Mutants and Masterminds foe and friend design.

A little late for me but it seems Wednesday is the weekly bug friends day. Project combat test is in debug and low level code work right now. With that said there isn't much that may be interesting so I think I'll talk about something else. As I've mentioned before I play and run Mutants and Masterminds second edition. So today I'll talk a bit about making characters from the DM side of the table.

There are three things to consider when making NPCs in Mutants and Master minds 2nd (and 3rd) edition. What it can do, how does it stay alive with pesky players attacking it, and what makes it interesting. The first two are relatively easy as there mechanic based so I'll start there.


What can your being of pure evil do?
The question we ask ourselves in the morning, it's less about what it does and more about what it can do to your Players. This is is more or less the characters "Attack". This does not necessarily mean it's brute force abilities to cause players pain but more often does. In some games it could be the NPC social connection or even it's ability to enable others to be the big problem with them staying the background. Those social ones can be covered in a few skills and feats or if you get fancy emotion control and some sort of boost system if you don't just hand wave it for the sanity I seem to lack. After that we have the "main" power that work wonderful for refluffing what it can do.


The offensive powers in question are Damage, Fatigue, Nauseate, Paralyze, Snare, and Stun. While this isn't all the attack flagged powers it's the ones I see most useful as apposed to trip and dazzle which have a more limited use. First thing I would like to say which is odd is that third edition had a real good idea which I will explain in a second. first every attack in mutants and masterminds is resisted by a "save" on the targets side, how much you fail by chooses the effect. In Second edition the effects listed above had two or three stages of failure of varying degrees of severity but were set based on the type chosen. In 3rd edition they combined everything but damage and let you choose the effects beyond the powers name. This allows for a lot more customization and more fitting effects. Though either way it should be aimed at some how taking someone out of combat. Which isn't too hard for damage, the non damage abilities have a harder time of sticking though they have the benefit of "stacking" and increasing the severity of their effects if a player has failed a save earlier. Either way these should be kept near the "Power level cap" or how much the game allows you have them at though this is to taste for a Game master and their musings.

While this list isn't impressive it is all based on your execution and proper extra use. For example Paralyze is slated in game as some sort of debilitating attack on a persons ability to react be it having to work through the confusion of some sort of poison or some monsters attack that saps the strength away from them. I have taken it's frame work and used it for an ice based attack from a foe that tries to encase in a layer of ice. I could have also used snare for the effect or even stun for this idea but paralyze was an interesting choice as it could slow players down. The only change was making it a "fortitude" save. I could get into a lot more on this but the bread and butter of any person making something in mutants and masterminds is using the same thing in different manner or even just a different weakness.


What can't your being of pure evil do?
The flip side of what we just discussed. It being inconvenienced, its defense and possibly an Achilles heel in the design. There are less things to consider here but they are very important. The first is do you want this to be a boss or a group of enemy encounter.

There is a big difference, the mutant and masterminds system runs on saves against everything, and a low roll means you fail and possibly takes you out of the fight. For players this is mitigated by hero points which can reroll the save around a "safe" zone or even higher for most attacks they would take. If you make a solo NPC to take the players on it is going to be thrashed by each one of them. Taking the group route hopefully means a division of attention as his buddies will be taking up the slack even if he goes down. Before I can go into the intricate parts I have to talk about saves in Mutants and Masterminds, if you played 3rd or later D&D they should look familar.

Saves in Mutants and Masterminds are Toughness, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will. From a mechanical standpoint they have more to do with the offensive powers above than what they mean in game but I'll go through the general explanation of each one. Toughness is effectively your HP in Mutants and masterminds, it allows you to shrug off attacks like nothing and take a lot of hits. For the most part only straight up damage. This one should always be near "Power level cap" for a villain because damage saves are rigged to have a higher chance to fail and plainly mess up a character than anything else. Other saves have roughly a 55% chance of succeeding if you are matched with it, damage saves have a 30% chance of passing so it is key that these are up to limits or the character in mind will go down far more easily than would be imagined. For this reason I tend to call everything that isn't Toughness a secondary save as they aren't the primary means of ending combat in a mechanical sense. Fortitude is the "strength of body" save, things like poison or shocks to the system go here. Reflex is actually one of the more import of the secondary saves, some powers may target it directly but it covers area of effect avoiding. Willpower is the flip side of Fortitude as it is the "strength of the mind" save that generally allows overcoming illusions and pain among other generic slated things.

