Scapegoat

Someone is dead at the inn, and you were the last to arrive. You are Grey — hired by the Duke to look into caravans vanishing in Deepwood Valley. You walk into the local inn to ask a few questions, and a guest named Aldric turns up with a knife in him. A merchant, the others say. Looks have been known to deceive. And your contract is clear: any incident gets investigated. Six people were under this roof tonight. One of them is a killer. One of them was chosen, long before you arrived, to hang for it. Interrogate them, befriend them, or terrorize them. Your job is to make sure the right person is held accountable — and the scapegoat walks free. What makes it tick **A cast that actually thinks.** **Living characters — no scripts, no dialogue trees.** Each suspect is driven by its own mind: memories, motives, a temperament, and a secret it will bend the truth to keep. Say something new and you get a new answer. Tell one of them something in the taproom, and another will have heard about it by the time you reach the stable. **Speak, don't select.** Type your questions, or hold a key and say them out loud — speech recognition runs locally on your machine. Interrogation the way it should feel: you asking, them dodging. **No canon culprit.** The murderer is drawn fresh at the start of each round, and the evidence is written so the guilty and the innocent look exactly alike. Learn the tells and they'll still fool you. **Solo, or six players.** Play the singleplayer mystery against the cast — or drop into a six-player round where the liars across the table are human, and one of them is quietly steering you toward the wrong neck. A night at the inn — how a case actually breaks **1. Make the rounds.** The six pieces of the story live in what people say, scattered across the whole cast. Nobody hands you the picture — you assemble it, room by room. **2. Find each person's key.** Red gives way to the truth. Yellow to gentleness. Green only to hard proof. Bring the wrong approach and the door stays shut — bring the right one and it swings open. **3. Catch the confession.** Press the right suspect the right way and the ground goes out from under them. It's the one thing the evidence can never do for you, and the only thing that names the killer for certain. **4. Name the killer — and clear the scapegoat.** Accuse on evidence alone and you'll condemn the innocent one it was built to frame. It takes the truth to hang the guilty and free the falsely blamed. Be sure. How it's made Every character, every secret, every line of the story was written by a human. The art is human-made. What the engine adds is improvisation: when you say something no writer could have anticipated, the character answers in the voice it was given — and remembers. That improvisation runs entirely on your own PC. No account, no connection, and nothing you say ever leaves your machine. Multiplayer has no AI in it at all. Six people, one killer, one scapegoat, and only human lies.