Yes! It was me all along!
A twist on murder mysteries and social deduction games
Social deduction/hidden role games equally fascinate and intimidate me.
Although they are generally categorized as board games or card games (as far as I know), those are experiences that rely heavily on the human factor. Mechanics scaffold and incentivize the main component of the game: the ability to read your friends, play with their psyche and, well, lie to their faces.
The game shines in the space shaped outside the rules (perhaps that is true for all games? Won’t get in that rabbit hole today, though), as it manifests through the push and pull of social interaction. That requires a very particular skill set (again, all games do, but that’s yet another rabbit hole I’ll avoid for now), one that I admire, in a sense, and I am not sure if I really possess.
I had my share of fun playing Resistance, or Mafia, or one of the many homebrewed varities of Werewolf with my friends, but keeping a poker face while blatantly lying about your intentions was always a struggle, if not straight up uncomfortable for me.
That didn’t stop me from playing with the concept.
Wait, it was me? Heck yeah, it was!
A few years ago, I had this idea of bringing the hidden role/traitor to tabletop RPGs. This is not new in any way (from the top of my head, I recall Uprising, the RPG in the universe of the Resistance, as an example), but I wanted to do some different with it.
What if the hidden role was not pre-determined? What if your actions and the mechanics build up to the conclusion of whom the traitor was? And even the traitor themselves didn’t know it beforehand? That way, up until the revelation, every player is lying and not lying at the same time. The Schrödinger Traitor.
Suddenly, the burden of holding a secret from your friends from the get-go is replaced by a slow burn of tension and suspicion.
Of course, simply getting to a specific point through play and, I don’t know, flipping a coin to determine if you are the traitor or not, feels frustrating to me. I like the idea of delegating some agency to chance, but an approach like that would rob you from the experience of feeling the accusation coming towards you and actually doing something about it while you have the chance (perhaps embracing it full-heartedly, perhaps rejecting it and playing to blame someone else).
Instead, we would need an increasing “treason score” that, upon reaching a certain threshold, would determine the traitor. This score should be partially hidden, akin to some variations of poker, or the dealer hand at blackjack, as to instigate the other players, but not give away your position entirely.
What if the hidden role was not pre-determined? Up until the revelation, every player is lying and not lying at the same time. The Schrödinger Traitor.
From zombies to socialites
My first take on this concept never left the stage of a few scribbles on my notepad. Well, I lie, I made a cover for it, but that’s kind of my standard procedure—making covers for my games even before I know if they will exist.
The pitch was a group of wrongdoers surviving through a medieval zombie apocalypse, having an emperor spy and potentially someone infected about to turn among them. It… made more sense in my head, I promise.
For various reasons, I never attempted to develop it. I knew it would require some clever mechanics to glue it all together, especially considering it would be a GM-less game (there’s no single person holding secret information and making the decisions on when and how to reveal them).
Skip to this year’s optional theme for the One-Page RPG Jam: Rumors & Secrets.
Oh, boy.
I had been listening to My First Dungeon’s actual play of Good Society, and my mind went straight to fancy diners and aristocrats backstabbing each other (shoutout to
, that’s the second game in a row that was inspired by listening to one of their episodes).But I felt like stepping it up a notch. A murder! I went full-on into the murder mystery tropes (and rewatched Clue for the vibes) and my pitch was born:
Invited to the opulent mansion of the enigmatic Mr. Shamus Morsley, you join a gathering of intriguing guests. Amidst whispered speculation, you dine in grandeur. Suddenly, a toast to a long life from Mr. Morsley is cut short by his abrupt death - a clear murder. Now, amidst the manor's darkened opulence, you must probe into each other's secrets, rumors, and motives. Can you uncover the murderer before the night fades?
That was the perfect scenario to dip my toes and experiment with the notion of an undetermined hidden role. It is a one-page game, so the stakes are lower, as I can give myself permission to take some more risks.
After 3 days of banging my head against a deck of cards, the game was done.
Liar, liar
The game builds upon the core mechanic of the Cheat/Bullsh*t card game. You play a card face-down, declare a rank. The next player does the same, but has to declare a rank exactly one higher than the previous one. At any time, a player can call BS on the rank announced. The last card played is revealed, and we check who was telling the truth.
I first added a narrative layer: every time you play a card, you choose another player to ask an investigative question to, and perhaps get to reveal some dark secrets and potential motives. The chosen player decides how they want to answer that, as they play their card on top of yours. If they are caught lying, they must reveal a Heart card from their hand (if they have one) and place it in front of them, representing that they might be guilty (they have “blood in their hands”—I know, very cheeky).
Now, here’s where things get interesting: you can win or lose by being the murderer. If you’re caught with 4 Heart cards, you were cornered and must reveal you are the murderer (“Ok! I confess! It was me!”). However, if you manage to secretly amass 5 Heart cards, you proudly announce you are the murderer (“Yes! It was me! Mwahahaha”). So you can decide to lean into the prospect of being found guilty, or you can avoid it.
But that’s not all: when the murderer is revealed, if another player has at least a pair of non-Heart cards in their hands, they declare themselves as a detective in disguise and may attempt to apprehend the murderer! (Funny detail: if another player has a trio, they declare themselves as a federal agent and outrank the detective to make the arrest. “We’ll take it from here, kid.”).
Choose your destiny
There’s more nuance to the rules, some special powers for cards you play in the open, and specificities on how a winner is determined. But I’ll let you check out the game if you’re interested (otherwise I’ll just transcribe the whole thing here).
The point is, by offering these avenues of development, you can see your character getting closer to the revelation of one of the possible roles, and you start to interpret it accordingly. And you make strategic choices to support your claim. If you have a pair and another player has 3 Heart cards already in the open, do you push them to be the murderer so that you can make an arrest? Should you try to get a trio, just to be safe?
Perhaps I’m over-analyzing a simple one-page RPG, but this approach to character development as a part of a somewhat competitive GM-less RPG really got my gears turning. It is an experiment, and there’s a possibility it will break into a thousand parts. Or maybe not, and I could turn it into an expanded version in the future.
Murder at Morsley Manor is available today on my itch page. Go give it a look. (And here is a casual reminder that my patrons get all my releases for free).
Know of any other games that explore this concept? I’d love to know about them!
Would love to see how this works. I’ve always hated Mafia and other games of deception, but a game where you could be the killer and not know it sounds like it could be a fun.
I love mining board games for hidden traitor mechanics.
Normally, Schrödinger’s traitor is unsatisfying in those, though. Maybe because it’s at the very end of very precise games like Cluedo. RPGs have always been better at the idea of quantum states and nonlinear storytelling.
Great read!