Christmas advent calendar coming soon

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Hey folks! Small update from me, apart from working on Ex Tenebris (lots of draft scenarios to review!) I’m putting together another Solo Journaling Advent Calendar.

Some of you may remember the folk horror game Advent Of Abomination from a couple of years back, which attracted a small but enthusiastic player base (including the author Frances Hardinge!)

This year I’m creating a lighter, family-friendly one called Advent of Adventure, where you play the one Christmas elf who has escaped the sudden invasion of North Pole HQ by a dragon and its gang of minions. Can you save Christmas?

I’ll be releasing a playtest version of Advent Of Adventure here on our Patreon. It’s a classic prompt-based game, where you write and/or draw your story. The aim is to get it out at the end of November to enable people to play it through the Christmas period. So block out some time for Christmas creative fun, and watch this space!

Events: bringing the mystery to life

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This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

Whenever I GM a mystery game, I aim to create a sense of something that is still happening. Just wandering around collecting clues to solve a puzzle is fun, but I find that it adds a real sense of verisimilitude, but also urgency, when the mystery continues to develop after the investigation begins. I do this by creating a list of events that I can drop in as the investigation proceeds. This also has the benefit of giving the players stuff to respond to even if they’re totally failing to make any progress in their investigation.

The point here isn’t to treat it like a linear experience where you have to go through the full list. You could do that, and it might be fun, but it might also end up feeling like the players’ actions didn’t matter – after all, you made them go through the full list of planned events regardless of what they did. (I often think this when I play games like Assassin’s Creed – I love the dramatic stuff that happens but I know that I can do whatever I want and 90% of the time it will play out the same way regardless.)

Instead what I like to do is react to how the players are progressing. I do this in two ways:

  • Pay attention to how long they’re taking, and release events in a way that reflects that.
  • Pay attention to who they’re annoying, and release events in a way that reflects that.

In this way the mystery is responsive to what the players are doing. It feels like what they do (or don’t do) matters.

When it comes to measuring time, I’m not an absolutist about it. I’m not trying to track everything they do and add it up, Gygax-style. Again, you could do that, but it potentially has some unfortunate consequences, if you thought they’d take a couple of days of game time to solve the mystery, but they went off on a side quest or something and it took wildly longer, so that when they get back you have to roll out your entire events list. Realistic, maybe, but not very satisfying. Instead, I pay attention to, and roughly tot up in my head, things like whether they took a lengthy research action, and whether they spent an hour debating what to do next. Also, whether they fumbled a lot of rolls. Again, this isn’t realistic – an hour of debating is on a totally different scale to a three-day research project. I don’t care about the realism, it’s about feeling like what you do matters.

If they do something that I think would really annoy someone, or draws a lot of attention, that also goes in my mental tally. Again, there’s no real attempt to systematize it.

I then dole out the events with an eye to that mental total I’m keeping. The longer the players take, the more attention they draw, the more events I’m going to hit them with.

And the events are chosen to create a sense that the mystery is not finished yet. If it’s a murder mystery, the events might be more murders. Or, I might have the villains try and interfere with the investigation. The events are always rooted in my theory of the truth behind the mystery, so they’ll always feel like they’re part of it, rather than just random stuff happening.

As mentioned above, aside from making the mystery feel alive and real, this has the added benefit that there’s always more to investigate. If the players just can’t seem to figure out what to do, or they keep messing up their rolls, events give them more stuff to investigate. More opportunities to find clues.

By giving out more opportunities to find clues, you do risk creating a sense of a railroad. You probably don’t want the players to feel like no matter what they do you’re going to make sure they find every clue, even if that means you have to have a giant plot monster come and vomit the clues on their head. So I don’t generally use these events as a way to give out free clues – more like, they’re a fresh opportunity to get their teeth into the mystery.

But also, I make sure the events feel consequential, and ideally that they represent things getting worse. Because that means it feels like it matters. You took too long, and so somebody died. You failed a roll, and so things got worse. Even though these are just NPCs, sometimes ones you literally made up to have an event happen to them, it feels like it matters. Players genuinely feel bad when a made-up NPC dies on their watch! And the contrast this creates with the occasions where they are smart and quick and roll well, makes it feel like their choices (and their luck) are important.

