Casting Shadows

Thursby’s Coat: Hiding your Spades and Archers

This week’s Seed is for any pulp, or possibly noir game. The premise is quite simple. PIs all over the city are meeting sticky ends, showing up cold in alleys, driving off piers and bridges, and getting shot in the back through frosted glass. It’s all in a day’s work for these hard-nosed detectives, but the buck stops with Death.

The seed:

End of the line for Archer

Private Investigators are being murdered one by one, at a steady pace. There are no witnesses, and police have no leads. As the death-toll climbs, they cast wider and wider nets looking for a clue. Some of them start looking at the PCs – closely.Who is doing it, and why? Who will be next? What can be done and pinned on the killer?

The details:

Someone is knocking off Private Dicks in this town in almost the same order as the listing of their information in the yellow pages. The police have not cottoned on to that clue, yet – but with a careful investigation, the PCs, coming at it from a fresher and different perspective, should be able to piece it together from interviewing the contacts of the victims. Further investigation will indicate that certain targets were out-of-town, in prison for a few days, or were otherwise out of commission, suggesting the killer or killers could not get at them and so moved on to the next target.

Are the PCs listed? Should they be expecting an attack, or has one already been attempted, but was somehow delayed? Is it safe to walk the streets?

Planting the seed:

I suppose the easiest way to get things going is to try to kill the PCs and fail dramatically, but why go the easy way?

I think it might be more interesting to have business steadily pick up to the point where the PCs are swamped just interviewing potential clients, let alone investigating anything. Potential revenues from working even half the cases part-way to conclusion could solve this year’s money troubles nicely… and THAT is what the cops notice…

“You stand to benefit a lot from the deaths of your competitors…”

The murders continue, but the PCs are never targeted. They are, of course, being framed.

An Unusual Suspect?

The experts say that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Imagine a scenario wherein the wife of an unfaithful PI decides to secure revenge by bedding his peers. Her intent is to teach him a lesson, and shame him into the personal hell that she feels as a result of his betrayal and her own black revenge.

The same taste in women~

Evidence could confuse the PCs into being unsure if she later set about killing her husband, and then the other victims to cover it all up, or if her husband decided to demonstrate what fury really is by killing each Dick she banged… pardon the pun.

Either way, the PCs need to get off the hook for the murders, now being made to look like their handiwork, and get someone tossed in the slammer before anyone else dies.