The Mistfall Inn

A small murder mystery. One night, one body, three suspects, three endings.

The Kelder bridge washes out at midnight and strands five travellers at the Mistfall, the only roof on that stretch of road. Before dawn, Halloran Vane of the Crown Assessment is dead at the corner table. You are a magistrate's clerk; the militia arrives at first light and takes whoever you name.

Sera Bragg was about to lose the inn to Vane's assessment. Maud Calloway had forty pounds of undeclared tin seized at his toll. Aldous Wren was his clerk until Vane dismissed him without a character. Two of those motives are real, documented, and wrong.

Play it

Needs Godot 4 and nothing else — no build step, no package manager, no accounts.

git clone https://github.com/Orbitope/mistfall-inn.git
cd mistfall-inn
godot

Examine the body, read the ledger, press the three suspects. Evidence accumulates; at five pieces the militia arrives and you name someone, or refuse to. All three endings are reachable, and the correct answer is gettable.

How it's built

The story is not in the code. It is plain JSON under data/ — dialogues, conditions, effects, skill checks, character dialogue ladders, endings — in the Parlance narrative format, executed by parlance-gdscript.

That split is the interesting part, and it makes this repo unusually easy to tinker with: almost everything you would want to change is a JSON edit, not a code change.

• data/ — the entire game. CC0, so fork it, remix it, ship it.
• lore/mistfall.md — the canon, including who did it. The data does not hide it.
• scenes/play.gd — the presentation layer. Renders rooms and choices; decides nothing about the story.
• addons/parlance/ — the runtime, vendored. See addons/parlance/VENDORED.md; fix bugs upstream, not here.

Now break it

Every one of these is a single JSON edit. Restart the game to see it.

Change the story. data/dialogues/*.json is the script. Rewrite a line, add a choice, point a goto somewhere else.

Change the difficulty. Every skill check declares its own difficulty. Drop dlg_examine_body's from 9 to 5 and watch the odds the UI quotes move with it — those percentages are computed from the dice distribution, not hardcoded.

Change the pacing. data/locations/loc_common_room.json has a gate reading evidence_count >= 5. That is what summons the militia and ends the night. Set it to 2 for a brutally short inquest, or 7 to force exploring every room. The status bar reads the number out of that gate, so the UI follows automatically.

Change the dice. Add "dice": "2d6" to any check. The odds display switches from a flat d20 to a bell curve, correctly, because the probability is derived from the notation rather than assumed.

Add a suspect. A character is one JSON file plus a dialogues ladder — an ordered list where the first rung whose showIf passes is what they say today. That ordering is the whole mechanism for making someone respond to what you have learned.

Provenance

data/ and lore/ are a copy of the Mistfall Inn demo that ships with Parlance, verified byte-identical when vendored. One deliberate divergence since: the militia threshold was raised from 3 to 5, in its own commit so it is visible in git log data/.

Licensing

Part	Licence
data/, lore/ (the narrative)	CC0
scenes/, assets/ (presentation and portraits)	MIT
addons/parlance/ (vendored runtime)	MIT, from parlance-gdscript

See LICENSE.