counting on Lucy's unique condition. He has become aware of it, thanks to an unlucky encounter with Lucy on the Common, and is secretly worried he too might be infected after Lucy bit him. So he's resorting to magical means, and reading every grimoire and tome he can get his hands on - in part to find a cure, and in part to get rid of Lucy once and for all.

This may or may not bring him into the players' orbit, as he's bound to need Bookhounds. However so long as he keeps lurking in the background, possibly arranging fiendish traps to get rid of the Ainsworth sisters or chaining himself up at night to prevent disaster when he transforms, the players are bound to suspect him.

Which means they may not suspect Lucy - until it's too late.

Enjoy!

Cedar Point and Wild Rides (BubbleGumshoe)

You're reading this in the Glorious Future, but it's coming to you from the Dim and Distant Past, specifically that same day that the UK decided to cut off its nose to spite its face, and also the day that my fellow countrymen said loud and clear that Gays Should Not Marry Or Have Civil Unions. Because my fellow Bermudans are a bunch of bigoted Christians, for the most part, who spend their lives with their heads up each other's butts.

But after last week's short post I thought it would be a good idea to put in some advance work rather than leave it all till Sunday. I also wanted to touch on BubbleGumshoe, the latest from Ken Hite, Emily Care Boss and Lisa Steele, in which you play as a teen detective solving mysteries. What better way to do that then a trip to the funfair?

I haven't much hands-on with BubbleGumshoe, so I may get some of the more intricate details wrong, but the basics are simple enough. The system is stripped-down Gumshoe, so if you've already played Trail or any of the other Gumshoe products, you know the core gameplay already. The big thing to bear in mind is, as a teen, you don't have nearly as many points in your pools as your adult counterparts, so you need to be careful about ability selection.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, since this really isn't a combat-oriented game, you'll be spending much less on fighting abilities than in other Gumshoe products. This can be huge; combat abilities are a significant point sink in, say, Night's Black Agents, such that a minimum of 20 General pool points ought to be sunk into each character's fighting abilities. But since that isn't the case here, you're free to design quirkier character types.

Relationships are much more important than martial arts. Who loves you, hates you, likes you? Using these relationships propels the drama, but it also gives you access to a host of abilities you otherwise wouldn't be able to use. Friends with a cop? Then Interrogate, Forensics, or Cop Talk become available. Or a host of other benefits; really, the only limit is the players' imagination. Mechanically this works much as Network does in Night's Black Agents, except that where Network cannot refresh, these Relationship pools can.

You're in this to solve mysteries - that's why you're a Sleuth, after all - but those mysteries needn't be as deadly as those you'd find in Night's Black Agents, or Trail. Finding a lost dog is a mystery. Discovering who's bullying your cousin is a mystery. Discovering who murdered the next door neighbor is very definitely a mystery, and so on and on.

While this isn't Trail, there is a Stability stat. Only this time it's called Cool, and losing Cool doesn't mean a quick trip to the nearest insane asylum. Instead it means that future tests or contests are more difficult, perhaps impossible, if you've totally lost it and are snot-crying at the least provocation. There's one interesting variation; since this game is based on relationships, you can channel negative Cool pools into creating a new Hate. This is a person, place or circumstance that, you now realize, you Hate. That restores your Cool, but creates a new negative Hate pool that the GM can use against you in future conflicts.

Incidentally if you were expecting some variation on the Pillars mechanic, first seen in Trail and later used, in one form or another, in most Gumshoe products, there isn't one here. Cool isn't as vital a stat as Stability is in Trail; losing it isn't as world-crushing as losing Stability, and you can't permanently lose, say, your faith in the Church, or your belief in the essential goodness of mankind. However Cool is very important in Social contests and Throwdowns, and therefore in Relationships, which are at the heart of the game.