This whole thing gets systematized in Ex Tenebris. Each scenario has a Menace track which the GM can mark. As it fills up, more events happen. If it fills up entirely the villains trigger their endgame with the players running to catch up. The Menace track sits alongside the Clue track, and they’re the same length, so you have a visible measure of how well you’re doing, and how much progress you need to make if you want to “win” the investigation.

With Ex Ten, marking Menace is a Move. So the GM can always do it if the players roll a mishap. They can also do it if they take an action which is time-consuming (like the lengthy research action mentioned above), or one which attracts a lot of attention.

In the current version of the rules (subject to late playtest changes), you can have multiple Menace tracks running at a time. While you only ever actively investigate one mystery, during downtime the GM sprinkles some Menace across these tracks. The players then choose one mystery to investigate. They can choose not to investigate a given mystery, but if they do it for too long, more events will happen, so that when they finally get around to it they’ll already be running to catch up.

You can use Menace – or the more informal version of it described above – with any mystery game. It really adds a lot to the experience.

Let me know what cool events have you sprung on your players to liven up the mystery. And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re live from 9 September to 9 October.

Shaking the mystery up: discordant clues

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This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

I’ve talked about how using investigation logic, the division of information into Clues and Leads, and driving the mystery with a Theory, to make an emergent mystery feel more real and coherent. Now I want to talk about messing that neat picture up, through the use of discordant clues.

As mentioned in my last article, a Theory can be used to make sure that the Clues and Leads you present in an investigation hang together, and make it much easier for the players to come up with a plausible solution to the mystery. But if everything is too coherent and straightforward, the mystery will feel dull, linear and flat. Discordant clues are how you shake things up a bit and avoid that feeling of predictability.

Throughout the investigation, the GM is maintaining their own Theory of the mystery, while listening to the Speculations and Theory the players are coming up with. If you’ve ever GMed a traditional investigative game, you’ll have had the experience of listening to the players coming up with entirely wrong ideas about the mystery. They latch onto particular NPCs or clues and wildly extrapolate. There comes a moment where they discover something that doesn’t fit with their wrong Theory and they’re forced to think again. Discordant clues are the emergent mystery equivalent to that moment.

Ok, so what are discordant clues? Simply put, they’re clues that don’t fit the players’ emerging Speculations and/or Theory. When someone makes an investigation roll and gets a partial success or perhaps even a miss, the GM feeds them a clue that deliberately confounds what they were expecting to find. Now they’re forced to rethink their Theory and rebuild it.

The GM can do that in one of two ways:

  • They can imagine that the players’ Theory is basically right, but with one important mistake. Reveal a Clue that connects closely to that mistake. Doing that will likely lead to the players tweaking their Theory (not necessarily in the way the GM expected).
  • They can look to their own GM Theory and reveal a Clue that connects to that. Doing that can yield surprising results – it might upend the players’ Theory, or they might find a surprising way to make sense of it, but either way it will probably make them stop and think.

By now it won’t surprise you to learn that this is baked into the mechanics of Ex Tenebris. One of the ways the GM can complicate a Discovery roll is to supply a discordant Clue or Lead. It creates moments of surprise and, sometimes, moments of epiphany as the players work out what they think this new Clue means. But it keeps the feeling of coherence, because the GM is still basing the discordant Clue on a Theory – just not the one the players were working to.

Incidentally, this is something that happens in Lovecraftesque and other GMless emergent mystery games all the time. Because all the players are working to their own secret Theory, without knowing it they are constantly revealing Clues that may not perfectly fit with what the others had in mind. The little tweaks or massive revisions to your Conclusions in Lovecraftesque are a big part of the fun, and what makes it feel like you’re discovering the mystery as you go.

