Murder Mansion
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A Werewolf-Cluedo halfbreed. This game is rather heavy on information concealment and would probably work best in a online environment.
Welcome to Murder Mansion! The Mayor has invited the members of the Villager, Mafia and Werewolf families for a masquerade ball in his sumptuous mansion. However, once they are there, the Mayor is nowhere to be seen and the doors are locked! Who will survive this night of murder?
Each player has a Family and a secret Mission. The game starts at 6 PM and ends at 6 AM.
Each hour (turn), a player may perform one action:
- Move to another room of the house (they will be seen by any players they move past)
- Kill a player in your room (All players in the room except the killed one must agree to kill a person; keeps player from acting this turn before killing them)
- Investigate a body (discover its true family and time at which they were murdered)
- Intercept a player (You grab the player if they pass you and stop them from moving further)
- Perform an action (Players must be alone to do this; may be required of certain Missions)
The 11 rooms are set in this manner:
Second Floor (connects to Master Bedroom, Mistress Bedroom, Library)
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Main Foyer (connects to Kitchens, Dining Hall, Office)
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Basement (connects to Pantry, Dungeons)
The Office has a passage to the Library, and the Kitchens have a small set of stairs leading to the Pantry.
At the end of the game, successful Missions count +1, and dead members count -1. The family with the highest score wins. -
This is great! I'd vastly prefer it to traditional Werewolf. It sounds like it might be easiest to run as an email-based game with a GM/officiator to whom you send all your moves? Would this work with simultaneous turns? I'm thinking of how information about players moved past / interception would work; maybe actions are simply processed in the order in which they are received.
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Funnily enough, I've just finished running a game with a similar thrust. It was a great success, although somewhat hampered by lack of activity.
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Turns are simultaneous. You get the information on who you passed by or intercepted when you're done. Killing has priority over all other actions, of course.
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I think all the actions would need a clear sequence of priority, so that critical moments (I take the "set fire to curtains while nobody's looking" action, but Professor Plum enters the room at the same time) are unambiguous.
You could maybe run this as a tabletop game using Werewolf's "open your eyes" mechanic. Rather than day and night, the GM would cycle through each room in sequence ("Everyone in the library open your eyes..."). You could either rejig the action system and have players simply miming their chosen action at that point (murdering perhaps only being possible if the GM noted that you picked up a weapon earlier in the game), or give everyone a set of cards ("Move to Library", "Move to Kitchen", "Perform secret action", "Kill the player I point at", etc.), and they pick one to reveal at the start of their room's "open your eyes" phase.
Nice game, incidentally, Josh. What was the ghosts' theme? (And did the ghost players get to know the theme before picking a character?) And did the rules get a final writeup anywhere? -
Hm, maybe not at this level of complexity, but a werewolf-like secret-dealing game where actions are done by cards would be interesting. Deal an action card to the judge, the judge deals the action card back with a result card.
I'll probably prototype this in PHP or Flash + Oregano at some point i nthe future. -
Nice game, incidentally, Josh. What was the ghosts' theme? (And did the ghost players get to know the theme before picking a character?) And did the rules get a final writeup anywhere?
Each ghost had a separate theme based, to some extent, on literature - one had to reference the title of a Shakespeare play in every suggestion (lasted 6 days), one had to reference the title of a Grimm fairy tale (lasted three days), one had to reference the subtitle of an Enid Blyton Famous Five book (he only managed to get off one suggestion before the game ended, however). The character theme was just "Victorian" - it was then up to me to wrap it into the story somehow.
The rules weren't actually changed after the draft in that first post, but they're due a revision before we play again. When that happens, I'll post them up here.
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