A Simple Mystery

I've tried a few mystery worlds:
1. Pyramid Puzzle
2. First Contact/First Murder
3. And one in which your Dop is a detective in a big city who's suspected of killing a cult leader.

#1 succeeded, but was not fully developed as MJ said it needed more variations. @2 and #3 were not fully developed. Let's see if four times the charm.

I'm going to follow my advice to John. Make it simple. There are only going to be two apparent suspects. And I'll try to make variations in which A and B are guilty. But I'll try for some more variations as well.

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In New Amsterdam, the capital of Her Majesty Queen Victoria the Second's American Provinces, there is a certain park, the Royal Park which is known among the cognoscenti as Unicorn Park. One of the last Unicorns in the world, a beast from the Age of Walking Myth, lives in its house/corral inside the Park. She has two keepers, one John Patrick Morgan, a good Irish lad, and the other is the Verser's Doppleganger or Other.

In all the Variations, the Dop is cursed by a death curse. He sweats, he sneezes, he goes to the pot all too frequently. He's dehydrating to death. But as he collapses, he pulls out a gift from his great-grandmother, a noted witch. Its an amulet about his neck that will Call for Aid once.

The Verser arrives to see his Other on the floor of the kitchen, in desperate need of water. The Other will be delirious, but will not want to touch the Verser.

If they touch, the damage to both ranges from One fingertip (Annoying) to Fireman's Carry (Fatal). This effect does not go away. [One effect in game will be to make some players distrust their Other which is no bad thing.]

If the Other does not soon get water, he will die. If he gets water, he will begin excreting it at a faster rate. This cycle of rehydration and dehyrdation will speed up [It will be somewhat unpredictable. Give the player an estimated time of a week, and then shorten it by suddenly bumping up the dehyrdration speed. This will establish a ticking clock, but also allow the GM to alter it for dramatic effect.]

If he receives enough water, he will be weak, but not delirious. Every minute of conversation is a simple stamina check vs. passing out.

"Someone has put a death curse on him. The only way to relieve it is for the would-be murderer to be unveiled."

1. Their are more effective means of killing someone, but this method is particularly horrible. This implies a great deal of hatred toward the Other.
2. The curse requires a range of less than a hundred feet to the target from the caster. There are no delayed effect spells.
3. The whole Unicorn House complex for the Unicorn and for its two keepers is a house, a barn, and a corral all in one. At night, it has a very strong protective spell prohibiting entry from outside as the Unicorn is very valuable. This spell extends two hundred feet from the center of the house, and over one hundred fifty feet from the bedroom of the Other when he was stricken.
4. It may develop that Other is a fairly strong mage as he knows all the data in #2.

Variant Murders:
1. Irish is angry because he has a girlfriend who wants to be married, but Other per policy refuses to have a married couple around a unicorn. Irish is not a magician of note, but his girlfriend is. He lets her in, and she curses Other. They intend after Other is dead to be the bosses, and hire a celibate animal handler to take care of the unicorn directly.
2. Irish is a magician of enough skill to buy a curse spell from the Cursorium, a magic shoppe on Battery Row, and he uses it on the Other. But he does not intend to kill the Other. He knows that the Unicorn's horn can heal the curse, but he figures this will weaken the unicorn enough that Irish can kill it, and take its horn, and sell it for lots of money to pay his gambling debts.
3. The Unicorn is secretly intelligent, and he's been offended by Irish's rude behavior too it. So he cast a spell, but he messed up, and hit the Other with it rather than Irish. Now he wants to save the Other, but not so much that he will expose himself as intelligent because he fears what the humans would do to an intelligent beast as they had a tendency a few decades back to slaughter them such as the Talking Geese which got wiped out.
4. The Other is a magician, but he has a dark secret. He's consorted with Powers he would have been wiser to let be. And one of them has slipped a servant into his mind, and so he has blackouts. During one of them, he cast the spell on himself.
5. The great-grandmother, a noted witch, foresaw that her great-grandson might meet an immortal verser if he came near death. So she cast a spell (a delayed effect spell, but it turns out that really powerful mages can do this.) and her great-grandson came down with the curse, and summoned the Verser. Now all that is needed is for the Verser to touch the amulet. If he does, he gets dumped in the Dops body, the Dop gets disembodied as a ghost, and the great-grandmother gets an immortal body to use.

And the problem of fighting over the body when the body verses is going to be tough, because the evil, nasty great-grandmother witch is a really hard-headed and cold-blooded woman with a steely will.

NOTE: Those are the variation plans for the murderers. Now I need clues to match up to each of them, but thats a post for later.

Facts that remain the same in all variations:
1. JPM, or Irish, has a girlfriend who is a talented witch.
2. The Other is a powerful mage who's done some questionable spells.
3. The Unicorn is secretly intelligent.
4. The Unicorn's horn can relieve illnesses and curses, but at great personal cost to it.
5. The Other says his great-grandmother is nice out of familial loyalty, but he knows better. Its rumored in the family that she poisoned her first two husbands. She is a powerful witch.
6. Irish is rude to the Unicorn.

