March 2025 – Sword’s Edge Publishing

Smuggling has a long history, and a lot of it is not exactly what you would expect. While now smuggling might make you think of drugs or people, smuggling has generally been a means to avoid taxation rather than a prohibition—though Canadian breweries and distilleries made a mint through smuggling during the US Prohibition-era, when alcohol was banned. Did the tea smugglers or the salt smugglers of the day face a criminal underworld like those that inhabit the drug smuggling world of today? Almost certainly. These were not cooking enthusiasts who just wanted to get ingredients to their favourite chefs! Smugglers did undertake some jobs we might think of as humanitarian—and some probably still do—but they were in it for the money, and not looking to better humanity.

But that would make a boring story.

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I’ve been away, but now I’m back. More one-pagers on deck. This time, it’s a bit of a murder mystery. I usually do something like mystery box stories for my campaigns—there’s a question the PCs need to resolve, and it generally has many layers and red herrings. That’s not something you can really do in a one-pager as it tends to be too complex. It’s also very different from a murder mystery. In a murder mystery, you generally know the answer and work back from there to find out what kind of clues might be left. In a mystery box game, there often isn’t a single answer and the clues themselves are often doorways to greater mysteries. A lot of times, events or items in my games that aren’t intended to be mysteries become mysteries because of how the PCs interact with them, creating greater complexity—I’m also a fan of improv game mastering. Rather than increasing complexity, as the story moves forward in a murder mystery, complexity is reduced—the number of possible answers reduces to one.

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