That was a fun game. Having the backroom chat on discord so we could still play along with the mystery after being eliminated was a cool idea.

My role as a miller actually threw my off a little bit in figuring out the mafia theme, because I thought that there was a specific connection there. But seeing the roles and that Rokk and I were mirrored, it makes perfect sense to me now.

Side Note: As someone who both survived to the end and solved one of the mysteries, I feel like won this game twice over.

Does that mean I have to kill you twice?

It's the only way to be sure.

I felt if anyone was going to be Moriarity, it was you.

*looks over at a game and progress* And the circle keeps spinning.


The Town cloak / Miller were essentially moot considering the one-shot natures.
I’m, honestly, still puzzled why the Mafia had Cop as a one-shot over something protective or misdirecting considering the powers we faced.

I am truly disappointed that I missed out on the backroom chat. I’m happy my teammates won but they’ll tell you I was more invested in the mystery aspect than the Mafia Game (which backfired when I discovered we could search for clues in the Day Thread and it seemed scummy).

You can only win once! But yes, you earned your victory in two ways. Grinner also earned his victory twice by solving two mysteries! Excellent work to all the winners!

Great game, lots of effort involved, and very interesting to watch everything unfold.

Good job adamical

I hate to be that guy, especially seeing as you put so much heart and work into this, and you’re surely tired, but...

...Sequel?

He and I had talked about co-hosting some games - being I need a mailbox, I mean partner - but I would not stand in the way of a sequel.

Ha. Maybe next Christmas.

This was actually a lot more work than I remembered - but this game also suffered from quite a bit of scope creep. I originally was just going to run a normal mafia game, and then it expanded. I decided on everyone being trackers as the initial gimmick, to kind of undermine the power claim meta that's been happening lately. I knew I wanted a gimmick Day 1 to distract from our normal Day 1 bickering. At first I was going to copy Vlad's artifact giveaway, but I was afraid that would lead to like a Day 1 mass claim and I didn't want the tracking gimmick to come out that early.

That led me to the idea of separate rooms and only being able to target people in your room. Naturally that led to the idea of a large house/mansion, and what happens when you get a bunch of detectives in a mansion? And it didn't seem right to have a detective mafia unless there was a murder mystery that needed to be solved. That meant I needed to create a mystery, and a bunch of clues to distribute. Then I wanted to also host a backroom on Discord.

And obviously having a request game with characters from so many different franchises, many of which I wasn't familiar with, took a lot of time to try and familiarize myself and bring just a touch of each character's flavor into the game.

But yea, this was originally just going to be a pretty plain jane mafia game.

I want to thank Girathon for letting me bounce ideas off him, too. He really helped shape a lot of the setup, I think the game would have been significantly less interesting without his input.

But yea, I don't know about a direct sequel. I put pretty much all of my ideas into this one; I don't think I have much left to say with regards to a detective mafia.

Oh, and as for the mailbox, this one slammed it. I used up like 300 PMs on this one. I don't even know how that happened.

I want to say truly, thank you all for the kind words, it means a lot to me. I really did put a ton of work into this one so I'm really glad that you guys had fun! I know I had a lot of fun writing it and running it.

Oh, and the writeup titles - I think one or two of you mentioned them at one point (Darq?).

They were mostly just funny little puns, but there were a couple of clues buried in there too.

Night 1: Not-So Silent Night
Something of a pun, but also drawing attention to Clouseau and Velma's slapstick in the kitchen.

Night 2: Three French Hens
The three referred to the three deaths, the Hen was a reference to how Vlad got turned into a chicken (which happened in the comic Quebbster requested), and French was obviously a clue to Dupin

Night 3: Jinkie Bells
This was just a pun on Velma being the one to die.

Night 4: Over the hills of snow
This was I think the most insightful clue but I don't know that anyone got it. Rokk was the mafia don, playing Sherlock the collective cultural image. He has a hat, and the mafia theme was hats. "Over the hills of snow" is from Frosty the Snowman, a story about a snowman brought to life by a magical hat who at the end of the song runs away. I almost titled this night "There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found" but that felt a little too on the nose. Also, Rokk was nightkilled by Harry Dresden, so the "magic" was also referring to the wizard killing Rokk. It made sense in my head at the time.

