ENIGMA: Investigation Rules
A downloadable role-playing game
This material consists of supplementary information for the FIST: Freelance Infantry Strike Team paranormal Cold War role-playing game.
It is intended to help facilitate games which focus more on procedural investigation, with a minimum of extra mechanics, resource shepherding, or failure due to chance found in other games.
Please be clear: As of the current version (v0.8), these files are in a rather unrefined state and have not been playtested. They are provided free of charge under a Creative Commons BY 3.0 license.
If you find them useful, feel free to use them as you see fit. However, if you have any successful experience with them or other feedback, I'd be happy to hear it.
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Enigma Team is an alternative game mode for FIST that focuses on intelligence gathering and espionage over action-first tactical engagements.
The PDF is 16 pages, with a straightforward layout and dense but well organized text that's easy to read.
Contents-wise, Enigma Team adds a new wrinkle to the lore, where FIST isn't just an organization composed of freewheeling do-gooder mercenary strike teams. It also works in conjunction with Enigma Teams, who gather information for those mercenaries to use.
The main mechanical feature of Enigma Team is investigative trainings, which give a bonus to certain avenues of investigation. There's a long list to pull from, with some headings spelled out in more detail than others.
There's also a detailed list of other sources teams can call on for help, ranging from computers to aliens to summoned spirits.
For GMs, there's a lot of discussion on how to structure an investigation, and how to make its moving parts satisfying for the players to interact with. None of this is really mechanical, but it's good advice, and worth the read.
Overall, if you want to play a more gumeshoe-y version of FIST, or if you want some material for an unusual variant mission to break your normal campaign's structure, I'd recommend giving Enigma Team a shot.
A solid investigative module for FIST. ENIGMA not only changes how you act in investigation scenes in a game but also adds context. Instead of rolling to resolve a mystery, ENIGMA equips characters with different 'training' choices and then gives them clues related to it. This makes investigations more rich and engaging without glancing over the process.
It's very well laid out with backstories for ENIGMA the organization, how it relates to your characters, training types, strange familiars and concise tips on how to run an investigative scene for the GM. I'm surprised this isn't a system in itself since it could very well function outside of FIST and without it.
Thanks for the positive comments!
To be fair, a lot of the general ideas about trainings and providing clues, I kind of took directly from the Gumshoe system. But FIST inspired me to try and streamline it way beyond the mechanics that Gumshoe uses.
But you're probably right that ENIGMA could easily be tacked on to other game systems as well. It does lack fight mechanics, if combat was something one wanted in an investigation game.
The rest of the supplement is basically my attempt to wrap my brain around what qualities of a clue are useful to think about in game terms, and how clues can be organized in some way that's helpful to running a game. Probably thr organization at least owes some relation to my previous experience with D&D-adjascent "point crawl" mapping, and trying to outline process flow disgrams at work.
I think your effort paid off! The diagram for investigation is really interesting. I had some similar ideas about investigation games and how it doesn't fit a combat framework. Your clues-first direction was very close to what I imagined. A sense-driven system where you get information by paying points. I never played Gumshoe so I don't really see where it begins and ends. But it's still very good work!
Actually the core of the Gumshoe system is that you get information by paying points. I intentionally removed point spending to try and simplify things. But, if I understand correctly, the creators of Gumshoe intended that point spending would limit investigation length.
The Gumshoe system is used as the basis for several different game settings you might find of interest (some of which might vaguely overlap with FIST themes), but you can download the setting-free Gumshoe SRD for free here:
https://pelgranepress.com/2013/10/24/the-gumshoe-system-reference-document/