As the title says. I eventually want to run an impostor scenario/murder mystery in my World of Darkness game at some point, and would like some pointers.
I wrote an article with my thoughts on running mysteries here:
https://slyflourish.com/running_investigations_and_mysteries.html
Concerning decoupling clues from locations, though, that only sometimes makes sense. It’s commonplace for a piece of evidence to only be meaningful in a particular context, and sometimes that context is the location in which it’s found.
That being said, if you can’t move a clue, it becomes more important to make sure there are multiple ways to learn about it. Maybe if the PCs don’t see the muddy footprint in the garden, the gardener did.
@Atlas48 First off, know from the outset whether you want to run a genuine mystery scenario, with an actual truth under the hood where the point is to overcome the challenge of finding that truth, or engage in mystery-*shaped* storytelling where the goal is to end up with a tale that resembles a mystery from the outside while not actually taxing the players’ brains. Advice varies wildly depending on which you’re doing.
Whatever you do, don’t mix up who the killer is behind the scenes just because the player guessed it correctly before you wanted them to.