Hi all, the last time I was in these forums I found an amazing group of players during the height of the Pandemic and I have been playing with them, dming a homebrew, ever since. And on the off chance that you ARE one of those amazing players, please stop reading to avoid spoilers!
OR ELSE
So here's the situation: I'm running a non-D&D game and the next quest is one that I've titled "SUPER_KILLER". The summary is that the players are told about a serial killer who is at large in Angel City, a futuristic LA. He's(or she) has proven to be difficult for the cops to find, and leaves behind cryptic clues and taunting reporters and police online on forums and in chatrooms.The killer becomes somewhat of a celebrity with a group of fans following him, copycatting his crimes(with less success) and attempting to contact him.
These fans grow increasingly active, finding the real killer becomes both more dangerous, and more complicated. As things spiral out of control, the players must solve the mystery, complete puzzles, avoid false accusations, the killer's growing mob of fans, and traps set by the killer.
Think something along the lines of the Zodiac killer, but with a cult-like following.
I think it would be really helpful to have someone or multiple people to bounce ideas off of. Even just for 1 meeting. I'm not asking for a full on writing partner or for anyone to do any heavy lifting. I just don't know any writers and thought my campaign would benefit from some outside perspective!
Background: I've been working on the system/world etc for 7 years, as a hobby. It's 90s-style cyberpunk inspired by works like Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Bioshock, Bubblegum Crisis, with doses of Halo and District 9 thrown in. No wizards or dragons, but plenty of room for adventure, horror, and dark comedy.
Whether or not you're interested in/familiar with Cyberpunk as a setting, your input would be helpful and if I can get some of ya'll on a discord call that would be awesome, and I'd gladly help you guys out with your own quests to return the favor!
If you don't have the time, feel free to just throw some ideas out in the replies! I especially need help with puzzles as I am VERY AVERAGE at puzzle design. Obviously the puzzles need to work in a psuedo-modern setting, so leave your magic at the door.
The first thing I would look to do is work out some sort of order to their murders. With an unnamed murderer (who presumably won't be a scooby-doo "it was this character we met before all along!" style "twist"), the only way that the party will catch them is to get ahead of them is to work out their pattern and anticipate it.
To that end, if you have a map then the killer could be writing out a name on the map, using a dot-to-dot with the locations of the bodies. To make the locations of the bodies relevant, make them be found in places they would not have been expected. Perhaps the killer is using the first letter of their first names to spell out their final victim, based on the location on the map, so it becomes a grisly game of hangman where the killer is filling in the letters one at a time and the party has to work it out before it's spelt out. Perhaps have the victims all hanged in various places, or have nooses around their necks. To maximize the difficulty, you can have some bodies be moved, or moving - perhaps one critical letter was on top of a train carriage, and the train would have followed a circular route, intersecting the message in various places and adding the letter in there.
You will also need to work out the motivation. This sort of thing can be super dramatic or just a psychotic break - perhaps their family property was seized by a corrupt bank and then sold to an oil company to capitalize on the unknown oil reserves underneath it, making them rich whilst the rightful owner has to watch from a bedsit. They might have sworn revenge on everyone who was involved in the scheme, and it might become apparent that every person who's been killed was employed by either the bank or the oil company. Then, perhaps one odd-one-out is killed, who might be the one who discovered the oil and talked about it. Perhaps that's their little claim to fame in the bar they drink at, but it's something no-one outside the bar has heard of (and no-one inside the bar cares about, so it's not repeated). That link suddenly gives the party the clue that links the oil company and the bank who forced foreclosure on the mortgage. By having a starting point on the map (the land which was stolen) they can suddenly decode the cipher the killer has been writing out. With the killer being a drifter now, they will have to get ahead of them to catch them, as they have no fixed abode.
The puzzle becomes difficult when the cult starts to kill people as well. The cult needs to be recognizable from the actual killer - perhaps the cult never actually kills anyone from the oil or bank businesses, so the party needs to pick out just the people who are from those businesses to reveal the actual pattern.
