Tag Archives: extra characters

Adding 20 players to Hollywood Lies

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We were recently asked how we would add around 20 additional characters to Hollywood Lies. That’s a lot, and as we’ve already talked about that for Casino Fatale, I thought I’d explain what I would do for Hollywood Lies.

Hollywood Lies starts with 32 characters, and there are two additional characters. So an additional 20 characters means you could run Hollywood Lies for 54 guests! You’re going to want at least one more host for that! (And this applies to Christmas Lies and Halloween Lies as well.)

Overall approach

Cover for the Hollywood Lies murder mystery game

As I mentioned in the earlier post, I wouldn’t write detailed characters (with secrets and bespoke goals) for these extra 20—that would be a significant amount of work. So these would be more minor characters, mainly focussed on solving the murder and making movies.

I’d give each character:

A clue—duplicated from the other characters.
A goal to help solve the murder.
A goal to be in the movies.
A goal to help their friends.
Another goal—related to either the Hollywood Charity Ball (maybe buy a ticket), the Post-Modern Freeform Movement (maybe as a member, maybe wanting to join), Club Monte Carlo (to join), find an agent, or be hypnotised by Les Tytan.

I would make sure that each of the new characters had two or three good friends they could support (hence the goal). Ideally, you would cast real-life friends in these roles.

I’d also give them abilities (based on the existing ones) and money to make sure there’s still enough money in the game for all the movies to be made.

More ability uses

With more characters, ability uses will be scarce. So to counter this, I would give everyone five blank “Tear this up instead of marking an ability use” cards.

Making movie changes

I would change the making movie rules slightly to ensure that everyone can make a movie.

Hollywood Lies starts with five producers and movie teams of 5-8 people. I would increase the team size to 8-10 and add a sixth producer—so theoretically, we could have up to 60 people making movies.

Six producers gives us flexibility, although it does mean the party will last longer as there will be another movie to show off. (With an additional 20 characters, the party will take longer than usual because it will take the players longer to find the people they need to talk to.)

Assistants

I would also create assistants to help the original characters. In particular, an assistant for each producer and the detective.

Copying existing characters

I would also copy some of the existing character types (similar to the new producer I mentioned above).
These would be new agents, another Hollywood reporter and maybe an amateur detective.

20 additional characters

So here are my 20 additional characters:

One extra producer, whose main goal is to make a movie
Six assistant producers
One assistant detective
Two new agents
One rival Hollywood reporter
One amateur detective as a rival to the police detective
Four actor/directors (who can do either role)
Four actor/screenwriters (each with a screenplay)

And if I needed even more, I’d increase the number of actors/screenwriters/directors.

More tips on adding characters

From our mailbox: twins—an accident in casting results in a novel approach to creating extra characters.
Writing extra characters—from Steve’s Great Murder Mystery Games website.
Expanding Casino Fatale for 50 guests—the original article.

A question

Would you be interested if we produced an additional 20 characters for Hollywood Lies? (And Halloween Lies and Christmas Lies.) Let us know in the comments below.

Adding characters to Court in the Act

From our mailbox: twins

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Recently we were asked a question about having two people play the same character. (It might have been a mixup, and by the sounds of it the game was oversubscribed.)

Our answer was that while it was tricky, it was doable – particularly with the character she had chosen.

What we recommended was to make the characters twins.

To do this:

Give each player the full character pack, and explain that they are twins. (They can have the same name badge if you like – you could say that they look so alike that people can’t tell them apart.)
Tell the twins that they can work together or not, as they prefer.
Announce that the characters are twins that at the beginning of the game so that everyone understands what’s going on.
Don’t make any other changes – so don’t double up on (say) items that they might be looking for. Instead they will both be searching for that same item, and it either of them finds it, that counts as a joint success in the goal if they are working together (or a success for one and a failure for the other if not!)

In sides with distinct sides, creating a twin can unbalance things, but in this case it didn’t matter.

