Immersive Storytelling from a Forgotten Family Mystery

I first heard about the mystery box when I was about 12 years old.  

My mom mentioned it in passing at dinner. Just a brief, offhand comment. Something about it stuck in my memory, but at the time, I was a twelve-year-old boy in a small Wyoming town, far more interested in airplanes, my bike, Hot Wheels cars, and baseball than in dusty family stuff.  

But a few years ago, that changed.  

When my Aunt Mildred, the last of my mom’s siblings, passed away, my mom received a big box of photos and family keepsakes from her sister’s kids. Inside that box was something unexpected: a lost discovery that would inspire me to launch Average Joe Hero.  

A Mystery Sealed Away for Over a Century  

I had been planning to launch Average Joe Hero for some time, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it would be about. I knew I wanted to create a different kind of immersive storytelling experience, but what that meant wasn’t yet clear. That changed when I dug deeper into the story behind this mystery box.  

As best we can tell, on May 12, 1872, someone with the initial C sent a letter to my great-great-grandmother, Triphena DePue. The letter was urgent — it begged Triphena to hide the enclosed cigar box, tell no one about it, and keep it safe until the sender could return in a year or two to retrieve it.  

But no one ever came.  

Triphena must have tucked the package away and forgotten about it. Somehow, for more than a century, the cigar box remained sealed, wrapped tightly in oilcloth and twine, buried in a trunk, untouched.  

A Forgotten Box, An Uncovered Story

In 1983, when my grandpa passed away, my aunts gathered to sort through his and my grandma’s possessions. That’s when they found the mystery box — and for the first time in over a hundred years, they opened it.  

Inside, they found:  

• A stack of old letters and papers

• A worn and incomplete deck of playing cards

• Five dark wooden discs, carved with strange symbols

After my mom visited one of her sisters, she casually mentioned it over dinner — just a weird little family mystery, something curious but not significant. And there I was, twelve, wondering if there were any maps to lost gold or something.  

I didn’t think much of it after that.  

But last year, after my Aunt Mildred passed, my cousins sent my mom a box of family memorabilia she had kept — mostly old photos and knickknacks. Tucked inside was a thick and worn out manila envelope stuffed with photocopies of papers and photos, along with a handwritten note from Aunt Mildred explaining what they were:  

The contents of the mystery cigar box. 

As it turns out, while my Aunt Frances took the box and its contents back in 1983, Aunt Mildred had made photocopies of everything and saved them for another forty years. No one ever mentioned them, it was just another story tied to our family.  

From Forgotten Letters to an Immersive Storytelling Experience  

Alone, this would be a cool story — a forgotten box and a mystery waiting to be solved about its origins and who sent it. But what truly captivated me, and got me started thinking about starting Average Joe Hero, was what was inside those letters.  

The papers described the founding and destruction of a forgotten Old West boomtown called El Castigo, chronicling strange events from the early 1850s. The deeper I read, the more I realized:  

This was a story worth telling.  

Not just as a written history, but as something playable, interactive, and immersive.  

That’s what led to The Saga of El Castigo, my first game series under Average Joe Hero. This project isn’t just about retelling the events found in those letters. It’s about immersive storytelling, bringing players into the mystery, letting them uncover the strange and eerie history of El Castigo that I discovered in the papers through playing games.  

For me, immersive storytelling isn’t just about telling a good story — it’s about experiencing it firsthand. And that’s exactly what I believe is the core of what Average Joe Hero is all about.  

So began The Saga of El Castigo —a series of games inspired by a real-life mystery, a forgotten town, and a box sealed away for over a century.