It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.
Today's prompt is Motive.
I could make this about Traveller again? Oh, go on then.
Traveller introduced many different things to the roleplaying game sphere, but Adventure 11: Murder on Arcturus Station did something that has seldom been adopted elsewhere. It presented a murder mystery on a lonely mining space station, along with a great selection of non-player characters. all with motives for murdering the victim. Released in 1983, there weren't that many investigative games out there yet, but this adventure dared to go beyond a simple chain of clues.
Instead, it tells you how to build your own murder mystery, allowing you to tailor the challenge to your players. You can have a simple mystery with three suspects, or perhaps all nine if you love complexity. Each suspect has their game statistics, reasons to be involved, known and hidden background, a clear Motive which can be discovered, and then the means. There are options given for how they could kill the victim (a somewhat obnoxious hard-nosed businessman) and also how they could be a suspect. Each has an alibi with reaction modifications depending on which lines of questioning are taken. There's also some final notes of elements that may be useful to the referee.
You can even set up a character as a murderer. This requires some work between the player and the referee before the game begins. There's some guidance on how to handle this (by encouraging the party to split and notes about information being passed around as a norm). The starter for the adventure gives all the characters a reason to dislike the victim (he refuses to pay them for their previous work), so there's some motive there already.
Mongoose re-released this adventure with a prequel (the job that they don't get paid for) as Mysteries on Arcturus Station. The new prequel is a more traditional investigation, but the second adventure is pretty much the same as the original, except that it gives a way to have a player as the murderer without prior collaboration, which I think would work very well. However, they won't know their motive unless they solve the reason for the murder.
So there you are. A flexible adventure, bundled with Motives.
7 August 2025
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