Though this sounds like it's less in line with the taunting serial killer you're after.
Is there some form of the internet (or better yet, the matrix / oasis) in your setting? Having the cryptic clues in the world lead to digitalized challenges could be a wicked trick.
So let's say the killer kills in batches of 13, and they are calling themselves "The Baker". Every time, it's 13 people dead. Every time, 24hrs before the deaths, the killer posts a clue on the forums. The clue leads to a virtual reality (or a real world location if VR isn't in your world) where there are a series of challenges for the would-be heroes to overcome. Each failure means one person dies, so 13 failures throughout the challenges and the people die. When they enter, a countdown starts, and if it runs out, they all die. If no-one comes to try and save them, they all die.
Once the killer has the party coming to save the day, they will start taunting them. They will know as much as they can know about them, from hacking and being a genius, and will play it against them. Perhaps if the party fails the first challenge (which should be likely) they will be "motivated" by the killer picking victims which the PC's know, such as a parent, sibling, or child. Make sure the players are up for that level of psychological horror before you electrocute their lost-but-reunited child!
Then you need to work out the pattern, so that the players can work out the pattern and get ahead of them. The killer won't be present at the challenges, only his traps and puzzles. This sort of serial killer wants to be caught, they want the fame, so they might drop hints as to the next victims in the previous forum clue - it might feature the location of the current challenge, and the marked victims of the next challenge, in two different ciphers within a single body of text.
Perhaps the text is some clever play on words or Egotistical - "From the Mind of a Sociopath" or something, which reads as some musings on the world and how society is rubbish these days, with vaguely narcissistic and egotistical edges on it - observations of why the world is wrong and people are disconnected from their own mortality by the machines and technology they have created for themselves, that sort of vaguely sinister musings.
Then, have a disused and long-abandoned cinema post obscure film listings which are just jumbles of numbers and hyphens - these will correspond to the letter number of the musings. So, the musings might say:
"In this world of ours, where humanity has sunk so deeply into the depravity of the cold embrace of technology, we are little more than a zoo for the machines, an endangered species kept from thinking freely by the computers lest we experience clarity for that moment it would take to unplug and breathe the free air."
And the cinema listing might be:
00:30 on 08-06-92: Bakers Dozen 1-2-13-19-21-36-70-73-93-106-3-138-139-155-156-8-161-178-195-203
Which spells out (including spaces, because computers do include spaces)...
Industrial zone nine
Giving a time, date, and location. A second cinema listing might give a list of names for the next victims. I'm fairly sure that an excel macro could easily be written to make this sort of cipher!
I'll happily help plug extra ideas into this thread or on Discord!
Interesting or not, if you're not interested in playing D&D, why would you expect to find much help in a D&D forum? I'm sure there are better places to look...
Interesting or not, if you're not interested in playing D&D, why would you expect to find much help in a D&D forum? I'm sure there are better places to look...
Mechanics aside, the techniques for putting a murder mystery together are pretty cool to think about, and relevant for any TTRPG. I'd like to see where this goes, as mysteries are not something I've much experience with!
I love Cyberpunk, one of my fav settings of any to be in as a player (yes shock horror I think it is better then DnD).
Is your game set using the latest rules, or are you playing cyberpunk 2020, just trying to figure out what point in history you are.
Do you have a Netrunner in game? I have an idea for you if you do :). I also have an idea if you don’t, will put the 2 together and add to another reply.
I love Cyberpunk, one of my fav settings of any to be in as a player (yes shock horror I think it is better then DnD).
Is your game set using the latest rules, or are you playing cyberpunk 2020, just trying to figure out what point in history you are.
Do you have a Netrunner in game? I have an idea for you if you do :). I also have an idea if you don’t, will put the 2 together and add to another reply.
As mentioned in the "Background" part of my post, this game isn't Cyberpunk 2017 or Shadowrun. It is a cyberpunk game I built from the ground-up. Though it thematically has more in common with Cyberpunk than with Shadowrun. I've been working on the game system/world since high school.
