Alice is Missing is a stunningly beautiful storytelling game that delivers an utterly unique and unforgettable experience. I’ve played it twice, with different groups, and each game was profound. Every player was deeply affected, and several texted the group the next morning to say that they’d dreamed about the events of the game.

The premise of Alice is Missing is in the title: A high school student named Alice has gone missing, and the players will take on the roles of her friends as they try to figure out what happened while dealing with the emotional trauma of her disappearance.

The central conceit of the game is this: You don’t talk. Instead, all of your interactions — all of your roleplaying — takes place via text messaging.

HOW IT WORKS

You can play with three to five players and you’ll start by each selecting one of the five broad, archetypal characters provided. These are quickly fleshed out with Drives, which provide Motives (a key personality trait) and two Relationships, which you’ll assign to two different player characters. It’s a fairly quick process that creates a remarkably broad dynamic of play while keeping the structure of play focused.

Now the Facilitator will start a group text message with all participants by sending a text with their character name in it. All the other players reply by sending their character name, at which point everyone should create a contact for that number (if they don’t have one already) and change its name to the character’s name.

At this point play begins: The Facilitator will open an Alice is Missing video which provides both a soundtrack and a 90-minute timer. From this point forward, no one speaks: The Facilitator will send a message initiating the game, and then everyone will spend the next hour and a half texting.

The core mechanic of the game revolves around Clue cards. These are synced to the timer — so, for example, there’s an 80 minute clue card, a 70 minute clue card, and so forth. There are three different cards for each time interval, and these can be freely intermixed, resulting in thousands of potential game states.

Each Clue card contains a prompt for the player who draws it:

• Reveal a Suspect card. This person shows up at your door acting suspicious. What weird question about Alice do they keep asking you?
• Reveal a Location card. You dig up some weird or unexpected history about this location. What do you learn about this place that would make it the perfect spot to hide?

The player creates the answer to this question and introduces it into the group chat, pushing the narrative of the game forward.

As you can see from these examples, the game also includes Suspect cards and Location cards. These help shape the mystery of Alice’s disappearance, and a number of clever mechanics are used to make sure that the narrative in the back half of the game evolves logically and naturally from the foundation laid down in the first half of the game, even as it’s ultimately being guided by the player’s creativity.

Finally, the game provides a deck of Searching cards which are more flexible: Whenever a PC decides to go somewhere without being prompted by a Clue card, they should draw a card from the Searching deck to reveal what they discover there. (Examples include “a drop of blood in the fresh snow” and “a loaded firearm.”)

SOME GRIT IN THE GEARS

Overall, Alice is Missing does an excellent job of walking a new player through the rules. The rulebook is actually split into two parts: The first is an in-depth explanation of the rules, and the second is a Facilitator’s Guide which walks the Facilitator (most likely the game’s owner) through the exact steps they should take to explain the rules to the other players (including short scripts they should read at every step).

This is crucial to the game’s success, because if everyone at the table isn’t completely onboard with the rules, the central conceit of silent gameplay won’t work and the game will fall apart. Spenser Starke, the designer, deserves major kudos not just for a great game, but for making sure the presentation of the game was everything it needed to be.

With that being said, there are a few places where grit gets into the gears, and I’m going to point them out so that when you play Alice is Missing you can hopefully benefit from my experience and avoid them.

First, the game comes in a lovely box that suggests completeness. Unfortunately, the box is missing components. There are no character sheets, for example, and there’s also supposed to be a stack of missing person posters that isn’t in the box. These are all easily downloadable from the publisher’s website (at least for now), but these aren’t just optional supplements: The rulebook will tell you to, for example, select a missing person poster, and you won’t be able to. (So make sure you track these down ahead of time and print them out.)

Speaking of the character sheets, they’re too small. For example:

In the half-inch by three-inch space between “Charlie Barnes” and “Dakota Travis,”you’re supposed to write down their physical description, favorite class, home life, etc. plus the answer to their Background question plus more… You can’t do it. The character sheet should have been designed as a full-page sheet and probably also double-sided to work properly.

