Calling all lovers of fantasy, mystery and party games.
Mythical Mystery Games, founded by astronomy Ph.D. candidate Jonathan Cohn and co-founder Jessica O’Brien, brings players along magical quests to solve mythical curiosities in a game combining the fantastical worlds of role playing games with the format of murder mysteries. The digital edition will be available to download on Oct. 1, and a demo version is now available on the game’s website.
The first game in the series is derived from a murder mystery script Cohn wrote for a Halloween party last year, O’Brien said.
“In the Halloween [script] that Jon wrote, he put in a lot of mythical elements,” O’Brien said. “I just said, ‘Hey Jon, will you write a murder mystery?’ And he put in a lot of mythical elements, and then we were like, ‘Hey, this is really cool.’ We’ve done some murder mysteries from other companies before, but none of them have mythical elements.”
The “mystery” aspects of Mythical Mystery Games pertain to more than just murders, including stories such as “Who started the zombie uprising?” O’Brien said.
Cohn said much of his inspiration for the storytelling in Mythical Mystery Games was derived from running Dungeons & Dragons campaigns.
“For some of these murder mysteries, I had an idea of some mythical element, and I thought, ‘How can I form a story where that’s the central conflict?’” Cohn said. “And the mythical element is not always the central conflict, sometimes it’s kind of just a side thing for fun. But that’s usually how it starts out.”
When writing the scripts for the game, Cohn said he was mindful to interconnect the games’ various stories.
“For worldbuilding, I think ‘Some of these [elements] are not necessarily very connected, so how can I make them connected? What characters or events can I have happen in one mystery that are then going to affect something else over in another mystery?” Cohn said.
Teaser titles for the games include “Halloween,” “Boardroom Siege,” “Haunting in an Orchard,” “Pranks with Fairies,” “Books go Missing at a Book Club” and “A Big Fire,” Cohn said.
For each game, O’Brien said there are 10 characters alongside a narrator.
“We’re also recording an audio track so that if you don’t have someone to read the narrated part, you can just hit play,” O’Brien said. “There is also a food recipe and a drink recipe for each game. All of the food recipes are vegan, but we have tested them with our meat eating friends and they’ve given them two thumbs up. So they are good recipes. For drinks there’s both an alcohol version and a non-alcohol version. There’s also art that comes with each episode.”
The narrator in all of the games is Penelope Press, who is a reporter in the mythical town of Salchester, where all the games take place, O’Brien said.
“She’s going around trying to prove that mythical things really do happen,” O’Brien said. “And she’s also the person who runs our Twitter account. So that’s one of the ways that we tie [the games] all together is Penelope Press, the narrator and reporter in all of the games.”
O’Brien and Cohn both said their favorite part of creating Mythical Mystery Games has been doing play tests with their friends.
“I hope that other people can have fun with their friends too, because they’re really good stories,” O’Brien said.
Mythical Mystery Games’ kickstarter can be found here, and updates pertaining to the launch can be found on their website, Instagram and Twitter.