If you like the idea of trying this, here are a few things to consider:

It should be sensible for the character to be a twin – so we wouldn’t recommend twinning a parent, or anyone in a romantic relationship, or the Captain of a ship. That wouldn’t make sense.
We wouldn’t recommend twinning the murderer (!).
They shouldn’t have any unique items.

And of course, we don’t recommend doing this unless you absolutely have to – use all the characters (and free extra characters) first!

Note – we’ve not tested this – let us know if you try it out!

Adding eight pirates to Pirate Island

The why

Pirate Island had been bugging me for a while – because it’s actually a bit fiddly to prepare.

Pirate Island is a team game, where the pirates are all members of a ship’s crew, trying to be the best pirate crew. To be the best, they have to enter contests, track down treasures and trade items with each other.

Everyone in Pirate Island plays a pirate. Either a Captain, a Gunner, or a Crewmate. And in keeping with our other murder mystery games, each of them has a character sheet.

A full game of 24 pirates has eight ships, each with three crew. However, with only 23 pirates, then we use seven ships with three pirates, and one ship that has only two pirates. That two-pirate ship is functionally the same as the one it replaced, except that it has a different name and only a Captain and a Gunner. By having four such ships (with two and three pirate versions) Pirate Island is fully flexible for 6-24 players.

But it’s a bit fiddly to prepare. Unless you are absolutely certain of your numbers, you have to print out all the ships just in case someone drops at the last minute. Or you get an extra unexpected pirate. Pirates can be so unpredictable!

When we came to Trick or Treat / Monster Mash, we simplified all this by creating team envelopes that didn’t require specialised roles. That way a team can be two or three (or more!) monsters – and there’s no extra printing required.

So one of the things that I wanted to do, given time, was to do the same with Pirate Island and tweak it to make it simpler to print and run, along the lines of Trick or Treat.

That’s not what happened, though.

What happened next – the Cub Scouts

Instead, I was contacted by a friend, Richard Salmon, who had purchased Pirate Island and wanted to run it for his Cub Scout group (the 1st Nork St Paul’s Scout Group). The problem was that he had over 30 cubs coming, and that would mean an awful lot of the generic extra Crewmate character. We had written the additional Crewmate to allow for one or two extra pirates – not nine!

Could I sort something out?

So rather than my original plan, I made the more-or-less identical ships more unique. The main change I made involved the pirate quests.

Questing for Treasure

In Pirate Island, each ship has a map to a pirate treasure (such as Blackbeard’s treasure, or the wreck of a treasure ship). To find the treasure means solving three puzzles, and the answers are scattered amongst the pirates – so they have to team up to solve them.

The more-or-less identical ships had the same treasure map, so I made them all unique. Instead of writing brand new clues, I simply re-used existing clues from the existing quests. (I had to choose the clues carefully to make sure that I didn’t accidentally give them all to one ship.)

Other changes involved tweaking item cards a little and checking that I hadn’t messed the game up anywhere else.

Feedback

So how did the new, expanded game go? I asked Richard for feedback and was told that:

“It went very well – they all seemed to have a good time.

“Took a bit of time to get started and the motto and performance contests were less popular. The quests all seemed to work out and there was a flurry of trading of items at the end. The winning team got nearly fifty doubloons, but some only collected a dozen or so (mainly because they didn’t do the contests).

“With cubs if something not engaging them; they start chasing one another about and generally messing; we didn’t have any of that for the hour they were playing; so that means they were really quite into it.”

Here are some photos from the scout group’s Facebook page. And here.

Overall

So while we’ve adjusted Pirate Island, we’ve taken it in a different direction than the one I had originally expected. I’m very happy with the way this has turned out, and maybe now that Pirate Island is bigger more groups will think about giving it a try.

And it really works for cub scout groups!

Bit parts

Reporting the news

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Reporting the news: We have written a free extra reporter character, “Ginger” Roberts, that can be used for many of our games.

You can have extra fun with Ginger (and other reporters that may be already in the game) by creating a system that lets them actually “post” news items. Here are some ideas:

Headlines: Put some sheets of paper on the wall, and let the reporter write news headlines. For example, “German Ambassador is really a woman!” or “I’ve had an affair, admits famous movie star!”. A flip chart board is ideal for this – let the reporter post the headlines, and when the sheet is full you can tear it off and stick it on the wall.