This is the part that players familiar with Gumshoe but not as well read in teen drama may stumble over. Mechanically the contests are broadly similar to Thrilling Contests seen in Night's Black Agents. The terms of the conflict are defined, the players pump in General pool spends to adjust difficulty or to change the terms of the conflict to more favorable ones, and then dice are rolled. However the conflict isn't how to stake a bloodsucker while at the same time surviving a high-speed chase on the autobahn. The example given in the main book is of a bunch of teens confronting a rival at a party and humbling her by pushing an anti-drug message. Its a situational switch, not a mechanical one. That's the key thing to bear in mind.

The default setting is a small American town, but really, it doesn't have to be American. Small town life is small town life, wherever you go. It wouldn't be at all difficult to rearrange things to make this a small town in France, or a small island in the Caribbean. However it might be more challenging to set this in, say, London, or any large urban area.

Relationships are different in large cities. The social dynamic is different, and in a sense diminished. If your mom is the principal of the high school, for instance, and it's the only high school in town, that makes her a very important person within the social fabric. Less so, if she's one of several dozen in a sprawling urban metropolis.

Plus there's the issue of added violence, particularly in the States. The game isn't really equipped to handle guns or significant violence of any kind, but a mystery-based game set in a modern city probably has metal detectors in every high school, just because of gun violence. The knock-on involved in setting a game in the big city is significant, and can't be avoided or skirted round. That said, it shouldn't be impossible to set this in a city; just more difficult. 

Okay, that's all mechanical. What about scenario and campaign design? Well, that hasn't changed significantly from other Pelgrane products. Action is still divided up into Scenes, some of which are very important, or Core, while others are optional. The big difference here is the addition of a couple scene types: Dramatic, Pushback, and Throwdown.

A Dramatic scene is exactly what it sounds like. It's not about the plot. It's about the character. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize that, up till now, Gumshoe games have never been about character. It's always about gathering clues, putting them together, and figuring out what's going on. Character has always been secondary, but this time it's primary, and that means the problems you solve may not be about the plot at all. Maybe someone's Relationships are frayed, or there's some other moment of high tension that needs resolving. That's what a Dramatic scene is for. This is the soap opera moment, but soap operas have survived for as long as they have because, when played straight, a Dramatic scene hooks the audience and gets them to pay attention.

Pushback is a little like an Antagonist Reaction scene from, say, Trail. The difference here is that it's non-fatal. An authority figure of whatever type gets involved, and threatens the character in some way. Except rather than drag the character down a dark alley and rearrange their spinal cord, the authority figure threatens social punishment of some kind. Exactly what that punishment is will depend on the scene, and the authority figure making the threat.

A Throwdown is a heightened Dramatic scene. Here the character needs to engage in an extended social conflict of some kind, against an important rival. This is the major drama moment. I went into this in some detail above, so I'm not going to go over old ground here. Except to say that, played properly, a Throwdown can be a major moment in the game; but a Throwdown also has the potential to go off like a damp squib. This is one of those times when the GM needs to take care.

It reminds me, oddly enough, of the Wraith RPG, specifically the Harrowing sequences when the character's Shadow accumulates enough negative points to put the character through the wringer. A similar aesthetic applies here. The intent isn't to destroy anyone, or even to attack them directly. Instead it's all about indirect attacks, in which the character's brawn or weapon mastery matters less than the character's ability to deal with social issues. But in a Harrowing the GM is specifically advised to take lots of notes and prepare in advance, and the GM would be well advised to do the same here. It's not like a typical Antagonist Reaction, where you can throw a few mooks into the mix and see what happens. This needs to be crafted, or it won't work.

In fact, BubbleGumshoe has one other important commonality with Wraith: it's not for everyone.

Wraith's a brilliant RPG, but not all gamers are going to be thrilled with the idea of playing the dead, let alone having a Shadow persecute them at every turn. Players like to feel in control, to be powerful, and the underlying message of the Shadow mechanic is, no, you're weak, you're a failure, you're doomed. Whereas nearly everyone who ever sat at a gaming table and threw dice around has played Dungeons and Dragons, a game which implicitly tells you not only that you're powerful, but also that you're the Most Powerful, if not the Chosen One.