There’s a final step to this, which is that the GM can also do this at the end of the game, when the players go to confirm their Theory. This is the equivalent to the Answer A Question move in Brindlewood Bay, Unlock Doom’s Door in Apocalypse Keys, or the moment where a player generates the Final Horror in Lovecraftesque. In Ex Tenebris, it’s the Breakthrough Roll. When the players roll well, of course, the GM reveals that their Theory was right, and sets them up for an advantageous confrontation with the villains of the story. But when they roll badly, the GM has the option to confound their expectations, presenting a modified version of the players’ Theory or even basing the ending on their GM Theory instead. Of course, with minor tweaks to the rules you can do the same thing in other emergent mystery games like those mentioned above.

The moment in an investigative game where the players discover the truth can be a magical one. When they get it right, there’s the satisfaction of having figured something out. But there’s also magic in getting it wrong. That moment where you say “Of course! So that’s why we saw xyz clue!” A confounding Breakthrough Roll delivers that kind of magic – and as long as the GM has been following the rest of the advice in this series, it will feel like that surprising ending had been the plan all along.

Have you ever thrown out a surprising clue that totally changed the players’ thinking? Tell me in the comments! And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re live from 9 September to 9 October.

Theory: how the mystery emerges

Josh Fox 1 Comment

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

I’ve previously discussed how Ex Tenebris is an emergent mystery game, but uses investigation logic, and the division of information into Clues and Leads, to make the game feel more like a real investigation. But that is only one of three major components that make the mystery feel more real. The second component is theory.

I’ve written about this before on our Patreon: if you generate a series of clues without thinking about how they relate to each other, you will get a hot mess. A curated list of clues supplied by a designer, such as you see in Lovecraftesque scenarios or Brindlewood Bay mysteries, go some way to fix this. But even then if you choose the clues without thinking about theory, you are leaving the players a hell of a job to retroactively impose order on those clues when they come to the end of the investigation. Theory can fill this gap.

So what do I mean by Theory? Simple, really: Theory is someone’s idea of what the clues mean. In other words, what is really going on behind the scenes of this mystery: who is the bad guy, what actions are they taking that explain these clues, and why are they doing that. Who/what/why.

In any emergent mystery game, the GM can dramatically improve how coherent and real the mystery feels by coming up with a Theory of what is going on and generating clues that fit with that Theory. Not all emergent mystery games tell you to do this! But you will get a better result if you do.

You use your Theory to drive the clues and leads you reveal in play. You’re still improvising the clues and leads, and/or picking them from the lists provided in the game’s scenarios. But you’re choosing them (and customising them) to fit with your Theory. That’s what makes the mystery feel coherent and compelling – the clues will appear to fit together, because they do.

Note what I’m not saying – I am not saying “decide what the truth is and stick to it”. Just the opposite, in fact. You come up with a Theory at the start, and then you change it as you go. You can change it because you listened in on the players’ discussions and realized they had a better idea. You can change it because the game’s rules permitted the players to create a clue that surprised you. You can change it because you had a great idea while in the shower the morning before the session. All good. Change is good, because it means you aren’t wedded to a particular answer – something that would be very counter to the idea of an emergent mystery.

What you do need to do is pay attention to the clues, leads and other information you’ve already revealed. That means (sorry about this) taking good notes. A trick I recommend here is getting the players to do it – then not only do you have notes, you also have an insight into how they see the mystery. But either way you regularly review all those clues and update your Theory to reflect anything new and unexpected, while also making sure it fits with the earlier clues. Otherwise you wind up with, again, a hot mess.

As I say you can do this with any emergent mystery game. Ex Tenebris makes it a requirement. But it also requires something else, and that is that the players also have a Theory.

You might wonder, why make the players have a Theory? What is the point when they don’t create the clues? It doesn’t matter what they think, surely? Well, there’s several reasons why it’s good for them to have a Theory:

  • The players do, in fact, create clues. Most emergent mystery games include special abilities and rules that permit players to introduce clues. If they have a Theory, those clues are more likely to be coherent with what has already been created.
  • Their Theory gives the GM ideas. By listening in and stealing from the players’ Theory, the GM makes the mystery more compelling, and helps the players to feel smart. As the game unfolds they move from feeling clueless, to feeling like they’re beginning to anticipate what the clues might be.
  • Having a Theory preps the players for the finale where they are going to be in charge of resolving the mystery. In emergent mystery, it’s the players who decide what the mystery means. It’s super helpful if they’ve already been thinking about it!

