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Roleplay / The Murderverse

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/murderverse_logo_five_and_a_half_hosts_7.png
Your life is but a toy in their hands.note 

"WE'RE PLAYING A GAME OF MURDER. OF DECEPTION. DOESN'T THAT EXCITE YOU?"
—Timeline Master Awe, in the introduction to the very first game in the Murderverse, A Game of Mafia

The Murderverse is a loose Shared Universe of hybrid Play-by-Post Game-slash-Social Deduction Games originally hosted on the TV Tropes forums, then moved to Trouble Cube.

It all started when Timeline Master Awe abducted fourteen people from across the multiverse and made them play his "game of mafia". Since then, there has been a recurring pattern of eight to sixteen people finding themselves trapped in a Closed Circle and forced to kill each other until their captor is satisfied with the result. Drama ensues.

    List of installments 
Games with dedicated pages:
Flicker: The Forum Game is closely based on the Roblox game of the same name. It was started by The Geek Artist 08. Its connection to the Murderverse is fairly loose; when asked whether Flicker was part of the Murderverse, her initial response was "Possibly". She later clarified that it does take place in the same verse, but its in-universe operators have no connection to or even awareness of the other games.
Wolf at the Door is a murdergame that draws from the "Werewolf" aesthetic commonly used for traditional games of Mafia. As such, it's heavily rooted in Gothic Horror, though with some typical murdergame oddities on top of that. Its links to the overarching murdergame canon are currently tenuous at best, but between its mechanical similarities and Word of God assuring it could be linked to it, it is here. Hosted by Dubh Kafkaesque.
God Complexnote  is a murdergame run by unfortunatezorua. Taking place in a prison complex and modelling its gameplay based on media such as Survivor and Your Turn to Die, it's main difference from the other murdergames lies in its absence of actual murder; players participate in a series of puzzles and secretly vote to determine who to eliminate between themselves. The last one standing wins, gaining release from the complex.
Monster Smash is a murdergame run by Ayy Bee 121. The main gimmick is that all the roles are species of monster, and the characters are all hiding their true nature. Like Your Final Frontier, it lacks roll to dodge elements, but it still has roleplay elements. The lights out sections are also fairly short, but not as short as the ones in Flicker.
Brothers In Arms is a murdergame hosted by Dookie Idiot Nimrod. A key difference between it and the other murdergames is that it's based on the reality show, Big Brother, meaning that there are immunity challenges in the day. The third game is modeled more closely like cooking reality shows, where the immunity challenges come in the form of dishes the cast must cook, and the cast being seperated into two teams, with the winning team gaining immunity from the killers.
Last Summer is a murdergame hosted by Custard And Pie based on slasher films of the 1980's. There, the cast is transported the summer of 1983 to stay and survive in a dilapidated summer camp. The sequel takes place inside an 80s arcade.
Murder RPG is a murdergame hosted by Smily Trope 112 that takes place in a completely virtual environment, in which the cast try to survive "virtual" killings - Which may trap them there forever...
The Mockingbird Watches is a murdergame hosted by Billy 5545 based off of The Hunger Games, where the cast is put in an obvious kill-or-be-killed situation in the Arena just like the original novels/films, using an action system that runs on Roll To Dodge mechanics.
Burger, She Wrote is a murdergame hosted by madface7 that takes place in a fictional restaurant chain titled "The Family Burger Barn". The cast is forced to endure work shifts during the day and said work tasks' outcomes are determined by Roll to Dodge elements. These work tasks also determine the number of votes each player gets at the end of the day.
Sinister Starlight is a murdergame hosted by MOARPYLONZ that is themed around Magical Girl anime. In particular, the Murdergame is based on dark Magical girl anime such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Magical Girl Raising Project. A mysterious archmage, themselves part of a larger group of mages, decides to capture magic users and force them to participate in a murdergame. It used Roll To Dodge mechanics, and was intended to include further mechanics derived from Danganronpa and Mario Party, though it was cancelled before those appeared.
Escape from Zombie Park Island is a murdergame hosted by Point Maid themed around a Jurassic Park like theme park of revived extinct animals from pteranodon to dodos. Unfortunately, the animals are kept alive with a zombie virus, and it's run by a mad scientist, Dr. Francine "Frankie" Frankenstein.
