Adding Intrigue to your adventures [Archive] - Wizards Community

Adding Intrigue to your adventures [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
igotsmeakabob!!
02-18-06, 01:32 AM So I feel like I'm missing intrigue in my adventures, but I'm not sure how I to add it. This is a pretty vague request but can anyone help me out with ideas or adventures of their own? I'm a new DM, have run 5 or 6 sessions now. I have the action part down.. how do I add the intrigue and gritty feeling to my adventures? I always liked the 'finding a dead body on the streets of Sharn and having to find out who they are and who killed them' but how do I get the party into the investigation and.. well... how the hell do i write it? Thanks alot in advance.
Kalanth
02-18-06, 02:41 AM One of the easiest ways to get the party to investigate the murder right away is to pull off the Law and Order style introduction. They are just arriving on the crime scene after being sent by someone (or maybe a character has a link to the dead person in their background). Right away they are stuck with the investigation of the murder, which could be a simple murder, or a whole elaborate scheme that could implicate royal families and so on. That gritty intreague can be many different things. Watch some of those dramatic movies that pull it off, take inspiration from them. The ECS lists movies that inspired Eberron for a reason, and you should take from them.

Other ideas for you, a bard performs in an inn in (place nation name here) and sings a somber song about the loss of Cyre. During his performance armed guards enter the inn and take the bard away, amidst a silent and unhelpful crowd. But why? Why did they want the bard silenced on this subject? What was so harmful about the song?

A man runs through the streets naked, nothing more than a piece of cloth around his waist. His eyes show fear as he runs headlong into the party. Though he does not recognize them, the party recognizes the naked man as (insert major political or religious figure here). Noting their recognition in their eyes, the man tells them to come by his home in the morning where he would pay them for their silence. The shouts of an enraged husband echo from down the street as the man pushes his way past and continues to run, shouting a reminder of the payment. The man that was chasing the first man stops short to ask the party where the naked figure went. The new arrival turns out to be the (religious or politcal) rival of the naked figure. Just what is going on here? Is it what it looks like? Is there more to the story? How can you suck the Players into the story further?

One game that I plan to run soon enough is a form of Fatal Attraction sideplot. An individual becomes interested in the PC, flirts, makes moves, etc. When the PC tries to ditch the NPC like a bad habbit and moves on, the obsessed individual chases after, stalking the PC through the world and attempting to kill the PC when the NPC finds them even talking to another person.
Adhevan
02-18-06, 04:01 AM Actually, let's start with what you already suggested, a dead body in the streets. The intrigue part is not really who killed him, but why. I'll get back to that, though. Getting the party involved in the investigation is the first priority. All the other planning is for naught if the party doesn't take the hook. How you do it can vary greatly depending on the player characters. If they are members of the city watch, then it is easy. It's their job to investigate. If not, then they need to want to investigate or have to. Without knowing your party, I can't really say how to get them to want to. I do have some ideas for making them have to, though.

The party has just successfully completed a venture and is celebrating at their favorite watering hole. As they are walking home, they hear a scuffle in the alley. There's a good chance that at least some of the members will check it out. When they do, they hear someone say, "Someone's coming. Let's get the Dolurrh out of here," and the beating of feet. Maybe the party finds some clue on the body, or maybe they don't. Either way, the murderers don't know if they have, and really, really do want to know. Whether the party members choose to investigate or not, they are now involved.

This particular dead guy is not someone society as a whole is really going to miss. He was scum. He had the good fortune of finding a unique schema in Xen'drik, and the bad fortune of getting overly greedy about it. He was shopping it around to each of the three branches of Cannith, playing them against each other in a bidding war. Each of the three wants it, and just as badly wants the other two to not have it. But which, if any, killed him? He wasn't as clever as he thought and others have heard of his discovery. He might not even have been killed on purpose. The murderers may have just been trying to beat information out of him and gotten carried away. Or they may not have been involved with Cannith at all.

This particular schema plays into the draconic prophecy. Perhaps not the schema itself, but where or how it was found fits into a key passage from one of the translations. The Chamber is very interested in the schema getting to the right people to fulfill the prophecy. The Mosaic Committee wants it destroyed. The Members of Cannith just want it. All of them will want to find out how much the party knows, and most of them will want to find out without revealing to the party who they are or why they are interested.