To an extent this happens naturally. As the mystery spins out, the players may well start talking about what they mean. What you can do – and what Ex Tenebris does – is codify that a bit.

Ex Ten has Reflections scenes which come after each solid chunk of investigation, where the players are asked to Speculate about what it all means. They don’t need to come up with a full-blown Theory, as that can be a stretch early on when you’ve only got one or two clues. Indeed early Speculations are going to be fairly simple and vague, even including different contradictory ideas, and early Reflections scenes will tend to be quite short. The important thing is that the players are encouraged to regularly air their thoughts about the mystery.

Player Speculations give the GM fuel for their own ideas, and naturally tend to build towards a player Theory. They also push the investigation towards the more logic-driven approach I discussed in my earlier articles in this series, because the players will naturally want to follow the direction logically suggested by their own Speculations and Theory. And there’s a third benefit, which is that they shake the players out of an otherwise potentially dull cycle of investigate, investigate, investigate, and start them talking to each other in character – which is great if you like your game to have a focus on the characters and their relationships.

Ex Tenebris takes this further by using the outputs of those Speculations and, later, Theory discussions, and feeds them into the investigation mechanics. I’ll discuss that in my next article. But the approaches discussed above aren’t only for Ex Tenebris – you can use GM Theory and Reflection scenes with any emergent mystery game and see improvements to how smoothly a real-feeling mystery emerges from the clues.

Let me know about your experiences with emergent mystery! And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re live from 9 September to 9 October.

Ex Tenebris is LIVE on Kickstarter!

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Ex Tenebris is LIVE on Kickstarter!

Ex Tenebris is a star-spanning gothic investigation TTRPG by the award-winning designer Josh Fox. 

You play the Guardians of Moira, a ragtag band who walk the stars and battle indescribable horrors with no backup. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.

We are crowdfunding a print run for two gorgeous books, illustrated by Juan Ochoa.

As Kickstarter veterans will know, early momentum is very important to crowdfunding campaigns, so please do pledge early to help us get off to a strong start. Your support makes a big difference.

The Republic Of Stars needs you. Will you answer the call?

Back it now!

Fleshing out the mystery: leads vs clues

Josh Fox 1 Comment

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

As regular readers will know, Ex Tenebris is a gothic space investigation game that uses an emergent mystery framework, similar to games like Lovecraftesque and Brindlewood Bay, coming to Kickstarter in, like, a week (gulp!) A new design feature is that it makes the distinction between Clues and Leads – something I think could be useful for other emergent mystery games.

What’s the difference?

In essence, a Clue is something weird and enigmatic that doesn’t directly connect to the questions you need to answer to solve the mystery. So if one of those questions is “whodunnit”, a Clue will never include any information about the perpetrator. Clues needn’t be supernatural (though they might be) but they are always out of the ordinary, and clearly mysterious. Clues are the gunshot in the night, the pool of blood with no body, the glowing green goo dripping from the walls.

A Lead is almost the opposite: it isn’t weird or enigmatic, and may include information that is more directly useful. If the question is “who killed So-And-So”, a Lead could very well include information like “Such-And-Such has a longstanding grudge against so-and-so and has repeatedly said they wish they were dead”.

Leads don’t have to provide such clearly relevant information – they could instead point to a target for investigation. For example, the murder victim has in their pocket a business card belonging to Such-And-Such Inc – so now you know it’s worth investigating Such-And-Such.

Notice that neither type of Lead solves the mystery by itself either. You might know that Such-And-Such as a grudge against So-And-So and wanted them dead, but that doesn’t prove anything, and it might well be that there are other suspects too.

