One of the more fundamental divides in tabletop roleplaying is between those who have a gaming group and those who are going to play a game.

It seems subtle, but it’s actually huge.

If I have a group, we all need to find something we can enjoy together. That’s true whether it’s an RPG or a book club.

But if I say, “I’m running a game about dragonslayers, who’s interested?” that’s different.

“I have dracophobia! I don’t want to play a game with dragons!”

Great! Maybe the next game will work for you!

This isn’t some radical notion.

If I say, “Hey, let’s all go see a movie next week,” we need to agree on a film we all enjoy.

If I say, “I’m going to see Encanto, anybody want to come?” then you just don’t come if that’s not a movie you’re interested in.

Each event has a different premise. And when it comes to books, for example, people have no difficulty understanding the difference between book club selections and personal selections.

In tabletop roleplaying games, on the other hand, there’s a good portion of the fanbase who only reads books in book club and many of them simply assume that it’s the only way to read books. So they interpret a statement of “this is the book I’m reading” to mean “I’m going to kick you out of the book club if you don’t read it with me.”

You’ll frequently see people online, for example, replying to statements like “this is the game I’m running” as a “red flag” revealing that the GM is some sort of tin-pot dictator forcing their players into misery.

Those who aren’t in a movie club, on the other hand, are baffled by a claim that it’s some sort of ethical failing to arrange a group outing to see a specific film.

(The Geek Social Fallacies may also play a role here.)

THE LOCAL POOL

For context, rather than having a gaming group, what I have is a local pool of a few dozen people that I will pitch specific games to: These might be roleplaying and storytelling games (like Blades in the Dark, Ars Magica, or Brindlewood Bay). They might also be board games (like Captain Sonor or Gloomhaven).

Those interested in that game join. Those who aren’t, don’t.

I’ve built this pool primarily through my open tables, which make it a lot easier not only to introduce new players to RPGs for the first time, but also to invite existing players into my circle. (One of the many reasons I suggest that, if you want to increase the amount of gaming you do, having an open table in your pocket is an essential tool.)

I also have a couple of specific social groups active at the moment that stick together between campaigns or who got together as a group first and then figured out what game to play next. For those groups, of course, we find the game that everyone wants to play.

Returning to board games for a moment:

Sometimes we’re getting together to play Captain Sonor.

Sometimes we’re getting together to play with Peter and Hannah.

These are different premises.

They’re both okay.

Matt Mercer, Aabria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan — all of whom have run canonical actual plays in the world of Exandria — sat down together for a roundtable discussion of their GMing techniques.

There’s a lot of GMing talent in that room and a lot of great GMing advice in the video. I wanted to kind of dig that advice out and make it accessible, so I rewatched the video and took some notes. Then I thought it might be valuable to polish up those notes and share them here. In practice, that’s turned into a little bit of a ramble as I try to both capture what they were saying, while also sharing my own thoughts on what it means.

Where necessary I’ve used [square brackets] to indicate my original thoughts.

GROKKING A SETTING

I’ve done my own video on coming to grips with a published setting, so I found these thoughts interesting.

Matt: As I learned to GM, I would just create new settings because I was too scared to dive into established settings like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. So I understand there can be a reticence or anxiety about not wanting to “ruin” the setting or run it incorrectly.

Brennan then talked about how their experience running Exandria was fundamentally different from a GM running it at home, because anything that they say during the actual play becomes official canon.

Aabria: Try it when the guy who made the world is at your table.

Matt: The good news is that for the majority of you, it will not be livestreamed to the internet. So you can fuck it up as much as you want.

Aabria: Nobody 100%’s the lore. (…) Give yourself a little bit of grace.

There are a couple practical tips here:

• Take a break and go look stuff up when you need to.
• Set your campaign in a corner of the setting where you can’t “break” anything.

But the really big idea is:

Matt: Establish in Session 0 that this is your version of the setting. If you really want to be hardcore into the canon you can, but the intent with writing the [setting books] is to make information that you can use. That’s meant to be helpful. That you can take and use as much as you want to the letter, or break it apart and remake it however you want.

If you give yourself permission to own the setting and make your own version of it, the problem (and anxiety) kind of just goes away: Once it’s yours, any “mistakes” you make are actually just the truth of your setting.

Mercer explicitly rejects the auteur theory of creation, particularly in the context of roleplaying games: Exandria was “born from accident” and developed collectively. Even in his own group, it’s not something that belongs exclusively to him.