This kind of thing is over the heads of the city watch. Although any of the five power groups involved here could have corrupt members of the watch on their payroll to use to hound or thwart the PCs. One of the groups could even hire the PCs to find the schema. They most certainly wouldn't tell them everything. And the same group who had the guy killed could be the one that hires the characters.

Where the party starts investigating will depend a lot on what they find on the body. Also, whether or not they turn that over to the watch or if they keep it. He could have identification papers on him to let the party know who he is and possibly where he lives. A lightning rail ticket stub could point to where he has been and a likely avenue of investigation. Or an unused ticket could show where he had been planning to go next. Or maybe he just has a word scrawled on a scrap piece of parchment (the word being the password for his Kundarak safe deposit vault). Another possible clue could be something dropped by one of the attackers as he was fleeing.

Or maybe the schema is a piece of junk, a fake, and one of the powers involved already knows this. He knows it because he has the real one and had the guy killed to keep the fake from falling into anyone's hands and being exposed. Or maybe he's not interested in it at all, but wants the other players (or the ones he knows about anyway) to think he is really focused on finding this schema to distract them from whatever he is really up to.

I hope this helped. For me, an intrigue plot is about secrets and misdirection. The powers involved all have simple motives, like "get the schema for myself," "keep X from getting the schema," "destroy the schema," or "use this convenient distraction as a smokescreen." From the player side, solving the mystery should be like peeling an onion. Every part they solve should just reveal another layer underneath. First they discover tht Cannith is involved. Then they learn that the separate branches are all involved. Then they learn about the prophecy tie-ins, and so on. Along the way, they can gain longterm enemies, or possibly even friends. Either way, organizations they probably don't want to notice them, will.

For inspiration, I'd suggest movies like The Interpreter, North by Northwest, or The Maltese Falcon.
Dustin001
02-18-06, 03:33 PM I actually got this idea out of the Sharn handbook. How about the PC's are walking through town at night, for whatever reason and discover a body. Upon further inspection they realize the boddy looks alot alike one of the Party members and was killed by mistake. Maybe it was a hired assasin or maybe the thief stole from someone he shouldnt have, but either way the party is involved
Cloud Divider
02-18-06, 03:53 PM So I feel like I'm missing intrigue in my adventures, but I'm not sure how I to add it. This is a pretty vague request but can anyone help me out with ideas or adventures of their own? I'm a new DM, have run 5 or 6 sessions now. I have the action part down.. how do I add the intrigue and gritty feeling to my adventures? I always liked the 'finding a dead body on the streets of Sharn and having to find out who they are and who killed them' but how do I get the party into the investigation and.. well... how the hell do i write it? Thanks alot in advance.
I think you've got three different questions going on here:

1) You want intrigue.
2) You want investigation.
3) You want gritty. I'm presuming you're meaning something rather more like "noir" in meaning?

They're related, but aren't necessarily the same thing.

The easiest way to do (1) is essentially do ensure that the old adage "Nothing is as it seems," is true. How to do it well...is not so easy. Having lots of factions (a group with a given objective - one man can be a "faction" in this case) can help. The "layers of an onion" analogy is a good one to use as well.

(2) is easy to do - but can be hard to do well.

(3) is a matter of tone. One thing I've found that really helps, is to really play up the "the world is not black or white, but shades of grey." Also, it works well to think about the kinds of sacrifices or compromises (more accurately, "devil's deals") people will make to achieve their goals.

Probably the BEST planning tool for an Intrigue/Investigation campaign is what's called a Relationship Map. It's sort of like a flow chart, but rather than decisions, you've got people, places, and things - and most importantly, how they all tie together. They're especially valuable because they let you track non-linear associations. A really complex map can start looking rather like a spider-web...

What's nice, is that the Map tells you what encounters (be it meeting with people, or finding Clue X, or whatever) are most important, and that helps you decide which scenes you need to focus on. So it's a really valuable GM planning tool, too.

I'm going to use an example of one of my campaign arcs (it was a single "adventure," but it took us about 4-5 5-hr sessions to play through), it involved both investigation and intrigue.

It started out with the PC's witnessing a suicide (more accurately: a murder): someone was being chased, and chose to jump from one skybridge to the one the PC's were on, and due to various circumstances, he didn't survive the jump. He gasped out some cryptic name to one of the PC's ("Selkatari"), pressed an amulet into his hands, and he had a carefully wrapped book hidden on his person. The PC's also got a reasonable look at the victim's pursuers.