After everyone picks their characters, they’re encouraged to specify their character’s pronouns. This is great in principle, but Alice is Missing completely flubs the execution by constantly referring to the characters by predetermined pronouns (and even baking this into the mechanics). Points for trying, but beaucoup negative points for failing. (A close edit of the rulebook to remove predetermined pronouns and, most especially, removing gendered identities from the character roles would be the minimum required to fix this. Ideally, I’d also want all the character names to be gender neutral.)

On a similar note, every character has a Secret. These are listed on the character cards, and so when the Facilitator is instructed to lay the character cards out in front of the players and have them select which characters they want to play, all of the players are going to read every single character’s Secret. The Facilitator’s script then almost immediately says, “Do not share your Secret — it should come out in play.”

This is not actually a problem: The players are not their characters, and what the rulebook means is that the answer to your Secret prompt question should not be included in your character introduction, but instead revealed during play. But every single group I’ve played this with has immediately gone, “Wait. Did we screw up? I read the Secrets!” It’s a very minor thing, but it’s a consistent irritation and it’s probably worth thinking about how you want to tweak that particular point of presentation to sidestep it.

My final critique of Alice is Missing is more significant: The rulebook sets things up so that the Facilitator is always playing the character of Charlie Barnes.

I can understand why they’ve done this. (It allows them to script specific examples into the scripts in the Facilitator’s Guide.) But it makes for a really bad experience if you’re the one who owns the game and is, therefore, always the Facilitator introducing new players to it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix this and let the Facilitator play any of the characters. (But it will require some edits to the guide and its procedures.)

WHAT MAKES IT BRILLIANT

I took the time to highlight all these little minor bits of grit in the gears of Alice is Missing because you’ll want to know about them when you play the game.

And you will want to play this game.

Because it’s brilliant.

The mechanics are elegant, easily grasped, and expertly tuned by Starke to effortlessly guide almost any group to a powerful story which is nevertheless unique every time. It’s a true exemplar of storytelling game design.

The novelty of the experience certainly helps to make it memorable, but the true brilliance of Alice is Missing is more than that. It’s a game that effortlessly immerses you in your character: The experience of play — focused through your text messaging app — is seamlessly identical to the character’s own experience.

You know how the world can sometimes sort of drop away when you get focused on your phone? Starke leverages that fugue state — everything else drops away, and the only thing you’re truly experiencing is the world of the text messages. A world where you’re not talking to your friends; you’re talking to Charlie and Dakota and Julia. (This is why it’s so important to change your contact names before playing.)

In addition, the text-based medium automatically leads the player to create the game world through a creative closure which is nigh-indistinguishable from the closure you perform every day in the real world. When Julia, for example, texts you to say, “There’s someone outside my window!” you immediately imagine that scene in exactly the same way you would if one of your actual friends texted that to you.

The power of that in a roleplaying experience really can’t be underestimated.

Either of these two things — the near-flawless mechanical design or the novel genius of the text-based roleplaying — would make the game worth checking out.

The two together?

Alice is Missing is one of the best storytelling games ever made.

Grade: A+

Designer: Spenser Starke

Publisher: Hunters Entertainment / Renegade Game Studios
Cost: $21.99
Page Count: 48
Card Count: 72

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33B: The Interrogation of Arveth

The man laughed. “It’s a fiction. A front for the Brotherhood of Venom.”

“Which you belong to.”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Being questioned by amateurs.”

Tee wasn’t amused. She signaled Agnarr, who lowered him and began swinging the top of his head through the sewer sludge.

It’s a classic scene: Our hero has been taken prisoner by the villain. An interrogation ensues, with an exchange of witty banter. But who’s learning more? The hero or the villain? And then the denoument: “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” Almost certainly most famous from Goldfinger, the trope extends back to the first James Bond movie and beyond. (You can find it in everything from Prisoner of Zenda to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to John Wick.)

