Black Armada Games’ Lovecraftesque Second Edition is on BackerKit and has attracted hundreds of supporters.
Designed by Josh Fox and Becky Annison, Lovecraftesque is a storytelling game that does not need a GM.
How’s that for a mystery? How can players solve puzzles and clues in a tabletop RPG-like way without a Gamemaster or some narrator with a blueprint? Josh and Becky cracked it.
As the second edition of Lovecraftesque is still open for backers, I asked Josh whether there was something he would write about mystery games and what makes them tick.
I was looking for inspiration for GMs and game designers. Josh stepped up and also provided hitherto not-seen-in-this-form art from Lovecraftesque.
The glue that binds mysteries
By Josh Fox.
I’ve been doing a heck of a lot of thinking and design around mystery games over the last few years. In this article I’m gonna talk about “the glue that binds them” – basically, how a mystery becomes more than just a pile of clues and comes together into something that feels real. This is mostly from a design perspective, but it’s very relevant to GMs who create their own mystery scenarios.
I was prompted to write this by a reflection on the design process for Lovecraftesque. When we started designing the game, we knew we wanted a Microscope-style “take turns to create a thing” game, and we knew that thing you were creating should be clues. We wanted the clues to be created independently without discussion (since discussion is quite damaging to atmosphere and a sense of real mystery). We were looking to emulate the structure of Lovecraftian stories as ably analysed by Graham Walmsley in Stealing Cthulhu. And that’s where the game started.
But it quickly fell apart in playtesting. Our early playtests were fun, evocative, and very weird. But they were not at all coherent. Each player would throw in their own spooky ideas without much regard to how they fit in with the other clues. At the start, we’d get one creepy clue and go “ooooh”. Then the next clue would appear and we’d go “ahhhh”. But once we had the requisite 5-8 clues, we’d mostly be scratching our heads, because we had between us created a grab bag of random spooky stuff that didn’t work when combined together. And the trouble is, Lovecraftesque asks one of the players to step forward and narrate a cool ending to the story. We couldn’t do it, because we didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.
Enter Leaping To Conclusions. We came up with the idea that, instead of just throwing in random clues, everyone should come up with their own theory of what was going on, based on the clues so far. They’d then invent new clues that fit with their theory. And, after each scene, they’d update their theory to reflect the new clue the main character had discovered. This simple change proved revolutionary: immediately the stories began to take on a coherent shape even though nobody had ever discussed what direction the story should go in. This is why I call this mechanic the glue that holds Lovecraftesque together – because it takes disparate ideas about the story and sticks them together into something coherent.
It’s only recently that I’ve made the connection between this and traditional GMed-mystery play. Leaping to conclusions performs the same role as prep. When the GM runs a mystery game, they will throw out clues much the same way that the players do in Lovecraftesque, and in just the same way, it won’t form a coherent story unless they’ve thought about what it all means. As a mystery GM, your prep isn’t just “come up with a bunch of random clues in advance” (or at least it shouldn’t be), it’s “come up with an idea for something mysterious that’s happening, and then generate clues to match”.
It’s that central idea, the truth behind the mystery, which binds the clues together and ensures that they make sense when presented together. This gives the players a fighting chance to use the clues to work out what the truth must be. Or, as is more often the case, to work out enough information about it to stumble into a final encounter with the big bad. Imagine if the GM just made up clues with no regard to whether they fit together! You’d have a game that was high on atmosphere, with a strong sense that something was going on, but there would be no way to solve the mystery. And whatever denouement the GM came up with would feel baffling rather than satisfying.
Lovecraftesque sets requirements for what your theory must include, and these are a pretty good blueprint for what a GM’s prep should include in a horror mystery game. They are:
- Describe a terrifying monster or conspiracy or a horrifying truth.
- Explain the clues
- Say who (or what) is behind them
- Say what they’re doing
- Say why they’re doing it or what their endgame is.
This structure: “who, what and why”, is at the heart of writing a compelling mystery. When prepping for a GMed game I would generally do it in a slightly different order. Come up with the monster, conspiracy or truth at the start; break that down into the who, what and why, and then generate the clues from that. With Lovecraftesque it’s the reverse process because you get given the clues and then create the theory. But the principle is the same: to tell a compelling mystery tale, have a really good idea for what is going on and build everything out of that.
You might be wondering about games like Brindlewood Bay and Apocalypse Keys. These games are run by a GM, but one who doesn’t know what the truth behind the mystery is. They really are making up clues as they go! So how does that work given what I’ve said above?
In my experience, these types of game are a bit looser with the coherence of the mystery. I also think that a lot of GMs do in practice do some informal theorising as the game goes on, through a combination of listening to the players’ ideas and maybe daydreaming some of their own. These games do include tools to tighten this up further, though. These are:
- Scenarios for these games come with a pre-defined start point: a murder, a weird occurrence, something that puts everyone on the same page at the start. This does a surprising amount of work in helping establish a coherent mystery.
- The scenarios also contain a pre-generated thematic list of clues that, while not describing a coherent theory of the mystery, have a certain internal gravity. They pull in a related direction, so they aren’t just a random pile of ideas.
- Then, at the end, the players theorise about the mystery and come up with the answer. Just like I described above for Lovecraftesque, they study the clues and make up an answer[1]. The dice decide whether they’re right.
- There’s a bit of extra special sauce as well: every game of this type I’ve read encourages the players to exercise a bit of creative licence in their theorising. They are allowed to retroactively change up the details of clues, or add in extra information. For example, if the theory requires the villain to have a maimed hand, but no such NPC has ever been seen, you might say “could it be that the villain has been wearing gloves this whole time, which explains why we never saw their hand?” The GM never described the gloves – perhaps they even described this person as not wearing gloves – but the creative licence forces the mystery into line with the theory.
I’m excited by games which allow you to play through a mystery without a ton of prep work in advance, and I believe there’s more to be done in this design space. Indeed you may soon see some stuff in this space from yours truly. At any rate, I strongly believe that a good theory that covers “who, what and why” is the fundamental glue that holds together any good mystery game. If you’re designing or running a mystery game, whether GMed or GMless, prepped or emergent, you’d do well to pay attention to that theory.
[1] This isn’t a coincidence: Brindlewood Bay is strongly based on “Apocalypse by Moonlight” by Oli Jeffery, an add-on module for PBTA games which uses this exact approach, and which credits Lovecraftesque among its influences. You can find that module in Codex: Moonlight.
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