[Establishing this attitude in Session 0 also frees the players from this burden. It’s okay to shoot Darth Vader. You won’t have broken anything. You’ll have created something new.]

SESSION 0 & CHARACTER PLANNING

“I have a class. And spells. And magical gear. And literally no desires and no attachments.” Buddy, that’s enlightenment. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re actually done. You beat the game.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Session 0 fulfills several functions:

• It establishes safety tools (lines & veils).
• It’s an amuse-bouche that clears the palette from your previous campaign.
• It sets tone for the campaign.

For an actual play, having an off-camera Session 0 is important because it gives the players space to explore ideas without feeling committed to them.

But the core discussion revolves around character creation. For a long-term campaign, you’re going to be spending dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours with the characters. So you want to spend the time to get the characters right.

• But also don’t be afraid to sunset characters who aren’t working. Allow players to retool their characters or even retire them and bring in a new character.

Session 0 character creation can be even more important for short campaigns, though, because you won’t have the time to explore and gradually develop the characters (and their relationships) through play.

AT THE TABLE: Do character creation at the table. This allows players to bounce ideas off each other and create pre-existing relationships between their characters. The result is an overt history shared by the group. [You can see an example of this in practice in Dragon Heist: Creating the Characters.]

SUB-GROUPS: You can enhance this by having one-on-one or small group sessions with subsets of the full group. (This can also be done virtually or by e-mail between sessions.) This allows for the creation of secret histories known only to

[This is desirable because (a) enigma drives interest and (b) dramatic revelations are fun. If you’re wondering what’s really going with someone else’s PC, the interest generated will immerse you into that relationship. And it’s fun to be the center of attention for a dramatic reveal; that’s an experience that doesn’t have to be limited to the GM.

This notably, for me, illustrates a central truth: An RPG is an act of narrative creation, and I don’t (necessarily) mean that in the sense of storytelling. I mean that the game is simultaneously the creation of an event AND the spoken narration/description of that event. Furthermore, players in an RPG are simultaneously creators and audience; they are both participants in the creation of the game’s narrative and also the audience for that narrative. (The rise of televised actual play obviously begins to shift this dynamic, but it obviously remains largely true.)

Furthermore, there is a tension between the mantle of Creator and the mantle of Audience. We’ll come back to this.]

KEY ELEMENTS: [I’m creating some jargon from the discussion here.]

• Momentum are attachments. Friends, enemies, debts, etc.
• Trajectory are the character’s initial goals.
• Motivation is the character’s “why.” What is it that they want?

So if you have a player who isn’t providing back story, you need to ask them: Where’s your momentum coming from? What is driving you? What do you want to achieve? [Because the question goes both ways: These things come from back story, but figuring these out will also inform your back story.] Where you are from informs where you’re going.

It’s not about the amount of character backstory. “You don’t need a forty page back story to do this.” You just need enough backstory for these key elements to be in place and for the character to “click” into place.

Nothing wrong with forty pages of back story if that’s what the player wants or needs! Aabria Iyengar has a tip, though: Five minutes before the session, ask everyone, “What’s your back story?” Because no matter the length, in that moment the player will focus in on what’s most essential for them.

Tip: Backstory also tells you where the players’ focus is. As Brennan puts it (paraphrasing), “No clerics? Guess I won’t bother developing the gods, then.”

GAME MASTER AS GREEK CHORUS

Matt Mercer also notes that, “Back story is an invitation to the GM; not an expectation.”

But it’s a potent invitation because the easiest way to prep is to ask, “What do you think you’re going to be doing [as a character]?” And then prep that. (As opposed to saying, “This is what you’re going to do,” and then trying to figure out how to motivate the PCs to do that.)

Brennan characterizes back story as “plot hooks you’ll bite every time.” He contrasts the mysterious necromancer in the corner who the players can freely ignore as opposed to, “Your uncle, who you swore to kill, is here.”

This really sets up the idea of the GM as the chorus of a Greek play: The chorus does not drive the plot forward. It exists to establish the scene, reflect and comment upon the actions of the characters, and also to provoke and inspire their action. In just this way, an RPG campaign is driven by the players and their characters, while the GM creates opportunity and context for them to do so.

