RPG Mysteries

Here's a great article on playstyle.  Specifically, it talks about how to successfully run a mystery game, which is often believed by many RPGers to be unrunable as an RPG scenario.  It is my experience that that is not true; you can have great mystery scenarios, but you need to be a good GM who understands how to run one.  If your experience is more "traditional"-which unfortunately tends to run towards "railroad," then mystery scenario success will probably elude you, and your attempts to do so will probably crash and burn with frustration on both sides of the GM screen.

This article is better than my own ruminations on the subject, because I developed the ability to run them more as an art rather than as a skill; i.e., I never really consciously thought too much about how what I did worked.  This article spells it out in greater detail than I could, because it talks about things that I did more subconsciously rather than consciously, and it develops steps for success that I didn't always necessarily think of.  Although I've had a good time running and playing mysteries in the past, and feel like it's something that I'm capable of well enough, this article even gives me a bunch of great pointers that I can apply to make my mystery scenarios even better.

Due to the choice of source material that I choose to emulate, I actually am much more likely to run this types of thing than any other type of scenario, actually.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule