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Willa Magland

Crafting a Diy Murder Mystery

Posted Feb 25, 2024

Note: this is another draft that got posted with the migration. Not gonna update it further, just leave it as-is.

For my most recent birthday, I did what I'd been wanting to do for a while: to throw a Murder Mystery party! I had never done anything like it before, and just to add to the stress of it all, I decided to write my own mystery rather than using one of the pre-prepared kits you can get online. It turned out to be really fun, and I thought I would write out how exactly I put the mystery together for anyone else who is considering hosting.

Worldbuilding

Characters

The first subject I had to tackle was how many guests, and therefore, suspects, I thought I could handle. I ended up having 10 guests total, which was a lot of work when planning and coordinating the mystery.

Some things you may want to think about when crafting your guest list might be:

Archetypes and Personality

From the beginning, I knew my mystery would take place in a 1920-30s US city, so I was able to assign my characters to different tropes that fit their personality. My bubbly, extroverted friend was a persuasive salesperson, while my attentive friend was a silent, cool-blooded mistress of mystery, a real Femme Fatale. There are boundless numbers of archetypes to choose from.

Once you have in mind who and how your characters will be, start connecting them. Some questions you might ask are:

Nearly every character should be part of this web of information, and it should make sense given their background.[1] The News Reporter character in my mystery knew the town's history, while my denim-wearing cargo man knew all about the secret smuggling of alcohol going on in the city.

Choosing a Murderer

I wasn't clear on who I wanted to play my murderer as I was forming my characters. I even switched between three suspects before I landed on the one that felt right, and made the most sense. It was fun going into it not knowing who the murderer would be, and having to figure out: who had the opportunity? what was their motive? did they do it solo, or did they have an accomplice?

In my mystery, I had three big candidates: The victim's wife (Double Indemnity), their daughter (revenge for a neglectful childhood), and the housekeeper (undecided). As I developed the former two's characters, I realized that it was only the housekeeper that would have had sufficient time to commit the murder, as the wife would be with some other friends, and the daughter would be hosting a party. So I ended up giving the housekeeper a family-fueled motive around a murder committed by the victim's great-grandfather a hundred years earlier.

Environment

The environment my mystery took place in took shape as I fleshed out the characters. The victim had an extremely successful casino business, so naturally, the one in town was the central hub for socialization. Since the motive behind the murder lay in a century-old family feud, the history behind the town's settlement was important for solving the mystery, hence the role of a town-reporter.

However you craft your environment, it should work to support and add to your story, not hinder it.

Timeline

Once you have all this information, you can start laying out the happenings in a sort of timeline. I used index cards and arranged them on a whiteboard for this, but there are also a lot of online timeline-making tools out there.

For my mystery, the murder took place the night before the party, so I had to figure out the entire timeline of that day. I started off with what I knew: that the victim was murdered in their mansion sometime in the evening. I also knew that character x threw a large house party. From here I could decide who had been seen at the party, who hadn't, what people had been doing earlier in the day, etc.

Materials

These are the things I included in my guests' character packets (manila envelopes).

Game Info and Rules

A basic document on how the game will work. Here's mine.

Character Sheets

Each of my guests received a 2-3 page printout about their character, seperated into three sections: Basic Info (name, age, employment), Biography, People You Know (with basic bios), The Night Before (outlining where their character had been the night of the murder / what they knew), and Key Points (summary, the important stuff that matters). The character sheets don't have to be this complicated, I just went overboard.

Notebooks

These are just small, paper notebooks I got online for $9. Each one included their character's Key Points, and the tasks they had to complete (see Game Mechanics). It was also a place for them to take notes on any information they come across during the game.

Other Things

Game Mechanics

Being left to my own devices, I had to figure out how the game was going to play out. Here are some obstacles I needed to solve:

  1. Having gone a little overboard on the story, I needed to come up with a way that would ensure the mystery's resolution by the end of the night.
  2. In the same vain, people had schedules! How was I going to pace the evening?
  3. Not all of my guests knew each other, so it was important to have some kind of way to break the ice.

I solved these problems with a couple of self-made game mechanics that really helped run things smoothly.

Tasks

In order to give the guests something to do, and to get them talking to each other, in that small paper notebook everyone recieved were 4-5 tasks they had to accomplish. This mostly included interrogating the other guests for information (find out where x was last night after the party!), but also included fun stuff, like making the ultimate mocktail, or taking selfies with the group.

Revelations

This mechanic was the most helpful for both pacing, and ensuring that the murderer was revealed at the end. Before the party, I prepared a "revelation" for each guest. This consisted of a single piece of information written on a card inside an envelope. These were laid out in a grid on a separate table.

I knew the party would last approximately 3 hours, so divided by ~10 guests, there would be one revelation every 15-20 minutes. This way, the game would run in rounds: 15 minutes of mingling and completing tasks, then the group would gather and choose a guest to receive their revelation. The chosen guest, along with one other person picked at random[2:1], would open the envelope in private, then re-join the group for another round of mingling.

Something you might want to consider is leaving a blank revelation for the end that you can fill in with whatever information you feel the group might need as the night unfolds.

The revelations I used were character-specific, such as, "Your lover is not who they say they are," or, for the police officer, "The autopsy shows wide knife-like puncture wounds."

Conclusion

That's pretty much it! The party went really well, and everyone had a lot of fun getting into it. It was far from perfect, and I think in the future I'd definitely simplify the mystery and characters (since making it all fit together was sooo much work), but it turned out great. I couldn't have done it without the help of my friend, who played as a second all-knowning butler and helped set things up and keep things on track. I'll definitely be throwing one again!

  1. To mix things up, I had a character outside of this social loop who doubled as

    1. A primary suspect (red herring)
    2. An outside source of vital information (in this case, a famous geologist that could identify a cursed crystal)
    ↩ī¸Ž

  2. I assigned a playing card to each character, and placed it in their character packets. This made picking random characters easier, as someone would simply draw a card from a separate deck. ↩ī¸Ž ↩ī¸Ž

Current Status ☕

a little dancing guy