The Party's characters consist of: a drug-addicted medical student, a fame-hungry reporter, a combat drone, a mechanical engineer working as a mercenary, and an amnesiac who is slowly recovering their memories after an injury.
Timeline-wise we're in the rough 2030s but I try not to pin down an exact date. Divergence point from real-world history is world war 2, where the atomic weapons were designed by two private companies instead of the US military. From then you had robotics in the 60s-70s, and cybernetics proper in the 80s.
The puzzle becomes difficult when the cult starts to kill people as well. The cult needs to be recognizable from the actual killer - perhaps the cult never actually kills anyone from the oil or bank businesses, so the party needs to pick out just the people who are from those businesses to reveal the actual pattern.
Is there some form of the internet (or better yet, the matrix / oasis) in your setting? Having the cryptic clues in the world lead to digitalized challenges could be a wicked trick.
So let's say the killer kills in batches of 13, and they are calling themselves "The Baker". Every time, it's 13 people dead. Every time, 24hrs before the deaths, the killer posts a clue on the forums. The clue leads to a virtual reality (or a real world location if VR isn't in your world) where there are a series of challenges for the would-be heroes to overcome. Each failure means one person dies, so 13 failures throughout the challenges and the people die. When they enter, a countdown starts, and if it runs out, they all die. If no-one comes to try and save them, they all die
Then you need to work out the pattern, so that the players can work out the pattern and get ahead of them. The killer won't be present at the challenges, only his traps and puzzles. This sort of serial killer wants to be caught, they want the fame, so they might drop hints as to the next victims in the previous forum clue - it might feature the location of the current challenge, and the marked victims of the next challenge, in two different ciphers within a single body of text.
Then, have a disused and long-abandoned cinema post obscure film listings which are just jumbles of numbers and hyphens - these will correspond to the letter number of the musings. So, the musings might say:
"In this world of ours, where humanity has sunk so deeply into the depravity of the cold embrace of technology, we are little more than a zoo for the machines, an endangered species kept from thinking freely by the computers lest we experience clarity for that moment it would take to unplug and breathe the free air."
And the cinema listing might be:
00:30 on 08-06-92: Bakers Dozen 1-2-13-19-21-36-70-73-93-106-3-138-139-155-156-8-161-178-195-203
Which spells out (including spaces, because computers do include spaces)...
Industrial zone nine
Giving a time, date, and location. A second cinema listing might give a list of names for the next victims. I'm fairly sure that an excel macro could easily be written to make this sort of cipher!
I'll happily help plug extra ideas into this thread or on Discord!
Thanks for such a detailed reply! I really wasn't expecting such enthusiasm! <3 I'll do my best to respond to some of your questions/ideas:
I think your idea for coded messages is fantastic! I haven't challenged my players with many puzzles as of yet, and I think this would be a perfect opportunity.
There is an internet, but it's primitive. Think Early 2000s internet. Websites take about 20 seconds to load pages, social media doesn't exist, but there are chatrooms and forums that fill that niche. Everyone uses screen names, and tracking people is more difficult, but hackers can do it somewhat easily.
I probably want to avoid the killer going after the player's relatives until maybe when they get towards the end of the mystery. I envision the killer as one who kind of does it because they can, not because they're trying to make a statement or change the world. They're a psychopath, not an idealist. But I think the killer's fans could muddy the waters by killing less-randomly, and leaving more explicitly political/ personal notes. It was my thought that the killer doesn't actually approve of the his/her fans and kind of ignores them.
Your idea about the Saw-style "complete this task or the hostages die" thing is a cool idea, but I'm not sure if it really fits the theme. Too much Joker and not enough Zodiac if that makes sense. But maybe that might work for a later quest! Cause the idea itself isn't bad!
If you want to tell me more ideas, or collab DM me! Otherwise you can keep em coming in the thread!
I agree that the killer should only go after their relatives as a later show of "I know who you are". Doesn't have to be relatives, it could be their immediate neighbors on either side, something like that, just to say "I'm better than you".
