GMing: Mystery and Fantasy

"360. I must remind the GM that my Blessed can Raise Dead before he runs another murder mystery again."
- The (as of this posting) 2050 Things Mr. Welch is No Longer Allowed to do in an RPG

 I recently got into an argument over whether it is possible to have a murder mystery in a fantasy RPG (or a transhumanist RPG, for that matter). The difficulty presented in a murder mystery is that the prime witness to the crime is, well, dead, so if being dead doesn't mean anything, where's the mystery?

You can still have murder mystery in a fantasy setting, though, as long as your culprit acts smart. What would be a perfect murder in an Agatha Christie novel is just stupid if the detective can brainscan the victim or cast Speak With Dead, so a clever murderer is going to take precautions against these.

For purposes of this post, we're going to be working off of D&D, since it's sort of a standard. Change out the spells listed and so forth for the equivalents in your own game. For instance, if you're playing Eclipse Phase, you can trade out everything in the spell limitations section for "pop their stack and run bedlams on it until they don't remember their own name, and establish an alibi". Also, these are going to be written as advice to a murderer in a fantasy setting; as a GM, hopefully you will be thinking about what your own culprit is doing.

1. Spell Limitations. A lot of the spells that detectives use in fantasy just don't work under some conditions. Speak with dead and raise dead need a reasonably intact corpse, so at low levels, chopping up the body and hiding the pieces will do the trick. Resurrection calls for a part of the corpse, so at the level that becomes available, you need to do something harder, like burning the body or sinking it in the swamp. True resurrection doesn't even call for a corpse, so you need to either use trap the soul, find another way of keeping them from coming back, or trick the investigators into using the wrong spell.
   Getting the investigators to use the wrong spell is deceptively easy. Just make them think that the body is fresher than it is (since these spells have a time limit) or in better shape than it is. Making a body look in better shape than it is is easy; after all, morticians do it all the time. Corpses are objects, so yanking out a vital organ and using a simple mending cantrip will do wonders (especially if you replace the organ with cloth or a slab of meat), or you can use the Craft (taxidermy) skill. If you're up against someone with resurrection, things get a bit trickier. For that, you need a statue of your victim and a stone to flesh spell.
   Making the corpse look fresher than it is is easy too. Mending or taxidermy can reverse damage caused by rotting, and a flesh to stone/stone to flesh pair can keep it ready to pull out when you need a corpse. You don't even need magic either; just carve some ice out of the local pond in the winter and leave a fresh corpse in a room with it for a couple months. It won't look rotted, and unless the detective finds the ice room, they probably won't think it's been kept from rotting.
   Of course, if you're making the murder look recent, you need to come up with an excuse for why it could be that fresh. This sort of thing's easy if you're a doppelganger or a master of disguise; just replace them and stage the murder mystery when you need to make your exit. It's a bit trickier, though, if that option's not open to you because you need to be elsewhere or can't disguise yourself worth ****. We'll assume for the moment that you haven't got a friend who can pull off the replacement. The easiest way to avoid raising suspicion is to have a confederate in the victim's household, either loyal to you, bought off/blackmailed, or dominated/modify memory-ed silly. The confederate can arrange excuses for why the victim isn't taking visitors: highly contagious and magic resistant disease, engaged in secretive and delicate magical experimentation for the rest of the week, out walking someplace, the excuses are limited only by your imagination. This works even better if you can cast modify memory on actual visitors every now and then; nothing like false memories to make people think the victim's still alive. And in either case, the alibi spell from Exemplars of Evil is useful for making people think you were someplace else when you were actually busy pulling this stunt.
   Other spells have their own limitations. Detect evil can be foiled by undetectable alignment, or by not actually being evil (maybe you're just that nuts, or maybe the sonova***** actually had it coming, or maybe you're good enough that this won't push you to evil), or by everyone else nearby registering as evil. Glibness can fool zone of truth, as can carefully worded evasions. Clairvoyance can be beaten with  false vision, or precise knowledge of when you can act. Even when your chambers (or those of your next target) are turned into a closed room with alarm, prying eyes, or blade barrier, you can still have your plots carried out using whispering wind, telepathic bond, hypnotism, or carefully arranged instructions; or you can break in or out of the sealed room with word of recall, passwall, greater teleport, a carefully timed still mislead or greater image, fog form, ethereal jaunt, or transport via plants, to say nothing of breaking Knox's third rule along with his second.
2. Victim Limitations. Let's say that you have decided to ignore the above section, or that against all reason Our Heroes have figured out your trick. All is not lost! The trick here is to keep your victim from knowing whodunnit. There's some simple, nonmagical ways to do this, ranging from slashing your victim's throat in their sleep to using your death attack assassin class feature from behind to using poison or disease to rigging a complicated trap in their privy, but there's magical ways to do this too. You can kill them while disguised (either the mundane way or with transmutation or illusion spells), you can use the Deceptive Spell metamagic feat from Cityscape to keep anyone from realizing you cast whatever killed the victim, you can manifest death urge on them from where they can't see (or you can mask the display somehow), and if all else fails, there's always contingent modify memory set to hit them if someone brings them back to life. Or you could just, you know, hire an assassin so that the victim never has to see you.
3. Victim Agenda. So the heroes have raised the victim, and you couldn't resist one last gloat. Either that, or there's now a ghost floating around. Or the victim was one step ahead the entire time, and named the killer in his will. Well, you may look ****ed, but this could turn out well. See, the victim could have their own plans. The victim might take advantage of this opportunity to advance a plot of their own, and implicate someone as their killer. And the suckers will probably buy it too. And nothing looks quite as bad as being named a murderer, or a kinslayer, or a regicide, by the victim himself. The only way you can count on this happening, though, is if you are the victim. That's right, I just said that the culprit and the victim might be the same person. A victim might make a suicide look like a murder in any number of ways, ranging from locking himself in a room with one other person and a crossbow, to having a guard slap him on the back and later jumping from a balcony with the intended "culprit" next to him, or any number of other tricks.

