Mince Pies and Murder

By Paco Garcia Jaen

6d6 RPG is one of those companies that, softly softly, can surprise you quite a lot, and quite often!

1920’s Britain. Six world famous detectives have been invited to spend Christmas with Jimmy ‘Hard’ Cheese.

Once a notorious crime-lord, Jimmy was sent to prison for a murder that involved, according to rumour, the Royal family. Released after just five years he retired to the USA a very rich man. In a much publicised move last year, he returned to Britain and bought a country house after being diagnosed with a terminal wasting disease.

Lured by the promises of a startling revelation, the sleuths are set for an unforgettable Christmas.

Mince Pies and Murder is an investigative adventure for up to 6 players. that uses the 6d6 Ultralite system and can be read, run and very much enjoyed in one session. It has everything you need, from a quick but thorough explanation of the system, adventure background, scenarios, locations, character, NPCs and the cards the mechanics use.

The document has 79 pages in total and it has been released under the Creative Commons licence, which always get my respect. It is a terrific initiative and everyone should support it.

The system is very interesting and one that works very well indeed. In a nutshell each character has a set of cards with different abilities or skills and up to four cards can be combined by the players to describe how or why they do what they would like to do. Each card they use allows the player 1d6 roll for a maximum of 4d6, and if they get enough points they are successful.

There is a little bit more to it than this, but you better get the adventure to find out the rest. It’s worth it!

The adventure has been very well put together. The NPCs are very believable, a great deal of thought has been given to the connections with the player characters and the “Agatha Christie” feel to it has been achieved very, very nicely.

The production and layout of the adventure is very unassuming. The layout is very simple and there are no illustrations, concentrating instead on the storytelling and the description of the environments.

There isn’t much I dislike about this scenario, to be honest. Although I had to read a couple of times before I could remember exactly the relationships and motivation of the NPCs against the characters.

Overall I think this is a great effort from a very interesting website with terrific ideas. If anything, this product is a bit wasted in the sense that it should be a lot bigger. The attention to detail and the idea is absolutely terrific and the writing is very, very clever.

This product deserves a good 3.5 stars out of 5 just for the quality and originality of the concept.

Mince Pies and Murder is available from: