If you are stuck inside amidst these social restrictions, anxiously awaiting something to do, murder mysteries are extremely entertaining activities to organize with your friends. Although planning them virtually does take a lot of forethought, their rewards far outweigh that. In this article, you will learn the different ways you can craft a murder mystery and how to host one with your friends.
First, you need to have a rough outline of the type of crime you are investigating. Was it a homicide or suicide?
Then, you need to also create your characters, which I find is the most time-consuming part of the planning process. With each character, you need to answer a few basic questions: Why are they being interrogated? Are they considered a suspect? Do they have relationships with anyone else being interrogated?
Once you answer those questions, you can embellish their character as much as you want by giving them distinct characteristics. For example, you could have a character who got in a fight with the victim over what they thought the best color was (it is objectively blue, by the way).
After the basic storyline and the character list are created, you can make the game much more challenging by adding as many red herrings as you wish. However, don’t forget to assign at least one participant the role of murderer and make their motive and method clear. Don’t let the red herrings distract you from the actual crime in the game.
There has to be at least one criminal, and their culpability has to be somewhat believable. For instance, make sure the perpetrator has the ability to get whatever weapon they used and had enough of a motive to carry out the crime (unless, of course, it was an accidental crime).
Once those things are all devised and meticulously thought out, you’re ready to host your event.
When you host, make sure you are able to somehow move the interrogation along enough so the participants get all of the necessary information. For instance, in the murder mysteries I host, each participant is able to ask another player a set of three questions to get some information (hopefully, incriminating) out of them.
Also, before you host, make sure you do not make this mistake. Make sure all the characters are somewhat aware of the basic storyline, because, if they are not, then the participants will not know who to interrogate or do anything but guess.
Again, developing virtual murder mysteries is a great way to pass the time, even with the hours of work you put into it. Once the planning phase of the murder mystery is done, you can invite your friends to participate in one of the various activities you can partake in during lockdown.
