Happy Friday!!

I thought it’d be fun to post a breakdown of the playtest we did for Danoise back when it was in early development! Lots of things have changed since then, but it was really eye-opening and exciting to see everyone try to put together who the murderer was :3c

The start off, I’ll drop some basic information to situate everyone :

• We played as a group of 7 including myself as the GM using D&D with looser rules.
• We used Discord to play
• The character picked to be the murderer was Jane Amarena Delight (who’s story can be read in the screenshots!)
• It took us about 10 hours over the course of 3 sessions to complete the game
• Danoise is the 4th setting I’ve ever written and I’ve been GMing for this group since 2021~

Before we started playing I had asked my Jane to play our murderer for the play test. She’d only been 6 months into playing d&d at the time, but ultimately she did fantastic and was able to evade being pinned as the murderer.

We went over her character, who has since had adjustments made to her story, and developed the way she murdered the Duke. She opted for death by poisoning, so we set up the crime and evidence together, and I added additional evidence and clues that she wasn’t aware of.

As written in Jane’s Story, she’s convinced the Duke murdered his wife and opt to murder him to avenge her late lover. My Jane used a high concentration of crushed cherry pits to poison his food right before the guests arrived.

When the actual play started, we started from the suggested start written in the document, and eventually our players found the murdered Duke. They all opted to break into groups to investigate.

This is where the fun begins! I set up the text channels in our discord to have a channel for each player + myself, meaning everyone could talk and role in secret. For the play test, I didn’t limit what my players could ask in secret, but now I would probably limit it to actual actions. Observations and perception checks should be made above table just to reduce the amount of messages to answer.

Even with the amount of message bloat, the secret actions tool made playing Danoise fantastically fun! All players, including my Jane, were able to take interesting actions during exploration.

Some examples include :

• Stash a stolen item onto the Duke’s body
• Sneak away without anyone noticing
• Destroy evidence
• Find incriminating evidence & secrets

Initially I had implemented secret actions in order to prevent meta gaming in a more thorough way. I think it was a lot better played that way for everyone.

In a previous iteration, one of the characters could see ghosts! She was visited by the ghost of a stranger who showed her visions of the deaths that happened within the house. In the final document I completely changed things around since I feel like having the mystery spoiled like that didn’t really lend to that character’s story.

I think all of the character stories are a lot more complex now that I’ve rewritten them, I’ve added a lot of details and motives as to why everyone behaves the way they do, but I also tried to leave a bit of room for players to make the character their own.

Once my players had finished exploring, they regrouped in the dining room. While having dinner, they argued about the will and about who was most likely to have murdered the Duke, all while the looming red and blue of police cruisers were lurking right outside the estate.

I took votes through the secret chats and tallied them up and then dove straight into narrating the epilogue! In our game, a second character died and left a note saying they did it, so the murder was pinned on them, allowing Jane to escape paying for her crimes. Once the game was over, we went over the murder and how it was committed.

In the end, I did end up making some major adjustments to the amount of in-game time players had to explore; From 24hrs to 12hrs. I think having a tighter deadline prevents players from staying too long on a specific area, also allowing them to make mistakes & lose out on certain things. As much as I like games that give you all the evidence, that wasn’t the intent I had going into this. I wanted the drama and evidence to intermingle, making things really difficult.

I think my players had a good time playing Danoise, although they definitely wanted to wait a bit before playing again lol.

I hope that breakdown gave some insight on the game itself, I had a blast GMing it. If anyone decides to actually run it, I’d love to hear about your experience!!

I think as far as the universe though, i might not be 100% done. Some of the characters/locations mentioned in the stories I’d like to expand on to add more for people to choose from when building the campaign.

I don’t think anytime soon though since I’m excited to get back to other projects hee hee :3c

On that note, check out Mona Mourn as well!! It’s a free demo I put out, also about murder that’s playable in browser!!!!

Thanks for playing!!