You need to work out how the killer could be identified. The Zodiac killer was never found, whereas I assume you're going to want your killer to be findable. The most common motivation for this is recognition - an anonymous genius serial killer is likely to decide one day that they want to be recognised for the genius of their crimes, but they aren't going to make it easy. To that end, I feel like making the clues really difficult but consistent is key - this will let the players analyse the cases retrospectively and learn the pattern (meaning that several killings will have to take place before they work it out). Be prepared that they may never work it out, and give them some pot-luck clues to help them piece it together, such as "The killer posted this at midnight, and there was a power outage on the eastern side of town that night, so they can't be there". Things the killer isn't giving them personally, but fate seems to offer them instead.
I would recommend that this be a side-quest for them to try and solve during downtime, as it will likely involve a lot of waiting and sleuthing. You might even have players taking their notes home to obsess over it between sessions. Making their own actions tie in with it (EG they caused the power outage) would be a good option.
For added sinister plots, you could have the blog be accounts of the heroes activities. This makes it clear the messages are aimed at them, and means that they will have to do things in between for the killer to write about in order to get more clues. This way you can easily weave it into their everyday adventures rather than leave the players / characters who don't enjoy mysteries feeling a bit bored (if that's a risk!). It will also make the player wonder how they know these things - maybe have the killer be able to hack into security cameras and such, if they're there. Maybe also give them tiny bug-drones, which (naturally) explode in a tiny puff of smoke if they are detected. You might even be able to weave them in as "description", until one of the players says "There's always a fly in the room, has anyone else noticed?". Little details which they suddenly realise were relevant are key to murder mysteries in books & films, so making the entirely unremarkable important (without making it obvious) is a good thing to do.
EG. "You enter the interrogation room, there is a table with a dark stain on it, and a single unshaded lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, with a fly buzzing around it. One of the chairs is bolted to the floor, and has manacles on the stained arms."
The fly sounds like it's just there for narrative, but it's actually a camera. When the players make the connection, they will be so pleased!
I would recommend that this be a side-quest for them to try and solve during downtime, as it will likely involve a lot of waiting and sleuthing. You might even have players taking their notes home to obsess over it between sessions. Making their own actions tie in with it (EG they caused the power outage) would be a good option.
For added sinister plots, you could have the blog be accounts of the heroes activities. This makes it clear the messages are aimed at them, and means that they will have to do things in between for the killer to write about in order to get more clues. This way you can easily weave it into their everyday adventures rather than leave the players / characters who don't enjoy mysteries feeling a bit bored (if that's a risk!).
Yeah, this is certainly how I'd like to approach it. The main issue is the other 2 quests I have lined up are kind of globetrotting. I'll have to write a more simple quest that I can run while this stuff, and some other simmering quests are going on in the background.
Have you considered having the murderer not be an individual, but be hired by a corporation, or even be a corporation. Maybe an ad agency promoting a new singer has decided the best way to get him a cult following is for him to seemingly be the inspiration of these murders. You could throw the party off, convinced he is behind it when actually it’s his PR guru.
Or some of the people being murdered all have experimental tech in there bodies and a corporation is trying to steal it. It would be obvious if they only killed the ones with the tech so they have created a serial killer who kills and then steals enhancements. The corporation who’s tech has been stolen might simply want it back not realising it is being deconstructed in a lab somewhere.
Maybe one of the players has one of these experimental chips in their body, as they unravel the clues they then become a target for this killer.
Have you considered having the murderer not be an individual, but be hired by a corporation, or even be a corporation. Maybe an ad agency promoting a new singer has decided the best way to get him a cult following is for him to seemingly be the inspiration of these murders. You could throw the party off, convinced he is behind it when actually it’s his PR guru.
That's an interesting idea. To be honest, I do a lot of corporate crime already, so I was kind of trying to get away from that and do something a little more gritty.But I like where your head is at.
