Escaped gaming meme: CSI: Lankhmar

[mithriltabby]

This notion could work in any large, grungy fantastic city— Lankhmar, Tai-Tastigon, New Crobuzon, Ankh-Morpork— that’s organized enough to have a city watch. It might be difficult to make a long-term campaign out of it, but it could be a fine convention game or short-run series.

The premise is that the player characters are on the crime scene investigation group in the city watch. While real forensic experts almost never meet witnesses and suspects and can wind up spending weeks processing a single bedsheet, the format of the television show should translate well into a setting with no hard division between the CSI techs and the rest of the city watch and the existence of forensic mages.

Part of the fun will be exploring the exotic forms of crime in a fantasy world, and any game master will have to devote some thought to consistency (and be ready to explain these details to the players until they get used to this particular consistency). How do various detection and analysis spells work, and what can confound them? Will a simple Dispel Magic destroy traces that spells might track, or does it require something more specialized? Do spellcasters have particular signatures that can be matched to crimes? Are divinatory results backed by a deity admissible in court? Does magic exist that allows a person to store some of their memories in an object for later retrieval, so they can lie undetectably? Players will want to specialize their characters in forensic skills and spells, but not too far— you never know when something at the crime scene might turn out to be an unstable container for an irascible demon or elemental, or the evidence trail leads into a monster-filled sewer.

Supply and demand will also come into play. Criminals will create a market for anything that can make it harder to catch them, and there might be an interesting tension between adventurers who have relatively legitimate uses for those one-shot items and the criminals who have clearly illegal ones.

Politics should also prove an interesting contrast. CSIs may find themselves working on a case where the local guild of thieves and/or assassins is aggrieved by someone working as an independent operator. In a city where this level of enforcement is new (perhaps one of the magistrates has a crystal ball that receives CBS!), the PCs might be involved in the development of the legal code as expert witnesses when questions come up: is a wizard always responsible for the actions of a creature they summoned or an item they enchanted? Is the person commanding the being or using the item entirely responsible, or is the wizard an accessory? What crime do you call it if you kill someone and bring them back from the dead in a way they wouldn’t have wished? Is murder a lesser crime if you can pay for resurrection?

A team will do well to have at least one forensic mage, a rogue with plenty of skill in spotting details, and a social type who can deal well with people (bard, paladin, high-charisma fighter). A druid or nature-priest will come in handy when figuring out scenes where decay has set in.

Comments

[artslave.livejournal.com]

Dru, one of the GMs you may remember from UCSB has run some similar games as episodes within her larger campaigns; unfortunately us players weren't /always/ clever enough to solve the crimes in time....sometimes we had to skip the mystery and go straight to the Bonk Box (You remember, Plan A for the Attempt, and B for the inevitable Bonk [followed by Plan C, the Cowardly Retreat, and then Plan D -- death, dismemberment, disembowelling, defenestration...]...?).

She has written a series of brilliant short novels about the forensic mage concept, though. Unfortunately they appear to no longer be online...if you're interested, perhaps she can be persuaded to share.

BTW, I found my notes the other day for my Kelthad Campaign....something about Gideon Strumpet and a raft made of air sharks. What was I thinking? :)

[mithriltabby]

Nostalgia? :-) The really deranged part of that design was that the raft was actually held up by people drinking air shark blood, since the air sharks themselves were neutrally buoyant...

[daehith.livejournal.com]

I think I lost sanity from some of your D&D ideas... :)

[mithriltabby]

That sort of deranged thinking is good practice for coming up with examples of why the mages that technically rule the Labyrinth of High Sorcery are seldom bothered with their duties...

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Sounds good for a oneoff, since to accurately draw it out would be "roll to find the eyelash in the carpet in under two weeks". (We don't have "Indiana Jones and the Potsherd He Found After Sieving Through 50 Acre Feet of Catal Huyuk Topsoil" on DVD for a reason.)

A couple of plot elements to lend an investigative story some urgency (and a potential chance for the team to meet the perp) can be swiped from the episodes themselves:

solving a kidnapping or hostage situation
solving a murder spree by a criminal that wants to shame/taunt someone on the team. This criminal would know how to cover his/her tracks well and the murders would be especially dramatic, putting pressure on the team from the public, as well as the threat that the the murderer might try for them next...

[mithriltabby]

The party druid could task a swarm of mites to locate fine bits of evidence in exchange (and not eat them because they’re getting tastier rewards for their effort).