Patchwork conspiracies

Multithreaded mysteries

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Crafting a series of mysteries with an overarching conspiracy can be intimidating. A lot of folks try to start with the big conspiracy, we’re going to turn that on it’s head.

This technique will work for classics like Call of Cthulhu, but also modern designs like Liminal Horror and Mothership. In fact, I used this technique for a Death in Space campaign a while back where I used Mothership’s excellent Gradient Descent as a keystone of the wider mystery.

I ran some Delta Green recently and its ‘shotgun scenarios’ (snappy one-shots) are great building blocks for the approach I’m going to take you through.

I shared my thoughts after running Delta Green in our latest issue of MurkMail Premium. Join MurkMail Premium (get a 7-day free trial).

Individual mysteries first

Start by making or gathering small mysteries.

For this example we’re going to use five Delta Green shotgun scenarios:

BESTOW: An art gallery that contains a hypergeometric puzzle trap.

The Button: A university academic creates an impossible electrical circuit.

Under New Management (UNM): A company has been using human victims as fuel for hypergeometric experiments.

The Drove: A cult is feeding victims to a swine like abomination.

Hellhole: An god-like creature hidden in a subway tunnel is harvesting victims.

It is important to leave the exact causation open ended, since you want to tie each mystery into the others. If you’re making your own scenarios, you can do this from the ground up. For pre-written material, you might need to modify or cut out some of the specific causes of the situation in the scenario.

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Connect them up

For each scenario, roll a d4 and randomly select that many other mysteries from our list to connect it to. When you come to roll for scenarios that you have already connected to previous scenarios, make sure to include those connections in the total. If you roll below its current number of connections, you don’t need to do anything.

We can draw a diagram like this:

Image credit: ME

Then we write the connections between these scenarios. Make the connections discoverable, so your players get cooking like conspiracy theorists.

Here is an example for the connection between UMN and Drove:

In the Drove scenario: the abomination on the farm was the farmer’s son, who was experimented on by the same division of McPherson Logistics Solutions (from UNM) that has been performing hypergeometric experiments. Paperwork on the farm indicates the son was part of a medical trial at McPherson.

In the UNM scenario, records of the trial (including the address of it’s participant from Drove) can be found in McPherson’s offices.

Repeat this for other connections and you’ll have a nice web of mysteries for your players to get tangled up in. You can keep stitching in more micro-connections, like NPCs being affiliated and so on, if you like.

For a more sandbox-y feeling: make a timeline with the events that led up to the current day and what will happen in each of these scenarios as time passes without intervention. You can use my sandbox event table for this too.

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For making these kinds of conspiracies, I write all my nonsense down in Muji notebooks (absolutely, 100% THE BEST notebooks) with a Lamy pen. Highly recommended.

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