Enhanced Murder Mystery

Knowing that I love event planning, in August 2023, a friend asked if I would play host to a murder mystery birthday party held at her house. She had purchased a pre-made party template online with a set story, characters, timeline and clues. Excellent.

Unfortunately for me, the murder mystery was set in a fictional snowed-in ski chalet, and my friend's birthday was in September. One of the hottest Septembers on record in Ireland. So getting the guests into a wintery mood was going to be a challenge.

I started out by reviewing all of the media sent over by the murder mystery story creators, Freeform Games. They provide an extremely comprehensive guide to each murder mystery package, including fully fleshed-out character backgrounds and motives, relationships, items and abilities. I felt that the content was excellent, but the plaintext presentation of some of the material could be improved.

Taking advantage of the hard work of other designers, I started out by sending e-invites to the guest list using a ski-themed greenvelope.com template.

From past experience, guests showing up to an event don't want to, and won't, read an entire essay before the event starts, so reducing information overload was essential to make sure that necessary clues wouldn't be missed. I reformatted the character guides (2+ A4 pages of text) to be more readable, highlighting key information that particular characters needed to know and focus on.

In prior murder mystery events where character location in a fictional setting has been important, I have found that guests can struggle to relate information to a location without a reference. Having read through all of the provided guidelines, I grabbed floor plans of a real holiday rental ski chalet, renamed the rooms, and printed these out on A3 paper so guests could refer to the map as needed throughout the night.

The items the characters were meant to use were quite basic - a diary, a set of account books, a pen, a portrait. These were included in the game pack as printable rectangles on paper. I redesigned the items so that guests could have a more tactile experience, and have more fun bartering and stealing physical items from each other.

The clues, secrets and abilities were also printed paper scraps. I translated these to a playing-card format, colour-coded based on item type. I felt this would be easier for guests to distinguish at a glance, instead of rummaging through several pieces of identical paper.

Midway through the event, an established character dies, and survivors are given individual tasks to carry out in response to the death. Again, this was originally designed as a paper slip, but I reimagined these tasks as memorial cards for the departed character.

Finally, and because I wasn't able to stop myself, I changed the plaintext name badges. I wanted to play with the ski theme as much as possible, so ordered cheap lanyards from Amazon, and designed ski passes with character names to fit into them.

Combining the revamped event pack with some off-season snowflake decorations and tablecloths hung outside the windows to give the appearance of being snowed in, we were ready to go.

As it turns out, the real victim of this murder mystery event was my printer. RIP Brother.

[Some items can not be shown due to copyright - Freeform Games]