Monstrous Detectives: A new take on investigative games

Newcomer game designer Carina Büker has come up with an fresh take on investigative TTRPGs in her game Monstrous Detectives (currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter for Zine Month).

You are monsters who are running a private detective agency together. Can you solve your newest case and help your client?

First, the game invites players to choose a tone somewhere between Monsters Inc. and Hellboy, as they sketch out the type of monsters they want to play, the kind of city they want to set their game in, and the fundamental relationship between monsters and humans in their setting.

After that, Monstrous Detectives is just asking questions. Literally.

Using Descended from the Queen's framework of randomly drawn questions (by way of a standard deck of playing cards and related random tables) players answer, the first phase of the game focuses on character creation and worldbuilding. Here you may encounter questions like:

Which monster from your team still owes you a favor? How come?

Can you trust your client? How can you tell?

Which of your monster characteristics do you expect to be particularly helpful during this case?

Once the monsters and their agency have taken shape, and the new case has been outlined, the second phase begins as the game moves into the action of the investigation.

However, the mechanics don't change—players are still randomly drawing questions and making up their answers, creating the story as they go along. Here you may encounter questions like:

A clue leads you to an abandoned building. What do you find there?

Someone is lying to you. How can you tell, and how do you react?

One of your monster characteristics creates a problem during the investigation. How do you deal with that?

While Monstrous Detectives still gives players all the elements of a classic investigation story—clues, locations, minor characters, and obstacles—it doesn’t offer any kind of pre-set plot or solution.

Sounds like the Carved from Brindlewood framework, whose core mechanic of having players create their own solution to a mystery instead of figuring out a pre-determined solution was first introduced by Oli Jeffery in "Apocalypse by Moonlight" (in Codex: Moonlight, 2018)? Yes, but Monstrous Detectives takes this idea even further and basically expands the “Theorize” move from these types of games to the whole second phase of the game.

And that's where the genius of its design lies: Players don't just make up the solution based on their individual combination of a set of pre-written suspects, locations, and clues—they make it all up as they go along. As they take turns progressing the course of the investigation and building on each other’s answers, the narrative of the case naturally emerges as everyone contributes to it.

Players also retain their narrative agency until the very end: There's no fickle dice roll to decide whether their theory is correct—it is correct because they’ve said it is. They may even choose to fail at solving the case because that’s the better story.

Carina Büker’s deceptively simple design allows players to focus on telling their very own detective story together, while the random selection of the question draws still introduces plenty of twists and surprises to keep it feeling like a game.

Monstrous Detectives is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter (funding is already secured, but there are still some stretch goals to be unlocked). It will be published as an A5-sized zine and a screenreader-ready PDF in both English (translation: Andrea Rick) and German, with illustrations by Daniela Schreiter aka Fuchskind. Its Berlin-based TTRPG publisher Plotbunny Games has previously put out original games Viva la QueerBar (Indie Groundbreaker Award 2024), Against the Monster, and Catcrawl as well as the official German translations of Dream Askew/Dream Apart, Follow, and Paranormal Inc.