Today’s prompt for RPG a Day 2025 is Mystery, and mysteries are hard!
All facetiousness aside, running a tabletop role-playing game mystery can be difficult, and we’ve been trying to do it almost since the start of the hobby.
When I think about mysteries, I think of Call of Cthulhu (CoC). Published in 1981, I first played it in 1988 or thereabouts. My good friend Luis Miranda (whom I’ve mentioned previously in the blog) and I love the game. There were many challenges when playing CoC. Miss a Library Use roll? You don’t get that critical clue. I remember the adventure where we got lost in the forest. None of us could navigate, and we couldn’t read a map or a compass. We were lost in a large and very expansive forest, paraphrasing the musical Spamalot, and when we got back to the mine (I think it was a mine), the cultists had fled, the adventure was over, and we failed.
Play this video for the full effect of the previous paragraph!
This conundrum is by no means exclusive to CoC. Around 2008, twenty years later, I stumbled upon a post-apocalyptic game at a FLGS. I think it was a Gamma Worlds game via D20 Modern, but I may be wrong. There were elements of Fallout as players woke up in a vault and tried to escape. The players kept making roll after roll and missing, unable to find a way out of the vault. Their frustration mounted, and the GM sat there and waited for the players to solve whatever puzzle or combination of actions he had predetermined was the way out of the vault. I stood up and left frustrated, and I wasn’t even playing the game. I can’t imagine the players!
Between those events, I read the Gumshoe system. I picked up The Esoterrorists on my first visit to Gen Con, and while reading it, I wondered: Do we need a system built to run investigative scenarios? Are the problems proposed here real? I had been lucky in retrospect, not to have many games grind to a halt due to a bad roll, but after reflecting upon it, and seeing the game mentioned above, I became convinced Gumshoe was right.
You’d be surprised to know, I’ve never run a Gumshoe based game, despite owning various, The Esoterrorists, Ashen Stars, Trail of Cthulhu. If you want a rule summary, Pelgrane Press provides one here. However, I’ve embraced the philosophy behind the game and not made the clues to solve a mystery depend only on a single die roll. Share the information, let the players interpret clues, and keep the investigation going, which may ultimately solve the mystery.
Just like Luis Miranda was my classic CoC Keeper, these days my go-to, favorite horror games GM is my good friend and current player at our weekly gaming group, José Garcia. I may have to ask him to run Trial of Cthulhu.
How do you handle mysteries in your games? What’s your favorite rule system or sub-system within a rule set you deal with mysteries? I’d love to read about your experiences and ideas; feel free to share them in the comments or tag me wherever you share them. If you choose to join in the conversation, don’t forget to include the #RPGaDay2025 hashtag so the community can find your contribution.
