Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D presents us with irresistible conundrums.

Sometimes information is its own reward. Sometimes its exciting to learn new things, or to string together some facts and learn a greater truth. If you’ve ever wanted to run a mystery in your fantasy TTRPG games, or if you’ve run one, but you want to reexamine how to do it for the next time, we’ve got an episode for you. We’re going to look at running mysteries in your fantasy games. Time to conjure some clues.

The Assassins Knot, an AD&D adventure from 1983, presented a murder mystery for the PCs to solve. It specifically mentions that the adventure may be less challenging due to the resources and abilities available to characters 6th level or higher. It contains a timeline of events that will happen each day, as well as reactions that happen when characters take various actions. It’s not a bad blueprint for a D&D adventure. But it feels a little unwieldy to have a suggested party of 6 to 10 characters of levels 2 to 5.