I've also considered multiple killers, but I think the cult following kind of covers that. It'd be a little too confusing to double-dip on that concept. You guys are really giving me a lot to consider. Dang
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Hi all, the last time I was in these forums I found an amazing group of players during the height of the Pandemic and I have been playing with them, dming a homebrew, ever since. And on the off chance that you ARE one of those amazing players, please stop reading to avoid spoilers!
So here's the situation:
I'm running a non-D&D game and the next quest is one that I've titled "SUPER_KILLER". The summary is that the players are told about a serial killer who is at large in Angel City, a futuristic LA. He's(or she) has proven to be difficult for the cops to find, and leaves behind cryptic clues and taunting reporters and police online on forums and in chatrooms.The killer becomes somewhat of a celebrity with a group of fans following him, copycatting his crimes(with less success) and attempting to contact him.
These fans grow increasingly active, finding the real killer becomes both more dangerous, and more complicated. As things spiral out of control, the players must solve the mystery, complete puzzles, avoid false accusations, the killer's growing mob of fans, and traps set by the killer.
Think something along the lines of the Zodiac killer, but with a cult-like following.
I think it would be really helpful to have someone or multiple people to bounce ideas off of. Even just for 1 meeting. I'm not asking for a full on writing partner or for anyone to do any heavy lifting. I just don't know any writers and thought my campaign would benefit from some outside perspective!
Background:
I've been working on the system/world etc for 7 years, as a hobby. It's 90s-style cyberpunk inspired by works like Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Bioshock, Bubblegum Crisis, with doses of Halo and District 9 thrown in. No wizards or dragons, but plenty of room for adventure, horror, and dark comedy.
Whether or not you're interested in/familiar with Cyberpunk as a setting, your input would be helpful and if I can get some of ya'll on a discord call that would be awesome, and I'd gladly help you guys out with your own quests to return the favor!
If you don't have the time, feel free to just throw some ideas out in the replies! I especially need help with puzzles as I am VERY AVERAGE at puzzle design. Obviously the puzzles need to work in a psuedo-modern setting, so leave your magic at the door.
-Macro
Ooh, sounds like a neat challenge!
The first thing I would look to do is work out some sort of order to their murders. With an unnamed murderer (who presumably won't be a scooby-doo "it was this character we met before all along!" style "twist"), the only way that the party will catch them is to get ahead of them is to work out their pattern and anticipate it.
To that end, if you have a map then the killer could be writing out a name on the map, using a dot-to-dot with the locations of the bodies. To make the locations of the bodies relevant, make them be found in places they would not have been expected. Perhaps the killer is using the first letter of their first names to spell out their final victim, based on the location on the map, so it becomes a grisly game of hangman where the killer is filling in the letters one at a time and the party has to work it out before it's spelt out. Perhaps have the victims all hanged in various places, or have nooses around their necks. To maximize the difficulty, you can have some bodies be moved, or moving - perhaps one critical letter was on top of a train carriage, and the train would have followed a circular route, intersecting the message in various places and adding the letter in there.
You will also need to work out the motivation. This sort of thing can be super dramatic or just a psychotic break - perhaps their family property was seized by a corrupt bank and then sold to an oil company to capitalize on the unknown oil reserves underneath it, making them rich whilst the rightful owner has to watch from a bedsit. They might have sworn revenge on everyone who was involved in the scheme, and it might become apparent that every person who's been killed was employed by either the bank or the oil company. Then, perhaps one odd-one-out is killed, who might be the one who discovered the oil and talked about it. Perhaps that's their little claim to fame in the bar they drink at, but it's something no-one outside the bar has heard of (and no-one inside the bar cares about, so it's not repeated). That link suddenly gives the party the clue that links the oil company and the bank who forced foreclosure on the mortgage. By having a starting point on the map (the land which was stolen) they can suddenly decode the cipher the killer has been writing out. With the killer being a drifter now, they will have to get ahead of them to catch them, as they have no fixed abode.
