Guided Improv in Brindlewood Bay

I enjoy game-mastering intricate investigative scenarios like the ones published for Delta Green and Gumshoe games (of the latter, I’ve run a lot of Ashen Stars and Swords of the Serpentine). These can’t be improvised on the fly, any more than an Agatha Christie whodunnit can be improvised as an extempore oral performance. Good GMs can improvise a simple swashbuckling, goblin-exterminating session though to great effect.

2010’s Apocalypse World has been hugely influential in creating the sprawling PbtA family of RPGs – “Powered by the Apocalypse”. Reading its rulebook though, I realised that it has neither scenarios nor a pre-described world. You just start with the concept of “after the Apocalypse”, some survivors and a shelter where they live, and then everything is improvised in collaboration between the GM and the players.

This made me recoil in horror. Remember, solid investigative scenarios can’t be improvised at all, and only good GMs can improvise a good swashbuckling scenario. Apocalypse World invites the players, most of whom typically aren’t GMs at all, to improvise stories. All I can say is no thanks, unless everyone’s a talented storyteller, preferably with an MA in ecology or agricultural economics!

In fact, I have a deep distrust in the average GM’s and player’s ability to improvise anything worthwhile. It reminds me of why I was never into cyber sex even in my youth. It’s improvised pornography written by amateurs, and it’s mostly just dreary.

I have however recently run our first session of a PbtA game, Brindlewood Bay (2023). This is an actual Agatha Christie whodunnit game! With some improvisation! But it is different from Apocalypse World in an important respect: it has prewritten scenarios. And where the improvisation comes in is funny.

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. Neat! In all investigative games, I enjoy listening to my smart players discussing the clues they’ve gathered and what they mean. With Brindlewood Bay, it turns out that this is fun even when I myself don’t know the answer to the riddle.