The point is that Clues are what makes the mystery a mystery. If nothing out of the ordinary is found, there is nothing mysterious, just a collection of ordinary facts.

Leads are what make the mystery possible to investigate, and they are what makes it potentially explicable. If all you’ve got is Clues then (by definition) you have a bunch of seemingly random weird stuff, with no idea where to look next or how it fits together. If you’ve ever played an emergent mystery game and thought “I have simply no idea what is going on here”, it’s probably because the game didn’t contain sufficient Leads.

Ex Tenebris formalises this distinction, and lets you get a Lead as a consolation prize if there is no Clue, either because you rolled badly or because there’s simply no logical reason why you’d find a Clue at this time and place using the method you’ve chosen.

Importantly, the game still has a requirement to accumulate a target number of Clues. Not Clues plus Leads. That’s because there can potentially be a lot of Leads – you could find yourself following a trail of Leads before gathering information about the motives of three different suspects. But not all of those Leads turn out in the end to be relevant to the mystery, whereas a Clue by definition always is.

In playtesting the effect has been remarkable: the Leads help to structure the investigation and makes it feel more… investigate-y. Instead of making the story feel like a clue piñata, it feels like you’re actually following a trail of evidence. And, when it comes to theorising about the mystery, the Leads provide context to interpret the Clues. The theory feels like something you’ve worked out from meaningful information rather than invented to explain the inexplicable.

Although they’re not a format part of other emergent mystery games (or indeed, mystery games generally) it’s a useful distinction for any investigation game. I recommend having a balance between the two types of information, because if you have too many Clues you’re likely to find your investigators baffled, while too many Leads just seems to generate an endless chain of investigation with no real sense of whether it connects to the mystery or not.

And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re launching 9 Sep 2025.

Puncturing the clue piñata

Josh Fox 2 Comments

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

The clue piñata is my name for a problem that sometimes happens with emergent mystery games like Brindlewood Bay. Essentially, the rules say wherever the players look for a Clue, they find one. That’s great! It’s a deliberate decision to avoid the classic problem in mystery games of the players struggling to find clues. But it can create a negative effect too: namely, that finding Clues feels too easy and not entirely realistic.

You walk into a room. You whack the Clue piñata. A clue falls out.

Walk into the next room. Whack the Clue piñata. Another clue falls out.

Look out the window. Whack the Clue piñata. Another clue falls out.

I’m exaggerating, but not by all that much.

The solution is rather simple: don’t let the players look for a Clue just anywhere. Ask them why they’re looking there, and how they’re going about it. They only get to roll if the answer makes sense.

In addition, feel free to set limits on how many Clues can be found in a given place. Ok, you searched the office and found a Clue. That means this place is now tapped out. If you want more, you’ll need to search somewhere else – or give an excellent justification for why they think there’s more information here that their first action didn’t turn up.

The effect of this is to increase the feeling that, even though we all know the mystery is improvised, it’s real. Because you have to describe how you’re going about looking for a Clue, and because that description needs to be good, it feels more like real investigation. Because you need to describe why you’re looking for a Clue there, and because that description needs to be good, the Clues feel more logical and more real.

Ex Tenebris, my gothic space investigation game (launching on Kickstarter in September), codifies this into the rules. The GM will only provide a clue if it makes logical sense to be able to find one – both based on the methods used, but also the context of the mystery: in other words is there any information here to find? It’s emergent mystery, so that question isn’t entirely based on GM fiat – if the players have a clear theory that there could be clues to be found, then there may be clues to be found. But they do have to have that theory – because if they don’t, the GM will look to their own ideas, and might well say “sorry, nothing to see here”.

Just because there’s no Clue in a place doesn’t mean there isn’t any useful information – Ex Tenebris distinguishes Clues from other types of information, so if the players go looking with a decent method but the GM doesn’t think there could be a Clue, they can still find something. What that something looks like will be covered in a later article.

In playtesting this has all worked really well. The process stops feeling like hitting a piñata, and starts to feel like, well, investigation. I think it would work just as well as an adaptation to existing emergent mystery games.