GM Notes: Sturdy & Wilde's Detective Agency

Hey Realmers! I'm back with your regularly scheduled behind-the-scenes glimpse of the making of Many Realms!

(First off, I want to say: did you love this episode, or what? I had a ton of fun running and editing it, and I think the end result turned out great. I hope you enjoyed it too!)

I have a few different juicy details about this week's episode:

Above we see the "suspect cards" on Wilde's office wall, which I sent along to the cast during the recording to spice things up. Who doesn't love a (virtual) prop in their RPG session? Note that Arabella's card contains a reference to Edward Darling, who became Edward Dashing once Jorie and I realized we'd given our characters the same surname. (Great minds and all that...)

The other major detail is the fact that I had a complete solution to the mystery prepped beforehand--but I had to throw it all out! I had written in my outline that Archie (the Fenwick butler, who appears toward the end of the episode) was responsible for the murder, furious that his favourite charge, Arabella, was being passed over in favour of her layabout sister.

But by the time we reached the halfway point of the adventure, the crew didn't really have enough facts pointing to the butler, and it didn't seem like they were going to get there anytime soon. (I tried to create an open setup, so they could feel free to travel to the important locations in any order they wished, but definitively bypassing the murder scene entirely was not something I expected...)

So, ultimately I just needed to practice that important GM skill: adaptation. When the cast mentioned that they were starting to get suspicious of Edward, I leaned into it, and played up his boorish American nature, which is a classic staple of Victorian stories. 

In the end, I like to think I pulled it off pretty cleanly, and I was quite taken with this setting. Who knows--maybe in the future we could return to this steampunk world and solve more mysteries!

--Jesse