Into the Unknown

What is a mystery?

For our purposes, a mystery is just an unresolved event. Something has happened and some or all of the circumstances around it are unknown: it could be the victim or the perpetrator, the motives, the goal, or some combination. This creates a puzzle to be solved. In a work of fiction, the author must solve the puzzle to write the story. In a TTRPG, this may not be strictly necessary. The mystery can evolve towards a solution (or not!) through play.

Holding on loosely

If you can be comfortable with not knowing all the elements of a mystery from the start, you can participate in the discovery and unraveling of things, not exactly as a player, but as more of a participant than an author. To do that, you first have to allow spaces in your world for mysteries to be. You have to let go of strictly mapping and marking every person, place, thing, and their relationships. You have to leave yourself some slack in the lines connecting your web so that mysteries can fill those gaps. If you find yourself constantly pushing aside options for reasons known only to you and your lore then, perhaps, you've plotted things too tightly.

Playing dice with the universe

Random tables of various sorts are a boon to scaffold out a mystery. We can roll dice to determine the outline of what event took place. GM emulators, such as Mythic, have specific generators for creating events. It would not be too difficult to craft our own. A very simple version might be:

1d6	What happened?
1	Someone is missing.
2	Something is missing.
3	Someone was injured or killed.
4	Something was damaged or destroyed.
5	A ritual was enacted.
6	Roll twice and combine.

1d6	Someone
1-3	A stranger.
4-5	An acquaintance.
6	An ally or enemy.

1d6	Something
1-3	A trinket or personal item.
4-5	An heirloom or magical item.
6	An artifact.

The key is to focus only on what is knowable by the party by whatever means they have to interact with the event. These resolve into two main types of information: evidence and testimony:

Evidence encompasses information that can be gleaned by investigating the scene of the event.
Testimony is information obtained from witnesses.

If the party has no means of answering a question, you, as the Referee, don't have to answer it either.

Questions and answers

When the party does ask questions that they can answer through actions:

Use your inspiration when you have it!
Listen to your players! As they discuss the mysterious, they will often unwittingly give you the answers to give back to them!
Oracles are useful tools! Whether through dice, tables, cards, or other methods: ask questions and roll dice; use the answers provided to inspire you or add more questions to the budding mystery!

A few simple oracles

An oracle is just a mechanic that uses random elements to provide answers to questions, much in the same way a Magic 8-Ball works. In fact, if you've got a Magic 8-Ball, you could easily use that as an oracle. The simplest sort of oracle provides yes or no answers.

1d6	Yes or No
1-2	No.
3-4	Uncertain.
5-6	Yes.

Other oracles might answer specific sorts of questions. The answers are almost always up for interpretation. I find this process invigorating for inspiring my imagination.