Developing Characters

One of the joys of planning your party is creating interesting characters for your guests with back stories and personalities that add fun, interest and conflict to the mystery party.    

1. Create a Character List  

Start by creating a list of your imagined party characters while considering how each plays a role your “tangled web” of lies and deceit. Listing your characters gives you a sense of the size and makeup of your party.  Design at least some characters as “larger than life” who are fun for guests to interact with (for example, a disgruntled UFOologist or person who believes she is a Mayan queen incarnate.)  It’s also interesting to have some characters with dual (secret) identities (an archaeologist who is actually a drug smuggler).   

Here are some additional ideas:   

• Create characters who naturally conflict; for example: a known criminal and a “by the book” policeman; an international spy and an Interpol agent, competing parapsychology experts.   
• Choose characters who are well-suited to your intended guests. Generally, avoid casting an introvert friend as a showgirl or an extrovert as the librarian.  Instead, devise characters that your guests will be comfortable playing. By the way, we have found that quiet, unassuming characters do quite well as murderers!   
• Freely draw from famous and/or historical figures as inspiration. For example, for a turn of 20th century party, historical characters such as the famous actress Evelyn Nesbit, magician Harry Houdini and the anarchist Emma Goldman might be  references.  Do some research on the time and locale of your mystery to add authenticity and conceive unique characters – it’s part of the fun!   

2. Develop the Characters    

Once listed, for each character craft a description beyond just the title which provides a better understanding of who this person is and their possible desires. See some examples below from our Maya mystery party:  

• Liam Hardwick: A jungle missionary and brother of Rafe Hardwick, the  daring leader of the Hardwick Expedition.  Rafe is on the verge of the greatest find in anthropological history: an intact Maya pyramid. 
• Nostros Deuteronomy: A renowned expert in Maya history and culture. He seeks to gain credit for Rafe’s discovery.  
• Vera Monterey: A botanist, eager to learn of Maya herbs and medicinal plant properties and uses.  
• Monty Derringer: A competing treasure hunter from a nearby dig who is convinced he can reach the undiscovered pyramid first.   

3. Weave Your Characters into the Plot 

Now that you have a line-up of interesting characters in mind, it’s time to weave plot lines tying them together.    

•  Select your victim:  Create a detailed back story for the murder victim that aligns with your plot and involves numerous characters. Consider designing your victim character as unlikeable or one who abuses his/her position of power or wealth.  This makes it easier to imagine motivations for your suspects to commit murder. During the party, the victim can be represented by a skeleton, mannequin or chalk outline.   

• Choose your murderer: At this point you may have a guest in mind to play the role of your murderer. Whoever plays this role should be willing to be sneaky and unlikely to crack under pressure. It’s helpful to involve your proposed murderer early in the planning so you can keep him/her apprised of any pertinent information about their role and to ensure his/her availability for the event. Even so, the murderer need not be informed of everything planned for the event. By only informing your murderer of the necessary information to perform his/her role allows this guest to also experience the twists and turns as they develop and challenges her/him to pit his/her wits against the other party goers.    

• Weave the other characters into the plot: Keeping in mind your plot statement and your complete character list, create additional characters and expand the description of each character to include an explanation as to why each of the characters is at the setting and what their possible ties to the murder are as well as motives for killing the victim.  Include facts that make the characters suspicious.  

Below, we begin to further flesh out the above characters: 

• Liam Hardwick: [The Murderer] A jungle missionary and the brother of Rafe Hardwick, [the Victim] the daring leader of the Hardwick Expedition.  Rafe is on the verge of the greatest find in anthropological history: an intact Maya pyramid. Liam has always been poor. His relationship with his estranged brother, Rafe, has always been troubled, at best, and sometimes violent. 
• Nostros Deuteronomy: A renowned expert in Maya history and culture. He seeks to gain credit for this discovery. He is really a fraud who lives off other’s findings and actually knows very little. He is currently heavily in debt. 
• Vera Monterey: A botanist, eager to learn of Maya herbs and medicinal plant properties and uses. Rafe was blackmailing her due to a past incident during which she accidentally poisoned a schoolmate. He requires that she appear at the dig site to help.
• Monty Derringer: A competing treasure hunter from a nearby dig who is convinced he can reach the undiscovered pyramid first.  He intends to disrupt/discredit Rafe’s dig site and take it over after it fails.  