Facts that change:
1. A worker may let in someone from the outside, or the spell may be inviolable.
2. Irish has a gambling problem or not.

If they touch, the damage to both ranges from One fingertip (Annoying) to Fireman's Carry (Fatal). This effect does not go away.

Since this is inconsistent with the ordinary relationship between a verser and his divergent, I'm assuming that there is an explanation for it. That explanation is probably either connected to the amulet or connected to the curse. What were your thoughts?

Facts that change:
1. A worker may let in someone from the outside, or the spell may be inviolable.
2. Irish has a gambling problem or not.

I don't think you have a copy of Vorgo beta* (a mystery with six potential solutions), but there's a chart in it that looks something like--well, I think I can't do charts here, so I'm going to have to describe it.

Down the left side of the chart are 19 "facts" which are true or false according to who the criminal is. For example, one of them is that the alarm sounds when the security guard activates it--the difference between whether the Vorgo was in place in the exhibit and then stolen, or whether its theft was discovered before the alarm was activated (which might mean it never reached the exhibit. Three of the suspects--the magician, the custodian, and the maintenance man--would have stolen the artifact from the stage, and thus it would never have reached the exhibit and no one would have confirmed that it was there. Three others--the outsider hiding in the building, the security guard, and the museum director--would have removed it from the exhibit after it had been returned there but before the alarm was activated. Thus in the six columns to the right, there is a mark indicating that the sounding of the alarm is true if the artifact was stolen by the outsider, the security guard, or the director. Each of the suspects thus develops a unique fact set. The more unique ones are also less obvious--the director hides the stolen artifact in one of the artifacts of another exhibit which is slated to go on tour the next week, but that tour is a unique part of that crime, and there are no posters for it if the director is not the thief. Similarly, the outsider is not seen leaving the building if he is the criminal, but is seen leaving the building in every other case (the clue of what the dog did in the night).

So think through the events as if you wrote this story once for each suspect, not as a mystery but as a crime procedural, that the criminal did this and this, and the victim did that and that, putting it all together so that you have a sequence of events for each, and then identify every point in the story that is discoverable and variable. List these on a chart and mark which ones are true or false in which suspect stories. If your clue list does not give enough information to sort through them (and let me note that some of your possible explanations are just unusual enough that you would need some fairly strong evidence to support them if you expect the player to think of them himself) you'll have to devise some additional clues or make them more discoverable.

Hope this helps. (And I'm glad I put it off for today, because I was much more able to get through your post and understand it on a fresh start.)

--M. J. Young

*The Vorgo is in the as yet unpublished Third Book of Worlds; Eric does have some material from that book which he has used to test-run in his game worlds (I know he has Lilith's World and Dark Honor Empire), but I don't know which worlds he has and does not have.

Thanks, I'll start working on that soon.

I've kinda got my first draft of 'Darwin's World' done, and I've been smushing together various docs to create a 35k Anoniblogger novel very rough draft recently. Just the last hour, I've been beginning to organize the rough draft so I can see where it needs patching, expanding, and shifting around. Imagine if you had one of your novels with the various characters doing slightly different things in differing versions, and in some versions not all the characters were there, and so on... I've been developing a new skill. Smush Novel Bits Into Coherent Whole, its a Do Anything Magic skill.

I'm thinking that in some universes meeting your Doppleganger is fatal. I'm thinking a similar effect to the Vampire is of the Night, and the Sun has the authority over the Day thing that you talked about before.

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I think I looked at a Vorgo Beta, but I'm not sure I remember a chart. I do remember thinking that 'this is too complicated for me'. But yeah, I can do a chart when I get the individual stories down.

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Murder Plan One:

John Patrick Morgan aka 'Irish' is deeply in love with Luisa Sopa. He is a minor mage with enough power to run spells set up by other magicians, and to light candles with a snap of his fingers, and the like. She is a talented young witch.

In his desk, spell-guarded by a simple lock spell, is a stack of love letters from Luisa. In this is revealed their fervent attachment, their agreement to meet at nights when the weather is cloudy or the moon is small, their desire to be married.

If they ask the Other, he will remember denying a request to let the two marry, since its against policy to have married people care for unicorns who require virgin's in close contact with them (otherwise they get angry and unmanageable.)

If they spy on Irish on a cloudy night, he will open the spellshield, and let in Luisa for a couple hours of dating time.

If they observe Irish, they will see that he is rude to the unicorn. They will also see that the unicorn does not appreciate this. Sufficient study or other methods may reveal that the unicorn is intelligent and sensitive to insult (which it is hiding because it fears Humanity's reaction to Talking Animals like itself--it cannot actually talk, but it can use sign language.)

