Live websiteWebsites & storefronts

Luna Mysteries

Murder-mystery party kits, with a library that casts your guests and prints their names.

Library screens were captured with a throwaway demo account. Customer data is never shown, and the casting animation uses invented guests.

Why it matters

Luna Mysteries sells murder-mystery dinner party kits and gives every buyer a permanent library to read, personalize and download them. The hard part of hosting is casting, so the library does it: guests claim characters from a shared link, and the documents follow the choices the host makes.

01
Guests choose their characters
The host shares a private link. Guests tap a character and type their name, with no account. The host can assign, rename or release anyone.
02
No role taken twice
Claims are race-safe. In testing, twelve guests grabbed the same character at once and exactly one got it.
03
Written for this party
The host picks a female or male version of each character, and their documents are rendered with those names and pronouns.
04
A cast list with real names
“Print with names” produces the character list with each guest's name on their character, plus a guest list page.
05
Invitations in minutes
Fill in the date, place and RSVP details and download a printable invitation PDF.

The details

Open any part for the full story.

Features9

A recommendation quiz that suggests a kit for the group and the occasion.
Checkout with idempotent fulfilment: a payment grants the kit exactly once.
A library where buyers read in the browser and download their files.
Guest sign-up links that can be paused, or replaced with a new link that retires the old one.
Group characters that several guests can share, up to a limit the admin sets.
Female or male versions of every character, with names and pronouns rendered into the buyer's documents.
An invitation editor that renders personalized PDFs with about thirty bundled fonts.
An admin tool that finds the characters on an uploaded cast list and maps each one, with snapping boxes and undo.
Party-planning guides, email campaigns and cookie-free visitor statistics.

How it works

Guest links are signed tokens; only a hash is stored. A claim takes a row lock and a unique key, so two guests can never hold the same seat.
Personalized documents are rendered per buyer with pdf-lib; the master PDFs are never edited, and a download is refused rather than guessed if a choice is missing.
Self-hosted with Docker behind Cloudflare Tunnel, with backup and restore scripts.

Technology

Next.js
React
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
Prisma
PostgreSQL
Stripe
pdf-lib
Docker

Development notes

My part

Engineering and infrastructure.

Credit

Co-created with Lauren, who leads product, design and the mysteries themselves.

Status and context

Status: Live
When: Sep 2026 — now
Kind: Websites & storefronts

Who it’s for

Hosts throwing a murder-mystery dinner party, and the friends they invite to play.

The problem it solves

Mystery kits are usually sold as a pile of files. Hosts are left to hand out characters by text message, track who is playing whom, and edit names into documents by hand.