Birtherism, And Why It Makes No Sense

Okay, I am officially fed up with the Birther movement. Seriously, I've filed the paperwork and everything. Okay, maybe I'm not officially fed up, but I will be in 5-7 business days.

The following material is flagged Red Level. It deals with the blogger's original ideas, personal beliefs, and delusions; and might not be believed by any expert in any field anywhere.

For those who live outside the United States, or have been living under rocks for the past... four years or so, there is a set of people called Birthers, who believe that the current President is not a citizen by birth, which is one of the requirements for the Presidency. They are frequently accused of racism, and are called conspiracy theorists. But conspiracies sometimes do happen, so I think I'll explain in detail why it doesn't make sense for this one to.
First, let's look at the general belief of the Birthers. The Birthers believe that the President was born outside the United States, and thus is not a citizen of the U.S. by birth. They postulate that he was smuggled into the country as an infant, and that his citizenship was falsified, so that someone would be able to use him as a puppet.
First, there's the actual smuggling part. This would be the easiest, requiring only transport and control of a hospital.
Second, it is important to keep in mind that at the time this allegedly happened, it was nearly unthinkable that any black individual (which, for those living under rocks with their fingers in their ears, the current President is) could be elected President. Therefore, the omnipresent-in-these-stories nebulous They would need to have triggered the Civil Rights Movement, or known that it was going to happen. This would require that They control a pharmaceutical company, since The Pill is generally considered the thing that set the movement off. And, of course, They would need to have a good enough understanding of society to know that a single medical invention would be able to do all this, but that kind of understanding is generally something that we can spot Them.
But it is important, when one designs a conspiracy, that one leave as little as possible to chance. Maybe the (Second-Wave, for those who care about such things) Women's Movement wouldn't have triggered the Racial Movement. Maybe the Counter-Civil-Rights Movement would have prevailed. Maybe the memes of anti-racism would leave the public consciousness before the smuggled individual would be old enough. Maybe The Pill wouldn't do anything to the public consciousness. So, to ensure that public opinion unfolded in the right direction, and that the movements triggered the right other movements, and that ideas persisted, They would need to maintain long-term control over a wire service, at least one major entertainment company, major dissident figures among the oppressed populations, and a competent spin doctor.
Third, They would need to ensure that Their candidate were still loyal to Them. For this, They would need a master manipulator. After all, how easy is it to control how one person reacts to changes in their environment? How easy is it to ensure that someone will not rebel against the values you teach them?
But again: leave as little as possible to chance. They need to make sure that nothing happens to Their candidate before he is ready. For this, They need an expert medical team and a crack squad of bodyguards. They need to make sure that Their candidate stays electable, which means getting Their candidate a Law degree, which means They need to control two admissions offices. They need to make sure that no one finds out about the conspiracy, which means They need a massive internal security force (something we generally spot any competent conspiracy), or a team to discredit anyone who finds out or turns stool pigeon (don't mind me, I'm counting the money these nice gentlemen gave me. I'm totally not in on it.)
Finally, They need to get Their candidate elected. They need a massive campaign fund for this (again, most conspiracies can claim Offscreen Villain Dark Matter for this) and a reliable way of rigging an election (hacked vote machines, control over every single media outlet, Orbital Space Mind Control Lasers, take your pick).

Now, what if instead of importing someone from outside the country, They just found some random Law student who seemed to have a solid chance, and indoctrinated him? This just needs the master manipulator, the campaign fund, and the way of rigging the election. If something happens to your student, or the indoctrination doesn't take, you just need to find another one. Better yet, you can cut out the manipulator by finding someone who's already sympathetic to your goals.

So, we can see that the Birther conspiracy postulate is far more complex than the Random Law Student conspiracy postulate. There are four reasons for an unnecessarily complex conspiracy:

1. You have no idea what you are doing, or are addicted to unnecessary complexity. Given that we are assuming that whatever conspiracy exists was competent enough to pull off whatever they did, this can be safely disregarded.
2. You don't know what your opponents are doing, and are trying to disrupt whatever it is. This type of conspiracy is generally only the sort of thing used in the short term, hardly the sort of thing you make span even a full three years, let alone nearly half a century. So we can ignore this one.
3. You are attempting some kind of crazy ritual magic, and the complexity is the minimum that you need in order to meet some special requirement. Well... we don't actually know that SEELE wasn't behind this. For all we know, this is some kind of plot by the Kenyan government to assert symbolic superiority so that a spell can convert it into literal supremacy. But, well, prove that there isn't a devil in the woods outside town. 
4. You are creating a distraction from your real plan, or attempting to implicate an enemy in the conspiracy. But even this should be made no more complex than necessary, and the simplest way to create a fake conspiracy is to have someone go on the air claiming to have found it, with a bit of fabricated evidence if necessary.
   
   Come to think of it, given a media outlet (FOX, say), it would be easy enough to create a fake conspiracy. Just start talking about the conspiracy, claiming that you're "just asking questions" while making boldface assertions, and in the eye of your viewers, you can implicate an opponent in your conspiracy.

So why do people believe the Birthers? The tempting response is to just chalk it up to knee-jerk racism directed at a black man in a higher social position (one of these days, I really must do an article on unconscious biases and privilege), or knee-jerk reactionarism directed at someone less far right, but I like to assume good things about people. So I'll just assume that they haven't thought through all the implications of the hypothesis, and all of the things that would be needed for the conspiracy to actually work.