Interrogations & Graveyards

The first block of Mystery Teens is nearing completion. Everything you can see here can be lifted up to gaze at the underbelly beneath - Trees, river pieces, houses, graves.

Interrogations

On top of opening envelopes, and opening up bits of the scenery, everyone will have some slots during the day when they can drag in any character in the game for full interview in person. You can ask any question you want, it's full role-play. There'll be a special interview room set up, with a big light-bulb to shine in their face.

I will play every suspect, using a variety of wigs.

The 10 big questions

I'm hoping to put tickets on sale for Mystery Teens this week or the next. Here's how signing up for this thing will work. The Eventbrite page will have 10 mysteries. Pick one:

• The central Scooby-Doo mystery. You've just walked into school on a perfectly ordinary morning morning to find every student but you has disappeared. What happened to them?
• A cop drama, working the other side of the same case as the Lovelyville P.D.
• An Indiana Jones search for lost treasure in the ancient ruins below the town
• A Heist caper where you have to figure out where the Maltese Diamond is and how to steal it without getting caught
• A Phoenix Wright courtroom battle. One of you plays the Prosecution, one plays the Defense - you both have to uncover the facts of a murder and then twist them to get the verdict you want in a live court scene
• A Film Noir mystery where you play the main suspect in the courtroom mystery above - a travelling salesman who gets in over their head and uncovers a web of corruption
• An X-Files/Twin Peaks mystery about FBI Agents who fall into supernatural chaos - one believer, one skeptic
• A kinda lovecraftian Pans Labyrinth thing where you play a child who starts falling out of reality and has to solve strange riddles to get back
• A classic intriguing Sherlock Holmes case where you play a monkey detective who can only talk by holding up signs
• A Tintin mystery where you play a boy reporter thwarting a gang of crooks

Each of these will have a price and a recommended number of players. I'm thinking that you just buy the mystery straight-out instead of buying individual tickets, so you can bring more or less than the recommended number of players if you'd like. That price will include everything you want to solve a mystery: Food (massive amounts of coffee and donuts for the cops, of course) interviews (more on that later), whiteboards, maps, big corkboards with photographs of suspects and bits of string showing their relationships. I want to provide everything you need to replicate the Detective chic of Rust's Shed from True Detective.

Once you sign up you'll get a package in the mail with all your secret documents. Everyone gets a dash of background info, rumors and news articles to start them off, and their own personal mystery, distinct from the group one. Bring that stuff on the day, and you're set.

Mystery Teens

In about 7 weeks I'm going to run Mystery Teens, a Megagame about solving weird mysteries in a small town. If you sign up, I'll give you a mystery, and plonk you down in the middle of town to solve it. I'm going to make an entire paper town, with an amusement park, dark woods, a graveyard, an abandoned mansion, suburbs and cars, the whole lot. You'll solve mysteries by going out into town and investigating. It's totally self-directed, and you can investigate any place that takes your fancy.

Here's how it works. You're snooping around and you find one Old Man Herring was at the crime scene on the night of the murder. You can look up his address in the directory...

...and head over there.

From here, you have a few choices. Let's say you do the basic - knock on the door, see if anyone's home, and ask him what he's up to. You do that by opening the envelope in front of the house.

Seems like a prime suspect. From here you could check his alibi by looking up the local cemetery - but if you want to go further here, you can sneak into his house and look for clues. You do this by actually opening up the house itself.

Inside every one of these houses will be physical clues and evidence.

You will be able to search almost any object in the game like this. Say you want to search the boot of his car:

The room will be full of tables, each one a block of town filled with houses and props like this. Every one of these cute little paper props will pop open to reveal filthy, horrifying secrets hidden within. The paper houses, the cardboard graves - they all hide secrets.

You'll sign up to solve a certain mystery with 1-7 of your friends, and spend the time snooping around this town while everyone else is hot on the trail of their own case, At the end, all of these mysteries will explode together in a climactic Denouement where you reveal the answer - or answer wrong, and see the villain get away laughing. 

I'll keep updating this blog and the facebook group with more details and snapshots of more of the buildings. I'm planning to put tickets on sale this week or the next. 

The Megagame

Watch The Skies 2 just happened in the UK, and I realized I never posted about the aftermath of our own Megagame event in Brisbane. It was amazing! Click any of these images to make them bigger.

The Russian team, and the aliens shouting "Worms! Worms! Worms!"

Alien Documents

The News and the game map

The war room

The Aliens successfully steal the world's supply of coffee. Later, they gifted it to France.

Ace Reporter Gordy Higgins personally challenges the aliens to single combat, and is abducted.

You can see more on our facebook page. This game went so well that I'm going to run another megagame of my own design in about a month and a half. It's inspired by Scooby Doo, Twin Peaks, and the Megagame "At Right Angles to Reality". Here's a sneak preview of one of the locations:

 More details soon!