Creating a murder mystery adventure lab experience

I love a good murder mystery and the joy of trying to find out ‘whodunit?’. Over the years I have enjoyed reading famous sleuthing books by authors like Agatha Christie and PD James; watching TV ‘whodunit?’ dramas; going to murder mystery dinners; and playing games of Cluedo with friends whenever the opportunity arises.  

Trying to unravel a series of breadcrumb clues, wean out the red herrings and decipher who committed murder, is great fun and more often than not, I get it completely wrong.

 

With the recent advent of virtual murder mystery games around town centres, it gave me an idea for a set of lab caches. And when I found out I had been awarded an adventure lab credit to build a series of adventure labs, I was overjoyed and began thinking my idea through a little more.

 

There were however two stumbling blocks that I had to overcome. The first was I could only have five locations with a strict word count on each location page. It seemed there was barely enough time to tell the story, leave alone leave enough clues, and bring in enough suspects and red herrings, to make it a puzzling mystery.

 

The second hitch was the guidelines for adventure labs, which all creators have to adhere too. 

They specify you aren’t allowed to place any physical elements or clues at each lab GZ. This is a strict requirement of the new generation of labs and was a bit of a problem for my idea. I had hoped cachers would be able to find some important clues at each location that would directly relate to the mystery. 

One of my ideas was to have a message written in UV paint that would appear once the finder lit it up with a UV light, but HQ said a very firm no when I contacted them.

 

Overcoming each of these was a challenge. After an evening walk around Mildenhall, which is where I wanted to set the adventure, I soon found some pretty interesting and historic locations. I wanted cachers to see some of the town’s interesting places, as well as follow the story and unravel the mystery.

 

Each location naturally inspired a different character/suspect and I built up the mystery and storyline around these. Each lab cache page would have the story and clues from one suspect and I realised I could bring in other clues and a couple of additional characters, using the images and video options on each lab page, and on the solved it page that pops up once the correct information is entered for each question.

 

Further, the option to add a bonus physical cache at the end of the lab series meant I could add an additional puzzle solving element, whilst at the same time including the big reveal, for anyone who had not managed to solve it.

 

Sadly, I never quite found a way to make the actual answers to each question, relate to the story, as I had to rely on whatever written words or numbers were at a particular GZ. Unfortunately, the name on an air conditioning unit or drain, really didn’t lend itself to being incorporated within the story, but I did overcome the other issues. 

It required a lot of harsh editing of each suspect’s story, the clever use of the image spaces available, and one rather cringey video, which was more of an audio…allowing the bar maid to give some additional, possibly essential material.

 

Finally, I finished the series, and developed some new photo editing skills along the way in order to drop some extra hints in here and there. I decided to make it a linear trail so that the story worked in a good sequence of events and interviews. 

 

The adventure starts at the pretty riverbank, not far from the free parking, and from there goes onto the 18^th Century coaching inn, the Bell Inn, on the High Street; the beautiful 14^th and 15^th Century St Mary’s Church; the lavish Georgian Riverside Hotel; and the Old Court House, which was built around 1750.    

 

There are six key suspects, including a vicar, a barmaid, and a hotel manager! Plus a couple of peripheral characters, who with a bit of imagination could be involved as well. 

 

I decided to make the bonus cache a mystery cache, with a difficulty five rating. Essentially each of the labs is just the usual question and answer, so it is no more difficult to gain a smiley for them, than any other lab cache out there. However, in order to get the bonus physical cache, you would need to have been paying some attention to the murder mystery story.

 

To get the co-ordinates, cachers need to successfully identify who committed murder and why? By entering four key words into the checker they then get the co-ordinates. 

However, as that can be tricky, even for those who have been paying attention to the story - a lot of red herrings in the taIe – I also added in the safeguard of a cipher. The cipher can be decrypted with the answer to the last lab cache and the right deciphering tool, and provides the solution to the mystery and the four key words for the checker.

 

Got it? Phew! It sounds far more complicated than it really is, but as a return visit is often needed, along with a bit of head scratching, a difficulty five rating seemed about right.

 

And it is solvable! Yes, to my great relief since publication quite a few budding detectives have tried their hand at it and triumphed, including Cagney & Lacy, Colombo, Scott & Bailey, Gene Hunt and Alex Drake to name a few!

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading all the logs. Some have really made me giggle. A big thank you to everyone who has done it so far and for all the nice logs, it is always rewarding as a CO to see cachers having fun doing your caches. 

 

Next week, we are off down south to catch a wave or two and grab some cliff top caches. Until then, don’t have nightmares about a murderer on the loose in Mildenhall…he’s been caught 18 times already!