An Affair to Dismember…
Saturday night DH and I and several other friends gathered together at Scimoria (a house owned and rooms rented out to several of our friends) for a murder mystery party. Tam’s parents have played several and know which ones are good ones and which aren’t and they gifted Tam a copy of An Affair to Dismember a part of the “How to Host a Murder” series.
The premise of An Affair to Dismember is that Lizzie Bordeaux and Neville Aster-Night throw an engagement party on Halloween. They’ve invited an interesting cast of halloween-ish characters - a mummy, a frankenstien-like monster, a clairvoyant, a deadly dentist, a depressed witch, The Prince of Dimness, and a kosher canibal. Each character was given an invite with the bios of all the other characters on it so we knew a little bit going in.
Following a dinner peppered with some off the cuff in-character banter we were presented with books and the left side of each spread contained information we were not to freely offer up about ourselves and the right side contained information we were supposed to bring light to about the other characters. At first I thought the party was going to be a dud. The first two spreads of the book contained info on how to use the book and then the same bio we had all gotten in our invites. Even round one seemed a little forced and slow. But, as clues about each other surfaced we seemed to get a bit carried away and were arguing, fibbing, evading questions, and what not for some very exciting exchanges of clues that were vital to solving the mystery.
Now, a few people took the idea of not giving up the information on their left hand pages a bit too far. It said to not lie, though you could try to change the subject and one of the more competitive persons present lied on at least a few occassions. Nevertheless, we all had come quite close to solving the mystery, though they threw in some twists and turns and we couldn’t quite make the complete picture work because a few of the neccessary clues had remained unrevealed.
Overall it was a lot of fun. It didn’t require too much acting. The fact that it was Halloween themed made the costumes pretty easy. You do need a certain mix of people it seemed - a few who are out-spoken and a few who fade into the background a bit so that there isn’t a room of 8 people all trying to speak at once. You don’t want anyone too competitive or too much information will remain secret, making it impossible to figure out the mystery. We did run into a problem of not knowing everything about our own characters before it started and ad libbing stuff that was later contridicted as we learned more in following rounds.
I was Angela Deth, DDS. A dentist known to put her patients six feet under. I had fun with the costume. It was pretty easy. Just go kind of goth, but professional. Add a lab coat and a badge (to differentiate myself from medical doctors). Do some angel of death make-up and I was ready to go. I did a little more to make it obvious that I was a dentist rather than an MD, but I’ll share that tomorrow. I was quite pleased with myself because Scott told me that while everyone was to be a little scary I was really the only one that was very scary. He said I was very convincing as a scary dentist! Yeah! :-) LOL!
DH and I are thinking about throwing one for New Years Eve (perhaps one between now and then as well so we can try out the different styles). There is talk of trying a more free form one that would require a bit more work on the hosting side and more acting. With those there is less hand holding as to what needs revealed and when, but we’d get dossiers up front that reveal everything we need to know about our characters. That would prevent some of the contradictory ad libbing that occurred this time. Then again, we may go with something a little more laid back. Who knows! But we’ll certainly do a murder mystery party again!
If you are in the area and think you’d enjoy something like this let me know. We’re thinking it would be best to mix up the guest list a little from time to time with some fresh people.