Across a multitude of groups — home games, convention games, open tables, etc. — however, I have rarely seen this dynamic emerge at the gaming table. In fact, exactly the opposite seems far more common: The PCs will have taken someone prisoner and, as in the current session, be the ones coming up with Rube Goldbergian interrogation techniques.

(And, as often as not, just like a Bond villain, the PCs end up giving away more information than they gain. They’ll also do this in another Bond-ian scene which is more common at the game table: As guests at the bad guy’s big social event.)

This might just be a me thing. Maybe PCs in your campaigns are constantly getting captured and interrogated. But I think there are a few factors that cause this to happen:

First, RPGs largely default to the PCs being masters of their domain, by which I mean that they are almost always expected to physically trounce any opposition put in their way. This is in sharp contrast to the protagonists in most action movies, for example, who are almost always completely outgunned. In fact, it’s quite common for the plot of an action movie to be entire about the hero desperately running away (until, of course, the final act when they turn it all around).

Second, unlike Bond, players will generally resist being captured unto their last bloody breath. Many players have had bad experiences with GMs stripping them of their agency, and so they’d literally rather die than endure that again. Game design also factors in here, with the typical RPG providing concrete structures in which the players can influence the outcome of events (or, at least, feel as if they can continue influencing events) as long as they keep fighting, but no such structures for sustaining their agency in a Bond-like fashion if they allow themselves to be captured.

Third, there’s the distinct difference between the group dynamics of the typical PC group in an RPG and the dynamic of the lone protagonist in other media. Most stories in other media protagonize a single character, even if that character is operating in a group. In the comparatively rare stories where there are a gaggle of main characters (e.g., Ocean’s Eleven or Stranger Things), it’s still virtually unheard of for them to always travel together in one big pack.

(Consider the group dynamics of the The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship is quite large, but during the period where the whole group is together, the story remains pretty firmly fixed on Frodo as the main character. It’s only when the Fellowship splits up that other characters start acting as protagonists.)

Even more unusual (again, compared to other media) is the penchant for most RPG groups to almost never frame scenes around a PC vs. PC conflict. (Not necessarily in the sense of a physical confrontation; in the sense of conflicting agendas.) Usually when you have a large, central cast of characters in other media, most of the storytelling is about the relationships and conflicts between those characters, but not so in most RPG groups.

Better RPG groups will, in fact, rise above this. But it’s pervasive largely because it arises naturally from the expected dynamic of “the GM preps material for the players to experience.” This inclines the GM towards presenting their prep and causes the players to slide into a weird midpoint between passive audience and hive-mind protagonists.

Anyway, the point is that PCs often interrogate NPCs as if they were Bond villains.

Weird, huh?

Campaign Journal: Session 33C – Running the Campaign: Action Schticks
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

The core structure of a mystery is not the absence of knowledge (as one might first assume), it is the acquisition of knowledge: It’s the detective finding the murder weapon. It’s the sleuth following the werewolf’s footprints. It’s the kid on the bike spotting the guys in Hawaiian shirts loading packages into an unmarked van.

So if that’s the case, why is the failure to find a clue so vital for a rich and engaging mystery scenario?

This can actually be a controversial statement, so let’s back up for a moment. If you go poking around the RPG meme-sphere, you’ll find all kinds of advice telling you that allowing the PCs to fail to find a clue in a mystery scenario is a sin somewhere on par with murdering a nun.

Much, but not all, of this advice is the result of running fragile scenarios in which Clue A leads to Clue B leads to Clue C in a breadcrumb trail that completely collapses the moment a single clue is missed. This isn’t good either, of course, and techniques like the Three Clue Rule can be used to build more robust scenarios where missing a clue doesn’t become apocalyptic.

Far more important than simply being able to miss a clue, however, is for the investigators to go looking for a clue and not find it because it doesn’t exist.

You can think of this a little bit like the scientific method: As the PCs investigate a mystery, they will form hypotheses and will then test those hypotheses to see if they’re true. (“If it’s a werewolf, then the attacks will only have happened during the full moon.” or “If the murderer came in through the window, then they would have left tracks in the mud outside.”) Null results are an essential part of that problem-solving process because it allows the PCs to discard false conclusions and refine their hypotheses (which can, of course, be tested through further investigation).

