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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?

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    \$\begingroup\$ 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. \$\endgroup\$
    – Community Bot
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 21:15
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    \$\begingroup\$ If you don't want players to figure out the impersonation before a particular moment, what is the purpose of giving hints? \$\endgroup\$
    – enkryptor
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 21:17
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    \$\begingroup\$ 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? \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil ♦
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 21:56
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    \$\begingroup\$ 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. \$\endgroup\$
    – GMJoe
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 22:02
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    \$\begingroup\$ The friend says that they could use a spell to make the body talk or they'd start investigating and get completely sidetracked \$\endgroup\$
    – NielIGuess
    Commented Apr 28, 2022 at 13:21

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