A house building murder mystery RPG for 2-6 players.
Corners requires:
- 1 Deck of cards (including Jokers)
- Scrap paper (Record Cards work well)
- A single sheet of A4/A3 paper and some pens (depending on how big you want to go.
- 2-3 Hours
Lord or Lady Stoneview has died, sorry, they were murdered. They ran a tight ship around here, and they had their enemies. I mean, who doesn’t. A house full of people waiting on you hand a foot, you’re bound to put your foot in your mouth eventually, maybe that’s how you’ll die.
Corners is a game in which you and your friends will alternate being detectives and witnesses, while creating the vast mansion of a royal. Be careful, each one of them could have a motive for killing their boss, and you’ll have to untangle the connections between each person and work out who dunnit, with what, and why.
Before the game begins, take your piece of paper and draw a rectangle with three symbols for doors, and inside write ‘main entrance’. Feel free to add some features, maybe a potted plant, or a coat rack. You can also use any symbol you want for door, and you can start portrait or landscape (just make sure you start at the edge of the paper).
Choose your first witness; they shuffle the deck (jokers included) and deal themselve 6 cards without showing anyone else.
Using these cards, they create a character and a room using the corners tables.
They need to choose:
- Room
- Trait
- Relation to Lord or Lady
- Motive
- Object in room
- Alibi
You can also come up with a character name, gender, and anything else to flesh them out, as long as it fits in with the cards you have drawn. On the central house, add the room with its name and objects. On the scrap paper write down the witnesses name, motive, trait and any other details.
You can then turn the paper over and write ‘innocent’ (or inno as it is easier) without showing anyone else and then turn the paper over again.
If you draw a joker, you can use it as any other card to design your character and/or the room. If this is the case, instead write ‘joker’ on the back of the card without showing anybody. If you draw two jokers, lucky you, you get two free choices but still only write ‘joker’ once.
Now you have your new witness, you’re ready to play out the scene. The detectives can ask questions of the witness, such as who they are, what they do in the house and any other things they want to know. If you’re the witness, feel free to add in little details and create a character that fits in but has their own personality. They can be suspicious or helpful, but they should always be interesting.
Detectives should ask questions relating to the points the witness has chosen, but let the conversation flow naturally; if the witness talks about a hobby while talking through their alibi, you could enquire further into their relationship with that hobby.
Once the detectives are happy, you can end the scene, and move onto the next room. The player to the left of the witness becomes the new witness, and goes through drawing cards and creating a scene.
Repeat until you’ve run through the deck of cards twice (you should end up with 18 witnesses and 19 rooms). At this point, the detectives split up and decide on who did it, where/how and why. Each player then gives a round up of who they’re convicting and why, this can be quite brief.
If you’ve drawn a joker during the game, don’t include it in your round-up, and try and guess the other 3 jokers out there and wrap them into your story. Once each player has done, reveal all the cards that say joker on the back, and you can then see the full combination of what was fabricated, and this will create the background to how the murder happened.
This game has taken inspiration from The Quiet Year by Avery Adler. The idea of creating a place as part of the narrative is something I love the idea of. Places are full of stories if you look for them and will mean different things depending on the people that inhabit them
AF Cowlin 