That first encounter gave the PC's a starting set of clues to investigate. The relationship map I drew helped me figure out which clues led to which other clues, and which were red herrings (but they weren't necessarily valueless red herrings...or obvious red herrings). It ensured that there was both redundancy (two clues may eventually lead to the same place), but also provided slightly different perspectives onto the evidence. It also let me know where the "choke points" in the map were - places where there were only a single link between one event and the next.

If you (or any other readers) are interested in more information, please let me know (via PM). I'd be happy to go into more detail (and even send a scanned copy of one).

Where intrigue showed up in this particular scenario, was that the murder was not "actually" the real mystery. The motive was the real mystery. Someone was going around and killing a small group of Last War vets. But not because of their actions in the Last War. Again, "Nothing was as it seemed." Several factions were involved (the Sharn Watch, the Blademark, the Sharn Kalashtar, Morgrave University, the Boromar, the Riedran Ambassador, and the Dreaming Dark...plus a number of "minor" factions). The influence of some factions wasn't necessarily obvious at first (nor was it necessarily the "expected" influence), being exposed at a much later point in the investigation. For instance, the Riedran Ambassador didn't necessarily have the same objectives as the Dreaming Dark agents.
Rechan
02-18-06, 04:33 PM Dungeon issue #129 has a murder mystery in it. I havn't looked at it myself but I've heard very good things about it. Based in Sharn, too.