Unlike Toughness these secondary saves are probably not the best thing to cap. In mutants and masterminds second edition there was an odd design decision to allow these to go up to PL+5 which when completely maxed out allows for a 70% chance of passing the save in question, I believe this is more from 3.X D&D than anything and actually makes things a bit difficult in designing solo encounters or boss battles where the villains are a higher PL. There is also the fact that it is kind of cheap to just cap these, as unlike toughness there are only a few powers that can take a character out of combat like toughness and last like an unconscious condition. So in general I follow the Mastermind Manuals "level based progression" of the D&D good and bad saves. One of the secondary saves is chosen to be "good" which means it's roughly double the bad saves values. There is a formula to this equation of good and bad save but it would probably be too long and pointless so I'll post up a small mock up chart here which is effectively what I use anyways. A thing to be mentioned is M&M is assumed to be played around Power level 10, it can be played higher or lower but it's assumed to stick around 10. The result is a character that isn't a brick wall for non damaging powers to get through. These aren't quite up to cap and will have a little variance when attributes are figured out due to save calculation. It also adds a bit of flavor when the big huge monster has a higher fortitude save, the small nibble melee fighter has a higher reflex, and the psionic powerhouse has a higher will save though it may not always be the case.

Why is your being of pure evil interesting?
Hardest question to answer. At the end of the day you will have a pile of numbers to throw at the players but why about this one over the last one is always a challenge. I commonly refer to this as the gimmick portion of the character and it can either be in the power set or its flaws. This one I can't really answer but it should be a theme to the character and how it's powers work, it doesn't even have to be blatant just something to tie the numbers together. I have made bosses that have abilities that drain down and on depletion give them a nasty complication (players never saw this happen) and ones that had reactive effects to show their prowess in ability. Though I will admit over the year or so in this game I've gotten a lot better and faster at this. Early bosses and such were a horrible situation that were often far too easy which was fine in learning a system. There is a lot of mechanical potential just in the books for interesting situations with a bit of thought into what the NPCs.

Well this was far too long and possibly convoluted for people that don't know much about D&D. So as a question for those that have stayed through all of this have you played any table top games?

Minion mash

Well it seems yesterdays listing of things to work out didn't come to pass today at least, spent about five hours wandering around town. Took care of some things though none of ti really panned out but was a lot of walking. So instead of progress I'll talk about some game running problems. The problem being, lots and lots of monsters.

Lots of games have you fighting hordes of monsters. RPGs are notorious for things you dispatch in one round and just keep appearing through the game due to random encounters. FPS and action games love hordes as it can present a legitimate challenge in a game where you are overpowered to everything and your downfall can come from overconfidence or other things. RTS use this with some factions as their main method of winning as they can overwhelm you with inferior troops. Usually this is fun, in table top games it's a little differnt.

Running games usually means all the little boring things such as tallying up dice is done by humans and not in microseconds by the machine, it also has some verbal asking of players to do things, and them joking around and other things. This means what in any other game of it's genera that would take maybe five to ten minutes takes roughly a half hour of real time. Online this is even worse, I believe this was mentioned it sometime ago but my tired legs and sore feet are preventing me from moving my mouse around to dig that up, how I'm not sure. Seeing a three round combat session take forty minutes  is not uncommon for me between 5 people. I suspect youtube, image galleries, and the lower typing speed of some players has something to do from it as seeing the same text for two minutes gets them to think "well I'll just look here and check back occasionally". While a player I don't usually mind but as a DM I feel like I'm failing in keeping them interested especially when this is just a minor inconvenience fight that could go bad if mistakes are made.

This often makes me question the making of such things. Usually I go with it though with less monsters than I'd see fitting as this keeps the hack and slash slough from continuing too long. Another thing is not only do my players have to roll, I have to roll for the monsters while the players have to do checks. Having 6 monsters who make attacks and target different players who may cause rolls from them and so on is a bit of a headache and extends the length of battle quite significantly.

Mutants and Masterminds system does have a solution to minion swarms that are still threats but aren't quite grinds. It's damage system is based on a saving roll and failing that by enough can incapacitate a player, foes generally run on the same rule. While it seems horribly swinging it's mitigated by hero points and the fact that you can't be taken out in one hit. Minions work slightly different, they make their saves so they can get by unscathed but on any failure they take the worst condition. Beyond that they can dish out damage like any other character allowing them to be a real threat without the unfairness of them facing double their numbers that are roughly as hard hitting as them.

