Overview
The Nerve is a 18-20 person murder mystery I wrote out around May 2024. This is the process I went through to create it.
Someone’s task was to take polaroid photos of every guest. They passed.
My friend, Zak, was turning 30, and one of his favorite things is games. Any games. Board, DnD, card, corn hole. Anything. The plan was to have a weekend retreat at a cabin in Montana with a big group to celebrate. About a month before, Zak’s wife (Kacie) reached out and asked if I could be in charge of finding/hosting a murder mystery we would do on Friday night.
Now, the easy thing to do would be to find and buy a boxed game, read through it, set up the puzzles, and play it as a group. Two problems with that: 1.) there aren’t very many (if any) 18-20 person murder mysteries and 2.) they weren’t good. I mean, I’d love to make my own. I love story and complex characters, but that option takes a lot of time, and I’m pretty busy right now, so the other option was set in stone.
Then I was let go from my job.
Well, I have time now.
Planning
I knew the more I thought about things, the more indecisive I’d become. Because of that, I committed to play off instincts than the illusion of “the best thing”.
Main Story
The plan was to have a fancy dinner party with cocktails and horderves, so I started to build off of the question: Why were these characters at the party? What brought them there? After a few different ideas, I decided on company celebration party. But what was the company and what were they celebrating? Let’s do a tech company. The tech would be nanochips. Like human tech? Yeah, a brain chip. What does that chip do? Eliminate pain. Why would someone need that? What if they were allergic to pain medication? (This is my thought process. Question/answer.)
Characters
So, a nanotech company (let’s call it Nurotomics) who are celebrating two successful test subjects who recently received and healed from the chip. This was the more painstaking part, making 18-20 unique characters for people to play. I got the guest list of people who would be there, people who I knew would play certain characters really well, others I didn’t know. The hope is that everyone would be involved and have fun, so with each character, I made a short bio of their side of the story, an objective, who they knew, and a motivation. I sorted these people up into three tiers of people:
Main characters were players who had big impact roles. They were people who would commit to the parts, be invested in the story, and would know what to keep close and what information to give away. These characters ended up being the detective, murder victim(s), murderer(s), and accomplices to the murderer(s). They had higher risk and more complicated tasks, knew more about the other characters, and directly effected the night.
Secondary characters were players with supporting roles. They usually knew one or two people at the party, and they had more suspicion of characters than backstory. I thought of them as the “rumor spreaders”. They were friends, co-workers, and +1’s. Their goals and motivations didn’t really impact the story, even if they thought it did.
Extras were people who helped with the atmosphere of the night. They had pretty easy and minimal roles and tasks. This worked really well for people who were (practically) in charge of the bar, food, or photos. They played some aspect with everything, but they didn’t have a lot of context to what’s happening. These were event staff and employees. These were the roles that were cut in case people had to bail.
I also broke people up in three “factions”: Nurotomics employees, friends of the test subjects, and neutral parties. This helped with writing out motivations, who they know, and (if there’s overlap) who’s side their on.
Murder
Here’s where I’ll get deeper into the story, so if you want to do this party with people, probably stop here because spoilers ahead. With so many people, I wanted some sort of chaos to happen. More than that, I wanted to be the one to be murdered (mostly so I could watch everything happen). My character was Adam Newts (all character names were from a mash-up of two ChatGTG prompts of “give me 20 names” and “give me 10 unique names”. Thanks AI). I also wanted to be redundant and foster competition, so I made two murderers and a backup plan.
Murder #1 was by poison. This person’s objective was to put a pill in my drink without being noticed. I formatted the story to where pain medications would short out the chip and kill the person. It’s something I’d want to work out more, but instincts over best.
Murder #2 was by stabbing. This person had to get me alone and mark me with a sharpie, showing they stabbed me. This as with the backdrop of revenge and psychotic thinking (again, instincts over perfection. I wish I developed it more).
The back-up plan covered if neither person followed-through. Remember how I said there were two test subjects? Well only one is at the party. Francis (the other test subject) was killed as well outside the party. If Murder #1 or #2 never happens, the focus then goes on who murdered Francis (since the same person that murdered Francis is at the party).
