The term "Wayside Shrines" was immediately evocative when I first heard about it in Paul Muldoon's poem of the same name. As with most of Muldoon's work, it prompted extensive research. I was struck by this image of a shrine built alongside the road, a sanctuary from brutal travels. Thus, I wrote Wayside Shrines as tribute.
Cluedo, the board game, had an pitch that immediately drew me in, but was always deeply unsatisfying mechanically in its accounting-simulator nature. I wanted to create a similar murder-mystery set-up in the setting of Psychopomps, but perhaps without the need for a checklist. This would serve as the impetus for the locked-room nature, requiring the players to survive the long night in a crumbling monastery, while also looking for the killer.
I recommend reading the adventure before looking at the design notes below. If you intend to play this, you should read nothing.
Spoilers:
In conceptualising a locked-room mystery, I was immediately inspired by yet another locked room, no, not Murder on the Orient Express, but rather Jean Paul Satre's No Exit. It was titillating to imagine a group of unpleasant people with differing conceptions of morality (in which the classic RPG murderhobo would definitely fit) torturing each other endlessly in this single closed space. I took the idea of Hell is other people quite a bit more literally here— they would serve as each other's torturers. This, as well as my reading of the very lovely Witchburner, led to the core mechanic of this murder-mystery module. Witchburner suggests a detective game whereby there is no real killer, whereby everyone is innocent of the specific crime the player must investigate. This concept of this intrigued me, but where it fit the thematic concerns of Witchburner, it did not fit mine. I wanted these people to all be guilty in some way, to all have some culpability in the acts of violence. Thus, in Wayside Shrine, everyone is the real killer at some point.
The only death that is not caused by our main cast of suspects is the first one, the accidental suffocation of the last monk in that temple. This death is the anomaly, both to the patterns of killing to follow, as well as to the core mechanic of revival. This complicates the scenario, injecting doubt into our players as well as establishing the misconception that the monastery is haunted by a ghost hell-bent on killing. The cast will then begin using this misconception as a way to start killing off the others.
The moment of great savouring is right after the first killing. The GM should try to have the players observe it or its immediate consequences. The method of death, victim and perpetrator is random, but there is a certain joy in watching the players' face contort in confusion as the victim comes back to life. Players with experiences in video-gaming are well accustomed to revival after death, but it is uniquely estranged to them in ttrpg form. They are now given this revival as a new mechanic by which to interact with the world. The game becomes not about the first murder, but rather, how and why they can keep resurrect, and how might that connect to the murders that keep happening.
The players will take liberties with the resurrection and this will be a limitation that has to be carefully managed. Once the game has little consequence, the players might become desensitized to their own actions and lose care in the scenario. A way to manage this is that NPCs remember what happen to them, and having them react accordingly to the actions of the PCs. You may also request that they physically track all deaths that happen (that they know of), with tally marks or even tokens. They may not know what happens, but they will behave with greater caution.
What will also be crucial is the player's interactions with the cast of characters be it who they suspect or who they befriend. There are characters that are more sympathetic, like Tara, but they are all guilty in some ways. The reason that there is a night watch is simple, to move people around the monastery, and keep them rotating around the different areas. The easiest way to "brute force" this is to ensure that everyone is trapped in the main hall, but having to guard a key defensive structure makes that impossible. Characters also have incentives to leave the main hall so that there is the possibility of a murder. Part of the game is in making all of these characters likable, empathetic, and understandable at all times, while still being flawed human beings who would want to kill for their own reasons, precisely like our own player characters.
