From publisher blurb:
Once escaped, players portray someone who now gets dragged back into a criminal underworld filled with revolvers, death, and drugs to find a missing person they care about; a friend, a lover, a sibling — they decide. In order to find them they’ll have to navigate a world that claws them back in or risk never finding the answers they seek.
This noir, hard-boiled tale being spun has a further twist, though.
High school can be hell. When you’re young it feels deadly serious. As deadly as death, even. This time it is. This story takes place in high school, riffing on the often exclusionary nature of cliques and literalizing the feelings that come with high school’s microworld.
The players will have to contend with the realities of being a hard-boiled detective as a student. As such, death and the serious, dramatic beats go without saying in this issue.
Integrating another twist, each playbook is actually a different aspect of the main protagonist the players will be portraying; playing into the tropes often found in the genre.
This issue is inspired by the 2005 film Brick.