Castle of Beasts is a murdergame hosted by Purple Eyed Guma, where King Doraco (who previously showed up as a player in Brothers in Arms) captures members of the NME Hunters' Organization in order to deal a blow to said organisation. Amongst them, some work for the King, which the Organization members have to find and snuff out.
POKÉMON 2.B.A. MURDERER is a Pokémon-themed murdergame hosted by KungFuCutBug. A group of Pokemon find themselves in a thick forest located somewhere in the Unova region, where a Hoopa Confined has sought to orchestrate a game of mafia with them.
Life's a Beach is a murdergame hosted by Dookie Idiot Nimrod, Matthew, wingedcatgirl, and The Geek Artist 08 where characters find themselves on an island caught in the middle of a gang war with two scum teams trying to kill off the innocents as well as each other.
Toontown Showdown is a murdergame hosted by Point Maid and KungFuCutBug, where characters from all forms of animated media compete to become stars by participating in a killing game. Its gameplay follows the killing games of Danganronpa, and it uses Roll to Dodge in its action system.
Bottled Time is a murdergame hosted by Tales Of Under, wingedcatgirl, and The Geek Artist 08. The cast have been recruited by the Ministry of Time as Time Cops in order to investigate time rifts that lead to varying periods of history, whilst trying to eliminate any members of the Kronos Rebellion (who oppose the Ministry) that have infiltrated them.
Decrypto is a murdergame hosted by LavenderDream. The participants have ostensibly joined a game show to play escape rooms, but when they arrive, the room still needs a few days to get ready...
The Turned Tables, hosted by Dookie and Weirdguy 149, is a Danganlike murdergame in which all the players are former murdergame hosts.
Murder in the Mountains, hosted by wingedcatgirl, is a mafialike murdergame, in which a group of vacationers gets stranded with death cultists. The first game takes place on a hiking trip, and the second at a spa.
Close Circle, hosted by Matthew and cohosted by LavenderDream and door-kun, is a mafialike murdergame in which the town is... The Mafia. The "mafia", of course, are undercover dirty cops trying to bring the whole organization down. With murder. Players also take part in daily challenges to earn money so they can buy abilities to aid them no matter what side they fall on.
Free Association, hosted by Florien, is a Danganlike murdergame, which the players are put through a bonus final exam to graduate from the spy academy by assisting with a serial killer case. And/or murdering each other.
Experiment #194, hosted by Dookie, is a danganlike murdergame where the cast have been secretly experimented on, which turns them into monsters at night. They've been gathered in a lab for an experiment for this.
The Aurora Project, hosted by Some Libre and cohosted by Magolor, is a mafialike murdergame where the cast have been assigned to help work on the titular Project in a snowy mountain. Unbeknowst to them, some have other plans for the project...
Party to Treason, hosted by Florien, is a Secret Hitler-like game, set in the same universe as Your Final Frontier, in which a group of rebels have infiltrated the colony of Allfield, and the loyalists need to eradicate them before they all get executed for sympathizing.
Like Tears in Rain, hosted by Point Maid and MadameButterflyKnife, is a mafialike murdergame in which a pair of Time Police robots have abducted a group of people identified as vital to their timeline. BOB-B is attempting to keep these people alive to preserve the timeline, while MORI-RT and his agents are planning to take over and change the timelines for (in their opinion) the better.

Games in the Murderverse contain examples of:

  • Adaptational Intelligence: Several characters, but one of the biggest examples is Knuckles the Echidna in Murder In The Mountains, who turns the tables on the scum Day 4 by revealing evidence getting Malakhiri and Mitsuha convicted as scum before he got killed for knowing too much on Night 5.
  • Aerith and Bob: There are some normal names in the Murderverse, such as Scott, Jocelyn, Michael, Frankie, Joe, Amanda, et cetera... and then, on the other side of the spectrum, we have Metabomb, Cutbug, Nagibaldi, Minrey, Triple Inverted Dan Quayle, and of course the crowned king of unusual names, Hercules Pirate Poirot Iamfrench.
  • Amusement Park of Doom: Escape from Zombie Park Island takes place at a Wildlife Park of Doom.
  • And Then John Was a Zombie: In Escape from Zombie Park Island, the characters all start out as park employees trying to escape the island alive, identifying any zombies so they can be executed. However, they have a chance of getting bitten and turned into, well, a zombie, killing the other players at night.