You can experience analogous problem-solving when working on a crossword puzzle, for example. Your read a clue, reach a conclusion about what the word might be, and then test it against the grid. If it doesn’t work, then you have to think about other possible solutions; or combine the clue with other information (e.g., letters crossing the answer) to figure out the answer. Sometimes you’ll think you have the right answer, but then later discover (due to crossing clues) that you were wrong.

You may have encountered techniques like these:

• Improvising a clue so that the PCs find a clue, no matter what method of investigation they used.
• Altering the solution of the mystery to match whatever theory the players come up with.
• Auto-finding all clues (so that the players can have complete surety that they didn’t miss anything).

These all remove texture from a mystery scenario by damaging or completely removing the feedback between creating and testing hypotheses: It can be a pleasant pastime to fill in a crossword grid with words you choose at random, but it’s not actually the same thing as solving a crossword puzzle.

It should be noted that these techniques can be quite popular, however, so I have no doubt that many hackles have been raised reading this.

So, to be clear, these are not intrinsically bad techniques, per se. In fact, they are often successful in redressing the problem they’re designed to solve, and it’s far better to have, for example, a shallow scenario than a broken one. It’s also quite possible for these techniques to be moderated or modified to good effect. For example, Brindlewood Bay is a storytelling game designed entirely around the players inventing the solution to the murder, succeeding because (a) it explicitly replaces the joy of solving mysteries with the thrill of creating them and (b) it mechanically enforces null results in the form of failed theories, forcing the players to create anew. Similarly, permissive clue-finding is a form of improvising clues, but with the important proviso that you’re doing so in a way consistent with the solution.

To return to the point: You don’t need to choose between shallow mysteries and broken ones. There are methods for creating robust mysteries that will preserve and even enrich the depth of the scenario.

Next: Returning to the Scene of the Crime

RUNNING MYSTERIES
The Null Result
Returning to the Scene of the Crime
Enigma
The Two Types of Leads
Hints

You’ve been playing D&D 5^th Edition for awhile now and you’re starting to wonder what other roleplaying games are out there. Is there something you’d like better? Maybe you have a favorite genre — space opera, horror, detective fiction — and it’s not fantasy. Or maybe you just want a break.

Or maybe not. I’ve been playing D&D for thirty years. It’s a game of infinite possibility.

But if you are thinking about trying a new RPG, here are some options I think you should check out.

5th EDITION: IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT

“I’ve only played D&D 5^th Edition, it’s not quite right for me, and I’d like to try something different.”

1974 D&D: The original version of D&D created by Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from 5^th Edition. This may not be what you’re looking for, but it will tell you a lot about whether you should be looking at other editions of D&D. I’ve done a video series taking a closer look at this edition and how it plays at the table.

Pathfinder (Jason Buhlmahn): The 1^st Edition of Pathfinder derives from the 3^rd Edition of D&D and the current 2^nd Edition heavily revises that into a more streamlined, tightly designed package. Either or both will tell you everything else you need to know about checking out other editions of D&D.

Shadow of the Demon Lord (Robert J. Schwalb): From one of the major designers during D&D 4^th Edition, Shadow of the Demon Lord is a good example of where the concepts of D&D can be taken when designers are given the freedom to reinvent them.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (Sean Punch): Based on the GURPS universal RPG system, Dungeon Fantasy is for the simulationists and the extreme character customizers.

The One Ring (Francesco Nepitello & Marco Maggi): Set in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, this one is for the narrativists and those interested in an earthier fantasy. Also focused on epic journeys.

Blades in the Dark (John Harper): Everybody gets to play a rogue! Also introduces org-based play as the group builds a criminal crew together.

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen): Everybody gets to play a wizard! Also introduces org-based play as the group builds a covenant together.

Burning Wheel (Luke Crane): Maybe you’d like a storytelling game! With Burning Wheel you’re really only dipping your toe in that end of the pool, but it’ll open the door for you.

WHAT ELSE IS OUT THERE?