Now, it's not BubbleGumshoe's place to tell the player how powerful their character is, but it's implicit in the setting that they aren't the most powerful in the game world. They're teens, functioning in an adult setting. If they want access to adult skills, like Forensics or Cop Talk, they need to have an adult ally. That alone suggests significant weakness, and that's before you look at the Pushback and realize that there's a whole scene type devoted to making sure the players know they're small cogs in a much larger machine.

Plus, the essence of the Throwdown is social combat, which isn't something that all players will grok instinctively. Oddly enough, teens will, because social combat is a large part of their lives. But it becomes less of an obsession the older a person gets, and I wonder how may players will be able to put themselves back in their fourteen-year-old mindset. The example Throwdown, for instance, has the characters confront a fellow classmate about drug use. While reading it, I couldn't help but wonder, 'is this what teens would do? Or is this what adults would like to think teens would do?'

It's more about fulfilling a particular kind of fantasy than it is wish fulfillment. In this instance, the Kid Fantasy. You can be one of the Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew, or even - if you want to go back far enough - Huck Finn. He's hardly a sleuth, but his fingerprints are all over this as the archetypal kid set adrift in an adult world. It hearkens back to the one time we all knew we were right and the world was wrong. There's a reason why this is a specifically kid fantasy, after all; only a kid could be quite so self righteous.

None of which is to say that BubbleGumshoe is a bad game. Like Wraith, it's brilliant in its own way. It does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it very well. The mechanics are polished to a mirror shine, and stripped to their bare essentials. The setting is fully realized and the Relationship mechanic plays right into the game's aesthetic. However it must be acknowledged that not everyone is going to want to play a teen detective, because it doesn't play into the wish fulfillment tropes that many gamers come to the table hoping to enjoy. Even in a zombie apocalypse game, where everyone's living off of tinned beans and paranoia, the players still get to prove that, when everything's gone to hell, they have what it takes to survive. Finding out what happened to somebody's bicycle doesn't have the same cachet.

Basically, it's the Marmite Effect. Some players are going to fall in love with the concept and never want to play anything else. These are the folks who have marmite on everything. Others will reject it outright, the ones who'd bury a jar of marmite at a crossroads with a stake through its dark heart. Most will fall inbetween, tolerating marmite because why not, but just as keen to get back to beating orcs, staking vampire spies, or whatever else the group usually does.

Okay, all that said, what about Cedar Point, I hear you ask?

Cedar Point is going to be the example I'll use to piece together a BubbleGumshoe scenario seed. I could go into a lot of detail here, but that's not what this is about. You do need to know a little about Cedar Point, though, so briefly:

This amusement park in Ohio, on the shores of Lake Eerie, is the second oldest such park in the United States. It's roller coaster heaven, with 17 coasters for the speed freaks out there, plus another 50-odd rides for those crazy people who don't like roller coasters. It also boasts all kinds of live shows for all ages, from Snoopy songs to Motown and fireworks displays. However for our purposes one of the most useful things about Cedar Point is that there's plenty of accommodation both on and off site. That means the characters can live somewhere else, and come to Cedar Point for, say, a week or two. Maybe it's a class trip, or a family vacation. But the point is that it takes the characters away from their usual haunts and puts them in a completely new situation, which can be great either for shaking up a game that's gone stale, or for introducing new players to the mechanics in a setting where failure can be forgotten as soon as everyone goes home.

There are two BubbleGumshoe settings that involve horror, or horror elements. Neither of them are anything like as bloodthirsty as Trail, never mind Call of Cthulhu or Night's Black Agents, but both have that weird Eerie Indiana crossed with R.L. Stein vibe. Either could be Lovecraftian, but Bellairs Falls is the more likely prospect.

This one has magic at its heart, but those of you shouting Wingardium Leviosa at the screen will be disappointed. I suspect one of the writers whispered 'quidditch' longingly, then two of the others screamed LAWSUIT, and that was that. In this setting, magic is eeeeevilllll, and those who practice it are likely to become Obsessed.