  • Arc Words: "A memorable experience". TM Awe started his murdergame to harvest power from being remembered, and closed its first round by saying "I hope you had a memorable experience". Many games, some by hosts replicating his tactic and some not, have ended by describing the events with a phrase playing on that, from Hercules repeating the phrase exactly in .EXE 3 to the Host admitting Lucas's short-lived presence probably didn't qualify in Murder U.
  • Author Avatar: The "Timeline Masters" are a set of characters directly representing the roleplayers as themselves. While most of them are dubiously canon at best (as they only appear in Murder-free and private Discord roleplay), some play a role in the murdergames:
    • Timeline Master Awe orchestrated A Game Of Mafia.
    • Timeline Master Mad is one of the Burger Deities — akin to hosts — in Burger, She Wrote (although it's unclear whether she's actually a timeline master).
    • Timeline Master Billy was the mastermind of The Mockingbird Watches. He only shows up at the end of the game, talking to President Snow about the game. The former then killed the latter, before personally going to the Arena and freeing the tributes due to them being not worth his "experiment".
  • The Bad Guy Wins: There have been a few times the scum team have pulled out a victory:
    • In Last Summer 2, the slashers end up picking off the power roles and get enough mis-eliminations to win the game, all for the Counselor to film the gory results for a slasher film.
    • In Close Circle, the undercover killer cops working for Frank Shannon manage to kill of enough people and got their own mis-eliminations resulting in them winning. Frank promptly kills off the surviving innocents, as well as Carmello and Incognito before blowing up the mansion. He rewards his cops with $5 million dollars each before they take their leave. He mocks Carmello for thinking he had what it takes to go after him before taking his own leave.
  • Bait-and-Switch:
    • In God Complex's "demonstration" round, after Na-Rae and Keyboard Cat get one vote higher than the others upon them, Glasya reels them in to demonstrate the execution portion of the game, with the guillotines stopping short of the two by the end of it...only for Glasya to take the matters into their own hands, messily executing both with a gigantic chainsaw.
    • In Brothers in Arms:
      • Snake's execution sees him maniacally screaming and some of the Game-Breakers menacingly preparing themselves as they both prepare for a memorable execution...only for the Shag to shoot him in the face with a pistol. Sam Black even lampshades the trope word-for-word.
      • After the execution, Audley decides to go out and prepare to kill what remains of the cast, with said cast retaliating in response, only for her to get knocked unconscious by the Shag shooting her at the neck mid-way through her screaming.
  • Better to Die than Be Killed: In Brothers in Arms 3, Steambot 3000 attempts to evade execution by shutting itself down. Audley defies this by forcing a hard drive into it, reactivating it to be executed.
  • Black-and-Grey Morality:
    • Life's a Beach consists of the extremists in the Shark and Crow gangs trying to kill off not just the other gang, but the moderates in their own. They are still gangs, though, and the moderates all have spotted histories and are willing to risk (relatively) innocent lives to root out the extremists. The only truly innocent parties are the two nephews, who managed to get dragged into the gang war just by being related to someone.
    • Close Circle sees the cast assist actual criminals in both fulfilling their cause and weeding out anyone that tries to overturn their business. The first installment has a Rabid Cop trying to bust The Don's business, whilst the second installment is a war between two rivaling gangs.
    • As The Aurora Project continuously progresses, the story of the game gradually turns into this, as whilst the Traitors are depicted antagonistically and are out to put a stop to the construction of the telecommunications hub, the hosts themselves reveal themselves more and more that they're hardly any better, leaving up the task of weeding out the Traitors to the workers themselves, without giving much assistance themselves.
      Bow: "And (Heeko)... that Mr. Throne has a point. He's clearly in the wrong for killing off completely innocent people, but you're also in the wrong for allowing those people to die just because you keep forgetting who the traitors are. How exactly does that make you better than the traitors that we are trying to fight off?"
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: In Murder in the Mountains, when explaining that Chip and Ada count as one person for gameplay purposes, the avatar of Life explicitly mentions that the GM "couldn't think of an in-universe logic for this so just accept it, okay?"
  • Bring My Brown Pants: In Brothers in Arms 3, Henrik Strumatem ends up shitting his pants in an attempt to relieve himself in the bathroom following Junko Enoshima's execution, forcing him to wash it in the laundry.
