Character Packs: Public Card and Private Sheet

The public card carries the portrait, the name, the role and the age, then the shared rules: one played character committed the murder with no accomplice, you know only the facts on your sheet and the documents already opened, permitted lies never allow inventing a route, a witness, a key or a document, evidence stays shared and intact, an out-of-character pause is always available. It is deliberately readable by the whole table. If a card is left on a chair, nothing is spoiled. The murder mystery kits pages show sample pages from each file.

The private sheet opens with the warning to read only your own character, then gives the public face, a line the character might say about themselves. After that come the facts they alone hold: what they did that evening, what they saw, what they have to hide. Then the permitted lie and its limits, which matters more than it sounds: a player may deny a purchase, but not invent a second cape or a third visitor. It ends with three useful conversations, naming other characters to seek out, and the personal objective with its two required partners.

Because a table needs both common ground and private knowledge. If everything were private, nobody could check anything; if everything were public, there would be no game. The split also solves a practical problem: the host can print and hand out public cards early, even by email before the evening, and keep the private sheets for the moment people sit down. And it protects the culprit. Their private sheet reads like every other one, same length, same sections, so nobody guesses from the thickness of a page who is hiding a murder.

Decide the casting yourself rather than drawing lots in front of everyone: the guide explains which six roles are always dealt and which ones join at eight, ten and twelve. Give the culprit's pack to someone comfortable with the responsibility, discreetly, without announcing that the role exists in that seat. Hand each person their two pages together, folded or in an envelope, and leave twenty minutes of silent reading before anything begins. That reading time is in the schedule for a reason: a guest who has not read their sheet cannot play it. The schedule itself lives in the host's guide on the case file portal, opened with the code that comes with the order.

Keeps it. The pack is a reference, not a script: people look at it between acts, check whether a fact they hold may be revealed yet, and cross off the conversations they have had. Some kits ask a character to disclose something at a fixed point, and the sheet says so plainly, so the game does not depend on someone remembering. At the end the pack helps write the accusation ballot, since it lists what that character can and cannot claim to know. The printable murder mystery kit page walks through a full evening.