Night 5: Down through the chimney
Obviously I was more blatantly alluding to The Murders in the Rue Morgue at this point, and I think it helped put the pieces together for the host's identity.

Day 6 Event: There'll be parties for hosting
A pun on solving the host's identity, of course, but also a hint as to the overall scenario - that the murder was staged, and none of the deaths were real deaths, and that this was just a holiday party thrown by a detective for other detectives.

Night 6: He sees you when you're sleeping
Both a pun n the fact that Encyclopedia Brown was napping in the library, but also a reference to the fact that the host was watching all of the players in the game, hence the cameras. It was a clue to the scenario.

Night 7: And so it continued both day and night
This one wasn't actually that clever at all. I was referencing the sun rising in the East at this point analogous to the Christmas star that guided the shepherds, but really it was a meta-commentary that maybe the game had gone on a touch too long to hold everyone's interest.

Night 8: There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of old glories
The mysteries had been solved at this point, so this was a callback to the Day 6 Event writeup. The ghost stories referenced the fact that the murder was faked and the tales of old glories was looking forward to what I knew would be a very short day phase. I echoed the "Most Wonderful Time of the Year" in the final writeup, with the Solstice being Dupin's happiest season of all.

Endgame: God rest ye merry gentlemen; Let nothing you dismay!
And of course the last one references one of my favorite seasonal songs. In this case, it's telling the players to rest and relax, the game is over; and let nothing dismay you, because all the murder and mayhem was just a party trick.

Anyway. I had fun coming up with titles. Some of the writeups were done early but still got posted late because I was working on the title.

Here's my contemporaneous notes on the game if anyone wants to see them:

Day 1: My rooms diversion hasn’t sparked as much discussion as I hoped; only a couple of players wanted to talk strategy. Plan was to get some gameplay on Day 1 without arguing about voting someone out.

Night 1: Wade makes an extremely clever play with his one shot triple CMD. He moves to a room with three others, and makes them all target themselves in a circle. He basically assured he couldn’t be killed or messed with and also if one of those three was a killer he’d have them dead to rights. Great play that I didn’t anticipate.
Also, I love the mental image of him offering Encyclopedia Brown 10 times his normal fee. $2.50. LOL.
Mafia dragged their feet on getting actions in which made it hard to open the game on time. They went ahead and used their no kill, which honestly is not a bad choice for them since a vote elimination is inevitable Day 2.

Day 2: Vlad theorizes that adamical is still alive. That’s an excellent theory. He then wants to try voting me out. Right track, wrong train, but I like where he’s going. I’m hoping players will decide to share their clues.
Some clue talk gets going, and people are starting to realize there’s a mystery. I hope they don’t get too mad that the mystery is really all flavor on top of a mafia game.
DestructoBoy gets some votes for unclear reasons, and his claim is a little strange, but hellsmurf gives pretty much nothing and is eliminated.

Night 2: Mr Stranger almost uses his one shot vig on Darq, who is town. Lucky for town, he decides not to. Unlucky for Mr Stranger, the SK decides to take him out. Morpheousdr3am3r decides to use his one shot vig on DestructoBoy. Overall, that’s bad news for town; neither of their one-shot kills hits scum.
About half of the mafia got town attention. Unfortunately for them, they picked someone who hadn’t talked at all the last phase and got tracked to make the kill. They settled on vlad kind of last minute, before that they were leaning towards Roy or Jackofhearts because they were afraid Mystery Inc. would be a competing mafia.
Also, this is killing my inbox. Also, I feel bad about opening the game late consistently. Leaving only an hour to resolve actions and do the writeup was too ambitious.

Day 3: I feel kind of bad for the mafia. Hellsmurf didn’t mount a defense at all, and Quebbster had real life happening that meant he couldn’t participate. The mafia would be in a much stronger position if they had avoided the vote elimination on either Day 2 or Day 3, but they are in a bit of a tight spot now. They still have 5 members though which isn’t unheard of for a mafia to start with in a 20 player game, and the town has lost a lot of its abilities.

