June 2022
Last month I had the pleasure of running Murder at the Three Swords Inn by Endhy Pino, a 5e adventure originally intended for one on one play, but easily adapted for a group. It’s roleplay heavy with the possibility for combat and meant to be a short adventure. With the Three Swords Inn being in a large city, it’s easy to drop in wherever you are! I had fun watching my players puzzle through the mystery. They were invested in figuring out who the culprit was and delighted when I revealed their guess was correct! Murder at the Three Sword Inn runs for $1.50 and is intended for low level characters.
If you’re interested in seeing more adventures like this one, head on over to Twitter! Ennio just released a new horror adventure for 5e called Whisper of the Weave Walker with Dana Braga, and while I haven’t had the chance to take a look at it yet, I know that I will be sometime in the future.
I don’t DM by voice, and that means it always takes me longer to run, well, everything. We operate entirely through text. I gave myself six hours to run this over two days and wound up using eight (3 hours on Saturday, 5 on Sunday). I usually aim for 2.5 hours/session, with a hard cap at 3 hours but by virtue of starting earlier in the afternoon, my players being available, and everyone having the energy to go longer we were able to let this one breathe a bit more – it was worth it.
I also don’t DM for this group in 5e. We use a homebrew system I made about a year ago, which grew out of two other systems I used when running games in World of Warcraft. That’s where everyone in this group met, so it just made sense to use a system more familiar to everyone involved. It works well for us, especially since it is still D20 based, but I do frequently need to adjust skill checks and fights – especially since max health in our system is 20HP.
Final note: this adventure happened entirely in session! Sometimes I need to put information in pre-game summaries for the sake of time constraints, but I did not do that here. Instead, I took each of the PCs and gave them a little snapshot of what they’d been doing around town since arriving, and which of the other PCs they’d crossed paths with.
Everyone was using new characters, so I wanted to give them small connections to each other. I also set aside a chunk of time in our first session for them to get together and chat amongst themselves to get to know each other a bit more. I knew that PCs sharing information they uncovered over the course of the investigation was going to be important, and that’s easier to do when you’ve at least had a conversation with the other PCs!
Spoilers for Murder at the Three Swords Inn ahead! (Murderer not revealed)
The Story
“A terrible secret was discovered by an investigator in the city, but their life was taken before they could reveal the truth. Can you solve the mystery they left behind without falling to the same fate?”
The Group
We’ve already established that I DM via text and that we aren’t running in 5e. With this group I know upwards of a week in advance how many people are going to be present, and which character they will be playing. It helps me with character specific prep as, wherever possible, I like to try and individually ground each character in the setting based on their interests and preferences.
This time around I knew I was going to have four players on the first day, and five on the second. Most of the PCs were regular people either on vacation, in town shopping for supplies, or just stopping in on their way to their next destination! It was interesting to have a new group of characters who had never met before working together to try and solve this mystery before the guard showed up. Each character had different ways of wanting to go about it and seeing where their interest fell and what they felt was important was a fun way to find out more about them!
The group composition was a baker who got on the wrong wagon and wound up in town by mistake, a farmer with a sweet tooth visiting town to see the sights, a career college student who was just looking for a place to sleep, a monster hunter by night / physician by day, and a mercenary looking to make coin wherever it could be found. Because everyone knows up front what they’re signing up for (I share pertinent information about the adventure so my players can make informed choices on who to play) we wind up getting some fun dynamics!
How It Went
It’s Saturday evening in Bretch, and you’ve found yourselves at the Three Swords Inn. To some of you, this is a now familiar haunt while to others it is as new as everything else in this city. Whether you wound up here entirely by mistake, or came looking for a specific type of work, this small inn in a more rundown part of town has become your home for the moment. Its owner, Igor, is an elderly elvish fellow who will talk your ear off given the chance, and everyone has met Avesta – the young woman who booked you into your rooms. How you’ve spent your day is up to you, but as the bell strikes 6pm, you all find yourselves in the Three Swords taproom.
Our adventure began with everyone being directed to the same table in the Three Sword Inn after a day of doing whatever it was they were doing. For some that meant seeing patients or coming back from contract guard word, for others it meant sightseeing or sleeping. Everyone in the group had at least seen someone else at the table before, and there was some chit-chat about what they’d been up to, and how they were finding their meals.
As the inn starts to empty out for the night, the table hears a yelp coming from upstairs. The monster-hunting physician immediately goes to find out what’s happening and is followed by the mercenary who has been keeping an eye out all night. They quickly find out a man upstairs is not breathing (that man is Alexander, our murder victim, and is already dead) and immediately make their way up. The baker and farmer remained downstairs helping clean up tables and chatting with other remaining patrons who had been asked to stay behind. The career college student was asleep!
This is where I got to show off my incredible map making skills. They served us quite well, and my players got a kick out of it. Our investigating PCs went upstairs and performed an examination on the body and a cursory search of the room. They determined the cause of death, found the weapon used to stab Alexander, saw a box hidden beneath the bed, and caught a glimpse of a letter with the words ‘not much time left’. Not wanting to disrupt a crime scene, they went back downstairs and were followed down by another guest at the inn, who offered up a coded report that they’d taken from the room – they apologised, knowing they should have left it all alone, but were terribly curious.