The rolling for the mobs attack I've written a page from my book on. I've come up with two solutions that I employ regularly. One I have "auto pass assistance" for the mobs, each one in range adds +1 to the attack roll of one monster. Assistance is an action that tests a monsters attack against DC 10 so it passes 55% of the time with no attack bonus, most have attack bonus so quickly this is just auto passed. Using the idea allows for a better chance to hit with less rolling, though it's safer for players as they have less chances to just flat out fail a save roll. For minor encounters it works for me. The other one is to use the books combined attack with monsters. For each one that "hits" the target there is an increase in the difficulty of the save that must be passed. It reduces rolls for players while allowing me to at least pretend each monster maters more, and does increase the threat level substantually from a group based beat down. The problem is that it starts to enter one shot territory. By rules and probability if they were equal level threats 6 monsters attacking would cause there to always be some sort of wound and about a 50% chance (with large room for error due to me not actually taking out scratch paper for this) of defeat if they all succeed on hiting. Players could hero point to avoid this but that seems slightly too punishing if it's just a bump in the road to your main encounter.

It's a thing I struggle with in designing encounters. Thematically it is great but in practice it could just be seen as filler or a time sink. At least with the last batch I've been making the taking out of the mass of zombies be laughably gory which has something for it.

Minor concerns

Did a bit of event generation for my upcoming horror game. Like the NPCs I explained before I've been using tarot cards for these. A much simpler design as this is just littering the sandbox with shiny things for my players to look at so today I think I'll talk a bit about tarot cards.

Tarot decks have 2 sets of card "types" that don't even seem related. Arcane major which goes from zero to 21 where people are more familiar with including the infamous Death card. The Arcane Major is major happenings in ones life, when one shows up it should be payed attention too, though seemingly all tarot readings in movies has Major Arcane after Major arcane which is sometimes appropriate but is silly with how often it happens.

The other type is the Minor Arcane. This is the daily life events which are probably better for cold reading and normal things if not as interesting as the major arcane. There are 4 suits of 14 cards numbered from ace to king. If this sounds like a regular playing card deck it's because the modern ones were based on tarot cards without the major arcane and combining the knight and page into the jack while changing the suits. The four suits follow a general theme and I'll go over them. Pentacles or more likely known a coins is largely based around money issues and goods. Swords is the second suit, it commonly has cards easily interpreted as reasons for things, easily negative reasons. Cups the third suit is commonly based on emotions. The last of the Minor Arcane is Wands, it is typically people and their status or actions. While this is the general theme each card is different and some change meanings based on other minor arcane in the reading.

Another theme in Tarot is the reversed card which strengthens,minimizes, inverts the meaning of the card on hand. It's generally easier for the Major Arcane than the Minor with how they go. For instance Eight of Cups has a meaning of "The card speaks for itself on the surface, but other readings are entirely antihetical - giving joy, mildness, timidity, honor, and modesty" from the Radint Rider-waite booklet I have. A booklet that I have caused to be very worn out due to how much I look through it even though I've only had these things for a few months now and looks like I won't be working on only memory any time soon.

It's been fun playing with them especially after playing with some of the persona series. For my games it has taken a lot of sitting around doing nothing but worry if an idea I have is good for the game. For better or worse using them as seeds gets me to work faster and pump out ideas for this game. Currently have a list of 40 events to scatter throughout the game generated by this, and a cast of roughly 30 NPCs to play multiple personality disorder with. I am actually aiming to increase these numbers a bit more too.

Knowing your Lim f(x) = L

Wow, MSPaint really has changed. I usually just use pencile tool in photoshop but I thought for today I'd really do it in that. Terribad mspaint aside I've had some amusing GMing the other day.

I run a very silly game in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. Ran it starting at PL 6 and it's about PL8 now. It runs on the premise of any bad yet funny idea I can throw at a party of "Adventures guild" members that take contracts and do stuff. Nothing too deep but I usually have thinly veiled refrences the players can laugh at while they roll virutal dice. That aside I'll get to the meat of all this.

Knowing your limits. And a GM's limits is the groups fun. A GM can do anything they want as long as the players stay at the table and take it. It doesn't mean that they should. Personally I try to have different parts in my sessions, I don't quite like having entire sessions be consistent of one thing. Often I want the situation to always be on the change, they do something something new gets to be chewed on by them. Doing this hopefully keeps it fun and allows them to fill up most of the session with in character talk instead of me dictating what is going on.

