Os Loucos de Lisboa is a live action roleplaying game about delusion and mental illness set in contemporary Lisbon. Currently it’s the game I’m most proud of designing.

Currently the game’s website is still only in Portuguese, but if you’re OK with using Google Translate, you can check it out here: www.loucos.pt

The game has a very “nordic” approach to roleplaying - it’s more focused on inner conflict, on themes, and players are not required or even encouraged to dress up into their characters.

In its most basic form, the game can be played only with a deck of cards. But for more complex scenarios, we’re experimenting with a new system.

Detective scenarios use clues. Those clues are represented by cards, which can be folded in two: in the front they have a symbol (more on that later) and a description of the clue (what the character is supposed to be seeing or thinking about); in the back they have an index (a number from 0 to infinity) which identifies the clue; inside, they have a set of hypotheses.



For instance in a murder scenario, players could see a clue card which would say “fingerprint” in the front, and “#25″ in the back. Inside it could have the following hypotheses: “the fingerprint is from the murderer’s hand” and “the fingerprint is not from the murderer’s hand”.

Hypotheses sets can be empty (cards can have nothing inside). They can also be sets of one, and serve as just further description (ex: “this is the fingerprint of a thumb”).

Hypotheses are arranged conditionally or non-conditionally.



If arranged non-conditionally, the fingerprint clue would look like this inside:

A: the fingerprint is from the murderer’s hand

B: the fingerprint is not from the murderer’s hand

If arranged conditionally, the fingerprint clue could look like this inside, for instance:

if the murderer was not wearing gloves: the fingerprint is from the murderer’s hand

if the murderer was wearing gloves: the fingerprint is not from the murderer’s hand

When playing the fingerprint card could be put on a glass prop, for instance. When interacting with the prop, players would see the card and read it.

By default, clue cards cannot be moved by players. In some cases that’s not true, however, and symbols in the front helps players differentiate which card means what. There’s different symbols for these three cases: when a card can be deleted from the game (ex: blood on a knife could be cleaned), when a card is bound to a prop and can only be moved with its prop (ex: a knife), when a card can be taken freely by a player but has to remain in-game (ex: when the card describes an object that has no prop in-game).

This is how the game simulates Holmesian Deduction while still being engaging for players.

What makes this system great, however is the interaction between clues.

That’s acheived with index-based hypotheses. Index-based hypotheses follow this format: #index -> letter. For instance: #65 -> C. In this case, “#65 -> C” means that the C (third) hypothesis of clue “#65″, whatever it is, is true.

Let’s say again that the fingerprint clue is “#25″, and that its two hypotheses are arranged non-conditionally (”A: the fingerprint is from the murderer’s hand / B: the fingerprint is not from the murderer’s hand”). Imagine then that one of the hypothesis of the knife clue was “#25 -> A” - that would mean that the first hypothesis of clue #25 would be true .

Imagine a clue card which said “knife” in the front (and has a symbol explaining it was bound to a knife prop in the game), “#12″ in the back, and inside it would be a set of one saying “the knife is dirty but has no fingerprints, it was not cleaned, therefore the murderer was wearing gloves #25 -> A”. If players didn’t find the fingerprint in the glass, they can’t understand the meaning of the clue; however, it they found it before, they’d know that because the murderer was wearing gloves, the fingerprint couldn’t be the murderer’s.



So, in short, this new system could turn some scenarios into a giant web-like puzzles of trying to relate clues to one another and basically doing detective work, which fits very well into the game thematically.