Matt: Part of the preparation (…) is getting to know enough about the world and the kind of story that you’re going to tell, so that when you start, you can kinda let all that preparation go and just ride with the player’s actions; their agency. And have that bag at the ready. At that point a lot of your preparation should be modular. You should know which things are important to tell the story, what bits of information you feel would be the most impactful for the players to discover, to uncover, to take to heart and use to drive them towards a goal, to fulfill that heroic fantasy, or that horror narrative, whatever it is that you’re using to tell.

[This is what I refer to as active play. You create these modular bits so that you can play freely with them at the table.]

RAILS vs. OBSTACLES

What I’m looking for when I’m a player is full immersion. I don’t want the experience of being a storyteller when I’m a PC. And that’s a little bit of a different thing. A lot of indie games want a flat hierarchy at the table where everybody is a storyteller. I don’t want that as a player. When I’m a player, I want to be living in a story, immersed into a character that is not, to their knowledge, living in a story. As Evan Kelmp says, “I am not a character.” I don’t want to play a character that’s thinking about their fucking narrative arc. I want to play a character who wants to save the world as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I, as the player, want the arc. So me and my character exist at odds.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

[Here we return to the tension between player as Creator and player as Audience. This tension is not a bad thing. It drives the central creative act of a roleplaying game in a way almost entirely unique to it as a medium, and when you get the balance right it creates a feedback loop of excitement.

And this type of tension is not, it should be noted, a strictly dramatist concern, although Brennan puts it in these terms. If you think in gamist terms: You, as a player, have a desire for victory. But you simultaneously don’t want that victory to be trivial.]

It’s the GM’s role at the table to resolve this tension; to unify the player’s desire and the character’s desire.

Brennan: So what does it mean if I want to provide that experience to the player? [Characters] are like water. They are going down the hill as fast as they can, seeking the path of least resistance. But the player wants anything other than a straight line. So my job as the “rails” is irrigating a path down that slope that lets the water always have taken the fastest route towards its goal, but at the end of it, the shape is the most convoluted and pleasing. You achieved the shape of a story while you were trying your hardest to avoid it.

The “rails” that Brennan is describing here are not railroading. They are obstacles. It’s the GM’s role to put obstacles between the PCs and what they want. The obstacles that Brennan is talking about are primarily derived from dramatic sensibility, but — as we’ve already discussed — the same equally applies to gamism or simulationism: The level-appropriate opponents who create challenge are placed between the PCs and their goal so that the PCs have to overcome them. Goals are not trivially achievable because the world would not feel real if they were.

Brennan also inverts this metaphor: The “rails” are ultimately designed by the players. They emerge from the character’s backstory. They are the hooks you’ll bite at every time; the uncle you swore to kill showing up to cause problems.

RANDOM TIPS AND INSIGHTS

OTHELLO TOKENS: Use the plastic discs from an Othello game set as generic monster tokens. You can use wet-erase markers on the white side of the token to identify the monster or indicate current hit point totals. [You can also flip the token to the black side to clearly indicate a corpse. It feels like corpses should be difficult terrain, but we so often lose track of them narratively.]

WHERE DO THE RELICS COME FROM? There are specific tropes in D&D. When you’re doing world-building for D&D, you want to identify those tropes and back specific explanations for them into the world, so that those tropes flow organically from the world and are a natural part of it.

[This can apply broadly to almost any setting creation. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a planet-hopping space opera. The essential trope here is that you need to be able to get from one planet to another very quickly: Cheap FTL is going to give you one setting. A solar system with dozens of terraformed planets is going to give you another. Stargates give another. Cross-planar journeys through what our ancestors called the elf-lands gives another.]

NO TIME FOR SESSION 0? If you’re running a one-shot, for example. You can replace some of that work by giving the PCs private moments at the beginning of the scenario. [And also framing scenes with smaller sub-groupings before bringing everyone together.]

Sometimes you can also use e-mail or text messages to ask questions before the session starts.

ACCEPTING OFFERS: The triad here talks about how, “Aabria is a great GM from the player’s chair,” by which they mean that she can see the storytelling beats a GM is setting up and will line herself up to hit the incoming pitch. These players recognize that you’re singing a note because you want to harmonize; and, vice versa, they sing a note because they’re hoping you’ll harmonize.

BATTLEMAPS AS IMPROV SEED. Highly detailed battlemaps can lock players into a particular visualization of the battlefield, but this can be useful if it encourages them to interact with the battlefield in creative ways. The example is given of a player seeing chains on the map and then grabbing them in-character.

