A Polite Fiction: In Confidence

A Polite Fiction: In Confidence is a GM-less story game of masks, whispers, and one poisoned pen: a circle of friends at the Grand Hotel, and a whisper that one among them holds the Poison Pen. An Auspice story game for three to four storytellers, told in a single evening.

You came to the Grand Hotel as one circle of friends, past your debut, making your own way in a Society that watches everything and forgives little. Then a whisper walks the halls. One of you, it says, holds the Poison Pen, the hidden hand that trades in what was told in trust. You close ranks around the accused, and the season tightens around all of you.

How It Plays

There is no game master and nothing to prepare. The season runs on a Social Calendar of four scenes, the Arrival, the Debut, the Mixer, and the Grand Ball, which the whole table sets as their cards come up. That calendar is also the clock. On your turn you draw a prompt and answer it aloud in your own character’s voice, and the deck comes in three tiers that tighten as the season fills: the Masks, then Behind the Veil, then the Crossroads.

The Poison Pen is never dealt and never held. The whole table writes it, a letter at a time, into an Archive of everything the Pen has published.

When the season closes, the masks come down at the Unmasking and the circle settles together whose hand the Pen was. There is no hidden answer waiting to be turned over. What the circle decides is what is true, and it may land on one of you, on a hand outside the circle, or on all of you feeding the poison a little at a time. Then comes the Reckoning: the card passes around, and each storyteller takes one thing they said this season and says what it truly meant. The facts do not move. Only their meaning does.

Every Auspice deck carries a safety card adapted from John Stavropoulos’ X-Card, agreed at setup and kept within everyone’s reach. Any storyteller may set a card aside and draw another, or pass a prompt along instead of answering it. The pressure in this one is entirely social: slander and reputation ruin, betrayal of confidence, social exclusion, and suspicion among friends. There is no violence and no horror in it.

Coming Soon

In Confidence is not on the shops yet. The ashcan alpha is printed and going to tables now, and the Print-and-Play edition follows. If you want to hear when it lands, join the mailing list.

About This Edition

A Polite Fiction: In Confidence is an ashcan alpha (v0.4, 2026-08): a rough, early edition let out before the art and the polish are anywhere near done, so tables can play it and tell me where it needs work. It is 70 cards across seven Avery ten-up sheets, text only by design, which is why the circle and its hotel can be a Regency salon, a gilded spa, or a 1920s medical convention without changing a card. All text is licensed CC-BY.

Design Notes

Design notes about In Confidence are on the way. Check back soon.

Credits

Written & Designed by Christopher Allen ChristopherA@DyversHands.com

In the lineage of Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. Safety tools adapted from the X-Card by John Stavropoulos. Banner photograph by Joseph Royer on Unsplash.