News stories: If your cub reporters are keen, they can actually write out the stories. You could even provide them with an old typewriter for them to do this (although it might be quicker if they just hand-write the pieces).

Bylines: The problem with actually writing the stories is that the person playing the reporter may end up spending all their time writing news reports instead of playing the game. So instead of typing up a story, get them to write their name next to their headline – and tell everyone at the start of the party that if they want to “read” that story they should talk to that particular reporter to find out the details.

You can use any of the above to create some rivalry between journalists. For example, you can create a competition to see who writes the most news stories, or even a give a prize for the wackiest headline.

Remember to give the reporters a notebook and pen so they can jot down the facts as they research their stories.

Writing an optional character for a FFG murder mystery game

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Sometimes more guests attend a murder mystery party than you originally envisaged. While some of our games have additional character packs that allow you to add up to 10 extra characters, most don’t. In that situation you may need to write an additional character (or two).

We will provide templates so that you can create your characters in the right format so that they don’t stand out too much from the “real” characters (just contact us to get a template). And we will also award anyone with a free game if they create a character that we like and publish on our site. But what we haven’t done is provide advice on how to write those extra characters. Until now.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to create a couple of imaginary optional characters for an imaginary murder mystery party: Murder at the Ball. Murder at the Ball is a murder mystery set in the world of fairytales – characters include Prince Charming, Cinderella, Snow White, the Wicked Witch, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty, the Beast and other familiar characters. The setting is the grand ball, where all the plots will unfold.

Two extra characters

We’ve realised that we need two extra characters as we have two more guests coming than originally expected.

Here are some typical types of extra characters that we find fairly easy to add:

Assistants, deputies, underlings
Rivals and enemies
Family – close relatives (sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters)
Characters linked to plots that involve lots of people
Investigator-types – reporters, extra detectives
Spies or diplomat in a national diplomacy or espionage games

So the first thing to do is to decide what additional characters to add. Having read through the game we’ve decided to add Fairy Tulip, an assistant to the Fairy Godmother, and Jack the Giant Killer (from Jack and the Beanstalk). We’ve decided to pick these two because we believe the Fairy Godmother already has plenty to do and Murder at the Ball has a plot all about electing a new Mayor, which involves a lot of people and we can fit Jack into.

Background

We usually start our character backgrounds with a brief summary of who the character is and why they are present in the game:

“You are Fairy Tulip and you are here to help the Fairy Godmother.”
“You are Jack the Giant Killer and you are here because you want to become Mayor.”

Then we explain any background information that the characters know (including links to other plots), along with what they need to achieve. So for Fairy Tulip, this would include some of the things that the Fairy Godmother is working on that she can help with. We would refer to the Fairy Godmother’s character sheet for examples – but we wouldn’t copy it word for word, but instead write it from Fairy Tulip’s perspective.

For Jack, we would look at other Mayoral candidates and use their description of how the election works in Jack’s background.

Do the same with other plots. For example, we would normally tie them into the murder plot. For example, it could be that Fairy Tulip was a close friend of the victim, and is therefore motivated to find the murderer. With Jack, on the other hand, we might decide that some of the clues that point to the murderer also point to Jack – turning him into a suspect.

Where possible we try to include conflict in our plots. So Fairy Tulip might not agree with all of the Fairy Godmother’s plans, and might actually be working to foil one or two. Similarly, Jack could be a rival to one of the other Mayoral candidates.

Goals

The goals section of our character sheets are a reminder and clarification of that character’s objectives. They shouldn’t add anything new that isn’t already covered by the background. The number of goals varies from game to game and character to character, but four goals is a good number to aim for.

Other People

We use the Other People section of the character sheet to add useful snippets of information about other characters in the game that our new characters know. We try not to repeat the information on the cast list as that doesn’t add anything new. Instead, we prefer to add something that lets our character strike up a conversation, either with that person or someone else.

Our new characters should need no more than five or six Other People entries, so they won’t need an entry for everyone.

