A detective RPG where the answer is not handed to you
A singer is dead, the city has already decided who did it, and you are the only person still asking. You interview, you push, you follow the one thing that does not fit — and the case closes when you make it close.
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No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
A mystery is ruined by a narrator who wants you to win
Ask a plain chatbot a leading question and it will usually agree with you, because agreeing is what it is for. Here whether your bluff lands is not decided by the part that is telling the story, so a witness can hold their line and a hunch can simply be wrong.
The world
In rain-soaked Ashgate, lounge singer Nadia Cole is found dead in a locked dressing room. The police call it suicide. Her sister hires you to prove it wasn't.
Ashgate is a 1940s harbor city of smoke-filled jazz clubs, corrupt precincts, and dock syndicates. It rains here as if the sky is hiding something, and everyone in the city has a second story they tell only when cornered.
Who is in it
- Halloran Syndicate
- the dockside crime family that owns half the waterfront.
- Ashgate PD
- a police force where honest cops are the rarest commodity.
- The Velvet Circuit
- the network of nightclubs where the city's secrets are traded.
Where you go
- The Blue Wren
- the smoky club where Nadia Cole sang her last set.
- Pier Thirteen
- a rotting dock where the syndicate moves its cargo.
- Precinct Six
- a corrupt police station that buries inconvenient cases.
What already happened
- The Locked Room
- Nadia Cole's death in a dressing room locked from the inside.
- The Harbor Fire
- an old warehouse blaze the syndicate never explained.
Who you can play
-
Sam Reyes Private investigator
A tired, stubborn investigator who can't let a wrong answer stand.
At the start: a cheap PI with a good eye and a bad reputation.
-
Vivian Cole Grieving client
A relentless reporter whose grief has sharpened into pure resolve.
At the start: convinced of murder and willing to risk everything to prove it.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.
Start playing Ashgate Confidential →