Night 3: The mafia used the guide to kill Jackofhearts2005, but ironically they were the only ones to target him this night, so they didn’t actually need it. Probably a good thing they did though because he was copping Space Jawa. Unfortunately, they chose not to use the untrackable kill and so michiganj24 got tracked.

Day 4: viciousbuddha comes out swinging and accusing Cuban Vader of killing jackofhearts. I like it. I actually went to check and make sure I sent him the correct results. Unfortunately, K-Ness tracked Cuban Vader, and saw him actually targeting killingjoke, which is going to implicate killingjoke101. I expect the mass tracker claim to come out today after the day starts. I hope the players like it and don’t mutiny. This is probably bad news for either the SK or the mafia though.

Well, the mass tracker claim came out and several people seemed unperturbed. I think many had come to that conclusion already, and the idea didn’t cause mass anger, so that’s fun. They caught michiganj24 in the act, and he got voted out. He had a work emergency pile up and so wasn’t able to defend himself. The mafia’s real problem this game was getting bamboozled by real life and not being able to participate as much as planned. I was afraid the mafia would curbstomp the town and the town would have legit grievances about being underpowered but it’s really going the other way.

I liked the role play aspect of looking for clues but the players have gotten too focused on that and are ignoring the fact that several players haven’t shared their clues, even though that’s essentially what hellsmurf got voted out for. I’m slightly annoyed because several key clues to the host’s identity and the murder are being hoarded by certain players and no one has called them on it. They’re too focused on the mafia game and not the mystery, which I guess is fair since it is a mafia game.

Night 4: Rokk had real life reasons he had to drop out, but it turned out the SK went for Rokk so I didn’t have to find a replacement. The mafia last minute decided to take out K-Ness instead of Darq. I felt bad for K-Ness, he was playing well. I think he was interpreted as too much of a threat to Rokk. Since the SK’s kill was untrackable, I went for Harry Dresden’s blending potion to have them fade out.

Day 5: The votes today are nuts and also from my perspective the most entertaining. It looks like the SK is going to get the boot early on, but Darq gets focused on theme. He’s right about the hat theme, of course. Charlie Chan was actually pretty tough to decide where he fits in with the theme. I wasn’t familiar with him and did research. This version is specifically based on Warner Oland. He does wear a hat, but not religiously like my mafia characters do. Eddie Valiant for example has a hat on pretty much the entire movie. I heavily researched these characters; I watched some Angel, Lucifer, Millionaire Detective, and Detective Conan, and read A Study in Emerald, the first Encyclopedia Brown book, and Valhalla album 11. Shel said she wanted to be Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan, so I looked up the best Warner Oland Charlie Chan film. It’s pretty much universally agreed to be Charlie Chan at the Opera. Go watch the trailer; he doesn’t wear a hat at all. Go watch the film; he’s only wearing a hat for a few minutes when he’s outside toward the beginning. Also, the opera is pretty much the closest setting I could find at a masquerade ball; would Charlie Chan wear his hat at a formal affair like this? No way. Detective Pikachu, Detective Chimp, Inspector Clouseau all definitely would. Odin wears his throughout his entire story. So that was the determining factor. I did briefly consider making him neutral, but in the end I decided against it. Harry Dresden has a much better reason to be neutral. There’s my defense of making Charlie Chan town when the mafia theme is hats. I can understand why people don’t like that decision though.
End of day: WTF. I was prepared with voteout writeups for Grinner or viciousbuddha, and then they all switch to Wade last second and I have no idea how to write him out.

Night 5: Cuban Vader decides to ask for an art cop 2 hours before actions are due. Turns out he died tonight so I get an extension. After tonight it’s 5 town, 3 mafia, and 1 SK, so not a lot of room for error on the town’s part, but Roy and Grinner both essentially have extra lives, so the town is still in a fairly good spot, as long as they don’t vote out town again for no good reason.
I got a couple of pretty good guesses for the identity of the host. Fantomas, Hercule Poirot (both noticing the French connection) and Lionel Twain (for the similar scenario as Murder By Death). Some other ideas are thrown around and not submitted.

Day 6: I’m slightly surprised they’re thinking Inspector Gadget when someone already claimed Eddie Valiant.
Viciousbuddha and Grinner solved the first mystery! Their relevant posts!

