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

Astonishingly dense arcane runes cover every side of incredibly complex origami structures. In some places, translucent onion-skin has been layered over the paper, creating sections in which the runes are overlaid with each other, forming inscrutable and ever-shifting patterns.

A proper understanding of the origami folds — and the multiple orientations in which they are designed to be read — allows one to begin unraveling a truly innovative method by which glyphs of warding can be interwoven.

INTERWOVEN GLYPHS

Interweaving glyphs of warding requires an Intelligence (Arcana) check (DC 10 + the total level of the interwoven glyphs). Interwoven glyphs of warding are:

• Simultaneously triggered.
• More difficult to find and disable, increasing the DC of the checks to do so by +2 per additional glyph.
• More difficult to identify, requiring an Intelligence (Arcana) check of DC 10 + the total level of the interwoven glyphs of warding.

Each glyph of warding must be cast in sequence and without interruption. If the sequence is interrupted or the Spellcraft check fails, the glyph of warding spells are all lost to no effect.

The total level of glyphs is based on the level of the casting of glyphs of warding for explosive runes, or the level of the stored spell for spell glyphs.

ADVANCED SYMBOLOGY

Among the origami notes describing the interweaving of glyphs of warding, there is also an incomplete treatise analyzing how symbol spells could also be interwoven (both with each other and with glyphs of warding).

If completed, this advanced methodology would also raise the saving throw DC of all interwoven glyphs or symbols to the highest DC among all of the interwoven glyphs and symbols.

However, because the research has never been completed, a PC interested in these techniques would need to finish perfecting them as a downtime research project. (See p. 338 of So You Want To Be a Game Master.)

This material is covered by the Open Game License.

Tonight at 6pm ET, I’ll be appearing on The DM Lair with Luke Hart! If you don’t see this until later, that’s okay! The interview will be archived on Youtube and you can watch any time!

Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian joins us in this live stream to offer our top new GM advice and answer your questions. Check out Justin’s latest book, So You Want to Be a Game Master, here!

Watch now!

Phandalin and the surrounding region of the Sword Coast have featured in three D&D adventures:

• Lost Mine of Phandelver
• Dragon of Icespire Peak
• The Shattered Obelisk

Each of these adventures have featured a slightly different versions of a region map drawn by Mike Schley. At the moment, I’m specifically interested in the various versions of the map designed to be given to the players as a handout. The best of these is probably the poster map found in the D&D Essentials Kits (to accompany Dragons of Icespire Peak), but all of them are fatally flawed as player maps because they spoil the adventures — not only showing locations that the PCs don’t know about yet (“Boy, I wonder if Icespire Peak — the only mountain labeled on this map — will be significant at some point…”), but frequently showing hidden sites that the PCs are supposed to go on adventures in order to locate.

NPC: But where could Cragmaw Castle be?! Nobody knows!!!!

Players: It’s right there.

NPC: If only someone could find it!

Players: It’s right there.

NPC: It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, baked into a souffle!

So I wanted a version of the map I could actually give to the players. I also, for purely personal reasons, wanted a version of the map without the hex grid.

Fortunately, you can purchase a digital map pack from Mike Schley that includes multiple versions of the map, including one with no grid and no labels.

The only catch, though, is that I don’t want NO labels… I want some labels: The roads. The major cities. And so forth. And I suspect I’m not the only one.

So what I’ve done is to create label layers that will let you control exactly which labels you want on your version of the map:

• Roads & Cities
• Regions
• Mountains
• Thundertree & Helm’s Hold
• All Layers

To use these labels:

1. Download the files below.
2. Buy the map pack from Mike Schley (also linked below).
3. Load the no-label map from the map pack into any graphic program that allows you to easily add and edit layers. Then add the PNG layers you want.

The layer files should line up perfectly with the map and with each other.

Alternatively, I’ve included a PSD file that you can use with Photoshop. (You’ll still need to add the no-label map from Schley as the background layer.)