The other setting, Ruby Hollow, has ghosties, ghoulies and long-legged beasties (Good Lord, deliver us!), but this is a Scooby Doo setting, in which Traps are key.  This is one for the rubber mask crowd, complete with animal sidekicks for the mystery-busting sleuths.

Take all that together, and then consider that Cedar Point once boasted a Bluebeard's Palace funhouse, and we have the germ of a plot. Bluebeard, in case you aren't familiar with the name, is a very famous fictional mass murderer whose career and characteristics are loosely based on a real mass murderer. It's pretty easy to guess what the Cedar Point Bluebeard's Palace was all about. There's little left of it online, but this blog post features, among other things, period postcards and images that give you a good idea what it may have looked like. You could get away with a lot more then than you can today, and despite the period quaintness there's a hard edge to some of this stuff that's unnerving.

Since I'm going to be referring to two BubbleGumshoe settings, there will be two Crimes, two Culprits and two Hooks, all taking place at the same location.

Bluebeard's Return

No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks! Plus, for once, you're going out of town for some much-needed fun. It's off to Cedar Point, the world-famous Roller Coaster Capital! Sure, you won't be staying on site; in fact, your group (Church group, school group, family group, whichever) has block-booked at one of the cheaper, more rickety off-site hotels, Castaway Lodge, within sight of the much more fun purpose-built pirate hotel, Castaway Bay. But why worry about that? It's time to have some fun!

But wait up a second; what's that funky place on the Broadway? It looks like something grandpa might have enjoyed. Bluebeard's Palace? Well, I guess that big guy on the front of the building is Bluebeard, but what's it supposed to be, some kind of horror house? I dare you to go inside! Heck, I double dare you!

Crime: (Bellairs Falls) one of the group becomes obsessed with the odd postcards that float around Cedar Park, which seem to contain a kind of coded message. If you collect them all, maybe you'll be able to figure out the code? (Ruby Hollow): Jeez! That guy in the mummy costume looks really dead. What's up with that, and why is he following us around after we leave Bluebeard's Palace?

Culprit: (Bellairs Falls) The spirit of Bluebeard, trapped by magic in his old Palace looking for a way out. Or, for a less mystic ending, Packy Dunlop, the operator of Bluebeard's Palace, who offers big cash prizes to anyone who can break the code, but has rigged the game so nobody wins. (Ruby Hollow) The corpse of long-dead gunslinger Elmer McClintock, who wants a proper burial. Or, for a less gruesome twist, Packy Dunlop, the operator of the Palace, who uses the funhouse as a base of operations for a pack of pickpockets.

Hook: (Bellairs Falls) Those postcards really are weird; it's like you can almost see something moving in the images. (Ruby Hollow): Is that a mummy, a zombie, or what? Look out! IT'S MOVING!

In the examples given in the main rules, there would then be a Story and a short list of Clues for the characters to pick up. However I think you get the gist of it, and as it's now Sunday - time flies - and I have an afternoon matinee, that's all for now!

In brief: I recommend BubbleGumshoe wholeheartedly, with the caveat that the central concept is not to everyone's taste. But that's a minor cavil. Even if you never play it, the game's worth reading and possibly data mining for other projects.

Enjoy! 

Mystery of the Mary Celeste (Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu)

The story of the Mary Celeste is one of those useful spine tingling tales that ghost story writers have relied on for over a century, to add that extra chill to a mystery ship story. Imagine finding a derelict, adrift at sea, all sails set and a meal cooling on the table. There's no sign of captain or crew, and the ship's log indicates that the voyage was an uneventful as any captain could wish for, right up to the presumed moment when everyone vanished. What happened? Was it an ordinary, tragic disaster at sea, or did something otherwordly happen to this ship's crew?