We left off our first session with the group reconvening downstairs and sharing the information they’d found so far! I wanted to leave off here to give my players time to decode the report, which happened immediately! Out of character, we agreed that we’d pick up a short time later, after the report had been ICly decoded, and the contents shared with the group.
Please take a moment to admire my incredible map.
Beautiful, right? I think so!
So, going into day two I realise that the PCs are reluctant to get involved with the investigation. They’re all law-abiding people, this is an active crime scene, and they know the guard is on the way. They’re all content to wait around until the guard shows up which is not exactly what I was going for! I had Igon, the Inn’s owner, expressly ask the party to help with the investigation.
I had already established that a large party was happening down at the docks that night, and drew back to this by having Igon say he knew it was going to be a busy night for the guards due to that party, so could the group help him and the guards out by trying to figure out what’s happened? They aren’t associated with the Inn, so Igon thinks it will be fine for them to poke around. Igon also doesn’t want the guard sticking around for any longer than necessary because he has his own secrets to hide – a secret our college student would go on to discover – which was a nice little added motivation point for his asking.
Day two also saw the arrival of our final player, the college student, who had been asleep in his room downstairs. Having no idea what’s happened and just sensing the sombre mood, walks in with a “jeez, who died?”
Investigations then took off in every direction, which I was happy to facilitate! I’m not sure having four different lines of inquiry going at once would work as well playing by voice, but it worked well in this format and kept me busy and had everyone deeply engaged. By virtue of replying to different people at once, it also gave players a chance to think about what their character was going to do next. It was great seeing how the PCs picked up on the different elements the NPCS were trying to hide. Our late arrival was immediately suspicious of Igon not wanting anyone down in the storeroom, for example. Walter, the old man who found Alexander’s body, was largely left alone after it was shared that he was very cranky. Then you got Avesta – poor Avesta she got asked a lot of questions, but she looked pretty guilty! Extremely guilty, actually. My players got a laugh out of it later!
When the PCs discovered Myev’s crush on Avesta, they became pretty invested in getting those two together. One PC told Myev to tell Avesta how she felt when this was all over, and another suggested that Myev offer to help Avesta with the dishes – by game’s end the pair of them were in the kitchen doing dishes together and both PCs and their players were quite delighted! For my group I’m pretty sure these ladies taking the first steps towards building something together was as important as finding out who the murderer was.
I let the investigation go on for quite some time, accounting for the fact that we operate by text and what would have been quicker to resolve by voice takes longer by virtue of our medium. After the players had come together to discuss their findings, the guard arrived, and the group shared what they had learned. When the guard went to confront the person the group suspected, they were irritable and then made a break for the door whiiichhhh was enough, combined with what the PCs had reported, for the guard to take the suspect in.
The players were thanked for their assistance, were able to settle back in with whoever they wished and the farmer, whose quest for pie and ice cream had been interrupted by the murder, got their treat! All in all, it was a very fun set of sessions, and the nerves my players had over whether they’d accused the right person made their excitement and relief over having been right all the more sweet!
Thoughts
I enjoyed running this. I hadn’t done a proper intrigue session before where I had the motivations and secrets of multiple NPCs to manage. At first, I was worried about finding this overwhelming, and fretted over whether I would be able to keep everyone’s facts straight. I knew it was important not to mix up information as if I did it could lead to players and PCs being confused and no longer knowing what was going on / getting off-track. I want my players to succeed, so if they had failed because I wasn’t clear, I would have taken that as a failure on my part.
The various red herrings presented were incredibly effective in giving the PCs other avenues to explore and suspects to consider. They all found the actual murder to be suspicious at first, and I’m glad that they decided to dig in and investigate rather than go with their gut! One of the PCs is a physician and so she wanted to do an examination of the murderer’s foot because they seemed injured, the murderer refused, and it was only after their guilt was revealed that the Player went “THAT’S why X didn’t want to examine it!!” which was very satisfying.
I do think this adventure is better suited to smaller groups – running this with a group of eight would have been challenging to manage, and I imagine also would have made it a much shorter encounter. If being used in a party situation, I would suggest running it with PCs who already know one another – it makes for a great interlude on those nights where you’re missing one or more people, and while it can be used as a stand-alone session, there is also the option to have it tie into other goings-on in the city!
If you have the option to either print out the NPC cards, or have them up on a second screen for easy reference, I recommend doing that – I wasn’t running from my usual setup and think my biggest challenge was keeping track of their motivations and secrets. Cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed how the NPCs all tied into this story and how they were almost all being shady about something – it really added to the intrigue of this adventure.
You can find Murder at the Three Swords Inn for $1.50 on DMsGuild [here]. It’s easy to prep, and while it doesn’t require a map, I’d still recommend drawing something up in paint to help players easily see what’s what. The NPCs and their intrigue add a lot to this adventure and leaning into that makes it even more fun to run. If you’re looking for a mystery to solve when someone is absent, or a game for afternoon play, give this one a look – you can’t go wrong!
PS. Since my first draft I have taken a look at Whisper of the Weave Walker and it looks incredibly cool so if you’re interested in adding some spooky fun to your campaign or one-shot, give it a look over [here]!
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