Also, Issue #128, Shut-In, is a pretty good adventure too. I looked it over and liked it.
Acev
02-18-06, 04:51 PM It ensured that there was both redundancy (two clues may eventually lead to the same place), but also provided slightly different perspectives onto the evidence. It also let me know where the "choke points" in the map were - places where there were only a single link between one event and the next.
Some very good advice here. One of the biggest problems with running intrigue\investigation adventures (or campaigns or whatever) is the amount of clues you give the players. Most DMs i've played under don't give enough. You need to give the players more than one way to advance to the next step. If you don't, chances are the game will stagnate and move at a mind numbing crawl. No matter how obvious you find the clue, if it's the only one, your players might miss it or not understand its significance. Redundancy is all important. "Choke points" will choke the fun out of the game.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
igotsmeakabob!! 02-18-06, 01:32 AM	So I feel like I'm missing intrigue in my adventures, but I'm not sure how I to add it. This is a pretty vague request but can anyone help me out with ideas or adventures of their own? I'm a new DM, have run 5 or 6 sessions now. I have the action part down.. how do I add the intrigue and gritty feeling to my adventures? I always liked the 'finding a dead body on the streets of Sharn and having to find out who they are and who killed them' but how do I get the party into the investigation and.. well... how the hell do i write it? Thanks alot in advance.
Kalanth 02-18-06, 02:41 AM	One of the easiest ways to get the party to investigate the murder right away is to pull off the Law and Order style introduction. They are just arriving on the crime scene after being sent by someone (or maybe a character has a link to the dead person in their background). Right away they are stuck with the investigation of the murder, which could be a simple murder, or a whole elaborate scheme that could implicate royal families and so on. That gritty intreague can be many different things. Watch some of those dramatic movies that pull it off, take inspiration from them. The ECS lists movies that inspired Eberron for a reason, and you should take from them. Other ideas for you, a bard performs in an inn in (place nation name here) and sings a somber song about the loss of Cyre. During his performance armed guards enter the inn and take the bard away, amidst a silent and unhelpful crowd. But why? Why did they want the bard silenced on this subject? What was so harmful about the song? A man runs through the streets naked, nothing more than a piece of cloth around his waist. His eyes show fear as he runs headlong into the party. Though he does not recognize them, the party recognizes the naked man as (insert major political or religious figure here). Noting their recognition in their eyes, the man tells them to come by his home in the morning where he would pay them for their silence. The shouts of an enraged husband echo from down the street as the man pushes his way past and continues to run, shouting a reminder of the payment. The man that was chasing the first man stops short to ask the party where the naked figure went. The new arrival turns out to be the (religious or politcal) rival of the naked figure. Just what is going on here? Is it what it looks like? Is there more to the story? How can you suck the Players into the story further? One game that I plan to run soon enough is a form of Fatal Attraction sideplot. An individual becomes interested in the PC, flirts, makes moves, etc. When the PC tries to ditch the NPC like a bad habbit and moves on, the obsessed individual chases after, stalking the PC through the world and attempting to kill the PC when the NPC finds them even talking to another person.
Adhevan 02-18-06, 04:01 AM	Actually, let's start with what you already suggested, a dead body in the streets. The intrigue part is not really who killed him, but why. I'll get back to that, though. Getting the party involved in the investigation is the first priority. All the other planning is for naught if the party doesn't take the hook. How you do it can vary greatly depending on the player characters. If they are members of the city watch, then it is easy. It's their job to investigate. If not, then they need to want to investigate or have to. Without knowing your party, I can't really say how to get them to want to. I do have some ideas for making them have to, though. The party has just successfully completed a venture and is celebrating at their favorite watering hole. As they are walking home, they hear a scuffle in the alley. There's a good chance that at least some of the members will check it out. When they do, they hear someone say, "Someone's coming. Let's get the Dolurrh out of here," and the beating of feet. Maybe the party finds some clue on the body, or maybe they don't. Either way, the murderers don't know if they have, and really, really do want to know. Whether the party members choose to investigate or not, they are now involved. This particular dead guy is not someone society as a whole is really going to miss. He was scum. He had the good fortune of finding a unique schema in Xen'drik, and the bad fortune of getting overly greedy about it. He was shopping it around to each of the three branches of Cannith, playing them against each other in a bidding war. Each of the three wants it, and just as badly wants the other two to not have it. But which, if any, killed him? He wasn't as clever as he thought and others have heard of his discovery. He might not even have been killed on purpose. The murderers may have just been trying to beat information out of him and gotten carried away. Or they may not have been involved with Cannith at all. This particular schema plays into the draconic prophecy. Perhaps not the schema itself, but where or how it was found fits into a key passage from one of the translations. The Chamber is very interested in the schema getting to the right people to fulfill the prophecy. The Mosaic Committee wants it destroyed. The Members of Cannith just want it. All of them will want to find out how much the party knows, and most of them will want to find out without revealing to the party who they are or why they are interested. This kind of thing is over the heads of the city watch. Although any of the five power groups involved here could have corrupt members of the watch on their payroll to use to hound or thwart the PCs. One of the groups could even hire the PCs to find the schema. They most certainly wouldn't tell them everything. And the same group who had the guy killed could be the one that hires the characters. Where the party starts investigating will depend a lot on what they find on the body. Also, whether or not they turn that over to the watch or if they keep it. He could have identification papers on him to let the party know who he is and possibly where he lives. A lightning rail ticket stub could point to where he has been and a likely avenue of investigation. Or an unused ticket could show where he had been planning to go next. Or maybe he just has a word scrawled on a scrap piece of