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Me and my friend are making a campaign for the friend group and a twist which we are planning is that an important lore NPC will turn out to have been killed early in the story and impersonated by the BBEG. Me and my friend (He’ll be DMing) plan to give hints of this by having the character become more erratic as the story continues, along with other hints. One of my ideas is that halfway through the campaign the players will find a corpse (of that NPC) with all of its identifying features cut off. However, my friend says that this will make it too obvious and they’ll figure out the twist immediately from this evidence. What do you think? How do I balance giving build for the twist and not revealing the whole thing?

Trish
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NielIGuess
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    Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. – Community Apr 26 '22 at 21:15
  • The problem is whether or not the "them finding a corpse" is a good idea – NielIGuess Apr 26 '22 at 21:16
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    If you don't want players to figure out the impersonation before a particular moment, what is the purpose of giving hints? – enkryptor Apr 26 '22 at 21:17
  • Oh, and Welcome to RPG.SE! Take the [tour] if you haven't already and see the [help] or ask us here in the comments (use @ to ping someone) if you need more guidance. Good Luck and Happy Gaming! – Someone_Evil Apr 26 '22 at 21:18
  • to have build up so it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere – NielIGuess Apr 26 '22 at 21:19
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    Re the close votes: I think this question should be answerable under Good Subjective. If there are additional info needed for this to be answered well (what the players are generally like?), getting those requests aired would be quite useful. FWIW we have a couple of similar questions: How can I foreshadow the identity of a villain without making it too obvious?, How to throw off suspicion for the big reveal in a way that it is not unfairly blindsiding them? – Someone_Evil Apr 26 '22 at 21:56
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    This question doesn't include enough context for us to accurately judge whether a corpse with no face would be too obvious a clue or not. After all, adventurers run into corpses all the time; the conclusions they draw from them depends heavily on the circumstances in which those corpses are encountered. I'm therefore voting to put this question on hold until that information is provided. – GMJoe Apr 26 '22 at 22:02
  • Finding a corpse would be a very surprising thing for the party – NielIGuess Apr 26 '22 at 22:33
  • @NielIGuess: Yes, but "a corpse with identifying features cut off" could be literally anyone; why would they suspect it to be the corpse of "living person they've occasionally interacted with"? Imagine that in anything resembling real life: "Hey, I found this corpse without a head, hands or feet, of someone that maybe kinda weighs about 150 lbs. , and was within a few inches of 6', with [insert a few generic other features like skin tone here] in a place I don't normally go. CLEARLY IT'S MY BOSS!" – ShadowRanger Apr 27 '22 at 18:46
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    The friend says that they could use a spell to make the body talk or they'd start investigating and get completely sidetracked – NielIGuess Apr 28 '22 at 13:21
  • @NielIGuess Well, yes, in D&D you can use spells to learn things from the souls of dead people. – order Apr 29 '22 at 01:24
  • There was a question how to prevent speak with dead... there: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/q/91602/30306 – Trish Nov 17 '22 at 15:36

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