The Girl and the Game

In early October I started a Brindlewood Bay game with one of my RPG groups. We had just wrapped up a pretty epic Mothership adventure and the party was in a good place to take a break and trade in the horrors of the vast expanse of space for the horrors of a small New England town by the sea. Prior to this game, I’d only run a couple of Brindlewood Bay one shots and maybe 3 or 4 mysteries for a group of friends online so I was really looking forward to playing through an entire campaign and getting a chance to unleash the late-game content on my players. Be warned – the rest of this post contains spoilers for Brindlewood Bay’s overarching mystery.

For those unfamiliar, Brindlewood Bay is a PbtA game described in its sourcebook as “a roleplaying game about a group of elderly women— members of the local Murder Mavens mystery book club—who find themselves solving actual murder mysteries in their quaint New England town. They become aware of a dark occult conspiracy connecting the murders, and will eventually have to defeat that dark conspiracy to save their community.

The game is directly inspired by the television show Murder, She Wrote, but
also takes inspiration from the cosmic horror genre, “cozy” crime dramas,
and American TV shows from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.”

I love the game’s overall theme and its mystery solving mechanic and was extremely pleased to find my Mothership group of three players took to the themes and tone of Brindlewood Bay immediately. (I never doubted them for an instant.) We are now five sessions in. That’s two real life months of playing every other week and we’ve concluded four mysteries. They’ve encountered eight void clues so far which puts as on Layer Three of the Dark Conspiracy and as a GM I am officially in uncharted territory. I’ve never gotten this far in the game before and I have some thoughts about the game play and how the Dark Conspiracy has unfolded as well as reflections on how I’ve run the game so far.

The Party Comes Together

First and foremost, this game is a hell of a lot of fun. Our first two mysteries, Dad Overboard and Decorative Gore Season, were very much familiar ground for me as a GM. The party leaned into the campiness and silliness of being septuagenarians solving murders and established strong character personalities and inter-group relationships very quickly. The party also figured out their playstyle quickly – they were not afraid to put on crowns to ensure successes and viewed the Gold Crown Mystery move as a resource to be used rather than something to be uncertain or afraid of which I’ve experienced with other groups. The party was also willing to use their cozy items to get advantage on rolls and as they earned advancements they chose new moves that were both flavorful and mechanically useful. For example, one player took the Colt Seavers move and loves figuring out when to use his once-per-mystery opportunity to do something daring and guarantee himself success. While I won’t call this “optimized play” because I don’t think there really is a way to min-max or play “optimally” in the system it is definitely an effective form of play.

One thing the table has been pleasantly surprised by – and I think this has just as much to do with the playstyle of the table as it does the game itself – is how quickly the Murder Mavens as characters feel lived in. They each have a role they like to lean into during play but aren’t locked into archetypes the way you might be in a game where a character class is more important. Both the players and I have commented on how, in just five sessions, it feels like we’ve been playing these characters and playing in this world for much, much longer.

Things Are Getting Weird

I distinctly remember it was in our third session when we started the mystery All Hallow’s Scream that I felt like I was leaving behind the more familiar aspects of the game and entering uncharted territory. The Mavens had just unlocked layer two of the Dark Conspiracy and things were feeling more dangerous. I began using more concrete Void Clues, things that the Mavens couldn’t just “blink and shake their heads” to clear away. The Void Clues were no longer just strange sounds that would eventually fade away or a fleeting image that vanished if they looked away, they were evidence of strange, inexplicable rituals. They were a circle of candles placed in a bedroom with a silver dish of red liquid in the center, they were video reels with grainy black and white footage of masked figures plunging daggers into huge platters of roasted pigs. The weird and the dark and the dangerous quickly changed the tone of our cozy little game and the players and I loved it.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soulless is a Brindlewood mystery I’d glanced through but never had a chance to run because none of my games ever reached a point where we could play it. It requires the party to unlock level three of the Dark Conspiracy and wouldn’t you know it, after All Hallow’s Scream we’d done just that. The flavor of this particular mystery was perfect to show my Mavens were teetering on the precipice of uncovering something big in their sleepy little town. For this mystery the Snowdrop Inn was having its soft opening in the winter time and there was a snow storm outside gradually increasing in severity. When the Mavens discovered Letitia’s body (we established she was a good friend of our southern belle, Annabelle) they found strange animal bite wounds on her throat and one of our Mavens eventually received a void clue where they spotted a strange, shaggy beast outside in the snow that could have been a wolf or a bear were it not for the unsettlingly human way it moved.

