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- Apr 4, 2017
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This is probably a bit of a crossover question. I am running a tabletop game with heavy investigation and minor supernatural elements. Because I let my players theorize based on the facts, I have to be really careful to get stuff right, or else they end up on some wild goosechase based on one of my mistakes. :/ In this particular case, I really need to get it right because one of my players is an actual paramedic and he fights forest fires during the summers, and he'll probably notice anything really off.
With regard to what the player characters have access to: the player characters have a friend who's a homicide detective with the police who sometimes passes them information about cases, if he thinks they're supernatural in nature. So the players can reasonably be assumed to have access to any interesting police information/reports that a homicide detective could get his hands on. He may or may not be primary on the case, depending on the story's needs, but he is at least helping with it.
So here's the situation: firefighters show up at a burning apartment building. Most of the residents escape. Once the fire is taken care of, the firefighters discover a charred corpse in one of the apartments. The arson investigator will have noticed *something* was really off about the pattern of the fire; it was very focused in that apartment, it burned hotter there than it should have, and it didn't spread as quickly as it should have. The victim is a known drug distributor, and the fire is weird, so it's safe to say that there will be at least a cursory investigation to make sure it's not homicide.
The main details I need to flesh out are below:
1) Regarding the fire: what actually happened is that someone who is both immune to fire and who can control it very well directed the fire to destroy the body of a man who was already dead. Any further really nitty-gritty details and terms would be really appreciated, because the player who is a firefighter in real life is undoubtedly going to jump on this fictional case with glee and ask me lots of questions I want to be able to answer.
2) I am assuming for the sake of the investigation that the killer is not able to create fire so hot that it cremates the body entirely. Some part of it is left for the medical examiner to look at. I know that the medical examiner will be able to tell that the body was dead before the fire got to it, but how much else could he reasonably tell? Is there likely to be any blood left? Could he do a toxicology screening for the specific drug the victim regularly handled (given that this is the most logical thing to look for).
3) The players are meant to discover that the distributor sampled his own drug, which was laced with poison. The poison is what killed him. Someone burned his body afterward. The drug was laced with strychnine (which is very plot relevant, as the players have seen mention of strychnine poisonings elsewhere before). Are there any reasonable symptoms of strychnine poisoning that would survive the body being burned? Is there any specific way an investigator could even come to suspect that the victim died of poisoned drugs, even if they can't figure out which poison was specifically involved?
Basically, I'm aiming to segue into another plot where the player characters ask themselves 'oh crap, where's the rest of these poisoned drugs'.
With regard to what the player characters have access to: the player characters have a friend who's a homicide detective with the police who sometimes passes them information about cases, if he thinks they're supernatural in nature. So the players can reasonably be assumed to have access to any interesting police information/reports that a homicide detective could get his hands on. He may or may not be primary on the case, depending on the story's needs, but he is at least helping with it.
So here's the situation: firefighters show up at a burning apartment building. Most of the residents escape. Once the fire is taken care of, the firefighters discover a charred corpse in one of the apartments. The arson investigator will have noticed *something* was really off about the pattern of the fire; it was very focused in that apartment, it burned hotter there than it should have, and it didn't spread as quickly as it should have. The victim is a known drug distributor, and the fire is weird, so it's safe to say that there will be at least a cursory investigation to make sure it's not homicide.
The main details I need to flesh out are below:
1) Regarding the fire: what actually happened is that someone who is both immune to fire and who can control it very well directed the fire to destroy the body of a man who was already dead. Any further really nitty-gritty details and terms would be really appreciated, because the player who is a firefighter in real life is undoubtedly going to jump on this fictional case with glee and ask me lots of questions I want to be able to answer.
2) I am assuming for the sake of the investigation that the killer is not able to create fire so hot that it cremates the body entirely. Some part of it is left for the medical examiner to look at. I know that the medical examiner will be able to tell that the body was dead before the fire got to it, but how much else could he reasonably tell? Is there likely to be any blood left? Could he do a toxicology screening for the specific drug the victim regularly handled (given that this is the most logical thing to look for).
3) The players are meant to discover that the distributor sampled his own drug, which was laced with poison. The poison is what killed him. Someone burned his body afterward. The drug was laced with strychnine (which is very plot relevant, as the players have seen mention of strychnine poisonings elsewhere before). Are there any reasonable symptoms of strychnine poisoning that would survive the body being burned? Is there any specific way an investigator could even come to suspect that the victim died of poisoned drugs, even if they can't figure out which poison was specifically involved?
Basically, I'm aiming to segue into another plot where the player characters ask themselves 'oh crap, where's the rest of these poisoned drugs'.