In the case of the Mary Celeste, most of what people think they know is, in fact, false. There was no meal cooling on the table. Much of the ship's contents were soaked with sea water, indicating a sudden event, though what that event was remains a subject for debate. Waterspouts and seaquakes, as well as more ordinary incidents, have been cited as possible causes. Several items were missing, including the ship's papers and navigation equipment, and there's evidence that the ship's boat was launched. There was no indication of sudden violence, despite the best efforts of Frederick Solly Flood, attorney general of Gibraltar and one of the chief officers of the court of inquiry into the incident, to persuade the court otherwise. In all likelihood the crew of the Mary Celeste abandoned the ship in fear of their lives, only to perish on the open sea. The ship they abandoned went on drifting with the wind and currents, before being intercepted by the Dei Gratia and brought to Gibraltar.

The real mystery isn't so much what happened, as why. The captain, Benjamin Briggs, was a very experienced sailor from a family of experienced sailors. His wife and daughter were aboard, as well as a crew of seven; two mates, a steward and four seamen. All were veteran seamen, and had good characters; one, the first mate, had sailed with Briggs before. There seems to be no good reason why a captain and crew as well prepared and capable as they should decide to abandon an apparently seaworthy ship and risk their lives in a lifeboat.

This was Briggs' first voyage with the Mary Celeste, which he and his brother had bought as a joint investment.  Briggs took her down to New York to pick up cargo, a hold full of denatured alcohol, which he intended to ship to Genoa. He departed harbor on November 7, 1872. The Dei Gratia would later discover the abandoned Mary Celeste on December 4th. There's no clear indication of what happened to her between the 7th and the 4th; the ship's log was one of the things missing, though the daily slate - where notes would have been taken each day, later to be transferred to the log - was still aboard. The slate indicated nothing untoward.

The tragic Mary Celeste became a ghost story, rather than a maritime disaster story, thanks in part to the efforts of fiction writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote and published one of his first stories, J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, about the disaster. Much to his astonishment, people began repeating that story - involving murder on the high seas by a man intent on race war - as true, and soon others began inventing spook tales which, in turn, became accepted as the 'true account' of the tragedy of the Mary Celeste. Nothing was too outrageous or outre. Perhaps the crew were devoured by a giant octopus, perhaps aliens got them, perhaps the captain, in a burst of religious mania, murdered everyone aboard ... and so on.

The truth is probably more prosaic. It's possible that Briggs became convinced that his cargo was about to explode, or that the ship was about to sink. Both events would justify abandoning ship, and there's at least some evidence to support either theory. The sounding rod - a bit of iron with rope attached, used in the same way you'd use a dipstick in your car - was found on deck, as if dropped there in a hurry, and the hatches were open, possibly to air the hold out. The crew may not have intended to completely abandon the ship; they may have been attached to the Mary Celeste with a rope, which subsequently snapped.

Even so, it's surprising that Briggs left the Mary Celeste completely unmanned. After all, the ship contains what amounts to his life savings and hopes for the future; he'd have to be pretty convinced all was lost to abandon it completely. It would have been more in character to send most of the crew, and his wife and child, out in the boat, particularly if it were tied to the Mary Celeste, and stay aboard himself. Brigantines like the Mary Celeste aren't complicated to operate; the Dei Gratia got her to Gibraltar with a four man crew, and it would have been possible to keep her going with one man only. It would have been incredibly difficult and exhausting, but it could have been done. 'She was so sound and stout,' said Oliver Deveau, the Dei Gratia's first mate and the man who sailed Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, 'That I cannot think that if I had been on board I should have abandoned her. I should have considered her safer than an open boat unless she was on the rocks.'

It would make more sense if Briggs stayed aboard, yet clearly he did not. It makes me wonder if he was out of commission at this point, perhaps having taken a blow to the head during the same incident that put the Mary Celeste in peril. The crew, lacking leadership and faced with what seemed to them to be extreme danger, might have launched the boat with him in it. Or perhaps he did stay aboard, only to see the ship's boat come adrift, or even capsize, taking his wife and daughter to the bottom. That might have been enough to make him throw himself overboard. Or that event, whatever it may have been, which put the Mary Celeste in jeopardy might have been so severe as to make staying aboard an impossibility. Threat of an exploding cargo would do that.

