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 on the spectrum 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. It also introduces the built-in safety and consent tools.

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

Playing in two phases

The game uses the Descended from the Queen framework of randomly drawn questions answered by the players (by way of a standard deck of playing cards and related random tables). The first phase of Monstrous Detectives 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?

The second phase of the game focuses on the action as players narrate their 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?

Mystery mechanics and player agency

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.

This may sound familiar if you know the Carved from Brindlewood framework and its “Theorize” move where players make up their own solution to the mystery at hand instead of figuring out a pre-determined solution (this mechanic was first introduced by Oli Jeffery in "Apocalypse by Moonlight" in Codex: Moonlight).

But Monstrous Detectives takes this idea even further and basically expands this “Theorize” move 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: Unlike Carved from Brindlewood's "Theorize" move, the end of Monstrous Detectives has no dice roll to decide whether their theory is correct—it is correct because the players have decided 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 and multiple stretch goals are already secured, but there are still some more stretch goals to be unlocked).

It will be published as an A5-sized zine and a screenreader-ready PDF in both German and English (translation: Andrea Rick), with illustrations by Daniela Schreiter (aka Fuchskind). Monstrous Detectives is of course 100% human-made.

Its Berlin-based TTRPG publisher Plotbunny Games has previously put out original games such as Viva la QueerBar (Indie Groundbreaker Award 2024), Against the Monster, and Catcrawl as well as the official German translations of Follow, Paranormal Inc., and Dream Askew/Dream Apart.