Devil's World Heroes! Greatest Detectives!!!!
In the campaign I'm currently running the Big Boys have made it to the second region: the Thunderplains. A sprawling savannah of megafauna and giants. There they seek out Corpulo who has swallowed his own daughter. The Big Boys (Most of the original members now moidered) seek to go inside of Corpulo's body to rescue her. The issue is that they must first get an audience with Corpulo.
I put in a few possible routes toward Corpulo. The ones the party latched onto involves an investigation in Phatt City, a sprawling urban den of depravity under Corpulo's control. The investigation involves finding Opal, a noble's daughter that has supposedly been murdered. Her sister, Pearl, is convinced that this is not the case. I'll spare the details.
As this is primarily a dungeon crawling game I had intended for this to be a single session investigation. Something without too much complexity. Somewhere along the way, however, I put a little too much juice into the mystery. Namely, there's all this business around the Yakuza that is neat background stuff once you have the whole context of the mystery but isn't actually very pertinent to Opal's location. All the potential investigation areas point to the same area, but all of the evidence is basically vibes based. Mistake: include solid proof that the players could operate on. When designing the scenario I somehow felt it would be unsatisfying if the players found the "right" answer too early. Looking back that's not the case: the players still would need to make the right investigatory moves to get there, and even if they knew what happened to Opal they'd still need to finish the final step and figure out where she actually is.
The reason I included an investigation is because I've always enjoyed variety in my RPGs. We just did some heavy dungeon crawling so I had wanted something else for a little spicy-vinegar. That's great, but my lack of experience with investigation scenarios walloped me by surprise, straight in the voicebox. I don't think the sessions have been bad (They've, in fact, been absolutely hilarious if not exactly Sherlock Holmes quality) it's just really not what I intended for the game. I also feel a bit bad for the players expecting the hack n' slash we've been primarily engaging in. I'm not afraid of any mystery and would love to give this another go later in the campaign. I do intend to make them much much simpler, to better integrate with the hexcrawl/dungeoncrawl loop. In fact, given the number of moving pieces when you actually get the game on the table, I think you could get a session of play out of some extremely simple mysteries.
As much as this deviates from the typical play-style of the campaign I have had fun with it. However, I find myself missing the crashing, bashing, and slashing of the dungeon crawl.