First up, you need to know what Consulting Detective is. Here’s a review explaining what the nancy it is:
And now we’re going to go into how you’d make a game like this. Before we do, some things to remember, friends:
- Game mechanics are open source. If your game uses the same mechanics as another game, that’s okay.
- Anything you make matters, even if it winds up not being good. Making things makes you better at making things.
- I release ideas like this out there in the hopes someone (like you!) can make better use of them than me.
With that in mind, onward!The basic components of Consulting Detective are:
- A booklet of specific events in the circumstances of the event
- A newspaper to provide current events and broader context you might not be told
- A map
- A table to crossreference the map and the booklet
Now, the booklet is the hardest part to make to me; what it contains is a huge arrangement of narrative chunks. Agnostically, the game knows that you’re travelling around this map area, and each chunk is going to provide you with information (or misinformation). The simplest way to imagine this kind of writing is a set of empty frames, with some of them giving tips to the next set of frames. If you’ve ever written a mystery story, this helps to give you, the storyteller, a way to introduce clues, and see if people follow from them.
Now, the table/map/booklet crossreferencing, that’s just math. You can put things down in there in nay order. You can even get to play with it – you might introduce an item or a topic that players can ask NPCs about by adding values to the entry numbers in the booklet. Maybe if players are at 151 and you gave them a Hex Wrench to ask people about if they +6, you can put an entry at 157 where the characters react to that Hex Wrench.
There are also some limitations in this game form that you might be able to work in. For example, why can’t players talk to the characters in the booklet?
- History; the events might have already happened, and players are just reconstructing evidence, like a cold case for some police.
- Time Travel; the players are using some sort of doohickey to witness events that happened a while ago, and therefore they’re just looking at series of vignettes to reconstruct history.
- Subtlety; the player might not actually be interacting, they might be sneaking around and listening to people.
- Disability; the player character might not be able to talk cleanly. This may be temporary or, if you’re up to the challenge, you might have a protagonist who can’t talk, dealing with people who don’t understand sign.
- Alienation; the player character might not be a human! You could do an adventure about dogs or cats following humans around an area to try and work out what’s going on!
So why do I think this needs to belong to someone else? Well, the newspaper.
See in Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, you have a lot of setting information conveyed in the newspaper and the map. People know what London is, it’s kind of famous. Victorian London is a fairly well worn fictive space. But that newspaper still had to get made, and it still had to be filled with both world setting stuff, and mystery clues, and a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with either to make sure that the newspaper didn’t just feel like a big clue list.
What if that newspaper was replaced by a zine?
I know a bunch of you folk out there like zines, like making zines. It’d be a chance to make a game around a thing you want to make, a fictive space to express things – and you’d even have the luxury of being able to put in this zine things you actually want. It could be a game of narratives set in and around your stuff, and your little zine could form the spine of it.
What’s more, because a zine is denser than a newspaper, you could put multiple mysteries‘ worth of clues in one zine – set up all these different events and narratives, then have people play their way through individual mysteries.
This is an idea. I can’t do it, I can’t follow through on it. But I believe in you and people like you to have the chance to do it.