🌳The Balsam Lake Unmurders Sends You To a Forested Minnesota Town To Catch a Serial Necromancer 🍂

Longtime game designer Paul Czege has just launched a Kickstarter for The Balsam Lake Unmurders, a solo journaling game about trying to catch a serial necromancer, which uses a deck of playing cards for town residents you interact with and your efforts to learn who among them had the opportunity, has a motive, and how they're bringing people back.

It's not about blood spatter analysis or forensic crime solving like the TV shows, which isn't how most crimes get solved anyway. It's about human interactions and talking to people. People talk if you listen. You'll write conversations.

"The thing is Paul, I have a motive and everyone knows it. Campbell and I were lovers."
"So, you're back together now?"
"No. Since he was dead he doesn't remember we had a relationship."
"I'm sorry."
"That's how it goes."
"Did you bring him back then? When did you do it?"
"If you can prove I did, arrest me."
"Just don't leave town."
"So that's a 'no'. I'm not going anywhere."

It’s structured like a choose-your-own-adventure gamebook. How you play your cards takes you from prompt to prompt, telling you what to write out in your journal: a conversation with a suspect where you learn they have motive, an interaction with a victim struggling with their return back to life, the event of a new victim being brought back, time alone thinking about the case, an interaction with someone who tells you how the necromancer is doing it, etc. People of the town appear in thumbnail descriptions throughout the margins of the book, for when a card tells you someone specific is a newly returned victim, or a new suspect, and to have an interaction with them.

And if you play your cards right you just might catch the necromancer.

Paul has been really caught up with journaling games the past two years and has written a lot about them. The Ink That Bleeds is a zine he wrote about how immersion works (and it's not how you think), types of bleed, why to write dialogue, self care, and other topics. Inscapes is about what happens to you when you play. And then now The Balsam Lake Unmurders is a game that's made to give you the experience yourself, without needing to read anything else if you don't want, even if you've bought other journaling games and haven't played them. You just start playing from page one, shuffling and separating your deck of cards and turning one over that's the necromancer's first victim.

One of the reward tiers is a chance to get an already-printed copy, mailed to you right when funds clear, but there are a limited number, so don't wait too long on that!

The live Kickstarter for The Balsam Lake Unmurders is here‼️