Download the Layer Pack

Download the PSD File

Buy Mike Schley’s Map Pack

ALTERNATIVE MAPS
Phandalin Hexmap
Reveilled’s Phandalin Player Map

On page 245 of the 5^th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, there’s a Conversation Reactions table. The basic concept is that, when the PCs propose a given course of action to an NPC (or group of NPCs):

1. The DM assigns an attitude to the NPC (based on their relationship or initial reaction).
2. The PC makes some form of social ability check.
3. The DM consults the appropriate table for the NPC’s attitude to determine their reaction to the PCs’ proposal.

The problem is that the tables are quite limited and prone to producing nonsensical results. (For example, Friendly characters will basically always drop everything they’re doing to help you out with minor tasks. On the other hand, it’s surprisingly easy to get hostile creatures who are “opposed to the adventurers and their goals” to nevertheless help the PCs out.)

This, of course, has led to a lot of DMs just abandoning the whole thing. But the core concept here isn’t a bad structure for making a ruling to resolve a social interaction. It’s just the implementation that cripples it.

REACTIONS & RELATIONSHIPS

The first thing the DM should do is determine the NPC’s attitude to the PCs. This is a spectrum, describing either the NPC’s immediate reaction to the PC or their long-term relationship with them:

• Intimate. Someone the PCs have a deep, meaningful friendship or romantic relationship with.
• Friendly. Someone who will generally be kind and welcoming. They might be casual friends of the PCs, or just someone who’s friendly with strangers. They are likely to help the PCs if they can.
• Indifferent. The NPC has no meaningful opinion about the PCs.
• Threatening. The NPC is actively opposed to the PCs or their goals. They won’t necessarily attack the PCs, but there’s a risk that they will.
• Hostile. Unless convinced otherwise, a hostile NPC will actively oppose the PCs’ goals. This still doesn’t necessarily mean that combat will break out, but if the NPCs have a violent disposition it’s very likely it will unless there’s an inhibiting factor.
• Nemesis. Someone the NPCs have a history of antagonistic interactions with.

What reaction or relationship an NPC has to the PCs is a creative decision made by the DM, based on their understanding of the game world. It might depend on what they know about the NPC and their goals. It might depend on the NPC’s past interactions with the PCs (or to the PCs’ faction).

On the other hand, if the PCs are meeting these NPCs for the first time and you’re looking for inspiration, you might use a random reaction check:

Note that some attitudes might be persistent: The bartender at the Golden Apple is always happy to see the PC. Nicholas has been their friend since childhood.

Other attitudes, however, may be situational: The NPC is only Hostile to the PCs in the context of this specific check. For example, the watchman would usually be Indifferent to the PCs, but they are currently trying to get into the vault that he’s guarding so he’s Threatening or Hostile.

Some NPCs might even be both, and you’ll need to figure out which attitude is most significant to the current scene! For an example of this, consider the relationship between Rick and Louis in Casablanca: They are generally Friendly with each other, but when the Nazi Strasser puts official pressure on Louis, he can become temporarily Hostile to Rick (by, for example, shutting down his casino). As this demonstrates, such conflicts in an NPC’s relationship with the PCs can be a great source of drama and adventure.

(Note that Intimate and Nemesis are only used to describe persistent relationships. They describe long-term trends in the interactions between characters which will bias them towards similar interactions in the future.)

OUTCOMES

When the PCs ask an NPC to do something specific, we’ll call this a proposal. This might be a formal proposal (e.g., the PCs gain an audience with a king to ask him for assistance with the goblin infestation of the Feybane Woods), but it’s just as likely to be something more informal and casual (e.g., “Have you heard anything about Robin?”; that’s asking for information, and if we’re uncertain whether or not the NPC would answer the question, we could resolve it as a proposal).

