Blazer's Ramblings

A Narrative Mystery Framework for Daggerheart

When I started working on my modern urban fantasy “Campaign Frame” for Daggerheart, I knew that I wanted the general structure of gameplay to follow the sort of investigative “case file” beats that many pieces of genre fiction use. Taking inspiration from the excellent Bump in the Dark and The Between Games, I landed on a variation of the excellent Threat, Questions, and Opportunities mechanics taken from the Carved from Brindlewood games.

Threats

A Threat is problem at the center of a scenario: a new drug laced with faerie dust causing mundanes to manifest magic, a force draining the little spirits out of the city, vampires afflicted with a curse of uncontrolled bloodlust. This is presented to the PCs directly via a framed scene to expound on the situation, and we write down what they want to call it on a “File” document. I then start a countdown towards an established “if the players don’t act” that ticks down when dramatically appropriate, on Long Rests or when significant in-game time has past, or the players Fail with Fear or present a Golden Opportunity to advance the Threat's plans.

Example:

Situation: At a pounding rooftop party at this house of a tech executive (Cody Miller), a number of attendees took a drug they’re calling “Glitterdust or Fairie Dust.” Powerful hallucinations and heightened sensual experienced followed. Some reported being able to “make colorful sparkles appear” and “change the taste and color of the food and drink.” The party came to a halt in the small hours of the morning when the police were called, after a partygoer plummeted from the roof after announcing that he was going to “fly on gossamer wings!”

Threat: The Glimmerman and his distribution.

What Happens if the Keepers Don't Take Action: On the countdown, another public display of magic, threatening the Veil.

Should the Countdown reach 0 without being resolved, the players have a last chance to try and prevent things from escalating - but the situation has already gotten bad and will have impacts on the campaign going forward. Likewise if they try to tackle a Threat and fail, this drives new twists in the narrative.

Questions and Opportunities

Each Threat has a number of Questions associated with it, the mysteries at hand that the players need to solve. These are phrased open ended and given to the players, such as “How do we stop the supply of Glimmerdust from entering Seattle (Complexity 6).” Finding Clues to formulate a theory about the answers to these questions will open the door to Opportunities to resolve the Threat. Each Question has a different complexity rating - this determines how many clues the players must uncover to attempt to put a Theory together, and affects the modifiers on the roll to see how accurate their theory is. Note that low complexity Questions are often more dangerous in some way, such as facing a creature directly in its hidden lair vs. figuring out its hunting patterns and ambushing it vs. determining what it truly wants and luring it to come peacefully.

By default, there’s no canonical answers to these Questions, and players should be creative with their interpretation of Clues and resultant Theories, while being aware that their answers set the scene for the Opportunity that results on a success. This gives permission for the players to string together ideas about what is really going on in the situation based on the clues and events, without the GM having to steer or frantically re-work behind the scenes. If you want a more traditional mystery structure where there are explicit answers, you can still use the structure presented here to formulate the Files and present clues. Simply drop the Formulate a Theory mechanic in favor of framing the players into appropriate scenes as they decipher the clues you've laid.

Questions can also be nested, unlocking in stages before an Opportunity to tackle the Threat directly is available. Or perhaps you might note that multiple Questions need to be answered before the Threat is resolved.

Opportunities are a short statement that describes a method by which the players can resolve the Threat (or that moves towards it), access to which is obtained by making a successful Formulate a Theory roll. For the example given above, “Locate the route from Faerie into the city. Resolve the threat by completing a ritual that will loosen the hold of the Ways on that site, preventing future use.” During their investigation, players may get tantalizingly close to a threat, but without completing a theory to properly answer a Question they will be unable to fully resolve it.

Clues

These are little ideas that tie into the theme and vibe of the Threat, prompts to give you something interesting to riff off when the players roll a success on the appropriate Move. You should try and write them in a way that doesn't rigidly tie them to a certain circumstance, so you can work them in to multiple different occasions or environments, or even invert or twist them into a new form. Additionally, you want to avoid having Clues that directly answer the question, but instead provide a springboard for theories that the players can bring to bear. There’s a degree of almost free association as you write these out, and you want a lot! Some examples from the same File as previous:

A custom campaign Action is introduced for this. Note that the default result is “you find a clue” because with this framework we’re more interested with the drama and beats of the fiction then hitting the right mechanical markers or questions:

Search for a Clue: Action

When you conduct research, gather information, or otherwise pursue leads for a File say how you intend to do so and the GM will call for an appropriate ability. This can be a Group Action (eg: examining a scene, studying books in a library together) or individual Action. The Difficulty will scale by Tier (13/15/17/20), and can have Advantage or Disadvantage applied depending on the fictional situation.

The "True Threat" is a structure taken from CfB games where there's a deeper mystery occurring behind the scenes. A true Mastermind of some of the surface elements, of dark conspiracy. If you don't want to nest things like that, easy enough to drop.

Theories

Finally, the players (once they have sufficient clues and confidence) take a Formulate the Theory Action to put everything together to answer a question and see if they unlock the opportunity. When you prep the File, you want to leave those opportunities general enough that whatever theory the players come up with can directly inform how it manifests. In the example file I’ve given so far, the players alighted on the whole Door/Painting motif and theorized that it was the entrance used to move product in and out. They rolled well, and suggested that their support NPC could make a skeleton key type thing to get them in.

Formulate a Theory: Action

When you feel like you’ve gathered sufficient Clues (at least half of the Question’s complexity) to formulate a Theory about the Threat, you may conduct a discussion about what that answer might be. Once you reach a consensus on the Theory, choose a player to make a Theorize roll. This is a Duality dice roll with unique modifiers: you will add the number of Clues you have incorporated into the Theory or explained away, minus the Complexity. The Difficulty is always 13.

Other tidbits taken from the CfB games for prepping a situation like this include: Moments - little fragments that tie back to the theme of the mystery that you can use when transitioning scenes or to make things more tense etc, Locations to center the scene framing you'll do, a short list of Dangers that you can bring in, and NPCs relevant to the file. My experience is that once you have this prepped, you likely have many sessions of easy play with the PCs driving where you go.

You can find the full sample File here, and I encourage you to look at The Between Threats available across the internet for further inspiration.