  • Brown Note: Helena Fortran's hit song, "Hour Love", as well as her other songs, are so bad that those who hear it suffer from various afflictions which range from trying not to hear it, to more amusing ones like Color Failure or falling into coma. Only those who have bad taste (Annoying Orange and Blitzo) or dark magic (Reaching the West of Reaches) can withstand it.
  • Caligula's Horse: In Party To Treason 2, Lucky — an ordinary, non-sapient black cat — has somehow been appointed captain of Allfield.
  • Character Death: As one might expect from something called the Murderverse, characters die on a regular basis.
  • Characterization Tags: Due to The Mockingbird Watches containing characters both named Wally from 2 different games (Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire and Centipede (1998)), the GM's narration refers to them as "Pokémon!Wally" and "Centipede!Wally" respectively.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: AGOM takes place within the 'Ideaverse', a place where fictional beings gain power by being thought of, known and remembered. The whole game exists for Timeline Master Awe to be remembered... by traumatizing the participants of the game. And it doesn't stop there — at the end of .EXE 2, the Virus reveals that its primary motivation is to find the Ideaverse themself and usurp TM Awe, which is why they're hosting their own game—the remembrance would already be there by the time they would find it, and the Headmistress of Murder U has a similar motivation.
  • Cleanup Crew: The death cultists of Murder in the Mountains have a Janitor who passively "cleans up" the nightkill, preventing their role from being revealed, and once per game can "deep clean" the kill to remove nearly all evidence.
  • Closed Circle: The nature of murdergames requires that the innocents and the murderers are inescapably trapped together, though the reason varies from game to game.
  • Complete-the-Quote Title: In Murder in the Mountains, Tainted Soul's execution is titled "That is not dead which can eternal lie", a quote from the Necronomicon. The second part of the quote is "And with strange aeons even death may die," — with the Soul's execution, Death had only one cultist left, whose identity was completely exposed, making their defeat the next day a Foregone Conclusion.
  • Continuity Cavalcade: When Overlynd C. Eyre first appears in Murder in the Mountains 2, ze recites a modified version of the USPS motto that follows the well-known weather conditions with a Long List of the basic premises of every previous murdergame:
    Neither Rain, nor Snow, nor Sleet, nor Hail, nor a powerful entity kidnapping everyone and locking them in a mansion or amusement park, nor a computer virus, nor a cult involving that virus, nor a dictator from the stars, nor a spy, nor a political officer, nor gang violence, nor a cult in a mountainous landscape, nor a powerful entity locking people in a camp or an arcade, nor an actual war, nor a zombie outbreak, nor a pokémon incident, nor a return to college leading to violence, nor witch or witches, nor a prison beneath the world, nor a laboratory in the snow or the city, nor an obnoxious streamer, nor anything else for that matter, will stop a mailentity from completing hir appointed rounds!
  • Continuity Nod:
    • A scene in Brothers in Arms 3 reveals that Pico is the arms dealer for the Virus Fragments, and the infamous "cursed gun" that shot 5 people who tried to investigate it in .EXE 3 actually came from him.
    • The first Murder in the Mountains game ends with Vince Ruiz on "a beach somewhere". The second game ends with the survivors — a group which notably does not include Vince — having a proper vacation on "a beach somewhere".
  • Curse Cut Short: Silvia drops a "motherf—" in WATD after Travis Touchdown, who the whole party had bandwagoned on, turned out to be innocent.
  • Cut Short:
    • Monster Smash, for many different reasons, was cancelled by its host halfway through, never giving it a true winner.
    • When Murder RPG was cancelled, the GM attempted to at least give a bit of closure by skipping to a Final Boss fight against TM Awe, but after a few rounds of combat, the game was abruptly ended anyway.
    • Castle of Beasts abruptly ended just as the cast is about to go to the Arena following Jessie Faden's execution.
  • Desecrating the Dead: Played for Laughs in Brothers in Arms 3 — after Vivi Elakha is murdered, their corpse is posed to look like it's dabbing.
  • Dramatic Irony: At the end of Escape from Zombie Park Island 2, Hitomi Elakha, resurrected from her execution as a zombie, is told she'll need to take Frankie's medicine regularly to remain mentally herself, to which she says "Can't imagine ever screwing that up." At this point, Decrypto had already shown that she will screw it up and revert to her zombie-brainwashed ways.
