Writing Chapters
In the Lead-Up and the Investigation phases, you will take turns writing chapters. To write a chapter, you narrate the next part of the story in order to create or update the clues in the journal. In the Lead-Up, you’re primarily creating new clues, and in the Investigation, you’re updating the existing clues with new information.
Each chapter has a focus character. In the Lead-Up, the focus character is the suspect that the killer is currently visiting. In the Investigation, the focus character is the suspect that the sleuth is adjacent to. The focus character must be involved in the scene in some way.
You must also involve a number of suspects equal to the rank of the card drawn that round. This makes sure that all of the suspects get involved with one another and builds a messier situation moving forward. The suspects included don’t need to be directly involved, e.g. having a conversation with one another, but they do need to come up in some way. For example, if you drew a 3, you could write a chapter about 2 suspects of your choice gossiping about your focus character.
When writing your chapter, start by simply describing a situation the suspects are getting themselves into. You can write a chapter that’s as specific as a single conversation between characters, or as far reaching as a character traveling to a new city and getting up to some sort of hijinks.
Narrating or Roleplaying
Each chapter, you can choose to simply narrate the action, or get other players involved by casting them as the various characters you’ve chosen and acting it out to see what happens. Either way, keep your chapters brief! You don’t have to come up with some complex situation or fill every single chapter with loads of details. It’s good to start with either an idea of characters you want to see interact (‘I want to show Chester and Miss Claretta together’) or a specific clue you want to add to the journal (‘I want a documented instance of Gerry being lactose intolerant’) and see where it takes you.
When narrating a chapter, you have final say over what happens, so choose that option if you have something specific in mind. If you want other people’s ideas, set up a scene to get more players involved. The best games have a healthy mix of narrated and roleplayed chapters.
The Table of Contents
Included in the playkit is a sheet called the Table of Contents. It’s wholly optional but can be a lot of fun to add to as well as look back on well after the game completes. To use the table of contents, simply give each chapter a name after it concludes. It’s a great way to emphasize the tone you’ve set for your story; a more silly murder mystery might have very pun-based chapter names, whereas a more serious one might have grave and foreboding names.