Exchange of Realities

So you’re looking into planning a mystery, and you’ve already figured out what happened. Now it’s time to figure out who the people involved are. In general, the characters connected to a standard mystery come in three varieties: suspects, witnesses and experts. That doesn’t mean there isn’t overlap between the groups—I’ve seen characters who ranged from being one to being all three—but it does mean that any given character involved in the mystery should probably be in at least one such group.

Who are they?

Logically enough, the suspects are the ones who might have done it. They’re often a varied lot, but all of them will have one or more of three qualities: a motive, or reason to have committed the crime; skills by which they could have done so; and an opportunity to have done the deed. As with mystery character groups, a given suspect can have more than one, and in fact, the culprit is going to need all three. The more a character’s got, the more suspicious she is. Another consideration for suspects is how much the investigators (or the audience, if the two are discrete groups) want to suspect them; I find it useful to have an even balance between people they’d rather not believe did it and people they have no problem whatsoever suspecting.

Witnesses, on the other hand, are observers. Most of us, when we think of witnesses, think of people who were at the scene of the crime and noticed something there, but there are other options. You have the ones who were somewhere else entirely but saw the suspects there, creating an alibi. Or overheard a plot, or saw someone doing something that might have been preparing for the crime, or—well, you get the idea. And not all of them are going to be telling the truth; they might have a bone to pick with one of the suspects, or someone else to cover up, or just want the notoriety that comes from Knowing Something About the Case, and the investigators will need to figure that out before they can solve the mystery.

Contrast the experts. While a witness is characterized by knowledge of things related the case, the expert is characterized by knowledge or skill that can advance the investigation. The lady who can get you to the scene is an expert; so is the forensic specialist, the jewelry appraiser, the hacker, the rival detective: basically, if they’re going to be sought after for their skills, or if their knowledge is useful regardless of how much they know about this particular case, you’re probably looking at an expert rather than a witness.

Combinations of the above are just as much fun. The most common overlap is between suspects and witnesses; after all, anyone who was present at the right time to say what happened probably had the opportunity to do it themselves, right? A witness-expert might know something about the case relating to one or more of her areas of expertise, but her witness knowledge might have nothing whatsoever to do with what she does as an expert. Suspect-experts are walking complications: on the one hand, their skills might be necessary for a certain phase in the investigation, but do you really want to deal with the risk that you’re giving away details of the investigation to the culprit?

Once you’ve figured out who these people are, you’ll want to figure out how to introduce them. If the characters already know one or more of the secondaries, so much the better; if not, you’ll want to figure out at least two or three ways to get anyone important to the mystery onto the scene or into the clue list. Players can be oblivious, after all, and even a character in a novel might miss the first tip-off that a character could be relevant.

But once they’re in, they’re in, and you can move on to the next step.

Death. So final. So irritating. And yet so inevitable, and so good at making protagonists complacent. Have you ever seen the look on a protagonist’s face when you pop up a bit after they could swear they sent you into the claws of the Powers themselves? It’s a wonderful thing. But not everyone has access to sources of resurrection once they’ve gone into the great beyond. How can even they still manage to get I-killed-you complacency out of the protagonists.

The first way is simple: don’t actually die. Yes, I know that’s cheating. But really, we’re villains. Cheating is what we do. Feigning death is tricky, sure. “Never found the body” doesn’t fool anyone anymore, and if you’re using another corpse as a body double you’ll want to make sure it died on the right day so people don’t start wondering why you’ve been a corpse and talking at the same time. There’s death-feigning magic, but the problem with it is that the less lily-white hero-types are probably going to stab you a few times just to make sure you’re really dead, and most aren’t too good at protecting against that, let alone subtly enough that they’re actually sure. And while it can be fun to be able to survive a sword to the head due to the compactness of your brain, being correspondingly stupid isn’t particularly good for your lifespan unless you know your dramatic role is Punching Bag. Who wants to be one of those?

For some people, possession is the way to get the death without dying effect. They leap from one body to another as if they’re taking stepping stones across a river, and die a thousand times without actually passing. The advantage is that you get to leave a body, but there are a lot of disadvantages. One, your choices in hosts are somewhat limited—bodies that won’t be missed aren’t always optimal for your purposes (particularly if you’re a talker rather than a fighter), and if you’re taking the body of someone who’s got connections, you’re going to either need to be very good at pretending to be him, or deal with the fact that people might put two and two together. Two, you’re going to need an escape plan of some sort—and if that plan is just a focus somewhere, you might spend a lot of time stuck there if things go wrong. Three, you might not be able to use all your powers in the new form, and while that’s a lovely surprise for the protagonists when they face the real you, it’s obnoxious having to remember which of your fallbacks don’t work anymore or being set back because you don’t have all your powers to bring to bear.

For some people, a halfway death is the optimal solution—bungee-jumping into the Dark River, if you will. It (usually) leaves a definite body which is definitely dead, or at least makes for a very obvious and thorough demise, ameliorating the concerns of the protagonists who offed you. But at the same time, it means you don’t have to worry about whether resurrection actually works in your world, as this isn’t fully dying, just putting your spirit on hold for a bit while the body gets itself back together. For some people, this is done by tying their life force to an object—I favor this over object-tied invulnerability, since it may still have the problems of object-based weaknesses , but it’s not as obvious a cheat as attacks bouncing off of you or instant right-before-their-eyes regeneration. Others have contingent spirit recall into false body effects in out of the way places—which is all very well if people can’t find your recovery site, but requires caution so they can’t locate it.

Do note, though, that unless you’re mixing and matching tricks, you’re probably not going to get the same complacency from them for more than one death. Protagonists may be suicidally determined to believe in the innate goodness of all, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Don’t assume they won’t be ready for you the second time unless you’ve done something clever enough to put them off balance.

(Stay tuned for more Generic Villainy!)