  • Dreadful Musician: Helena Fortran, one of the Game-Breakers of Brothers in Arms, is so abjectly horrible at singing and the guitar that in the second season, when she sings "Hour Love", among other things, Tails experiences Color Failure, and Sonic gets knocked out into a coma.
  • Driven to Suicide: Russell Seager ends his own life by stabbing his knife to his chest once he is voted out by the cast, and the suicide serves as his execution.
  • Epic Fail: Since some games utilize dice rolls, this to bound to happen, especially if multiple players aren't in the dice's good graces.
    • In day 3 of .EXE 3, bad rolls resulted in evidence getting accidentally destroyed, 5 people accidentally shooting themselves in an attempt to examine a gun, and one of the players falling on one of the hosts and promptly sleeping on them.
    • In day 3 of Free Association, Runner Five and Dr. Fischer, attempting to search for a key witness, rolled double 1s and somehow managed to shoot each other. They survived thanks to their bulletproof vests, but it still hurt like hell.
  • Evil Learns of Outside Context: Discussed and defied by the Headmistress — she forbids anyone to leave the Murder-Free Hotel as long as TM Awe is still alive, for fear that he will somehow trace them back to her before she has enough power to face him.
  • Exact Words: When Edgar protests to Planeswalker Glasya over the fact that the demonstration round of God Complex ended up with Na-Rae and Keyboard Cat dying for real on the execution, Glasya tells him menacingly that they never lied - what happened was indeed a "demonstration" of how the execution portion of the game worked.
  • Genre Savvy: In Last Summer 2, Sylvi Tempest, as an Author Avatar of one of the Murderverse's long-time players, immediately figures out that "wake up in a strange place with a bunch of strangers, many of whom are fictional characters an average person might recognize" is a strong sign that it's in a murdergame now. Its headmate Ana disputes this, but Sylvi points out that Big Ben Harrison matches the "malformed politician" signature of another one of the verse's long-time players, convincing Ana to admit that they "might" in fact be in a murdergame. Sylvi's awareness of murdergame conventions doesn't save the system from being the first murder victim.
  • Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Bad Future segment in Burger, She Wrote after Penguin Joe accidentally turns the ice cream machine into a time machine. The surviving members are transported into the future and must complete work phase during the apocalypse.
  • God's Hands Are Tied: The Avatar of Life in Murder in the Mountains can't just stop the killing, despite very much wanting to. The Avatar of Death is just as powerful as they are, and has managed to conceal the identity of their cultists from Life. The best they can do is grant special abilities (i.e. power roles) to the innocents, and resurrect them after the fact if the death cultists are defeated.
  • Gone Horribly Right: The roll-to-dodge mechanics in certain games can cause a "success, but at what cost" result when rolling the highest number on the die.note  Examples include:
    • Ikei setting himself on fire trying to light a blunt in .EXE.
    • Tatsuya getting so absorbed into his music while he's investigating that he completely forgets what he's investigating in Murder U.
    • Wario snorting cocaine while investigating it in Brothers in Arms.
    • Baba disabling gravity for everyone in the hotel instead of just itself in .EXE 2.
    • Mr. Zecro locking the rooms of all the players when he intends to only lock his own room in The Turned Tables.
  • Groin Attack: In Brothers in Arms, after Robotnik wins the first challenge, Wario accuses him of cheating and shoulderbashes him "in the PINGAS".
  • Hand Wave: In Murder in the Mountains, there are fresh fruits and vegetables in the pantry for the players. How are they preserved? "Yes, yes they are."
  • Hazy-Feel Turn: At the end of The Aurora Project, the last two surviving innocents, Voi and Sherry, join the last surviving traitor, Dubhe, to take down the project and the hosts. Between the traitors, who had murdered their way through most of the cast at this point, and the hosts, who had not just stood by and let it happen but forced the innocents to kill their own in a completely redundant attempt to root the traitors out, it's not exactly clear which side is "good" here.