…BUT YOU DON’T HAVE A BATTLEMAP: When playing theater of the mind, make it a conscious habit to establish three details of the battlefield. You don’t have to have a plan for how they’re going to be used; just make sure there’s scenery there and you’ll find that circumstance and creativity will make use of it.

And, Feng Shui-style, it can be useful to explicitly give players explicit permission to infer and/or ask about the presence of detail.

AABRIA’S SIGNATURE MOVE: “And here’s what you don’t see.” A cinematic technique in which the GM describes a scene that none of the PCs are present to witness. This can be very powerful.

Brennan: And my head popped off my body, spun around in a circle, and said, “You can do that?!” And then settled back onto my shoulders… Talk about inviting the audience in.

Brennan’s quote here is particularly interesting in light of his earlier discussion regarding the fact that he wants to remain in character. How can this be if he’s so completely blown away by a technique feeding him information that his character has no access to?

Because, once again, the player is both Creator and Audience.

CONCLUSION

If you have time, make sure to check out the full video! There’s a lot of fun stuff — anecdotes, random observations, etc. — that aren’t captured in these notes.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26B: A Disposition of Treasure

There were three main problems to overcome: The sheer weight of the arcane equipment and precious metals. The pit of chaos warping the hallway. And the difficulty of lifting the material out of the basement here at Greyson House.

Out of everything, the “Drill of the Banewarrens” was going to prove the most difficult: Everything else could be mostly parceled up into smaller bundles, but the drill was both bulky and weighed several thousand pounds all by itself.

“Could we just sell the location of the drill to somebody?” Elestra asked.

“Like House Erthuo?” Tee said. “I doubt they’d be all that interested considering what just happened.”

“How can you make encumbrance fun?”

You can’t.

But you also can’t make hit points fun, and for much the same reason.

Hit points are just a number: It goes up. It goes down. At a certain value you might suffer penalties. At another you fall unconscious.

So, too, with encumbrance: The number goes up. The number goes down. At a certain value you suffer penalties. At another you can’t carry any more.

Hit points and encumbrance are simple gauges, and you can’t make them “fun” for the same reason you can’t make the gas gauge on your car fun.

But driving a car? That can be fun. And so is combat in D&D and a lot of other roleplaying games that use hit points.

The gauge isn’t fun. It’s just a gauge. But the system in which that gauge is used – for which, in fact, that gauge may be an essential part – can be all kinds of fun.

So the better question is:

“Why do we want to track encumbrance?”

Encumbrance is often most useful in expedition-based play: You put together the resources for an expedition, then expend those resources on the expedition to maximize your returns.

Encumbrance is, in large part, a budget. Without a budget, the solution is always “bring everything,” which is kind of like playing 52-card draw poker: Without limited resources, there is no challenge.

(Tangentially, one interesting facet of such play in 1974 D&D, because it had a system for resolving characters fleeing from combat, is jettisoning equipment in order to pick up speed in flight-pursuit situations. It became a unique way for bulk resource management to impact combat-based play.)

This kind of gameplay does become obfuscated if the encumbrance system is unwieldy and difficult or fiddly to use. (Imagine if hit points, for example, could only be tracked by keeping an exhaustive list of forty or fifty different individual entries on your character sheet. Combat would almost certainly become a slog.) Unfortunately, a lot of encumbrance systems are unwieldy and difficult to use, with the result that many groups simply ignore it (either decisively or by default through “close enough” fudging).

What you want, of course, is an encumbrance system that’s easy to use so that encumbrance-based play will effortlessly integrate into your play. Correctly designed slot-based systems, like Encumbrance By Stone, for example, can make tracking nitty gritty encumbrance as easy as writing down your equipment list.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE EXPEDITION

Prepping the resource pool for an expedition and then expending those resources efficiently in order to maximize your success is the front half of an adventure.

The other half of the adventure is returning home with what you’ve gained, which, in the case of D&D, is usually treasure.

We’ve talked about this a bit before, but creating bulky, difficult-to-transport treasure (and/or putting it in places where it’s difficult to extract it) can create its own unique challenges. We’ve seen the players here come up with a creative solution for disposing of the orrery, and now they’re being challenged once again with the Drill of the Banewarrens and some of the other treasure.

(And this stuff is all just a few hundred feet under a major city. Stick it in the middle of a jungle and watch what happens!)

“But, Justin, challenge isn’t really a big focus for my group! We’re much more interested in narrative, storytelling, and roleplaying!”

