PLEASE NOTE: this is the FRENCH edition. All files and all player booklets are in French.
Will your three guests find out who stopped the presses — before the novel goes to the printer at 23:00?
At 23:00 tonight a novel goes to press. At 21:50 its author is found dead in the meeting room of her publishing house. The clues are proofs marked up in red ink, two missing pages, a call log to the printer, and the colophon of a fanzine printed eight years earlier. Every piece of evidence is a text: no pictures to decode, no board to read.
LENGTH · 90 to 120 minutes
PLAYERS · 1 host + 3 to 6 players (4 to 7 people in total). The host runs the game and does not play
FORMAT · online by video call, or around a table. Printable PDF, delivered as a single .zip archive
SETTING · Japanese-style murder mystery — a publishing house, on the night the book goes to press
LANGUAGE · French
AGE · 15 and up (lots of reading. A death is investigated; nothing gory is shown)
ROLES · every role is open to anyone — change a character's gender or name if it suits your table
How this differs from a boxed murder mystery dinner
- The host does not play. They run the evening, which is what lets the story hold back information until the last clue.
- Each player gets their own booklet, with a secret only they know and two goals: a shared one (find the culprit) and a personal one.
- One of the three players is the culprit — a real player with their own goals.
- Played once. Anyone who knows the solution cannot replay it, but you can host it for other groups.
- Want more players? The story is written for 3 players, and the "Plus de joueurs" file explains how to open it up to 6.
What you get (8 files, PDF + TXT — 35 A4 pages, in one .zip archive)
- Read first — 5 pages, for everyone
- Host script — 9 pages, host only
- Evidence — 12 clues, 5 pages, host only
- More players — 3 pages, for everyone
- Three player booklets — 4 to 5 pages each
- Virtual tabletop text (Discord, Roll20…) — ready-to-paste TXT file
Also prints on US Letter ("Fit to page"). Nothing to print if you play online. No props to buy.
Content warning
This scenario deals with a death and plagiarism, and mentions suicide. No injuries, violence or gore are described. All publishers, people, awards and printers in it are fictional.
Licence
Streams, videos and let's plays are allowed, including monetised ones. You may host this game for others, free or paid. Please do not redistribute or resell the files, claim authorship, or publish the solution.
The series
"Dernier contact, 04h00" (1 host + 2 to 4 players) is also available in French. The rest of the series is in English, with some titles in German, Spanish and Portuguese. Each game stands alone.
About
Ai-Q Labs is a small studio in Japan writing Japanese-style murder mysteries: the host runs the game instead of playing, every player has their own secret, and every clue is a text.
How this game was made
This scenario was written with the help of a language model (Claude, by Anthropic), then read, structured and checked by a human before publication. The plot, characters, clue structure and all texts were reviewed by the author.