In this mystery, members of the Midwives of the Fragrant Void also made themselves known to the Mavens and here is where I think I could have done a better job in the early part of the game setting up NPCs from around town that the Mavens would know. As it was, their connections were mostly with Sheriff Dalrymple and members of the police department since the police were always at least peripherally involved in the mystery. Because of this, the big reveal at the end of this mystery was that Deputy Brett Anderson was a member of the cult – he was literally caught by the Mavens skulking around the Snowdrop Inn in robes and a mask and in an “end credits” scene Officer Phillips, a bumbling, hapless NPC I introduced in our very first mystery that the Mavens took a shine to, was busy conducting an investigation of his own into a cold case that rocked the New England coast decades prior. He had stumbled upon some information in the course of his investigation and in that closing scene, Officer Phillips was in the middle of sending the Mavens a text when he hears a knock at the door. He sends his message, “Don’t trust Dalrymple” before getting up to answer the door and there, we cut to black for a three week cliffhanger.

The Final Chapters

I have about three weeks before our group is able to meet again so I’m glad we ended with our current mystery wrapped up. I’ve done a bit of prepping for the next session and the new mystery (Fudge, Jury, and Executioner) but the other really nice thing about Brindlewood, like so many PbtA games, is that it requires very light prep work. I’ve already got a mystery in mind and the goal is to take the Mavens away from Brindlewood Bay and put them in an unfamiliar location.

I have two goals. One is to really lean into the unlocking of layer three of the Dark Conspiracy and create an unsettling tone throughout the mystery. Fudge, Jury, and Executioner has moments built in that paint the town as strange and suggest there are dark forces at play. There is also a much larger cast of characters (or suspects) than the Mavens are used to which I think will be interesting for their theorizing. My second goal is to up the danger factor even more. I think we are coming up on the end game and there might be one or two more mysteries after this before the Mavens are ready to confront the Dark Conspiracy so I want to raise the stakes and utilize a mix of Day and Night moves and present a mystery that might take them more than one in-game day to solve. (Yeah, so far the party has been that good and rack up enough clues to Theorize and solve mysteries within one in-game day.)

Which brings me to my last few thoughts …

Reflections

Like I said earlier, the biggest change I would make to how I run my Brindlewood Games (specifically for a campaign) would be to introduce important town NPCs sooner and to throw them into scenes with the Mavens more often so I could have more options for members of the Midwives. I scoured the internet for some Brindlewood playthroughs and Jason Cordova’s Ninth Step was really helpful for me in seeing how to set up those characters early on. It’s too bad I didn’t start watching his playthrough until after we’d already started our game.

Another piece of commentary that has come up multiple times at my table is how “bought in” you have to be as a player for Brindlewood to work. When we debrief, all my players agree that this is a game where you have to lean into being a little old lady and recognize all the history and life lived that your character is bringing to the table. The Mavens constantly reference their lives before moving to Brindlewood, they talk about their children or their former spouses and they connect moments in the game to moments in their past. I get that this is what the game wants you to do. Jason Cordova says as much in the opening of the Brindlewood book but it’s another thing to find people who are able to commit. My table’s commitment to their characters and the fiction has been a huge part of my own enjoyment of this game.

So the end is nigh for the Murder Mavens and I think I might do a write-up of my prepping process for the Void Mystery and then a wrap up and some final thoughts on the overall campaign. This is also the inaugural post on my shiny new TTRPG blog so I hope this was a decent read. Until next time!