This one is totally easy: Murder on Arcturus Station for the original Traveler rules. There's a fun story behind it too.
I forget exactly what year this was, but it was sometime around or after college. I'd moved away but was in Louisiana visiting my parents for Christmas. Now that I think about it, it was probably during college because I was there for a long time and once I graduated, I didn't get to take long vacations. I got a call from my old friend Michael (who ran a Villains and Vigilantes game that I swear I've talked about before but apparently haven't) that he had moved to New Orleans and wanted to know if I could visit and maybe game.
I was thrilled and it was cool to see some of the old gang who'd also moved to New Orleans. Anyway, Michael ran Murder on Arcturus Station for me and another member of his gaming group. The premise is: you're on a space station in the middle of nowhere. There's a big important guy Mr. Urshakan, who nobody likes and he's murdered. The space station security is great at busting up drunks, but not so much at solving murders, so they ask the PCs to help.
So, we had fun solving the mystery and I made a note to find a copy so I could see all of the details. And that's when I learned how really awesome the adventure is. You see, when we played, the killer was a labor leader Urshakan was blackmailing. But in the adventure, it could have been any of the ten or so suspects. The book's written so that the GM can pick whodunnit and how they did it. In each case, there's evidence and testimony and timelines so the adventure is never the same twice (unless you want it to be). It's really amazing work and ahead of its time. That is a drawback, however, as modern CSI fans will want to go for evidence that was undetectable when it was written.
Since then, I've run it:
* Once using Traveler for friends one weekend. Most of them weren't familiar with Traveler, but it didn't matter, because it's all about looking for clues and talking to the suspects. I used the same murderer that Michael had used.
* Once using The Babylon Project system. I had to swap out some of the aliens for Babylon 5 aliens, but it was fun. That time it was additionally challenging because one of the PCs was a P5 Telepath, and I had to prepare for how to handle the telepathic aspect. Fortunately, the TV show had already showed me how telepaths and the legal system interacted. In this case, I don't remember who I'd picked, largely because all of my memories of running it are based around the PCs interacting.
* Once using Shadowrun, replacing the space station with an oil platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. This time I really poured my heart into it, working out timelines for all of the suspects and who each of them suspected (or who they'd accuse). Even better, I had multiple overlapping murder plots. Urshakan was poisoned before he was stabbed and the PCs find a ticking bomb under his bed while going over the murder scene. I was almost thrown by one of our players, who had an almost psychic ability to solve mysteries with no evidence correctly identified one of the killers. Fortunately, the other PCs didn't really believe him (because "Played By Kelly" was a 20 pt Psych Lim in Champions) but looking back, they said "dammit, we should have paid attention to Kelly." It being Shadowrun, one of the PCs took a bribe from one of the killers to hide their involvement. AND the guy I considered to be the "real killer" skated because his crime was "get 10 people who hate my boss enough to kill him on the oil platform and one of them is sure to take the opportunity." (Actually, 11 people, if you count the PCs as a suspect, because Urshakan wasn't going to pay them for the job they'd done for him. Of course, one of the PCs' Plot Radar sensed that someone was going to murder Urshakan, so they stayed up all night in the bar in front of plenty of witnesses. It didn't clear the other PCs, but the head of station security really didn't think they'd have done it.)
* I'd consider running it again for some other system, but I think that my Shadowrun version of the adventure was the platonic ideal in terms of making it an interesting and complex mystery to solve. I just now had the idea of adapting it to Eclipse Phase, just to try to figure out how to do a good murder mystery in a world where just about everyone's minds are backed up and can be restored into new bodies trivially. Having Urshakan's consciousness around as a restored backup would add an interesting twist to the investigation. (Scribble, scribble, scribble)
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