This latest bad idea didn't quite have that. As I have possibly 3 members who occasionally look here I won't get into deeper reasons but effectively they had ideas about this entire situation which made the plans for the session seem a little short. So I threw a wrinkle in it, a minor boss fight that could prove entertaining and possibly scare them through some of the dirty tricks I threw on it. Nothing too major though but outcomes of the fight would have extended this session in interesting ways. As the image shows, that fight didn't take long (and they did strip both of them and time them up so they could check to see what was causing some of the complications). I did have ideas on the spot how to extend the fight and make it seem like a boss fight. But with some thought didn't take them. Time was almost up and while I did plan this to be a drag out fight I thought actually dragging it out would not accomplish much. I do lean more towards lengthening plot fights through villain points

While knowing this it always seems a cop out to let players just smash and grab something that I designed to put up a bit of a challenge to them. Overall it did accomplish what I wanted though, it gave some more conflict and added a complication to what seemed to be a mission that was involving "go here talk to them, make a decision and come back" with how they went about things. One fault was I had one of the duo be a lower PL than the main guy as it seemed to make sense, another was some misunderstanding on just how effective some of the players effects were. Other than that I did get to show off a few of the tricks though not all of them which makes it feel like a waste. Though it is food for thought on better design later.

Random NPC tarot creation

Well I talked about it yesterday so I might as well do it today. Also a confirmation about Shaw's inklings about this being similar to Shin megami Tensei ideas. While not completely taken from there it's where I got a lot of learning about the cards. Basing a character completely off an arcane major is a little too cheap for me, too little surprise. So without further delay my Random NPC generation method.

First:  The Fate Card. Out of only the Major Arcanes is the fate card. It's a binding force for all the following cards be it primary going with or against such a fate.

Second: The Mask card. This is obvious a persona refrence but it works, it's what the person appears like to the world be it how they project themselves or just how they end up being percieved.

Third: The Impression card. This is important for me for NPCs. It could be just how I have all other NPCs who don't know that particular NPC reference them as that's their only exposure or how the party gets to first meet them. Typically it's first impressions, just some things that are easily remebered about the character regardless of their mask.

Fourth: The Action card. How the NPC goes about things, or things they have done in the past and are remembered for. It's self explanitory to a degree though can get tricky.

Fifth: The Reason card. This can help lend a lot of help to the Impression, the Mask, and The action card. It's an event or a thought process that makes the character what it is today.

Sixth: The Hope card. This is what the character wants (or fears) to happen. Like the Reason card it retroactivly helps with all the cards before it and can tie them together.

So with that out of the way I'll go about generating an NPC with my Rider-Waite deck.

The Fate: Strength. The Strength card is a card about power, though it can represent the struggle with ones self. We'll see which works better after the others.

The Mask: Knight of Cups. The Knight of cups has a list of things involving messages, arriving, advancements and other such things. For a mask this easily can be used as a charming person. One who goes about doing things involving other people. A life of the party person.

The Impression: The world. A major arcane card, while I don't make a big deal about them in these readings they help a lot more than the minor arcane due to their nature. The world Is the journey card, going about places but also arrival at the end in some instances. It does fit the charming persona that has been somewhat established, always doing things with other people. Disapearing on trips or other assorted adventures.

The Action: Reversed The moon. I use reversed tarot cards, what a reversed card generally means is an inverse of the meaing, or in some cases a strengthening or deluding of some aspects. The moon is a somewhat dark card. Talking about hidden enemies and deception. The little booklet I have likes to reduce the aspect of the moon and for this it fits. The character is known for streching the truth on more than one ocasion or outright fabricating lies to carry a conversation.

The Reason: Reversed Two Swords. Swords is rarely a happy bunch of cards, this sword however has a meaning in Conformity, courage, friendship and a few other nice things. Normaly reversed it means imposter, falsehood, and disloyalty among a few other things. As a reason this really works for this charcter, could make a very dark reason but today I shall make it silly. They were mistaken for another person at a party and shown the town under a lie. Now the lie continues in some fashion. Simple enough.

The Hope: Seven of Pentacles. Every once in a while you run into means that are conflicted with another. Seven of pentacles has quite a few readings, the one you settle on is going to based on other cards. For this character with all the fun loving roguery I'll settle on business. With all his trips and other actions they could be making up some form of clientele or business partners. Always charming everyone in hopes of further gaining their business or suport in the future he keeps on rolling like a ball of energy.