What happened: One dark night (and it was dark the night of the curse), Irish let his love in. She cast a spell on the Other. They intend to take over the Other's job, and hire a celibate animal handler while they do the office and promotional work without actual contact with the animal after they get married. The Other, cursed, spends several hours trying to survive, and in desperation uses his nice grandmother's amulet.

I'm thinking that in some universes meeting your Doppleganger is fatal.

I'm thinking that this would be true in a related universes context, that is, the duplicate selves who are from universes connected to this one as part of a coherent mini-multiverse might be so affected. I have a lot of trouble applying such a rule to a verser, unless there is a reason for it that is not simply a plot device. For one thing, if it is not the norm there needs to be a discoverable explanation for it.

--M. J. Young

Wouldn't it be interesting to have in a few universes some special effect that only applies to versers?

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Irish is deeply in love with Luisa Sopa. They both are strongly talented, although she is definitely more than he in this. It will be hard to get into Irish's room without triggering some painful trap spell.

He goes out at night to talk to his lady through the shield spell, with about five feet separating them. It turns out that its impossible to open the shield spell at night.

A receipt is spotted in a trashbasket as it flames into ash.

Irish does not much like the unicorn it is obvious, and the feeling seems mutual.

The Unicorn is a Talking Animal (although he hid this fact as he was afraid of human reaction to this.)

What happened? Irish owed lots of money to some gamblers, and so he decides to cancel his debts by stealin the unicorn's horn, and selling it. To do this, he buys a curse from the Curorium. He unleashes the curse in the middle of the night on the Other. He then hints repeatedly that the Other ought to availd himself of the healing from a unicorn's horn.

This will have the effect of weakening the Unicorn so that irish can steal i t.

How about in that world all indigs automatically have adverse to twin skill because of inherited gene?
It could also be like a world that have reverse protein, but the protein in this case is the DNA thus upon contact inflicts damage.

Certainly there have been some interesting worlds in which the verser has an unfair disadvantage. The world with the reversely-linked proteins is a good example. My argument is that for there to be such a disadvantage, there has to be a reasonable explanation for it within what the game allows. It can't simply be that "versers" are targeted.

One possibility is that the world has some protections against "off-worlders". This would suggest that the world has a high mag bias such that there would otherwise be frequent visitations from gated visitors from the supernatural realms, and the deity in charge wants to prevent such visitations without powerblocking them directly. Thus some sort of dispel off-worlder skill is in place, which works against versers as well as any others.

One possibility is that the indigs are not humans but there are humans elsewhere in this or a related universe who prey on these indigs, so the indigs have wards against humans. This would adversely affect the player character, but not any non-human associates.

In every case, there should be a rational explanation of the problem, because there ought too to be a way to compensate or overcome it.

--M. J. Young

Okay,
I understand now. I'm going to go with Brock's explanation which means in this world there are no twins as they naturally abort. It means, among other things, no Remulus and Romus. It means that pschyologically the Verser is downright eerie to his Other.

This protein affects both the Verser and the Other at the same time.

Historically, in really ancient times, there are tales of twins, but this is regarded as a 'fable of the ancients'. What happened is a genetic mutation which degenerated a positive protein into something that was dangerous to twins about four thousand years ago.

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Variant #3: The Unicorn is offended at Irish's rudeness (which is because Irish is mad about not being able to marry). The Unicorn is not wanting to let others know of his intelligence because he fears the reaction of humans to an intelligent animal a so-called Talking Beast.

The Spelllock Barrier at night is inviolable, and Irish is a so-so magician. There is no receipt flaming in the trash can. However, there is a man from the Cursorium who wants to be paid for 'Four dragonsblood infused candles, a flying torch (it flies on command and lights fires on command), and one vial of Elemental Water.') that was delivered earlier.

The Other and Irish deny ordering this.

If examined, a bit of red dye is touching the Unicorn's right front hoof. If searched for the flying torch can be found in the bushes outside the window of the Unicorn's inside stall.

Ehhh, not so great, but I'm slogging through it...

Variant #4:

The Other is a magician, and he unbeknownst to himself either botched a spell, or was too trusting of certain darkling powers. In a blackout, he cast the spell on himself.

The Spelllock is inviolable, there are no red bits on the unicorn's hoof and the flying torch is not out the window of the unicorn, but instead out the window of the Other. The fellow from the Cursorium still wants his money.

Variant # 5. The Evil Great-great-grandmother of the Other cast a delayed effect spell, which only the truly gifted can do in the amulet of 'protection'. She put this curse forward so that in time, her descendant would be cursed, summon the verser, and the verser upon touching the amulet would be sucked into the Other's body, the Other would be a disembodied ghost, and the Ancient Witch would have a new immortal body to use.

This mystery is solved by the lack of clues indicating anyone else. The spelllock is inviolable, and no one has ordered any thing from the Cursorium to be paid for later, and the Other is a very minor magician. In other words, it can't be the Fiance', or the Other, or Irish, or the Unicorn. Its the Person Who Is Apparently Not There.