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A completely reactive mystery — in which the characters simply explore scenes, discover leads, and follow those leads to new scenes (and then repeat) — can make for a perfectly lovely scenario.
With that being said, when you’re designing a mystery scenario, I strongly recommend including proactive nodes: Stuff that can (and will!) come to find the PCs even if they’re standing still. These elements put the world in motion, implying that the world exists and things are happening beyond what the PCs can immediately see. Even the lightest spicing of these elements can add a ton of dynamic life to a scenario.
These proactive elements don’t necessarily need to be (or, more accurately, contain) clues, but in a mystery scenario why would you pass up the opportunity?
This, in turn, makes proactive nodes the single best troubleshooting tool you can have when running a mystery. As discussed in the Three Clue Rule, if you end up in a situation where the players are stuck, dithering, or have decided to hide from the adventure, you can simply trigger a proactive node to bring the next scene to the PCs and keep the adventure moving forward.
But troubleshooting isn’t the only reason to trigger a proactive node.
Another option is to advance the timeline. This assumes that the antagonists in the scenario are actively pursuing an ongoing agenda (e.g., another bank is robbed; the serial killer targets another victim; the Death Star blows up another planet). You simply trigger the next step in their plan (or the next stage of the parasite’s life cycle).
The trick, however, is that the bad guys’ plan may have nothing to do with the PCs, and the next stage of the plan may happen completely offscreen without the PCs being aware of it. What you want to do, therefore, is to think not only about what happens, but also how those events end up intersecting the PCs.
This maybe straightforward. For example, if the PCs are FBI agents investigating the serial killer, then their boss can simply contact them and send them to the new crime scene. If they’re superheroes pursuing high-tech bank robbers, on the other hand, you might want to have them spot the robbery in progress while they’re patrolling the streets or, alternatively, they could spot a news broadcast mentioning the most recent crime.
Along similar lines, you can also raise the stakes. For example, the bad guys have finished building their death ray and now they start using it. Or the parasite begins transforming the residents of Evergrove into horrible monsters.
Proactive nodes can also be used to create consequences: Did the PC super-spies tip their hands and let Le Élcarlate know they were investigating him? Then it makes sense that he’d send some thugs to dissuade them! (Or a femme fatale to seduce them.)
This technique can work even if the players are clueless about what they did to earn the payback. (“Well… we clearly pissed somebody off.”) But it’s usually even more effective if they can see the connection between what they did and the proactive node that landed in their lap. It reinforces that their choices are meaningful, as are the repercussions of their successes and failrues. (If it’s unclear, you might consider including some clues or hints to help them figure out why the fish-people suddenly tried to blow up their hotel room.)
You might also employ proactive nodes simply for pacing. Are the players getting a little listless? Does the session seem to be lagging a bit? Nothing a squad of android assassins can’t fix!
TIME PASSES
Something I’ve discovered is that proactive nodes work best when the players have a clear sense of time passing in the game world.
There can be a tendency in an RPG for stuff to just kind of happen, one thing after another after another, in a sort of amorphous temporal void. It can be surprisingly easy for an adventure to start in the late afternoon and then have the PCs do eighteen different things, drive back and forth multiple times across town, and yet never have the day come to an end.
When you get stuck in this timeless state, it can become difficult to properly trigger a proactive node. (“If it’s only been an hour so since they found the body, does it really make sense that the bad guys could figure out where they lived and planted explosives there?”) And consequences can also feel capricious instead of consequential.
This can also be true if things become untacked in time: If it feels like only a few hours have passed, it can feel unfair or unhinged when a proactive event suddenly reveals that days have passed.
What you need is both a clear internal sense of how much time is passing for the characters and to clearly communicate that to the players so that their mental image of the game world is accurate.
For the first part, what I find useful is a mental model that roughly divides the day into four parts:
- Morning
- Afternoon
- Evening
- Overnight
(If the PCs are particularly active at night, you can also split that into two parts.)
Generally speaking, the PCs can each do one thing in each “slot” of the day. When they change location or tackle some completely new and time-consuming task, you can move things forward to the next slot. (If any PCs haven’t done something in the current slot, this is also a good time to ask them what they were doing while “Bob spends the afternoon at the library” or whatever.)
All you need to do now is communicate that passage of time to the players. Fortunately, you don’t need to make a big deal out of this. In fact, asking, “What are the rest of you doing while Bob spends the afternoon at the library?” neatly takes care of the problem. You can also make a point of including time of day when describing new scenes: “As you pull into the hotel parking lot, the sun is setting…” or “When you reach Aunt Cass’ house, she’s in the kitchen making lunch for the kids…”
Collectively, this temporal awareness will give a concrete sense of structure to the events happening in the game world; it’ll help you balance spotlight time; it’ll impose a sense of urgency in the players (even if there’s no clear time pressure); and it’ll let you naturally slot in your proactive events.
Frankly, it’s just good praxis in general.
CRAFTING PROACTIVE NODES
Our discussion of proactive nodes has mostly focused on various forms of trouble: A crisis happens. The bad guy’s do something horrible. A guy with a gun walks through the door.
But proactive nodes can also be opportunities. In fact, probably the most ubiquitous form of proactive scene is the scenario hook at the beginning of an adventure: The PCs are minding their own business when they see a damsel in distress. Or a patron offers them a job.
A key insight is that these kinds of opportunities can also be offered in the middle of an adventure: A local gangbanger hears the PCs have been looking into the recent disappearances, so when her friend goes missing she comes to the PCs hoping they can help. Or maybe the antagonist decides it would be cheaper to offer the PCs a payoff to go mind their own business.
(If you’re running a more complicated campaign structure in which scenarios can overlap with each other, you might even have situations where the players don’t immediately realize that the new offer is connected to the ongoing scenario.)
What if you’re in the middle of a session, discover that you need a proactive node to get things back on track, and then realize that you don’t have one?
You can improvise something, of course, but it may also be possible to repurpose a static node.
For example, maybe the PCs were supposed to track down the safe house where the vampires are keeping a bunch of blood-addicted Renfields. Now they’ve pissed off the vampires enough that it would seem to demand a response… so why not grab some or all of those Renfields and throw ‘em at the PCs?
The all-purpose version of this, for scenarios that have gone completely imploded, is to just have the Big Bad Guy show up wherever the PCs happen to be and trigger the final showdown. In practice, of course, this is insanely unsatisfying for the players. You’re almost always going to be better off using a proactive node loaded up with clues that point the PCs to the Big Bad Guy (wherever they might be), so that the players will have the satisfaction of “figuring it out.” (This is, ultimately, a form of Matryoshka technique.)
NEXT: Background Revelations