When we resolve a proposal, there’s a spectrum of possible outcomes:

• Attack or Hinder. The NPC not only won’t do what the PC asks, they will seek to actively stop them from achieving their goal. (This might be getting the immediate goal of the proposal, but it might also be whatever underlying goal was the reason for the proposal – e.g., the king doesn’t just refuse to provide help, he recruits the goblins or locks the PCs up so they can’t return to the Feybane.) In a dungeon scenario, raid scenario, or similar situation, it likely means rolling initiative and trying to murder each other.
• Hinder, if there’s little risk. The NPC will take action to hinder the PCs, but only if there is little risk to them doing so. (This means combat is very unlikely, since potentially lethal consequences are generally the opposite of “little risk.” Although, a necromancer who thinks he can shout, “Destroy them my skeletal minions!” and then leave unmolested while the interlopers are dealt with may feel there’s little risk to themselves.)
• No Help. The NPC will not agree to the PCs’ proposal, but they won’t work to hinder it, either.
• Help, if there’s no risk or cost. The NPC will agree to the NPC’s proposal as long as there is no cost or risk to themselves.
• Help, if there’s a minor risk or cost. The NPC will agree to the PC’s proposal as long as it wouldn’t pose more than a small inconvenience – i.e., if it requires no more than a minor cost or cost on their part.
• Help, if there’s a major risk or cost. The NPC will agree to the PC’s proposal even if there’s a major risk or cost to themselves.

The judgment of what constitutes a major or minor risk/cost should be made from the NPC’s point of view: Asking a king to make a 100 gp donation to help the local orphanage is, at worst, a minor cost to the monarch, but making the same request to a pauper would be a major ask.

MAKING THE CHECK

To resolve the social interaction, the PC making the proposal can attempt an appropriate ability check, most likely some form of Charisma check. The outcome will depend on the proposal, the NPC’s relationship, and, of course, the check result.

For an Indifferent NPC, use this results table:

For NPCs who aren’t Indifferent, adjust the DCs on this table by one step per shift in the relationship. There are two different ways to think about this, and you can use whichever works best for you.

First, you can adjust the skill check by the NPC’s attitude:

Alternatively, you can use a master DC table for all reactions/relationships:

(Note that this results table is calibrated so that it’s Easy to get a friend to help you if there’s no risk to them. It’s also Very Hard to get a Hostile enemy to help you at all, and Nearly Impossible to get them to help you if there’s any kind of risk or cost.)

GROUP CHECK

Instead of resolving a persuasion attempt as a single check, you (or the players) might choose to resolve it as a group check. This has the advantage of getting all the PCs involved in the roleplaying, and you can also space out the individual checks, roleplaying between them and allowing each check to reflect the back-and-forth of the negotiation.

Particularly when making group checks, you can also be more flexible in which skill checks each PC might make as part of the check. For example, a PC might make a Wisdom (Insight) check and whisper in their chief negotiator’s ear. Or make an Intelligence (History) check to provide a historical precedence for the king’s aid to the Feybane.

RETRIES

The PCs have tried to convince an NPC to do something for them and they’ve just failed the check, but now they want to continue the negotiations and retry the check.

What do we do?

What you don’t want to do is just allow the PCs to continue retrying the skill check until they’re happy with the result. So here are a few options.

Let It Ride. Assume the check was made under the principles of let it ride: The check determined the result. It doesn’t matter how much the PCs keep talking, they can’t change the outcome. In fact, more than that, the players should be encouraged to finish roleplaying the scene with their check result in mind.

Transition to Group Check. Alternatively, if the initial attempt was a single check, you can transition the failure to a group check. If proposed after the initial check, however, the group is trying to climb its way out of the hole dug by the initially failed check: Have them make their checks with disadvantage. (And, of course, they already have the initial failure.)

Alter the Deal. If the PCs rolled a result of Help, but the risk was too great for the NPC to actually help them — for example, they rolled “Help, if there’s no risk/cost,” but the NPC would be putting their life in great jeopardy — then the PCs might have an opportunity to still get what they want if they can alter the deal to change the risk vs. reward (see below). (“Okay, you won’t got into the dungeon for 50 gp… what about 200 gp and an equal share of the treasure?”)

Limited Shift: If the check was Attack or Hinder, you might give the PCs a single chance to shift the result. I would recommend, however, that the best possible result in this situation would be No Help, and you might also require them to offer some sort of additional incentive to even attempt the check. (“Here! Take the rubyweed! We’ll leave peacefully!”)

