There shouldn’t be spoilers in this as I’m deliberately not covering the details and making this generic.
This past weekend, I ended up running ‘The Black Butterfly Murders’ from the City of Mist Local Legends book twice at Revelation. I’d only planned to do it once, but illness caused us to lose two of the GMs so I stepped in to make sure people had a game. I love City of Mist; it’s probably the game I’ve run most at conventions after Traveller. I have slowly worked my way through the various case files that are available and used them, and most of the time everything runs like clockwork.
I was a little nervous about running this scenario, because it risked being condensed down to ‘you find the murder victim’, ‘you do two chases and fights’, ‘you fight your way into a location’ and then ‘you fight the big bad’. It didn’t feel like your typical case, and there were elements about it that left me nervous about running it. However, it did have a much higher stake theme to it than a lot of the other cases that I’ve run, which made it quite attractive.
The case has a number of flaws:
a) Two of the key non-player characters who could be aiding you or fighting against you don’t have danger stat blocks. A quick search of the internet and questions on the Son of Oak Discord didn’t find any that someone else had done. I winged it and fortunately, they didn’t get into conflict.
b) The main antagonist’s danger block assumes that everything has happened in the previous plot steps. This is significant as they are invulnerable to damage of certain types if this is the case. If you encounter the character before the plot steps, there’s nothing there to guide you. Again, I winged it.
c) The two introductory (Depth 0) steps in the case iceberg don’t really mesh well with scenes that follow deeper into the case. This was the point that the case’s logic broke in both the games that I ran.
d) The big bad is effectively immune to direct attack, and the Rifts (player characters) could foreseeably take significant damage statuses finding that out. If the crew is slanted for combat, it could go sideways for them. I had one character stop.holding.back. and fail the roll, which limited their options going forward. It would have been better if there had been some hint about how dangerous the confrontation would be.
However, in both sessions, the players had a lot of fun!
The introductory scenes in a case will usually trigger Rifts to start digging, even in the space between the initial call or voicemail, and the conversation with the client. In both runs through this, the players dug into news and contacts at this point so they were pulling clues from the depths below. This didn’t really matter and it was helpful that they were there. But I did have to improvise a fair few answers.
The introductory scenes would more naturally take place in day time. The key scene that follows - the first murder the characters interact with directly - happens at night. This means that in most realistic timescales there will be a gap between the characters initial steps and the murder, which will likely be used for investigation. In fact, if you don't do this, the scenario collapses down to a sequence of chase/chase/fight/fight/fight which loses the investigative flavour.
How did I approach it?
I had all the murders happening every two days apart, and effectively gave the Rifts just under 24 hours to find out what was happening. They did this with legwork and conversations with key characters. The first group pursued a Pokémon style approach and collected all the key non-player characters, and convinced them to work together. The second team carried out a more traditional investigation, but by the time that the fourth murder was due, they knew roughly where and when (as usual, Flicker showed her potential to derail scenarios), so they prevented it.
Preventing the murder took the scenario off-piste completely, as the danger stats for the antagonist assume that they are in the fullness of their power and the ritual completed. However, I improvised around the stats and that led to a confrontation in their lair in the City.
Pretty much all the material needed for the investigation is there; you just have to be more flexible as the MC than usual. I did feel that the scenario could have done with more thought on how the various non-player characters may interact (perhaps with focus on what they want from each other and what they are ready to give in return) with guidance for the MC in playing out.
I've not going to suggest a rewrite of the iceberg for the case, but if you intend to run the scenario, I suggest you get really familiar with the available clues and relationships so you improvise how they work together.
Overall, I think this is an okay scenario; the scope is exciting with a significant threat level. However, I don't think that it is always clear to the Rifts that they are getting drawn into. We certainly had fun at the table.
Iceberg below the jump, minor spoilers.
18 February 2026
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