parchment (the word being the password for his Kundarak safe deposit vault). Another possible clue could be something dropped by one of the attackers as he was fleeing. Or maybe the schema is a piece of junk, a fake, and one of the powers involved already knows this. He knows it because he has the real one and had the guy killed to keep the fake from falling into anyone's hands and being exposed. Or maybe he's not interested in it at all, but wants the other players (or the ones he knows about anyway) to think he is really focused on finding this schema to distract them from whatever he is really up to. I hope this helped. For me, an intrigue plot is about secrets and misdirection. The powers involved all have simple motives, like "get the schema for myself," "keep X from getting the schema," "destroy the schema," or "use this convenient distraction as a smokescreen." From the player side, solving the mystery should be like peeling an onion. Every part they solve should just reveal another layer underneath. First they discover tht Cannith is involved. Then they learn that the separate branches are all involved. Then they learn about the prophecy tie-ins, and so on. Along the way, they can gain longterm enemies, or possibly even friends. Either way, organizations they probably don't want to notice them, will. For inspiration, I'd suggest movies like The Interpreter, North by Northwest, or The Maltese Falcon.
Dustin001 02-18-06, 03:33 PM	I actually got this idea out of the Sharn handbook. How about the PC's are walking through town at night, for whatever reason and discover a body. Upon further inspection they realize the boddy looks alot alike one of the Party members and was killed by mistake. Maybe it was a hired assasin or maybe the thief stole from someone he shouldnt have, but either way the party is involved
Cloud Divider 02-18-06, 03:53 PM	So I feel like I'm missing intrigue in my adventures, but I'm not sure how I to add it. This is a pretty vague request but can anyone help me out with ideas or adventures of their own? I'm a new DM, have run 5 or 6 sessions now. I have the action part down.. how do I add the intrigue and gritty feeling to my adventures? I always liked the 'finding a dead body on the streets of Sharn and having to find out who they are and who killed them' but how do I get the party into the investigation and.. well... how the hell do i write it? Thanks alot in advance. I think you've got three different questions going on here: 1) You want intrigue. 2) You want investigation. 3) You want gritty. I'm presuming you're meaning something rather more like "noir" in meaning? They're related, but aren't necessarily the same thing. The easiest way to do (1) is essentially do ensure that the old adage "Nothing is as it seems," is true. How to do it well...is not so easy. Having lots of factions (a group with a given objective - one man can be a "faction" in this case) can help. The "layers of an onion" analogy is a good one to use as well. (2) is easy to do - but can be hard to do well. (3) is a matter of tone. One thing I've found that really helps, is to really play up the "the world is not black or white, but shades of grey." Also, it works well to think about the kinds of sacrifices or compromises (more accurately, "devil's deals") people will make to achieve their goals. Probably the BEST planning tool for an Intrigue/Investigation campaign is what's called a Relationship Map. It's sort of like a flow chart, but rather than decisions, you've got people, places, and things - and most importantly, how they all tie together. They're especially valuable because they let you track non-linear associations. A really complex map can start looking rather like a spider-web... What's nice, is that the Map tells you what encounters (be it meeting with people, or finding Clue X, or whatever) are most important, and that helps you decide which scenes you need to focus on. So it's a really valuable GM planning tool, too. I'm going to use an example of one of my campaign arcs (it was a single "adventure," but it took us about 4-5 5-hr sessions to play through), it involved both investigation and intrigue. It started out with the PC's witnessing a suicide (more accurately: a murder): someone was being chased, and chose to jump from one skybridge to the one the PC's were on, and due to various circumstances, he didn't survive the jump. He gasped out some cryptic name to one of the PC's ("Selkatari"), pressed an amulet into his hands, and he had a carefully wrapped book hidden on his person. The PC's also got a reasonable look at the victim's pursuers. That first encounter gave the PC's a starting set of clues to investigate. The relationship map I drew helped me figure out which clues led to which other clues, and which were red herrings (but they weren't necessarily valueless red herrings...or obvious red herrings). It ensured that there was both redundancy (two clues may eventually lead to the same place), but also provided slightly different perspectives onto the evidence. It also let me know where the "choke points" in the map were - places where there were only a single link between one event and the next. If you (or any other readers) are interested in more information, please let me know (via PM). I'd be happy to go into more detail (and even send a scanned copy of one). Where intrigue showed up in this particular scenario, was that the murder was not "actually" the real mystery. The motive was the real mystery. Someone was going around and killing a small group of Last War vets. But not because of their actions in the Last War. Again, "Nothing was as it seemed." Several factions were involved (the Sharn Watch, the Blademark, the Sharn Kalashtar, Morgrave University, the Boromar, the Riedran Ambassador, and the Dreaming Dark...plus a number of "minor" factions). The influence of some factions wasn't necessarily obvious at first (nor was it necessarily the "expected" influence), being exposed at a much later point in the investigation. For instance, the Riedran Ambassador didn't necessarily have the same objectives as the Dreaming Dark agents.
Rechan 02-18-06, 04:33 PM	Dungeon issue #129 has a murder mystery in it. I havn't looked at it myself but I've heard very good things about it. Based in Sharn, too. Also, Issue #128, Shut-In, is a pretty good adventure too. I looked it over and liked it.
Acev 02-18-06, 04:51 PM	It ensured that there was both redundancy (two clues may eventually lead to the same place), but also provided slightly different perspectives onto the evidence. It also let me know where the "choke points" in the map were - places where there were only a single link between one event and the next. Some very good advice here. One of the biggest problems with running intrigue\investigation adventures (or campaigns or whatever) is the amount of clues you give the players. Most DMs i've played under don't give enough. You need to give the players more than one way to advance to the next step. If you don't, chances are the game will stagnate and move at a mind numbing crawl. No matter how obvious you find the clue, if it's the only one, your players might miss it or not understand its significance. Redundancy is all important. "Choke points" will choke the fun out of the game.