We find it useful to look at the Other People sections of the original characters. In many cases those entries can be copied word for word as they often reflect things that they have seen or have heard stories about – and our new characters might have seen those same things or heard those same stories.

Some examples:

Prince Charming: You met Prince Charming earlier and he told you that he was looking for a glass slipper.
Snow White: You’ve heard a rumour that Snow White has been living in the forest with some dwarves.

Tips for beginners

Tips for beginners consist of two actions that the person playing your new character can do at the start of the game. The idea is to give them something to get them going, to start the game with a bang. We don’t tend to include actions that will directly solve their goals – the idea is to get a new player started, not solve their goals for them.

In our example, Fairy Tulip might have an action to report to the Fairy Godmother and ask if there is anything she can to do help, while one of Jack’s actions might be to talk to Prince Charming about the glass slipper.

Abilities

The easiest way to give abilities to our new characters is simply to copy some abilities from the other characters. If you’ve played one of our other games, you could also copy an ability from that game.

We normally give each character three abilities (some of our older games don’t follow this rule, however – do whatever suits the game, but three is about right).

Secret and Information/Clue

Most characters have a guilty secret that they don’t want anyone else to know – that’s what goes in their Secret. This is usually pretty incriminating, although we don’t put the identity of the murderer in Secrets because we want the murder to be solved by using deduction rather than abilities!

Information/Clue contains a piece of information that the character knows. This relates to one of the plots, often the murder plot. We put key information here to ensure that it circulates around the game (to those that need to know) via the use of abilities.

Items and money

Our new characters may need items that are both needed for their backstory and help with other plots. For example, Fairy Tulip ought to have a wand and Jack the Giant Killer might have some magic beans, a golden harp and (perhaps) and axe.

Information for the original characters

Once we’ve finished our characters we need to link them to the original characters. If we don’t do that then our new characters may struggle to interact with the original characters.

We first decide who needs to know these new characters. Where we have created an assistant or a family member then they will need to know who this new character is, but there will also be other characters who will know something about your new characters.

In our example, clearly the Fairy Godmother will need some information to introduce Fairy Tulip, and Fairy Tulip may well be known by other characters as well.

Where we’ve told one of our new characters that they have interacted previously with an original character, then it is important to tell that character of the interaction. For example, we added to one of our characters that Prince Charming had told them that he was looking for a glass slipper (see Other People, above). It’s worth telling Prince Charming that he has asked Jack the Giant Killer about the glass slipper but that Jack didn’t know where it was.

When we give our characters guilty secrets, we make sure that another character either knows their secret already, or has clues that they aren’t what they seem. For example, suppose we decide that Jack the Giant Killer is a fraud and didn’t actually climb the beanstalk and kill the giant. In this case we might give Rapunzel some additional information that she recognises that Jack is really Rumplestiltskin.

Send your characters to us!

Once you’ve written your characters and used them in your games, please send them to us! If we like them we’ll upload them to our site (after we edit them a bit) and give you a free game in return. (Note that any characters you send to us become our property and copyright of Freeform Games, and we may use them in future releases, although we will credit you as author.)

Note on intellectual properties: We’re very happy if you want to include characters based on existing intellectual properties (such as Captain Jack Sparrow for A Dead Man’s Chest, or Harry Potter for Spellbound). However, if you write those characters up we will change their identities to avoid infringement.

Interviewing absent characters

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Interviewing absent characters

Sometimes it can be useful for the detective characters to interview absent characters to eliminate them from their inquiries.

Here’s what you do:

When you’re preparing the game, print out all the characters – even if you know that you haven’t got all the roles filled.
Also print out the items and other handouts for that character – and put it all in that character’s envelope.
When the game is running, if one of the players wants to ask a question of one of the missing players, you’ve got all the information in one place so that you can answer the query. (This is easy if the detective has the “I’d like to ask you a few questions” ability as you can simply show them each characters’ Information/Clue.)

An advantage of bringing the complete characters to the party is that if you do get someone arriving at the last minute, you can easily get them involved by giving one of the spare characters to them.