Offer an Alternative: You could also proactively have the NPC offer a compromise along the lines of an Altered Deal or Limited Shift. (“I won’t do it for 50gp, but I will do it for 200gp plus an equal share of the treasure.”) You may or may not let the PCs counter-offer (which would still need to be better than their original offer) with a successful check.

Risk the Relationship: When appropriate, you might allow the PC to push hard on a Friendly or Intimate NPC and retry the check. In doing so, however, they’re risking the relationship: If they fail the check on the retry (or if the request requires a large sacrifice), they permanently damage their relationship, and it drops by one step.

RUNNING THE SCENE

The mechanical resolution at the center of this scene structure is fairly simple. As the DM, however, you have a number of levers that you control in framing and running the scene beyond that mechanical resolution.

First, you determine the NPC’s relationship. Think about your vision for this character, the PCs’ history with them (if any), their current goals, and so forth.

Second, what does “hinder” or “help” mean to this NPC? A king, for example, is unlikely to personally ride out and help the PCs slay giant rats, but he might assign some of the King’s Guard to assist.

Third, explain the outcome. For example, why did the friendly character help last time even though the risk was great, but won’t help this time? Well, perhaps he’s nervous now because of what happened last time. Or he’s busy. The context provided by this explanation may end up being the real meat of the scene. It might even have repercussions far beyond this scene.

Fourth, you decide if a check is allowed in the first place. Just like any other check, if you judge that success is either guaranteed (“hey, could you hand me that box?”) or impossible (“please abdicate your throne and make me the queen”), there’s no need to make a check. (Similarly, you decide if retries are allowed, as described above.)

Alternatively, you can extend the table to handle even larger risks or costs. Some caution is recommended, though, as a thoughtless application of this principle can lead to nonsensical results (e.g., a king abdicating his throne for a charismatic bard).

In fact, if the PCs are asking for something with a truly astronomical cost, it may be more effective to make them pay for it by figuring out what the PCs could do for the NPC in exchange for their largesse (i.e., what adventure will they be asked to do).

THE PLAYER’S LEVERS

Like the DM, the players also have levers they can use to influence the negotiation instead of relying strictly on a bare mechanical resolution.

First, they can minimize the risk in their proposal. They might do this in a direct way by altering the proposal in order to reduce the risk or cost. Alternatively, they might take action to only make the target believe that the risk or cost is minimal, which you might resolve with a Charisma (Deception) check. (A failed deception might scuttle the negotiation entirely, or it might just inflict disadvantage on the negotiation check in addition to the target assessing the proposal in accord with its actual risk.)

Second, they can provide a reward or perform a favor to change the perceived balance between risk and reward for the NPC. (This is also something that the PCs could theoretically deceive the target about, convincing them that a reward exists when it doesn’t or that it’s more valuable than it is.)

The PCs might also try to change their relationship with the NPC. Generally speaking, this should not be something that the PCs can achieve with a single ability check. Relationships are developed over the long-term, evolving over the course of multiple scenes (and likely multiple sessions). Are the PCs consistently helping the NPC or people/things the NPC cares about? Then their relationship will likely improve. Are they taking advantage of the NPC, putting them in danger, or damaging the things and people they care about? Then their relationship is going to deteriorate or collapse. This is really a roleplaying decision for the DM to make. (One thing I would recommend, though, is that it’s probably easier to knock an NPC out of Indifferent than anything else.)

The one exception to this is changing first impressions. Whatever that initial relationship may be, the fact that it’s only existed for a few moments and is likely based on very little information will probably make it more susceptible to a rapid shift. A particularly effective technique here is to invoke a common ally, faction, or cause. Letters of recommendation can serve this function in formal negotiations. (This, too, could be a matter of deception. For example, if the PCs can convince the orcs they just met that they, too, work for the Golem Master, then we’re all on the same team and even a Hostile reaction could flip to Friendly.)

ROLEPLAYING THE SCENE

Something that we’ve emphasized throughout this article is that this is a scene structure which resolves a roleplayed negotiation. It does not, importantly, replace the roleplaying. The scene should be roleplayed to set up the check and then the outcome of the check should be roleplayed, too.

For a deeper look, and more tips and tricks for handling this during actual play, you might want to check out Rulings in Practice: Social Skills.