As I explained after our first session of this 2023 tabletop role-playing game by Jason Cordova, Brindlewood Bay is an Agatha Christie or Murder, She Wrote whodunnit game. Every one of the player characters is an old retired widow and a member of the Murder Mavens, a crime-novel appreciation club in a coastal New England town. The game features a strong H.P. Lovecraft influence and stripped-down rules based on Apocalypse World. BB differs from AC in having much fewer and more generalised Moves, the little routines into which the mechanics of these games are packaged. And also in having many pre-written scenarios, while AW is entirely based on collaborative improv. I described a central and unusual trait of BB’s back in March:
Every scenario provides a murder to solve, a few potential suspects and a list of somewhat vague clues. But it doesn’t tell you whodunnit or how the clues fit together. As a GM you hand clues out to the players in response to their inquiries, and then it’s their job to put a case together and point to a suspect. They roll some dice, and their chance of success depends on how many clues they’ve incorporated.
After seven sessions, I can report that this novel mechanism works well in the sense that it always leads to a really fun and lively discussion among the players when the time comes to put a case together. But also, the cases my players delivered were pretty weakly linked throughout to the actual clues they had to incorporate. It was much more “Our version of what happened is not gainsaid by any clues” than “Our version is strongly implied by the clues”. This is hardly surprising since the clues you get aren’t meant to point in any specific direction.
Why seven sessions? Though this is not spelled out in the rule book, six or seven is apparently the ideal maximum number envisioned by the designer. Each case should give the players at least three meta plot or season arc clues (p. 42). The season finale is triggered after the players amass 15 meta plot clues (see the Dark Conspiracy Sheet p. 2), that is, after 15 / min 3 = max five cases. Add to this one “sweeps week” case set somewhere else and the season finale, and you get max seven cases, each of which took us one four-hour session to play.
A few bits of the rules worked really well for us. The End Of Session tasks nudged players to do interesting things to fulfil them for experience points. The Dale Cooper and Jim Rockford Moves allowed me as GM to deliver interesting tidbits through dreams and answering machine messages. The Meddling move was in constant use. The Cozy, Gold Crown Mysteries and Theorise Moves came into play as intended, sparingly and dependably.
Other bits weren’t useful to us. The Occult Move is basically “Create Magic Spell”, and never fit into our narratives. The Day and Night Moves didn’t come into play at all as much as the rules imply, because my players rarely did anything even remotely risky or anything they feared. Instead the Night move was mainly triggered as a SANity check for when occasionally a character would passively be confronted with something scary. This meant that the Queen Crowns (which are mainly fallback measures for when you make poor Day/Night dice rolls) barely came into play, and the story-fertile Void Crowns sadly never at all.
One way in which we played the game contrary to the designer’s stated intentions was in the player count. He recommends three players plus one GM as ideal (p. 155). We were median five players plus one GM. It worked well for us, except in the dramatic sense that occasionally the player characters swamped a situation with extremely inquisitive little old ladies, outnumbering everybody else on camera.
Inspired by the games Saboteur and Werewolf, I added a little twist at the start of the season finale session. I showed the players some playing cards: hearts to the same number as them, plus the ace and jack of spades. I explained that hearts meant kindly granny, spades meant secret member of the Dark Conspiracy. Then I shuffled the card selection and dealt each player one card to look at briefly. Finally I asked them all to close their eyes, and any Dark Conspirators to open theirs and look silently around, then close them again. This meant that the group suddenly knew that they had either two, one or zero traitors among them. We ended up with a single conspirator.
For the final session I left the BB format and prepped a normal investigative scenario with a string of clues. This allowed me to revisit the most interesting locales of the series and make a lot of callbacks. The big ritual, it turned out, was going to be held at Bonfire Cliff, the town’s Lover’s Lane location. Here the players disrupted proceedings with fireworks, canned air horns and Mace. The renegade member assumed control of the conspiracy and turned it to less dangerous pursuits.
All in all I’d say that a seven-session season of Brindlewood Bay is an excellent interlude between longer campaigns in investigative RPGs such as Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green or the various Gumshoe games. But the designer is right that BB probably wouldn’t stand up well to a 25-session campaign. The novelty value of the GM not knowing the answer to the scenarios’ riddles is finite. As for groups that love fantasy dungeon delving in D&D etc., I’m guessing that Brindlewood Bay and PbtA games in general would confuse and disappoint many players.
The BB cases we played were Dad Overboard, All Hallows’ Scream, Homecoming At Bonfire Cliff, Ctrl Alt Deceased, Hex Files, Lies & Dolls. Our Dark Conspiracy was the New Age Spiritualists, and the Big Bad they wanted to summon was the Gate & Box.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 