VB:And the chimney is none other than from
The murder of the rule mourge!
Edgar Allen poe short that is one of the very first detective stories. Man I almost sent that in last night too. The killer used an orangutans for the kills

Grinner:
Green glasses and the broken nail are Dupin from Murder in the Rue Morgue, as well as the orangutan and chimney murder last night.
AND Dupin smokes a Meerschaum pipe.
And he isn't American.
And is pretty much the archetypal father of all of us murder mystery detectives…
Vote: C. Auguste Dupin as our host
Dupin met the narrator of his stories searching for a rare manuscript in an obscure library, and is a fan of hieroglyphics. He is a knight in the French Legion of Honor.
Vlad on Discord: "Laying them out on the table, a drawing was on the sheets; it almost looked like handprints, but none of the detectives’ hands matched when they overlaid their fingers. One detective’s hands were closer than the rest, however." This was a clue about the orangutan from murders in the Rue Morgue, yes?

Vlad also picked up on the handprints clue in the backroom, I think he was the only one to do that. Very nicely done.

The tracking made identifying the killer by process of elimination too easy, so the untrackable kill didn’t matter. I wondered if that sort of thing might happen late game. A lot of people keep talking about how the mafia got fake claims, which is hilarious. Rokk roleplayed his second choice claim, but that was about it. Darq made the same point, there weren’t many fake claims. Also interesting that people are so concerned about Shaggy and Velma both being here, I made it clear that it was a request based game.

Mafia is upset about all the tracking and not having a way to evade it. The funny thing is, they did have very powerful ways to evade it, but they didn’t use the most powerful one and squandered the other two. I think if anything the game was stacked in the mafia’s favor. Also the game isn’t even close to over; a town win is not at all assured. I don’t think it’s all the tracking that did them in, it’s the lack of participation. 2 of the 3 remaining mafia are the two lowest posting players still in the game; the only ones below them are other mafia and the players who died Night 2 (and it’s now Day 6). StormCrawler got voted out today, and has by far the lowest number of posts of still living players. Except for Rokk and Jawa, the town would have done pretty well just voting out the lowest poster.

Night 6: Mafia was unhappy with everybody tracking, but it works in their favor tonight if they don’t mess up in the day. Both SK and mafia targeted Darq for kills, but neither got caught. Morph however targeted Darq for tracking, and got caught, and has admitted to killing previously. I’d say there’s a good chance if the mafia and SK play their hands well that Morph gets framed for Darq’s murder. That might sink the town, actually. Very interesting. Viciousbuddha actually has a pretty great chance if he survives the day but he might get eliminated today as well.

Day 7: So Morph did end up going down for targeting Darq. He didn’t seem to put up too much of a fight, so there wasn’t much consideration of who else to vote for. They also didn’t talk about the murder mystery at all today.

Night 7: Well, the mafia takes out one of Grinner’s double lives, and both the mafia and the SK are tracked targeting Grinner.

Day 8: The SK got out early and said Grinner’s target, sort of proving he tracked him successfully. No votes are out yet, though. Viciousbuddha has played well and has a legit shot at an SK victory. No one has voted yet, which is interesting since older votes trump newer votes.
Post 1048, Roy broken clocks viciousbuddha by misunderstanding his action claims. Roy is right in that VB is the SK, but he thinks the track Jackofhearts action had a result of Mr Stranger, when VB was saying he tracked JoH N1 and targeted Mr Stranger N2. I would hate to see VB go out on a broken clock. But Grinner figured it out, we’ll see which way it goes.
In the end, VB got voted out, which is great news for mafia. As long as the don’t target Roy they’re golden.

Night 8: The game hinges on who the mafia targets. They first lean toward Grinner, then to Roy for awhile, then back to Grinner. If they target Roy they probably lose, otherwise they probably win. They end up settling on Grinner but don’t submit actions, so they get randomized and end up targeting Shel. The dice were in their favor.

Day 9: killingjoke and Space Jawa were ready to rush a vote and did so successfully to clinch it.

You're a generous Mod. MY RNG would almost surely have punished them.