4. Add Conflict Between Characters   

By adding potential conflict between characters, you ensure that your mystery puzzle is not easily solved.  While your guests will need to cooperate in solving the crime, design your party so that couples and close friends will not succumb to excessive clue sharing. This makes the group puzzle solving effort more challenging and livelier and fosters an environment where all attendees will have a fair chance at solving the crime. For example, craft characters with opposing goals to be assigned to partners or close friends, such as a snoopy reporter for one and a criminal in disguise for the other.  You may also wish to handicap certain of your attendees who are naturally highly competitive by creating facts/clues to cast them as prime suspects of the murder. This impairs the ability of such  gameplayers to “take over” the event and unduly pressure other players to follow their lead.   

5. Create Secret Personal Objectives for Characters   

To further develop intrigue during the event, your next step is to assign each guest/character a secret, personal goal to attain - independent of solving the murder. The idea of “solving the murder” can be initially overwhelming to your guests. Reaching the solution will take time, patience and may not be linear. Personal goals can give each guest clear, fun, attainable tasks to complete as they make their way through the clue finding and puzzles to the ultimate solution of the mystery.  

At the end of the party, invite your guests to share (or brag) about their efforts to meet their secret personal goals. You may wish to offer prizes to those who were most successful.   

One method of creating personal goals revolves around providing fake currency and/or stock shares as props for some of your guests. In essence, create a miniature economy in which the wealthier characters use money/stock ownership to barter for information, cooperation or clues from the cash-poor characters.  The cash-poor characters can be given a monetary goal (or stock ownership goal to achieve, perhaps even one which requires them to creatively cooperate with others and pool resources.   

Another method is to create a second, mini mystery for a personal objective. Examples might be searching for a missing item of value or apprehending a thief or notorious criminal in disguise.   

To add an extra element of danger to the event, consider allowing certain of your guests to “murder” others as their personal objective. This works well as an extra task for the chosen Murderer in your overall mystery plot. The Murderer can be permitted to “kill” those guests who are getting too close to learning his/her secret identity. All guests are alerted in advance that they may be killed.   

“Murdering” can be accomplished by creating a small card (stating a player is murdered) which is handed to victim by the Murderer in private. A botched (witnessed) murder attempt permits the victim to remain “living”. The dead victim is not allowed to reveal his/her killer and plays the rest of the party as a “ghost”. (We create an extra ghost nametag for the victim to wear). We usually limit the number of any additional murders that can occur.  

Below we again expand our character descriptions from above:    

• Liam Hardwick: [The Murderer] A jungle missionary and the brother of Rafe Hardwick, [the Victim] the daring leader of the Hardwick Expedition.  Rafe is on the verge of the greatest find in anthropological history: an intact Maya pyramid. Liam has always been poor. His relationship with his brother, Rafe, has always been troubled, at best, and sometimes violent. Your personal goal is to murder (without detection) any guest who may be close to discovering your identity as the Murderer.  
•  Nostros Deuteronomy: A renowned expert in Maya history and culture. He seeks to gain credit for this discovery. He is really a fraud who lives off other’s findings and actually knows very little.  Your personal goal is to locate the missing jade statuette of the feathered serpent, Kukulkan. 
• Vera Monterey: A botanist, eager to learn of Maya herbs and medicinal plant properties and uses. Rafe is blackmailing her due to a past incident at which she accidentally poisoned a schoolmate. He has required she appear at the dig site to help. Your personal goal is to acquire knowledge of the native cures for the infamous five deadly Mayan poisons.
•  Monty Derringer: A competing treasure hunter from a nearby dig who is convinced he can reach the undiscovered pyramid first.  He intends to disrupt Rafe’s dig site and take it over after it fails.  Your personal goal is to acquire stock in the Hardwick Expeditions, Ltd. (AEL) venture or to acquire 50 gold.