So with these taken as a whole we get this.

A person of considerable power of personality. Always in a state of motion he travels about entertaining others at events even if qutite a few stories are far fetched. Actions stem from an incident in the past where he found out that some lies and fun can help quite a bit especially with meeting new people. With this there is hopes of the busniess partnerss of the now and future look favorably upon the person.

And that's what we have. Hopefully this has been somewhat of a fun read.

Progress day

And for once I use an image  that is not scribbles.

I'm taking the rest of the day to spruce up some projects I have been lacking on, and I have quite a few so this will be a short post. I have the Combat Test project that I'm going to work on later, some planing for a possible instance in a game tomorrow, and a stack of homebrew that could use my cold hearted and fun destroying eyes look over. Since those would take too long I'll go on about what I was doing when I realized it was about time for me to start this up, and it relates to the picture even.

For a while I have been designing a sandboxish horror investigation game for my group. Using basic d20 resolution and systems via Mutants & Masterminds I'm not giving my players much to work with, the system chosen is basically for me to have a good hold on running the game and making monsters with it. Since it was a sandbox game I decided I need a huge cast of non playing characters to mess with. Not being one to actually have off the cuff creative ideas had some inspiration and the entire concept of how I'm making this game came from it. I generated all my NPCs from tarot cards. An Arcane Major for their 'fate' and a variation on the 5 card spread for who they are and went from there. I didn't even own tarot cards so I made a virtual deck in python that allowed me to test this out in rapid progression. The result, some unexpected and wonderful created poor souls for my Players to befriend before the problems start to sprout up.

Tarot cards are some old things that were primarily for card games. In fact dropping the Arcane Major and the knight will give you a standard playing card deck of sorts. More commonly we know it for fortune telling purposes. Mostly it's cold reading. The majority of the cards are based around mundane everyday things that can easily be cold read into being important. Major Arcane like The Tower pictured are generally more important, more focused, while somehow being more ambiguous than the minor arcane. Taking The Tower for example means generally bad things, it's one of the bad cards to draw. It's things not working out, being beyond your control, and just bad things happening. It was originally the fire at some point as the picture suggests, as in the old days if you were in a tower or castle and the bottom floors caught on fire you were generally unable to do anything beyond jump out. While it is a grim card it can be applied mildly to situations, you pull up the tower card and ask if anything out of the persons control has been making you feel down or causing unneeded worry and you'll get something. In whatever spread you just make attention to it and move on.

I don't believe in the divination properties of such cards. I do however believe using their piece-mailed ideas to create characters or events is quite interesting and rewarding. It has been saving me a lot of time when coming up with a 25+ list of npcs the players will regularly have a chance to interact with. It has also given me quite a few good starting points for event ideas. I'm not the most creative but somehow I can take things and wrap them into something applicable to an idea so it's been a good discovery for me. Maybe I could even start up some tarot posts on this blog later but for now I'm going to focus on making at least a dozen more events for my players.

The five room campaign

I actually have a minor in art. Not that any of this shows it.

Bad MSPaint diagrams aside I'm going to rant on a bit about Game Mastering table top games. I've been running one campaign online for a very long time under a very simple scheme of typing up a paragraph for each session then supplementing it with everything I planed going wrong. More often than not it does.

Game Mastering is practiced failure, you learn to fail in more amusing ways for your players to enjoy. Mostly because of your character actions. That spy you planted and were going to have talk to the PCs just to have a reveal later? The spy going to be punched by one of them and told to get out of the Players sight because he was upset over something the Spy said or other things that completely destroy that scheme. On top of that your players will notice your plots a mile away or otherwise not even notice them when you try to hint leading to frustration later. Player may or may not be intentionally wrecking the game, more than a fair share hate the dreaded "railroading" where a Game Master forces them to do a certain action. What qualifies for railroading widely varies for some it's having to listen through the BBEG's rant unable to do anything before he vanishes mysteriously for others it's the local law enforcement actually putting them in jail for breaking into someones house, smashing their pots, and taking their gold. It's always a challenge to meet a happy medium of your plans working and your players being allowed to do after all everyone should have fun.

