This project is a murder party generator. More precisely, this project aims at generating live-action role-playing-game scenarios involving a lot of player-versus-player. It does not necessarily generate a murder mystery: the scenario will not necessarily consist of an investigation. The generated scenarios are not meant to be extraordinary in term of content, but they do aim at providing interesting interactions between players.
The generator is available online at this address.
The generated scenarios can be freely used for any role-playing game you want, in any context: it can be a party amongst friends, an exercise in a theater or language course, part of a role-playing-game festival, etc. The generated scenarios can also be used as a help to write custom scenarios.
Scenarios are made by combining scenario elements, defined in the data/elements folder. These elements range from very simple ones (for instance by just stating that a given player is female) to relatively complex ones (like stating that a player is a double agent, or that a player is responsible for a contract between several other players). Each of these elements yields some specific relations, and the generator tries to even them out along players according to the player’s preferences.
If you want to contribute, you are very welcomed to: more information can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md. There are various ways to contribute, and not all of them include programming.
Program documentation can be found in index.md. In particular, documentation about its source code can be found in structure.md. Documentation also includes material to write scenario elements, notably elements.md for a detailed explanation, or basic.md for a simple tutorial.
The program was mainly written because writing murder parties take quite a long time. I already have written some scenarios (which are available here), and quickly realised how difficult it is to have a balanced scenario. My main frustration was that there was always a “core scenario” whose characters I really like… but around this core scenario, there was always some “filling characters”, just there to confuse the tracks. This program tries to avoid such “filling characters” and attempts to provide interesting relations between all players. I hope that this leads to scenarios which are interesting to play.
You do not need to compile the program to use it, as it is already available online. Compiling the program yourself however provides an additional native version of the program, which is sensibly faster (but not as pretty as the online interface).
To compile the program, you will need to install npm and esy.
On Debian, this would look like that:
sudo apt install npm
npm install --global esyTo compile this project, you will need to install some dependencies. The following line will fetch and compile all dependencies. This might take some time.
esy installAll commands cited below may take a much longer time the first time that they are run.
To compile the project, do the following.
Simply typing esy is an alias for esy install followed by esy build.
esy buildThis created (among others) two files, corresponding to the two ways to run this program:
_build/default/js/main.jsfor the web interface;_build/install/default/bin/murder_generatorfor the native interface.
The web interface is prettier, but it is significantly slower than the native version.
To run the native version, run _build/install/default/bin/murder_generator, or simpler:
esy runYou get a terminal interface similar to the web interface.
The interface wait for a number input, corresponding to one of the displayed links.
For instance, if it is displayed [3], then typing 3 then enter would activate this link.
One can also change the width of the display by typing 0 and entering the new width.
To exit, emit an end-of-file message to the terminal (which is usually done by simultaneously typing the control and d keys).
To locally run the web interface (available at this address), you need to set up a local server.
This README does not aim at explaining how to set it up; if you are using Github, you can push these changes online and access the corresponding github.io address.
If you have Python 2 installed, typing esy server will set up a local server: accessing localhost:8000 should open the website.
One can generate documentation from the source as follows:
esy docThis should create _build/default/_doc/_html/index.html containing the in-source documentation.
More documentation can be found in index.md.
Optionally, one can perform some tests using the following command.
esy testCopyright © 2019,2020 Martin Constantino–Bodin
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
The program is under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). See the file LICENSE for more information. This license covers its entire source code (which can be found in the src folder), its local libraries (which can be found in the lib folder), the web resources (which can be found in the web folder), as well as the game data (which can be found in the data folder).
Note that the generated scenarios (and more generally, any material generated by this program) are not associated any license: you are free to use, adapt, and more importantly play with all the products of this program without any constraint.