After about a month of writing, revising, and dialing in, the time came for the party.
How it went
I packed everything up, and we drove up to the cabin. At one point, I sat down and sorted out who I’d want in each role. For Murder #1, I attached a pill to the paper and a sharpie for Murder #2. I handed people their roles with enough time to read their bios, 8:00 rolled around, and we were off.
I got a glass of wine and started to chat with guests around. Pods started to form and people were starting to achieve their goals. Asher Moon (played by Martin) had the goal to get an interview at Nurotomics, which he secured by talking and making a drink for Ducan (CEO of Nurotomics, played by Justin). Murderer #1 was Jason, who played his character like a borderline deranged Swiss Scientist (not in the bio, so props to him). Kacie played Murderer #2 who, at one point, pulled me a few feet away and said “can we chat in a few minutes?” before being interrupted by her accomplice. There were multiple times I gave both murderers time to win. At one point, I left my wine glass on a shelf and went to the bathroom. I came back out, took a sip, and looked at the bottom. Now, realistically, if you were to try and be discrete, you would crush up the pill before putting it in the drink, right? Nope, in the bottom was the whole pill, white and hanging out in the bottom. Close enough. Time to die.
30 seconds later, Seraphina Moon (evening host played by Emma) called for a toast and speech. I gave a short one, acted drunk, set the wine glass with the whole pill on the counter, and fell dead right outside the bathroom. One detail that I added was the need to be alone after being poisoned (both when I died and before Francis died, as told in Sirenna Hunns bio). This is when things got fun.
Post-death
The first person to find me was Nurotomic’s bodyguard (played by Wes) who asked “are you dead?” “Yes” I responded, trying to act dead. “Oh… What should I do?” I remained dead “I’ve never been in this situation before… ummm.” “Is he dead?” Ryan (character of Benjamin McGuff) said, joining around my body “I…. believe so”. They talked about what to do for about 2 minutes. Then Kacie (Murderer #2) came over and suggested we move the body. She took one of my arms and marked the sharpie on my wrist, signifying I was cut, so technically, she achieved her goal. That’s when undercover detective, Orion (played by Zak) blew his cover and started taking control of the situation. He told everyone before the murder that he was one of the sales people for Nurotomics to keep his cover. Zak waved around his badge, telling everyone to get back, and threatening them. After it cooled off, I told Zak that I was dead, with no signs of physical harm except a slit on my wrist.
Zak told everyone to sit down and started interrogating them. This is when Zephyr (Sirenna’s young son played by Wes C.) started following Zak around. Zephyr was a wannabe detective, so Wes C.’s goal was to be around Zak for at least 30 minutes. He kept saying “you’re Batman and I’m Robin” while “helping” him on interrogations. Meanwhile, I was staring at the wine that was slowly dissolving the evidence of my murder not 10 feet away from Zak. He never looked in what I was drinking. After about 30 minutes, we called it and all sat in the living room.
The debrief
Wrapping up
Zak went through what he learned and called out who he believed the murderer was. His assumption was it was Seraphina Moon who murdered Adam on behalf of Apollo. He was close, but he didn’t achieve his goal of guessing the correct murderer. We opened it up to everyone else and people guessed it was Declan, Marlowe (Adam’s ex-wife), and Nova. I explained the story and got the wine glass.
Murderer #2 is Sirenna Hunns. She was best friends with Francis and was there with both Francis and Adam the whole time they were recovering. When Francis dies, Sirenna believes Adam murdered their friend, hence the revenge on Adam. In reality, Apollo (Murderer #1) tested acetaminophen on the test subject, and it fails the chip, killing test subject #1 (Francis). With shipping deadlines of the chip pushed up, this leads Apollo down the “kill one person to save millions” route.
What I Learned
I think what I took away from this is how to better do “red herring” moments in a story. Things that sound like the solution, but they end up leading away from the objective. I should have gone lighter on them and looked from on outside perspective. People who don’t know the story as well as I do.
If you’re wanting to plan a murder mystery, contact me and I’d love to give any tips/suggestions!