  • Infodump: Following the Shag botching an attempt by Audley to kill all the remaining cast members after Snake's execution, he gives out expository lore that reveals that the entirety of Brothers in Arms was the work of Audley, who made it after turning completely evil as a means to gain power through the souls of the recently dead, how she based it off of the gameshow Big Brother, made Helena Fortran in response to the first game suddenly ending due to Trent Reznor throwing the game, and her response to the second game ending after Snake gets executed.
  • Ironic Echo Cut: At the end of Murder in the Mountains, the avatar of Life wonders where Vince Ruiz, the tour guide, got off to — since he seems to have helped Death arrange the killing game, they figure he's probably not "planning to sip coconut drinks on the beach somewhere". Naturally, the next scene opens on "a beach somewhere" with Vince sipping a coconut drink.
  • Killed Offscreen: In Free Association, characters whose players drop out of the game are unceremoniously reported dead.
    • Bowser Koopa randomly drops dead in an alleyway somewhere when nobody is looking.
    • Evil Jay Leno choked on a chicken bone during the night when everyone else was asleep.
    • Wario was randomly shot to death by Trent Reznor. Again.
  • Kill It with Fire: Sir Reginald was charred almost beyond recognition during WATD's first night phase.
  • Loose Canon: Murderverse characters frequently make appearances in other forum games, particularly avatar-based ones such as Our avatars are posting on a forum thread or Your avatar asks the above avatar a question. Whether these appearances are canon is never quite made clear, partly because the Shared Universe nature of the roleplay makes the concept of "canon" very fuzzy in the first place.
  • Mass "Oh, Crap!": The second challenge of Brothers in Arms 2, themed after Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, opens with the Shag found dead in the second room. This is disturbing enough, but when Audley, who has taken over the challenge in the meantime, says "wasn't the original a musical?" and Helena steps out, nearly everyone freaks out.
  • Murder by Mistake: Kirby and Ribbon are executed in Life's a Beach by being fed poisoned roasted squirrel ( Actually Peanut). Jimmy, who gave them the squirrel, is absolutely livid, as he didn't know it was poisoned and was only trying to give them a last meal. The poison is much later revealed to be Victoria's doing, as she was trying to poison him.
  • Mythology Gag: In Free Association, when Wario had to be Killed Offscreen due to his player dropping out, it's revealed that he was shot by Trent Reznor — just like in Brothers in Arms.
  • Near-Villain Victory:
    • Flicker: The Forum Game ends with the cast of 13 whittled down to just 3, before the last murderer is successfully lynched out and poofed.
    • Burger: She Wrote ends with the cast of 14 whittled down to just 4, before the last murderer is successfully lynched out and executed.
  • Neck Snap: In Brothers in Arms 2, Audley sabotages and kills the Shag during the second challenge with a neck snap.
  • Non-Human Head: The avatars of Life and Death in Murder in the Mountains have planets for heads. Fittingly, Death's head is a barren rock while Life's head is an ocean-covered planet.
  • Oh, My Gods!: Stew refers to himself in a godly way, saying phrases such as "Stewdammit!" Not because he has a God Complex, but because his old friends apparently saw him as one and he never shook the feeling of godhood.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: The werewolves in Wolf at the Door are very much the traditional sort - terrifying feral beasts possessed of an insatiable bloodlust, into which normal people cursed with lycanthropy will transform against their will. They also have the traditional weaknesses, especially silver.
  • Plot-Triggering Death:
    • The Deadly Game of Murder in the Mountains starts when the death cultists hidden among the hiking group kill one of the hikers during the night.
    • In The Aurora Project, a worker shot dead in broad daylight by the Traitors and Heeko Amekawa's subseuqent failed attempt to give chase to them leads to the start of the Deadly Game where the workers have to figure out which among them was a Traitor that had snuck in to foil the titular project.
  • Potty Emergency: Everyone who tries Spongebob's Krabby Patties in the first night of Brothers In Arms needed to use the restroom, thanks to Elizibeth's laxatives.
  • Stealth Pun: The name of Block 7 (The Catkin) in Free Association bears the same name as a type of petaless flower cluster that's used by plants as a method to disperse seeds for reproduction. The pun lies in how Block 7 is also the seediest block within the Nine Blocks.
  • Resurrection Gambit: The Unjester of Murder in the Mountains is doomed to fade out of existence when the game ends. To avoid this, they seek to get killed at night, knowing that when the game ends, the avatar of Life or Death will resurrect them, thus bypassing their fate. Crucially, they have to be killed at night; if they're eliminated during the day, they're dead for good.