Drama is born of adversity.

And I don’t mean that you’re wrong or that you should value challenge-based gameplay more, I mean that in expedition-type stories encumbrance-based challenges are a fundamental part of the drama you’re looking for. (Look at, say, Indiana Jones trying to get the Ark of the Covenant out of Egypt.)

For example, a scene in which the players are roleplaying through the crushing guilt their characters are feeling because their decisions resulted in the deaths of innocent people that they feel responsible for? Grappling with the difficult dilemmas created by balancing expediency of liquidating their treasure against the responsibility of who’s benefiting from that treasure? This stuff is pure gold for dramatic play!

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26C – Running the Campaign: Running With Background Events
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

A thousand years ago, we built twelve giant mecha to fight a cataclysmic war. We call them Thrones. Each was unique, a paragon of war…

Down the generations since the Great War, dynasties have formed, each drawing its legitimacy from the ownership of a surviving Throne. These titans are ancient weapons with grand legacies of battle and betrayal, but they are also symbols of dominance and entitlement. Possession of a Throne bestows wealth, power, authority over whole solar systems, and a seat on the Galactic Council.

That’s why you’re going to steal one.

Stealing the Throne is a storytelling game by Nick Bate. It is GM-less, and can be played by 3-5 players in 1-3 hours. (The game I played with four players lasted for one hour and fifteen minutes.)

The core concept of the game is evocatively summarized above, and your reaction to it probably makes this review superfluous: If stealing a giant mecha in a heist with galactic stakes makes you say, “Hell, yeah!” then you should buy this game, play this game, and love this game.

Taking a closer look, we’ll discover that the game is broken down into four phases:

• Building the Throne
• The Heist
• The Getaway
• The Finale

In Building the Throne, the players will follow a simple collaborative process that will establish the scene of the crime (where the heist will take place), the history of the Throne, the look of the Throne, and the major subsystems which define the Throne’s capabilities.

You will also, in a step whose importance may initially slip by you, establish at least three Reasons why you want or need to steal the Throne.

During the Heist, each round of play begins with a player volunteering to be the Throne — a GM-like figure who gets things rolling by establishing the next seeming insurmountable challenge in the Heist. Once the challenge has been established, a different player will take on the role of the Thief by saying, “This is what I’m here for. I’m ________, and I’m the master of ________.”

In creating your Thief, you can specify any area of expertise you can imagine, but examples include cracking impossible locks, precision timing, and forbidden technology. The Throne and Thief roleplay through the challenge, eventually reaching the Pivotal Moment in which you determine the outcome of the challenge.

The Pivotal Moment is fail-forward, with a very clever mechanic that results in one of four results:

• Unqualified success. (Woo-hoo!)
• A call for assistance. (In which one of the other players can offer their assistance to overcome a surprisingly difficult obstacle… but only at the cost of making it more difficult for them to accomplish their own goals and getaway later on.)
• A blaze of glory. (“The Thief throws in their hand and goes out in a suitably spectacular fashion,” describing how they overcome the current obstacle, but are captured or killed in the process.)
• (With the player revealing that their character is secretly a traitor, a truth which will become manifest in the fiction only later.)

In play, this process is tense, exciting, and has just the right amount of mechanical richness wed to narrative truth to relentlessly push your story right to the edge.

Each player gets one turn being the Thief and one turn being the Throne, at which point the Heist draws to a close and the Throne is seized!

But just because you’ve taken control of Throne, doesn’t mean you’ve managed to escape. In the Getaway, players have the opportunity to power up the Throne and then attempt their escape. (This is also when all sudden-yet-inevitable betrayals will play out with, in my experience, usually devastatingly amazing results.)

If any of the Thieves manage to survive the Getaway, then the Finale wraps things up. A secret vote is conducted as everyone indicates what Reason for stealing the throne is obviously the most important and must be pursued first. The almost unavoidable disputes which result inform a brief epilogue. (An alternative structure is given for epiloguing a scenario in which only one Thief escapes.)

The only other thing to mention here is that the rulebook includes several playsets, each describing a Throne. These playsets are optional, but provide a little extra structure and a fodder of creative ideas that can subtly shape and inform play in order to create unique experiences. I’m looking forward to experimenting with these playsets in the future.