“I’ve only played D&D, but I want to see what other sorts of games are out there.”

Some of the games listed below are repeated from the list above.

Numenera (Monte Cook): A science-fantasy game seting one billion years in the future. Earth has seen eight mega-civilizations rise and fall, and a neo-Renaissance now picks through the ruins, rediscovering what was lost.

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen): Everybody plays the wizard! Your powerful magi have banded together to found a covenant in Mythic Europe, a fantasy version the 13^th century.

Pendragon (Greg Stafford): Step into the legends of King Arthur, playing knights of Camelot in a campaign designed to span decades.

Technoir (Jeremy Keller): A cyberpunk game with a radically inventive game system in which you change the world by using verbs to push adjectives. Also features conspiracy-driven plot-mapping.

Blades in the Dark (John Harper): Everybody plays the rogue! The players craft not only their characters, but also the criminal crew they all belong to. Features mechanics specialized for carrying out heists and other scores that are tightly integrated with downtime development of the crew.

Night’s Black Agents (Kenneth Hite): A vampire spy thriller, in which retired secret agents discover that vampires are real. After creating your own unique vampire variant, very creative tools like the Conspyramid empower the GM to run a vast, global conspiracy.

Eclipse Phase (Rob Boyle & Brian Cross): A transhuman kitchen sink space opera set 10 years after the Fall of Earth. With elements ripped from the pages of cutting edge science fiction, Eclipse Phase is a multitude of games in one.

Call of Cthulhu (Sandy Petersen): Based on the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, the players take on the roles of investigators seeking to unravel eldritch mysteries.

You might also enjoy these storytelling games, which are tabletop narrative games similar to roleplaying games, but distinctly different (and not all of which even have a GM):

The Quiet Year (Avery Alder): A map-based storytelling game in which the players collaboratively create a post-apocalyptic civilization using prompts generated from a deck of playing cards.

Microscope (Ben Robbins): Explore an epic history entirely of your own making, using the rules of the game to build an ever-expanding, non-linear chronology.

Shock: Social Science Fiction (Joshua A.C. Newman): A game intensely focused on the speculative in speculative fiction, in which each player takes on the role of both their Protagonist and also the Antagonist for the player sitting to their right.

Ten Candles (Stephen Dewey): Ten days ago, the sun went out. And then They came. The survivors have learned to stay in the light. You play this game by candlelight, snuffing one of the ten candles at the end of each scene… until the last candle goes out.

MY GAMES

“I’ve only played D&D, I want to try something new, and Justin’s a shill.”

These are all games I’ve created, co-created, or oversee as either the RPG Developer at Atlas Games or publisher at Dream Machine Productions.

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen): The only game to make all three lists!

Technoir (Jeremy Keller): A cyberpunk game with a radically inventive game system in which you change the world by using verbs to push adjectives. Also features conspiracy-driven plot-mapping.

Magical Kitties Save the Day (Matthew J. Hanson, Justin Alexander, Michelle Nephew): Every kitty has a magical power, every kitty has a human, and every human has a problem. The magical kitties have to use their powers to solve the humans’ problems! (Warning: Problems may include witches, alien invasions, and hyper-intelligent raccoons.) This game is designed for first-time roleplayers and first-time GMs, including an introductory graphic novel adventure that lets you start playing within minutes of opening the box and a plethora of guides for running your first game.

Legends & Labyrinths (Justin Alexander): A version of 3^rd Edition which strips the game down to its simplest core. Designed to be 100% compatible with 3^rd Edition, however, allowing you to not only use any adventure material designed for the game, but to also bolt on any and all advanced options you’d like to have in your game.

Infinity (Justin Alexander): A space opera kitchen sink based on the Infinity miniatures game from Corvus Belli. Notably includes a three-part conflict resolution engine with fully integrated Warfare, Psywar, and Infowar systems.

Feng Shui (Robin D. Laws): The Hong Kong action film roleplaying game! Laws has created an ingenious setting allowing him to wed historical, modern, and science fiction settings into a single experience for your PCs, while the innovative combat system allows you to capture the high-octane fights from your favorite action movies.