  • Retcon: Two pertaining to Vivi Elakha in particular: First, her original entry form in A Game of Mafia states that she isn't the Warrior of Light. Several later developments in Murder-Free have been based on the fact that, actually, she totally was. And second, her name was originally Sylvi and she was explicitly an Author Avatar, but these traits were removed to give the character room to develop on her own.
  • Riddle for the Ages: In Murder in the Mountains, at least one of the hikers is a Rickroller (anyone who visits them gets a gag video as their result). The avatars of both Life and Death admit to not having any idea what's up with that.
  • Running Gag:
  • Shout-Out:
    • A common cause of death for players kicked for inactivity is being eaten by a grue.
    • Flicker: The Forum Game is a murdergame-styled adaptation of the Roblox game Flicker, as the title indicates.
    • Voxel is chock-full of both Vinesauce and Red Vox references.
    • Games 1 and 2 of Brothers In Arms is a murdergame-styled adaptation of Big Brother.
    • June's execution in The Aurora Project directly involves a 15th-century catapult implied to be taken from the SCP Foundation, based on the host's initial remarks regarding Dr. Gerald's (who is a Foundation personnnel) death in the execution, even quoting the old creed of SCP-1543-02-J.
      "Honestly? I'm glad Gerald's dead - Don't want anyone trying to confiscate the sun catapult."
  • Synchronization:
    • While it varies from game to game whether one is allowed to enter multiple characters, when it is allowed, they always take up a single "slot", have the same role, and live or die together. This is required for gameplay balance reasons.
    • The Twins role and other roles that function like itnote  is a role that causes the two players that have that role experience any effects upon any of the two to happen to both, ranging from being killed, to being saved by the Medic, and so on.
    • The Cupid in Brothers in Arms is a role that shoots two players at night and makes them "twins" who will both die if either is killed.
  • Take That!:
    • The Game-Breakers of Brothers In Arms are parodies of controversial players and RPing tactics, including Mary Sue OCs, godmodders, turbolurkers, game throwers, and attention whores.
    • Helena in season 2 of Brothers in Arms is a parody of the controversial players of Brothers In Arms itself.
  • Thanatos Gambit: On Burger She Wrote, Colonel Noodles gets into an argument with Jake during voting time over roles, with Noodles claiming himself as the Security Guard and stating whom he looked after after Jake accused him of being a murderer. Hageta then makes the claim of being the Security Guard and made up people who he looked after. The plan goes in Hageta's favor as while Noodles gets executed, everyone else instantly turn on him and after killing one more the following night, Hageta doesn't even try to hide it as he knew his fate was sealed.
  • There Was a Door: On day 1 of Last Summer, Bulk Bogan and Sheriff No-Name decide to enter their cabin by breaking through the boarded-up windows and manage to rip open the tarp covering them. Even the Counselor comments on this in frustration, as they had literally just fixed those windows.
  • Unnamed Parent: Vivi's dads have been mentioned, and Jo's dad sticks around as a malevolent ghost, but none of them have ever been given names.
  • We Hardly Knew Ye: Inevitably, some characters die very quickly:
    • Pamela dies in a kitchen explosion early in Day 2 of Murder U, before her character gets established at all.
    • Angel drew the short straw herself in AGOM 2, keeping her from being able to get any character development.
    • Annette in Brothers In Arms died before they said even 2 lines. Luckily, they were the killer.
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: In Last Summer 2, after the first execution, the moment it's revealed that the Medic was Libre, after the cast thought he was the one behind the Tempests' murder, some of the cast members have this reaction as a result of the unbelievable circumstances that would indicate otherwise.
    Selen(ium): [Beat] You have got to be kidding me.
    Quinn: ...No...how could this be? Was Libre just...messing around? Was he that dumb?
    Sollux Captor: ...you have got two[sic] be kiiddiing[sic] me.
  • Your Days Are Numbered: The Unjester in Murder in the Mountains knows that they're doomed to fade from existence by the time the game ends. Their only hope of survival is to get killed in the night so that the avatar of Life or Death can resurrect them when the game ends. Amy, the Unjester of the first game, did not manage to accomplish this goal.
I hope you had a memorable experience.

Alternative Title(s): Murderverse

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