Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs: debrief

If you tell your players they're in a murder mystery, but the murder doesn't occur until halfway through the session, you're going to have some problems. I ran Slow Sleigh the other night and it could have gone better. Here's some thoughts. what?First, some facts. I had 6 players. I made all of them pick from the backgrounds supplied in the book. Players included my brother, who's played troika once before one guy from my biweekly B2 game who is an extremely committed chaos-monger two strangers roughly my age who had never played troika before A 12 year old boy and his mum. I ran it as a one-shot lasting about 3 and a half hours. I gave a brief lowdown -- the planet the players were on; the fact that this is a murder mystery investigation module; and that the trip is meant to last 72 hours. I started by running the game in 1-hour 'turns', but quickly started to skip large tracts of time because we were at risk of ending the session without the first murder occurring. Overall it was…