The puzzle becomes difficult when the cult starts to kill people as well. The cult needs to be recognizable from the actual killer - perhaps the cult never actually kills anyone from the oil or bank businesses, so the party needs to pick out just the people who are from those businesses to reveal the actual pattern.
Though this sounds like it's less in line with the taunting serial killer you're after.
Is there some form of the internet (or better yet, the matrix / oasis) in your setting? Having the cryptic clues in the world lead to digitalized challenges could be a wicked trick.
So let's say the killer kills in batches of 13, and they are calling themselves "The Baker". Every time, it's 13 people dead. Every time, 24hrs before the deaths, the killer posts a clue on the forums. The clue leads to a virtual reality (or a real world location if VR isn't in your world) where there are a series of challenges for the would-be heroes to overcome. Each failure means one person dies, so 13 failures throughout the challenges and the people die. When they enter, a countdown starts, and if it runs out, they all die. If no-one comes to try and save them, they all die.
Once the killer has the party coming to save the day, they will start taunting them. They will know as much as they can know about them, from hacking and being a genius, and will play it against them. Perhaps if the party fails the first challenge (which should be likely) they will be "motivated" by the killer picking victims which the PC's know, such as a parent, sibling, or child. Make sure the players are up for that level of psychological horror before you electrocute their lost-but-reunited child!
Then you need to work out the pattern, so that the players can work out the pattern and get ahead of them. The killer won't be present at the challenges, only his traps and puzzles. This sort of serial killer wants to be caught, they want the fame, so they might drop hints as to the next victims in the previous forum clue - it might feature the location of the current challenge, and the marked victims of the next challenge, in two different ciphers within a single body of text.
Perhaps the text is some clever play on words or Egotistical - "From the Mind of a Sociopath" or something, which reads as some musings on the world and how society is rubbish these days, with vaguely narcissistic and egotistical edges on it - observations of why the world is wrong and people are disconnected from their own mortality by the machines and technology they have created for themselves, that sort of vaguely sinister musings.
Then, have a disused and long-abandoned cinema post obscure film listings which are just jumbles of numbers and hyphens - these will correspond to the letter number of the musings. So, the musings might say:
"In this world of ours, where humanity has sunk so deeply into the depravity of the cold embrace of technology, we are little more than a zoo for the machines, an endangered species kept from thinking freely by the computers lest we experience clarity for that moment it would take to unplug and breathe the free air."
And the cinema listing might be:
00:30 on 08-06-92: Bakers Dozen
1-2-13-19-21-36-70-73-93-106-3-138-139-155-156-8-161-178-195-203
Which spells out (including spaces, because computers do include spaces)...
Industrial zone nine
Giving a time, date, and location. A second cinema listing might give a list of names for the next victims. I'm fairly sure that an excel macro could easily be written to make this sort of cipher!
I'll happily help plug extra ideas into this thread or on Discord!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
Interesting or not, if you're not interested in playing D&D, why would you expect to find much help in a D&D forum? I'm sure there are better places to look...
<Insert clever signature here>
Mechanics aside, the techniques for putting a murder mystery together are pretty cool to think about, and relevant for any TTRPG. I'd like to see where this goes, as mysteries are not something I've much experience with!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
I love Cyberpunk, one of my fav settings of any to be in as a player (yes shock horror I think it is better then DnD).
Is your game set using the latest rules, or are you playing cyberpunk 2020, just trying to figure out what point in history you are.
Do you have a Netrunner in game? I have an idea for you if you do :). I also have an idea if you don’t, will put the 2 together and add to another reply.
As mentioned in the "Background" part of my post, this game isn't Cyberpunk 2017 or Shadowrun. It is a cyberpunk game I built from the ground-up. Though it thematically has more in common with Cyberpunk than with Shadowrun. I've been working on the game system/world since high school.
The Party's characters consist of: a drug-addicted medical student, a fame-hungry reporter, a combat drone, a mechanical engineer working as a mercenary, and an amnesiac who is slowly recovering their memories after an injury.
