Plots · Hired · Side-Quest
Mon Frere
An obviously wealthy and beautiful woman contracts the PC's to solve a missing persons case. The missing person is her younger sibling, a teenage boy.
The PC's will either be freelance detectives or working for a reputable agency. However, this is not essential. They could also be working for a newspaper. To name just one example.
The teenager ran away from an exclusive school because of racism on the part of his peers and teachers. Her parent's ordered him to man up. Of course a willful ignorance of the full scope of the problem didn't help matters.
He sent his sister a series of postcards from across the country, with postmarks of various monuments. She will give the characters these postcards if asked.
Checking with the police for leads will result in a visit from the Mayor's personal staff, telling them to back off. Checking on the streets will bring in the local crime lord's henchmen, also telling them to back off.
Someone will send the PCs a picture of the kid. Deceased. The house the boy was staying in, where the picture was taken, has been bulldozed and a new park is on the lot.
The investigation leads down the dark alleyways of the city and up the heights of power. Organized crime and the mayors office are in bed together and both sides are doing their utmost to obstruct the investigation.
The local papers are afraid to even print a hint of the story without solid evidence.
If the PCs press hard enough, the warnings will go to outright assassination attempts.
Editor's Note: The ending is left intentionally open for the GM to ultimately decide the direction in which to proceed. This is a short crime mini-campaign I was playing through with a friend last week via another chatroom. When I noticed the Freetext Friday challenge, I just thought it had to be posted.
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A fun frame work for an adventure, and can be easily plugged into Shadowrun or other sci-fiish setting with minimal effort.
Edit: I would enjoy heqaring the specifics of the play through you did with the adventure and how it all turned out.
Sure! It was just a one-on-one roleplay that lasted a couple of nights. The setting was 1920's Chicago, during the Great Depression, and the heyday of bootlegging and gangsters! It's ending was rather dark, with a lot of difficult choices that left me thinking for quite a bit after we'd finished.
I think that this is a good framework for an adventure, and it certainly hits some detective tropes and gets the mind working, but I'd like to see either a hint more to it, or perhaps a selection of several possibilities.
As it is, I think it's just a hint too open-ended.
Thank you max. The open-endedness was intentional but I can see what you mean by it being a little 'too' much so.
I am all for an open ended climax or resolution. You need room for the players to improvise. However, 'leaving room for the GM to improvise ' is not really a thing. You don't to leave room for the GM, by the nature of being a GM already has all the room they need. I can understand not wanting to bog a plot down with esoteric world specific details and game mechanics, but this one could use a few more details. In a detective story, isn't it the details that matter?
Overall, I think a good open ended campaign, as most RP campaign should be written, should be to leave the resolution open-ended. You leave everything open and poorly defined: the connection between the kid and the crimelord, the connection between the mayor and the crime syndicates, the connection between the kid's school and the mayor and/or criminal elements. You give us one detail, postcards, and two plot points the picture of the dead kid and the bulldozing of his house.