Over the Edge (Jonathan Tweet): The Ultimate Democratic Republic of Al Amarja welcomes you. During your stay with us please remember that Liberty is Job One, Disarmament Means Peace, It’s Polite to Speak English, and, of course, Paranormal Activity is Perfectly Legal. Thank you for your consent. (Make sure to check out my adventure in the Welcome to the Island anthology.)

Unknown Armies (Greg Stolze & John Tynes): An occult horror RPG about broken people trying to fix an equally broken world.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 32B: Shaped by Venom

A beam of scintillating energy shot out from a second door – only slightly cracked – and struck the barbarian in the chest, paralyzing him completely. Agnarr was completely defenseless as one of the thralls thrust its lance-like claw through his chin and up into his skull, killing him instantly.

Oh no! Agnarr! I can’t believe this! How will his death reshape the campaign? What will be the emotional fallout? What new character will his player create?

With the entryway cleared, Dominic came around the corner, looked at Agnarr’s grievous wound, and sighed heavily.

(…)

As Tee came back inside, she saw that Agnarr was shaking his head gingerly – Dominic had resealed the bond between his soul and body.

Oh. Never mind.

For the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, and other 3^rd Edition games, I used a set of house rules for death and dying designed to narratively smooth out the “you’re dead, you’re back, you’re dead, you’re back, you’re dead” up-and-down cycle that can emerge in D&D, but it’s nevertheless true that once you start hitting the upper range of what we’d now call Tier 2 the PCs’ relationship to death shifts.

Raise dead really is a game changer.

This used to be less true. In AD&D, for example, a character could only be returned to life with raise dead or resurrection effects a number of times equal to their Constitution score. (This could eventually be surpassed with a wish spell, but obviously only at a much later point in the campaign.)

(At least in theory. The fact that 3^rd Edition began eliminating such consequences because they weren’t fun is largely because a wide swath of people were already ignoring them because they weren’t fun. But I digress.)

Regardless, most D&D protagonists will reach a point where their relationship is largely unique in storytelling. Superheroes often experience a revolving door of death, but it’s rarely seen that way by the character except for comical asides or fourth-wall breaks. Video games will have stuff like phoenix down that will “revive” companions who are “dead,” but this is usually ludonarrative dissonance with these games nevertheless featuring actual death in their cutscenes.

The same sort of ludonarrative dissonance — a disconnect between the story of the game and the mechanics of the game — is something that will often crop up in D&D campaigns: You instinctively want death to have the same meaning that it does in stories or real life, but the reality is that it doesn’t. Dominic’s reaction to seeing Agnarr’s impaled corpse may be distress, but it really shouldn’t be the same emotional reaction that someone in the real world seeing their companion’s corpse would have. Because the reality Dominic and Agnarr are living in is just fundamentally not the same.

And, in my opinion, that’s OK. It’s fascinating, even.

I think there’s kind of two ways to deal with this.

First, you can try to treat death in a mid- or high-level D&D game as if it were emotionally and factually the same as death in the real world. If you take this approach, though, I think you’ll be best served if you actually house rule the game to match the vision of what you want (and sustain ludonarrative harmony). That would mean getting rid of spells like raise dead, and if you do that, you’ll probably also want to modify the mechanics around dying, your scenario design, or both.

Second, lean into it. Death doesn’t have the same meaning. So what meaning DOES it have, both emotionally and factually? And what are the unique stories that you can tell with that meaning?

A sentiment I often see in a variety of places (discussions of prequel movies, for example) is that if a character can’t die, then there’s nothing at stake. This can be a particularly alluring belief when it comes to a D&D because, other than the outcomes of specific die rolls, death IS the only mechanically defined thing at stake in the game.

But it’s not really true, of course, because the experience of playing D&D is much more than just the sum of its mechanics. And, particularly in fiction, life-or-death is often the least interesting thing at stake.

Campaign Journal: Session 32C – Running the Campaign: Non-Combat Goals
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index