Secrets, mysteries, deceits, deceptions, red herrings, misdirections, hidden motives, outright lies – these are great drivers of plot and narrative, as most of us know. But we seem to have trouble getting such elements into our D&D gameplay and have it turn out as fun as we’d hoped for. We’re adventurers, gosh darn it, not librarians! It’s not that we don’t want to come face to face with the tantalizing splendor of the Knot of Gordium, but rather – like – Alexander himself, we want to solve such, um, knotty puzzles by way of the sword. And so, mystery often fizzles.

Which is a shame, because discovery, in all its forms, is a lot of what makes adventuring (and thus, adventure gaming) fun. And secrets, by their very definition, are guarded, arcane, and rare, and thus valuable, and thus motivating objects of desire for adventurers.

I’ve experienced my share of problems while playing “figure out the mystery” adventures. It’s tricky. When you consider it in the context of an open-ended play world, those wonderful things called clues – necessary rationing units of help needed to play out a mystery for maximum effect – can be all too-easily ignored, or worse, derided as heavy-handed attempts by the DM to put the story “on a rail”, or still worse, accepted only as meta-game food pellets whose narrative merit can be blithely ignored (“don’t care! don’t care!”) en route to the locale of the next combat. The DM sighs in frustration and wonders what went wrong.

This is not an academic musing for me, since I plan to make secrets, hidden agendas, and the whole long-story arc an important part of my upcoming campaign setting. While most people in this world will know exactly nothing about why the world is the way it is (you know, just like all of us here!), there will also be hundreds (yes, that many) of clandestine groups that know (or think they know) a few tiny-yet-vital shards of truth, and that those little bits of wisdom are jealously guarded exactly because it’s that group’s edge in the world. To lose your secrets is to be seriously undone. And of course, the party is going to be one of those disruptive, crosscutting forces in play that gets to find out a lot of other people’s secrets, and to do important things in the world as a result – if they’re smart, fast, strong, and lucky.

Here, then, are a few (predictive) strategies for how to make it work in the DM seat. I’ll report as we put them to the test of playing ‘em out, what went right and wrong:

Preparation is important. First decide what valuable thing that party is supposed to learn on this adventure. Treat it as the treasure that it is! Consider the ramifications – what can the party do with it? Who else is affected? What new friends and enemies will emerge? What are the likely ways the dominoes will fall?

Put it on a rail, for starters. You get to decide how the party gets introduced to the story, the major characters and obstacles they face, just like any other adventure. The trick is that the plot is as vital as the map, so consider your false clues, your dramatic moments, and how to set the stage for drama. The ‘a-ha!’ moments shouldn’t all be about offing the boss enemies.

But be flexible about it. You have to allow for your players’ creativity. Nudge them gently toward the goal if they’re lost or even stubbornly wrong, but be ready to play out their course of action if it’s plausible and has merit. Hopefully you’ve tried to foresee a few such possibilities.

Help your players with the paperwork. Sure, maybe you’re lucky and one of your players takes meticulous notes on place names, people you’ve met, stuff you’ve done. Or maybe not. You know you’ve got to do the same, so find a way to share what’s needed to keep your players engaged. Oh, but of course, keep the roster of people and places active in today’s adventure as short as you can. No one’s going to remember twenty major NPCs who are all part of today’s plot.

Help your players with the guesswork. It’s a dicey proposition to plop the party down in a given situation and flat-out say, so, whatcha want to do? You’ve got to give them the lay of the land, spell out what you think the major choices are, even if the party comes up with a different one. The only real danger is when they’re paralyzed into no plan of action.

Help the players to commit. If you offer a handful of reasonable choices, are you surprised when the party tries to do them all, at once? Try to craft the story in such a way that there’s choices to get to the goal, but that the party commits as a group and stays together. Be a good salesman and give positive reinforcement to their plan of action. Your job here is to help this path turn out in a good and exciting way.

Don’t waste good characters. Taken at face value, D&D is a pretty violent system where bad guys seldom live to fight another day. This is a waste, not only from the effort it takes to get a good Nemesis Ranger character put onto paper, but also the emotional and creative energy expended to bring him to life. I’m going to be bringing a heavy dose of morale and combat honor into my world, so a party can flirt with a bad guy for quite some time before they finally nail him once and for all. The good news from the party’s side is that if they learn how to withdraw from combat, they’ll usually avoid TPK’s if they accidentally walk themselves into a real meat grinder of an opponent.

In the end, it’s always an action game. Good action movies and stories find a way to reveal a mystery by way of a dozen action sequences. Don’t drive your players into the library; give them colorful contacts who can provide the info they need to get them going. Adventures that start as a for-hire mission has the advantage of giving the party a clear mission vector, and they can start experiencing and sorting out the parts that don’t add up while they’re on the road. This is as it should be.

Hope this helps with your approach with your plot creation. Allegedly, the new DMG has some fairly useful pages devoted to campaign creation, and I’m looking forward to seeing how true or not that is.