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CHUNKS as Story: Roleplay and Mystery in ICRPG

I was drafting the "starter session" for a city quest the other day I call "The Whispers of Madness." It's a mystery adventure. ICRPG is an inherently fast-paced game, and mystery-type adventures are notorious for grinding parties to a halt for HOURS as they attempt to solve what the Game Master thought a relatively simple mystery, what is wrong with you idiots, make a damn Perception check already! This is mostly because mysteries tend to rely on the wits of the players, and not the player characters. And GM's are not always flawless story or mystery writers.

This was something I sought to remedy.

BEHOLD: GM Grizzly's Story CHUNKS

I love CHUNKS. They are so versatile, and I wonder just how much so Runehammer thought they might be when he first devised them. Initially, I applied a modified version to travel, then applied the concept to buildings and towns. Through the course of developing this adventure and its story, however, I realized something: stories, particularly mysteries, can be "distilled" into sections or blocks. Hank was already nearly there with his 9-act Story Architecture in ICRPG Core (check it out!), but here we take it a step further. Break a Mystery up into its base CHUNKS: Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why. Use Effort to track Clue progress in each CHUNK, throwing in a few Red Herrings, Plot Twists and some Trouble, and with each CHUNK solved, a piece of the Whole Truth is revealed. They've earned it.

So what does this do?

For starters, it now gives players a choice on whether to ply their own wits or their PC's wits to solve a Mystery. A series of Investigation, Interrogation and Deduction Attempts and Checks and they amass clues, reveal bits of the plot and eventually uncover the Mystery themselves. Or, they can opt to solve it the old-fashioned way, through sheer guts, intuition and will, knowing full-well that the GM may have intentionally or accidentally "forgotten" a crucial piece to the puzzle needed for a logical solution. Let's face it; we are not all mystery writers, nor should we be.

But that leads to another question: why even run a mystery adventure?

Drama. Role-play. Variety. These things can be what breathe life back into a group weary from weeks
in the Underdark, looking for something different. Or, it could even be inserted in the middle of the regular adventure, now that it is simple, easy, fun and quick.

In short, this opens up a whole new world of adventuring for GM's and players looking for something new, but aren't quite sure how to break that mould. 

Conclusion

An astute GM might notice this could be applied to far more than Mysteries. It could be applied to even the 9-act Story Architecture itself as a way to track adventure or even Campaign progress, or track the development of a "greater story." Make it something crazy! Me, I'm working on translating this into something more mechanical, beautiful and inspiring in Grizzly Encounter MYSTERIES so... be on the lookout for that on DriveThruRPG!
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