That One Time We Solved a Mystery
A downloadable game
That One Time We Solved a Mystery (or “TOTWSaM,” pronounced “TAH-tuh-sum”) is a framework you can add to any tabletop roleplaying game, to develop and play mysteries with no advance preparation or planning. Really! And because everyone at the table can be surprised by the way events unfold, TOTWSaM is especially well-suited for solo or collaborative (GM-less) play.
Find Real Evidence
No abstractions, no hand-waving. With more than two dozen evidence tables full of random prompts, you'll make every clue you discover concrete and relevant.
Think Like an Investigator
Armed with those clues, you'll formulate hypotheses and propositions to direct and guide your investigation. You decide where to go, what to do, and how to do it.
Play the Game and Setting You Want to Play
TOTWSaM is designed to be played together with any tabletop roleplaying game, called the host system. Literally any host system works. Play the game that you want to play; TOTWSaM simply adds some additional mechanics on top of it.
What you Get
With your purchase, you get the core rules of That One Time We Solved a Mystery—90+ pages of tables, instructions, and examples. You'll also get a mystery tracker and question worksheets you can use to track your investigations.
How to Play
Early in a game of TOTWSaM you’ll pose one or more story questions that encapsulate the mystery you want to solve. Then, over the course of your game, you’ll take actions using the mechanics of whatever TTRPG system you're using (because you can use any TTRPG you want!). You might interrogate witnesses, search a room for things of interest, or research property records at the town hall—the only limit is your imagination.
When you succeed at one of these actions you’ll get a clue. Clues may be randomly generated using tables provided in these rules, but they can also be created using any oracles you have handy, or even purely from your own imagination.
Periodically, you’ll try to answer the story questions you posed at the beginning by forming hypotheses, and supporting them with propositions based on your clues. When enough propositions are well-supported by clues, you can test your hypothesis to see if it is correct. If it is, then you’ve solved the mystery!
Join the Community
Join us on Discord and ask your questions or share your stories there!
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $9.95 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Exclusive content
Support this game at or above a special price point to receive something exclusive.
Community Copies
If you love mysteries but sincerely cannot afford the asking price for TOTWSaM, please feel to grab a community copy.
On the other hand, if you've got an extra dollar, add it to your purchase as a donation. For every $5 donated, I'll pitch in another $5 and add another community copy to the pool.
Comments
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I play-tested an early draft of these rules with Jamis a couple years ago and I think the final version is an excellent framework. It provides a simple and comprehensive system for generating mystery plots. There are clear guidelines for crafting the initial hook, generating clues, obstacles, threats, and confirming hypotheses. There are expanded tables with a lot of highly specific prompts that are still broad enough for most genres. Most tables also have compact versions with prompts that are even more freeform.
I especially like the mechanisms for naturally escalating tension as you gather clues during an investigation.
This framework also seems pretty modular and easy to add to any game. You could start or stop using the system in the middle of a session without a lot of fiddling.
(I wrote this when rating the game but it's not showing, so I'll just copy it)
I never thought a generic mystery system could exist. I was wrong.
I've been playing TOTWSaM for most of its beta period, through I think 4 different iterations of the game. There have been changes, of course, but the core always remained the same. And that's because it works.
Jamis has found a way to dissect what makes a mystery a mystery, what kind of clues are there and how you can get them... All of it independently of the specific genre you might be playing. I've played mysteries regarding: a jedi trying to find what happened to an old contact decades ago in a remote planet, a normal dude in today's actuality wanting to know if his uncle's death was really natural or not (and why is there a ghost in the manor he just inherited?), a university student in a steampunk/post-post-apocaliptic world receiving a mystery letter from a secret organization...
Whatever mystery you have in mind you can play. TOTWSaM doesn't make any assumptions. You can play with characters and worlds you already know, or you can build it from scratch as the game progresses.
I usually like to change things up and after a game move on to a new system, but since TOTWSaM is not a system but a framework that acts as an add-on I feel confident in saying that it's going to be a regular presence in my games.
Happy gaming!