Announcing Sleuths.

Sleuths is a new tabletop roleplaying game designed to let you run compelling mystery stories, like police procedurals, gentleman sleuth whodunits, or crime scene investigation dramas.

Building on the strengths of Welcome Aboard, Captain and Dungeon Hero, this new tabletop game takes refinements and embellishments of those systems to create a powerful new system that naturally hits the traditional story beats of various mystery genres.

Some of the game's design principles were:

• You shouldn't need to be as smart as Sherlock Holmes to play Sherlock Holmes.
• You should be able to express your character through the clues that you find.
• You should be able to easily create any sleuth character you want.
• The game should help you brainstorm and create interesting, compelling mysteries.
• There should be an objective truth to the mystery – no "roll to see if our theory was correct".
• It should not fall victim to traditional problems of mysteries in TTRPG's, like having to look under the right rock for a clue, guess what the GM was thinking with the clue, understand the solution from the collection of clues, etc.

Sleuths introduces several mechanics designed to hit all these targets, which still allow for a simple, straightforward manner of running the game and defining the mysteries.

The game comes with two sample adventures in two distinct mystery genres:

• The Willow Point Werewolf – Cartoon teenagers and their mascot find themselves in an abandoned theme park beset by a scary werewolf. Will the Funninghams have to sell the beloved park, or will these "meddling kids" solve the mystery and save the park?
• The Matryoshka Murders – In this gritty serial killer chaser story, a Russian nesting doll is discovered with severed fingers inside. Clues to catch the killer lie both in the present and in a decades-old cold case file, because this isn't the first Matryoshka doll found.  Can the detectives scour the streets of Albuquerque for clues and catch the killer before the killer strikes again?

The game also comes with pages and pages of tables you can roll on to randomly create mystery plots. Even if you don't use the rules set, it would be a valuable resource for solo RPG players, GM's running other mystery systems, or aspiring mystery writers.

I'm excited to be rolling this out. If you decide to pick it up, I hope you enjoy it!