So with this in mind, back to the whole premise of this article. The five room campaign. Earlier I stated that I put down a paragraph and other outcomes, keeping each session as modular as possible. This limits the amount of damage that happens the basic idea of the campaign, if a bad guy dies and the party though they were the main bad guy it just turns out he was one of the lieutenants, that sort of cheap trick most GMs do to keep the very frail plot from falling apart. The one problem with my set up was while it gave me an idea to dance with, it didn't give me the best stage to use it. I may have had a few scattered ideas for what I could do during that session. While I may have a plot for that time, I do not have as many things for the players to do as I like, and with out proper prodding or things they could do players get bored quickly which is not fun.

Some time later I discovered something called the "5 room dungeon". You can find a lot about it with Google or the one I have bookmarked to relearn the gist of it, there's a few places to look into it but it boils down to this.

Room 1 The Entrance:
Self explanatory it's how you get to the meat of the session. Be it defeating guards, talking to townsfolk about events, opening a magic seal on an artifact they found, or anything that takes the players doing something to start this chain of events.

Room 2 The Challenge:
Not as informative as the first.  The challenge can be quite a few things. It could be a set of skill challenges or logic puzzles to figure out how to progress, or it could be convincing someone or something to help them get further in the place. If really pressed for ideas it could be a minor fight to introduce what foes in this area could be like.

Room 3 The Delay:
This segment is meant to throw your players for a loop.It could be some red hering they spend their time on trying to figure things out, something that gives them missinformation about the whole over arching plot, or simply an obstacle that will give them the choice of dealing with or finding a differnt longer way to proceed. This choice should have some effect on the rest of the "dungeon" or even the overall game to a degree. It can also easily pad your time if it's something like a giant heavy locked chess that the players get to argue about and decide on having the fighter carry it the rest of the way.

Room 4 The Climax:
Here it is, the big encounter. The boss of the dungeon. Or if you're not into that, the situation that is possibly dooming a village and needs to be figured out. Anything that would effectively be before a "goal" or the "goal" itself could be the climax. Finding the lost treasure could be a climax with the delay just being a giant fire breathing lizard baring the path to it.

Room 5 The Twist:
The anticlimax, the part after the most exciting event. This is generally where plot is revealed or you get your things, though maybe not as you expect them. Personally I don't like calling it the Twist but more often than not it turns out that way when designing just to keep it from being a pure plot dump. This is where it ties into the rest of your game, something got accomplished, learned, or gained through all this. It's the reward of the entire session for better or worse.

While this is a "5 room dungeon" it doesn't necessarily have to be underground. It could be a loosely connected series of events that may not require brute strength to get through. For example the 5 non room dungeon.

The non room Dungeon.

Room 1: The Rumor
For sake of simplicity this game is about modern investigators who try to stop horrible things from coming into this world. One of their contacts informs them that something has been shiped leaving everyone coming in contact with it mysteriously dead in their wake.

Room 2: The Investigation
After this the players are left to follow up on this or possibly go about other things, but with such a juicy lead they go about collecting information. One player starts hitting up contacts to see where this package came from, another looks through old books to see what this could be, and the last tracks down the most recent person with intent to look through his house when the other two are done.

Room 3: The House
After breaking through police tape the players are free to wander the house. However it does not do much, everything is mundane except for the mysteriously exploding boiler where the owner died. Nothing is directly mystic or supernatural in any way and lots of time could be wasted here. The only thing that might lead them to the next place is a few letters (Are in the trash, or some other way of finding them) hinting at a disagreement with a man about not releasing names of a family line.

Room 4:Security Box
The players come up with the plan of breaking into the security box. This presents a lot of challenges for the PCs as they could likely get caught and put in jail if they set off alarms. 

Room 5:Inside the Box.
After gaining access to the box the players are presented with some lists and a strange black yet light metal bar. The bar at the moment does not bring up any information though looking at the names gives a line of accidents, more on the list showing people not yet killed but somehow related to the others. On the end of the List is one of the Player charcters. Both these could be plot hooks for later sessions.

Not a dungeon in sight yet the idea stays the same. One problem though is what happens if the player can't find anything in the house? Or if they fail to find the latest victim. A bit of leeway is going to have to be get given. In fact it's simpler to call room 3 "place where they can find things" and room 4 "hard to get to place where they find the list" just so you can easily shuffle it to a logical location or if you are not into that shuffling in a generic delay event to get their attention. Such as another mysterious death happening or one of the previous plots picking up so they don't have to sit around doing nothing all session.

Running a game can be hard, but it is quite fun if you enjoy constantly building things and testing yourself against player actions.