Timeline-wise we're in the rough 2030s but I try not to pin down an exact date. Divergence point from real-world history is world war 2, where the atomic weapons were designed by two private companies instead of the US military. From then you had robotics in the 60s-70s, and cybernetics proper in the 80s.
Thanks for such a detailed reply! I really wasn't expecting such enthusiasm! <3
I'll do my best to respond to some of your questions/ideas:
But I think the killer's fans could muddy the waters by killing less-randomly, and leaving more explicitly political/ personal notes. It was my thought that the killer doesn't actually approve of the his/her fans and kind of ignores them.
If you want to tell me more ideas, or collab DM me! Otherwise you can keep em coming in the thread!
I'm glad you like the coded messages!
I agree that the killer should only go after their relatives as a later show of "I know who you are". Doesn't have to be relatives, it could be their immediate neighbors on either side, something like that, just to say "I'm better than you".
You need to work out how the killer could be identified. The Zodiac killer was never found, whereas I assume you're going to want your killer to be findable. The most common motivation for this is recognition - an anonymous genius serial killer is likely to decide one day that they want to be recognised for the genius of their crimes, but they aren't going to make it easy. To that end, I feel like making the clues really difficult but consistent is key - this will let the players analyse the cases retrospectively and learn the pattern (meaning that several killings will have to take place before they work it out). Be prepared that they may never work it out, and give them some pot-luck clues to help them piece it together, such as "The killer posted this at midnight, and there was a power outage on the eastern side of town that night, so they can't be there". Things the killer isn't giving them personally, but fate seems to offer them instead.
I would recommend that this be a side-quest for them to try and solve during downtime, as it will likely involve a lot of waiting and sleuthing. You might even have players taking their notes home to obsess over it between sessions. Making their own actions tie in with it (EG they caused the power outage) would be a good option.
For added sinister plots, you could have the blog be accounts of the heroes activities. This makes it clear the messages are aimed at them, and means that they will have to do things in between for the killer to write about in order to get more clues. This way you can easily weave it into their everyday adventures rather than leave the players / characters who don't enjoy mysteries feeling a bit bored (if that's a risk!). It will also make the player wonder how they know these things - maybe have the killer be able to hack into security cameras and such, if they're there. Maybe also give them tiny bug-drones, which (naturally) explode in a tiny puff of smoke if they are detected. You might even be able to weave them in as "description", until one of the players says "There's always a fly in the room, has anyone else noticed?". Little details which they suddenly realise were relevant are key to murder mysteries in books & films, so making the entirely unremarkable important (without making it obvious) is a good thing to do.
EG. "You enter the interrogation room, there is a table with a dark stain on it, and a single unshaded lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, with a fly buzzing around it. One of the chairs is bolted to the floor, and has manacles on the stained arms."
The fly sounds like it's just there for narrative, but it's actually a camera. When the players make the connection, they will be so pleased!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
Yeah, this is certainly how I'd like to approach it. The main issue is the other 2 quests I have lined up are kind of globetrotting.
I'll have to write a more simple quest that I can run while this stuff, and some other simmering quests are going on in the background.
Have you considered having the murderer not be an individual, but be hired by a corporation, or even be a corporation. Maybe an ad agency promoting a new singer has decided the best way to get him a cult following is for him to seemingly be the inspiration of these murders. You could throw the party off, convinced he is behind it when actually it’s his PR guru.
Or some of the people being murdered all have experimental tech in there bodies and a corporation is trying to steal it. It would be obvious if they only killed the ones with the tech so they have created a serial killer who kills and then steals enhancements. The corporation who’s tech has been stolen might simply want it back not realising it is being deconstructed in a lab somewhere.
Maybe one of the players has one of these experimental chips in their body, as they unravel the clues they then become a target for this killer.
That's an interesting idea. To be honest, I do a lot of corporate crime already, so I was kind of trying to get away from that and do something a little more gritty.But I like where your head is at.
I've also considered multiple killers, but I think the cult following kind of covers that. It'd be a little too confusing to double-dip on that concept. You guys are really giving me a lot to consider. Dang