The party will return from a journey to their base of operation to find their hostess brutally murdered. They will need to search out her killers and bring them to justice.
The murder will be committed by agents of he Shadow Thieves operating in Baldur's Gate (FR). The Party knows their hostess is hunted by said guild but not where the agents are in the city. Also during the course of the challenge I would like another character introduced as a witness.
Any suggestions on how to accomplish this will be most appreciated.
Basically, there are several scenes (locations), each with several usable skills that reveal info or open new locations.
The problem with those skill challenges is that failures may mean that the party may miss some really important info; for that info, you may wanna make it either easier to get, or have several ways to get them.
I would also recommend that you look into DMG2, which has a very good section on skill challenges.
In general the more skills you use the more people can be involved. One question you need to ask is what happens if the PCs fail the skill challenge? Does the target die? Do they lose out on a valuable contact that they could make?
For instance, in one skill challenge that my party "dodged" by doing something completely unexpected, they would have a battle on favorable terrain with a surprise round if they won, and they would have a battle on worse terrain and be surprised if they lost. However, we were weak on letting the PCs know they were entering a skill challenge and they thought of a great way to get around the problem entirely. It was a lot of good preparation thrown out. However, subsequent attempts at the same set up have been very successful. We've been a lot clearer that the skill challenge is starting and the players have loved them.
Really its not an essential pass or fail challenge. Failure means simply that the party don't find the person that killed an NPC that they managed which they shouldn't have.