After the Mary Celeste was brought to Gibraltar, the inquiry into her abandonment very nearly became a one-man lynch mob. Flood, convinced that murder or mutiny was at the back of the mystery, was hell-bent on proving that the crew had met with foul play, and that the Dei Gratia's people were somehow behind it all. This theory met with a severe setback when scientific investigation proved beyond question that stains found on the ship, and on a sword discovered in Briggs' cabin, were not blood. Eventually the court decided to uphold the Dei Gratia's salvage claim, but awarded it a relative pittance of one-fifth the value of the Mary Celeste, including cargo. Probably this was because the court had made its own mind up and felt that there was still some merit in the piracy argument, though there was no evidence to support it. Just goes to show, when the judge hates you, you might as well stay as far away from the court as possible.

The Mary Celeste bounced from owner to owner for a while, before finally finding its way to Gilman C. Parker in 1884. She now had a reputation as an unlucky ship, and had regularly lost money on her cruises. Parker loaded her with a supposedly valuable cargo, insured that cargo with three different agencies, and took her down to Haiti, where she conveniently found her way onto a reef and went down. '[I] had no more intention of wrecking the vessel,' said Parker to a disbelieving New York court of inquiry, 'Than I did of cutting my own throat.'

Yet that valuable cargo proved, on inspection, to be dog collars, spoiled beer, and rotten fish, loaded by merchants who clearly expected a huge insurance payout. Parker was charged with barratry - damaging a vessel or its cargo through abandonment, illegal scuttling or theft - which carried the death penalty. In the end barratry was dropped, though other charges were brought against Parker and the merchants. In the one civil case that came to court the jury refused to deliver a verdict, as there were several counts pending against Parker and his accomplices, and it was unwilling to prejudice the case against Parker in those separate indictments by returning a guilty verdict, particularly since the barratry indictment might mean hanging. The insurers immediately requested a new trial, but the court, electing not to go through all that expensive mess again, persuaded all concerned to drop charges. The insurers wouldn't have to pay out, any money already paid would be returned with interest, and the accused would leave the court, free men.

In the aftermath, one of the accused went insane, another committed suicide, the rest went out of business, and Parker himself died within three months, destitute and with a ruined reputation. The Mary Celeste remains on that Haitian reef to this day.

If the aspiring Keeper wants to use this tale as a one-off, say for Fear Itself or Trail, and is looking for more information, I highly recommend Paul Begg's Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea. If you already know Begg's name, then you're probably a Jack the Ripper fan.

Here's some potential treatments:

You're all members of the Mary Celeste crew. One of you becomes possessed by an unclean spirit, or perhaps just goes mad, and starts killing off crewmates one by one. Who's behind it? Is it some kind of shapeshifting demon? A ghost? Some invisible Cthulhuoid entity, running the crewman like a puppet?

Or alternatively, the Mary Celeste comes under attack by something otherwordly, or just overwhelmingly powerful; a giant octopus, say. Then it becomes a survival horror narrative, with crewmen trapped below decks or in cabins, trying to keep the monster at bay, while its questing tentacles probe at every weak spot. 

A Trail 1930s scenario could have the characters go to Haiti, perhaps to investigate something else, or even to shoot a film about the Mary Celeste. Maybe they're led there by evidence discovered in New York; perhaps one of the merchants, the insane one or the suicide, left some document behind that strongly hints at an occult angle to the Mary Celeste's wrecking. There they discover that whatever curse struck down the crew of the Mary Celeste is still very much active, and claiming more lives. Sorcerers ashore are trying to put a stop to it with their own magic, but whatever it is, it's far too powerful for them. Or perhaps those sorcerers have been salvaging bits from the Mary Celeste to use in their own spirit magic, only to discover that, whatever it is, it's much too dangerous to handle.

Once TimeWatch becomes available, there are other options. After all, the Mary Celeste story has already been the subject of at least one time traveler's adventures. Mysterious disappearances ought to be meat and drink to aspiring time agents.

That's it for the moment! I hope you find this useful. Enjoy!