Inspector Schmidt: The Ebbing - Prologue

About

In this detective RPG, you play Valentin Schmidt, a weary bureaucrat turned accidental sleuth. A steamship voyage to a North Sea island takes a dark turn when the captain collapses mid-meal. Your job is to interview passengers, piece together scattered evidence, and roll dice to test skills like observation or persuasion. The gameplay leans into classic mystery tropes with a dice-driven twist, forcing you to balance conversation choices with timed skill checks to uncover hidden motives. The setting pops with period detail, from clanking ship corridors to tense parlor room interrogations. While the prologue status means the full story isn’t here yet, the tightly written cast of suspects and branching dialogue already show promise. Early community feedback highlights the satisfying click of solving a clue through lateral thinking, though some note the pacing feels truncated. Still, it’s a solid hook for a mystery that leans into cozy intrigue without skimping on moral ambiguity.

Storyline

Valentin Schmidt, a Bavarian civil servant with truly bad timing, actually just wants to go on a well-deserved vacation to the North Sea. But right from the start, this is overshadowed by a drama: The captain of the steamship that is bringing Valentin and the other passengers to an idyllic North Sea island suddenly collapses during lunch and struggles for his life. Was the captain poisoned? Valentin is tasked with finding out what happened – and discovers a web of relationships, dependencies, and motives among the ship's crew and passengers that he must unravel to find the true culprit.