Runaround and a Red Herring Avoided

Just finished up a session of Missions & Mayhem: Cryptids & Conspiracy. 

The mission was to investigate strange things going on in a small Indiana town. Why Indiana? Well, first of all I went to college there so it's an area I know well. Second, Indiana is sort of the liminal space of U.S. states. It's just so bloody normal that you know weird things have got to be going on there. 

Anyway, for this mission, there were obvious attempts by the shadowy conspiracy group to divert them from their mission. Also, competition to solve the mystery first. There didn't end up being a showdown with agents of the conspiracy, but the party fairly quickly diverted from the red herring (not knowing yet that it was a red herring) into the clues that led to the actual mystery. 

It was a lot of talking, and not much die rolling. I got to play a bunch of quirky small town NPCs (many based on or at least inspired by folks I knew either growing up in Illinois or from my uni years in Evansville). The players seemed to enjoy it, especially when one of my NPCs struck a chord and they could recognize that exact sort of person from their own experience. I did a few voices, but mostly stuck to impressions of mannerisms and different speech patterns to differentiate the various NPCs. It was pretty fun for me, too. 

Before we got into the adventure, we went over the Cryptids & Conspiracy advanced classes. Jada's Hero (PC) Sarah doesn't qualify yet, but she's interested in taking the Occultist class to get some ability with magic. We haven't done any occult/spiritual/undead adventures yet, but that will probably be coming soon. Next adventure, I want to lean into the psychic ability rules. Justin suggested they all make new psychic powered PCs and we do a power battle. 

I could probably run with something like that. Maybe the psychics and battle minds have to escape from captivity in a secret research institute run by the conspiracy group. Then we could go back to the regular PCs who are investigating. The players will have new knowledge of the conspiracy group, like when we get to see scenes in a book or movie from the bad guys' perspective.