Haunted: Giving the GM back their secrets
A tarot-driven noir mystery game of ghosts, cults, and murder, where the GM builds the case and the players crack it.
Heresy time: in Haunted, the GM knows whodunit before anybody sits down. (Please don't cancel us.) The hobby's spent a few years falling hard for no-prep, no-secrets, everyone-owns-the-story games, and honestly no complaints - we love a bunch of them. We just wanted to make a different kind of game - the kind where there's a real mystery with a real answer, and a GM whose whole job is to know it and hide it well.
Haunted is our first game. It's noir, so the detectives are at least as broken as the cases they're chasing, and it's supernatural, so there's magic and ghosts and cults and things. And it runs on tarot from the first spark to the last scene.
Prep is where the deck does its iterative spawning thing, working a system capable of generating thousands of different plots. You pull a card from the major arcana and that's your theme - it tints every detail that comes after it. The court cards become your cast: rival factions, a face and a want for each character. Then you shuffle those courts, deal them out in pairs, and every pair is a secret two people would kill to keep. One of those pairs, drawn blind, turns out to be your murder - victim, killer, and motive already tangled together. The other nine secrets don't go anywhere. They sit in the same web, so whatever thread your players yank on is tied to something true.
By the time everyone shows up, the mystery's already whole. You're not making it up as you go. You built it. And because you actually know whodunit, your players get to do the thing mystery games so rarely let them do: solve it.
The same deck comes back out to run the table. When a detective reaches for something risky, they draw. Major arcana, clean hit. A court card gets you there if you've got the skill the moment's asking for. And the pips are the mean ones - you succeed, but it costs you, or you take the failure instead if you'd rather. It's never just pass/fail, either. You read the card for what actually happens. Chase a guy down an alley, flip the three of cups, and now two of his friends are stepping out of the dark with billy clubs.
There are six playbooks to pick from - the Bull, the Reader, the Medium, the Shamus, the Shrink, the Uppercrust, all archetypes borrowed from classic noir stories - and every one of them is carrying a Core Wound, some specific old damage they were already running from when the body turned up. Between episodes, downtime leans into that, giving characters space to try to heal or grow - or not. The case always gets closed. Whether your detective comes out okay is the part we can't write for you.
Oh, and every playbook, every card, every book cover is illustrated by Belgin Kaya, whose cover work just landed a Silver ENnie - all of it drawn by hand.
Haunted launches on October 1st, as part of RPG Party 2026. You can follow the campaign now at Gamefound or join our mailing list over at hauntedrpg.com.
