Casting Shadows

This is day fourteen of #RPGaDAY2025 and so it’s time for mystery to be our prompt. So far, we have established a framework to recruit initial, additional, and subsequent characters as needed to an ongoing cause. For campaign play with significant risk to characters’ mental, moral, and physical health, this is a tremendous benefit as it helps preserve discovered information and context, makes forming connections between characters easier, and presents clear rationales to support player decision-making. This framework has been set-up through the notion of a patron, the consideration of a threat and linked motivation which affects or interests the characters, giving voice to the driving force of an organized group actively trying to achieve undesirable or deplorable ends, and settling on the horrifying being and accompanying lore which gives context to how the world feels, operates, and because of which is sliding off to hell.

What it is time to start considering is a pivotal moment where as far as the characters are concerned, the time for inaction has passed. From this point forward, something must be done. For this type of play and the type of campaign I am interested in pitching, a mystery is called for, and it should be one which requires a timely solution.

Day 14: Mystery

To help build the sense of surges in activity followed by period of inaction, I think starting with a fast-paced mystery will be just the ticket. This takes the normal excitement of starting a new campaign with a new character, builds it up through action and discovery, and then allows for numerous means of describing and possibly playing through moments where that activity drops off – as if the opposition had retreated like the tide.

As the surface of the cult’s activity involves many layers dealing with the dead ranging from medical research, cadaver theft, grave robbing, and abduction, there are many things which can seem disconnected that when linked paint a frightening and repulsive picture of hidden villainy which must be dragged into the light and stopped. It’s one thing for a patron figure like Neslinger (from Day 1)to reveal this villainy, and it’s quite another for it to affect the characters directly. In this regard, an abduction is valuable. It is personal, it is a line which should not be crossed, if Neslinger’s information is correct it is suggestive of a fate which only includes death, and it comes with an inherent sense of urgency.

So, to my understanding of the cult’s activities, I will add periods of random-seeming abductions and consider some NPC families and characters who have been affected by these activities, some who have narrowly avoided them, and once the characters have been made, some who are among the circles of their Allies, Contacts, and Followers.

The mystery itself can be two-fold. Can the characters recover the abducted person or persons, and can they glean information into who or what organization is behind the adductions?

At a certain point, the abductions will stop – for a time. Will the group be able to act fast enough to gain sufficient information before that lull settles on the nation?

See you tomorrow for Day 15: Deceive