Chaos: The Investigation Without End

Over the Christmas break, I caught up on a bit of reading for 'pleasure' with CHAOS, Tom O'Neill's account of his madcap 20-year effort to get to the heart of the Manson murders. I don't think this is a spoiler - the effort was fruitless. But the book does throw up a huge amount of fascinating speculation, and thereby succeeds in casting a lot of doubt on the 'official' story as to why the Tate-LaBianca killings happened. It may be the only book of its kind - devoted to debunking a widely accepted version of events and then, Rashomon-like, giving a smorgasbord of other options to believe in without itself committing to any of them. In the end, I don't think it quite works, but it is at least a riveting read. 

The experience of reading CHAOS, in any case, struck me as a good metaphor for a problem that has always made it difficult for me to conceive of running a genuine investigative 'mystery' game - namely, coming up with an Agatha Christie-level scenario that the players can solve, which doesn't feel too easy or too hard, and which doesn't rest on the tabletop RPG equivalent of pixel-bitching. That is to say, good mystery stories are like intricate faberge eggs in which every detail matters and the solution requires careful elucidation and focused awareness of all moving parts. And this isn't what tabletop RPGs excel at - RPG players are mainly good at causing, well, chaos, like a herd of bulls in a series of china shops. Coming up with a good, interconnected series of clues, NPCs, etc., in such a way that a group of players can figure out a way to the final mystery without getting sidetracked feels like a prohibitively difficult challenge.

RPG mysteries, in other words, strike me as being rather like O'Neill's frustrated attempts to uncover the truth about what really motivated Charles Manson. He starts off with a curious sequence of events - the murders themselves. And then he starts pulling at various threads which lead him to a haphazard collection of encounters with drug dealers, record producers, Beach Boys, former police officers, district attorneys, private investigators, washed up actors and has-beens, Hollywood stars and CIA spooks. He learns about elephants being dosed up with LSD, the infiltration of hippie-dom by the FBI, the corruption of the LA Sheriff's Office, possible murders incompetently disguised as suicides, free love gone wrong, torture and mayhem. It's very entertaining. But it goes nowhere.

It reads, in other words, rather like the 'Actual Play' from an RPG campaign (Unknown Armies, maybe?) in which the DM flung together an initial mysterious scenario and a big cast of NPCs, locations and events connected to it, without having a clear idea in his own mind what was really going on behind the scenes or what 'really happened' - and then just let the PCs have at it and see what they stumbled through. And whenever it seemed like they were about to exhaust a lead, he'd throw three more into the mix. It strikes me that somebody could easily run a campaign that way almost indefinitely, with the PCs going about ostensibly investigating something (a murder, a paranormal event, etc.) and from there simply uncovering yet more mysteries, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, having weird encounter after weird encounter, and never actually coming to an end. This would be a sort of open-ended investigation in which the journey was everything and the destination nonexistent.

This, I think, would at least be achievable and is, I suppose, what is really implied behind the classic idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign - a sort of sandbox of plot hooks that the PCs pursue until death or insanity claims them. But would it be satisfactory to actually play?