There is only thing I would change about Stealing the Throne: As written, you only utter your introductory statement (“I’m ________, and I’m the master of ________.”) when it’s your turn as the Thief. I would tweak this to say that you should utter the introductory statement at whatever point your Thief makes themselves known in the narrative (including when they’re offering assistance during another Thief’s turn).

I mention this mostly because I think this minor (and only!) tweak is actually the strongest indication of just how great Stealing the Throne is. It’s smooth, it’s fast, and it’s satisfying.

(The speed of gameplay here should not be ignored: Being able to pick up a storytelling game and have an experience this rich in just over an hour is phenomenal. My guess is a typical session will be about 90 minutes long, which makes the game incredibly appealing as something you can pick up and play more or less on a whim. Or as a deeply rewarding filler on boardgame night.)

Stealing the Throne will be entering my gaming rotation. I think it should enter yours.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Nick Bate
Publisher: ickbat.itch.io
Price: $10.00
Page Count: 40

Disclaimer: I have worked with Nick Bate previously, having hired him to work on Infinity, Over the Edge, and Feng Shui.

Thanks to Heather, Erik, and Allen for playing this one with me.

Brindlewood Bay is a storytelling game by Jason Cordova. The players take on the rolls of the Murder Mavens mystery book club in the titular town of Brindlewood Bay. The elderly women of the book club, who are huge fans of the Gold Crown Mysteries by Robin Masterson and starring the feisty super-sleuth Amanda Delacourt, somehow keep finding themselves tangled up with local murder mysteries in real life.

And there are a disturbing number of murders per capita in this sleepy little vacation town.

The reason there are so many murders here are the Midwives of the Fragrant Void, cultists who worship the “chthonic monstrosities that will usher in the End of All Things.”

That’s right. We’re mashing up Murder She Wrote with Lovecraft, along with a healthy dose of other mystery TV shows from the ‘70s and ‘80s (including Remington Steel, Magnum P.I., and even Knight Rider).

Brindlewood Bay sets things up with a fast, elegant character creation system that lets you quickly customize your Maven, sketch in their background, forge connections with the other PCs, and flesh out their personal version of the Murder Mavens. Then it wraps the game around a Powered By the Apocalypse-style resolution mechanic, performing evocative moves by rolling 2d6 + an ability modifier with three result tiers (miss, partial success, success). To this now familiar mix, it adds a couple mechanical wrinkles:

• An advantage/disadvantage system tuned for the 2d6 mechanic; and
• Crown moves, which allow you to override the results of a die roll by either playing out a flashback scene (developing and deepening your character) or advancing your character’s connection to the dark forces in Brindlewood Bay, moving them inexorably towards retirement.

The Crown moves, in particular, seem to work very well in play, with the former building organically on the sketchy foundation established during character creation and the latter relentlessly advancing the dark, long-term themes of the game.

Brindlewood Bay’s real claim to fame, however, is its approach to scenario design. It comes bundled with five one-sheet scenarios (and provides guidelines for creating your own), but these notably do not include the solution to the mystery. In fact, there is no solution until it is discovered (created) in play.

Instead, each scenario presents:

• An initial scenario hook that presents the murder,
• A cast of evocative suspects,
• Several locations, and
• A list of evocative clues.

Examples of these clues include:

• An old reel of film showing a debauched Hollywood party.
• A bloody rug.
• A phone message delivered to the wrong number.
• A fancy car, the brake lines cut.

And so forth. There’ll be something like two dozen of these clues for each scenario.

The idea is that the PCs will investigate, performing investigation moves that will result in the GM giving them clues from this list. Then, Rorschach-like, the Mavens will slowly begin figuring out what these clues mean.

So how do you know what the solution actually is?

This is actually mechanically determined. When the Mavens huddle up, compare notes, and come up with an explanation for what happened, they perform the Theorize move:

When the Mavens have an open, freewheeling discussion about the solution to a mystery based on the clues they have uncovered — and reach a concensus — roll [2d6] plus the number of Clues found … minus the mystery’s complexity.

On a 10+, it’s the correct solution. The Keeper will provide an opportunity to take down the culprit or otherwise save the day.

On a 7-9, it’s the correct solution, but the Keeper will either add an unwelcome complication to the solution itself, or present a complicated or dangerous opportunity to take down the culprit and save the day.

On a 6-, the solution is incorrect, and the Keeper reacts.

When it comes to roleplaying games, I’m generally pretty skeptical of the “have the solution be whatever the players think it should be” GMing method. I mention this for the sake of others who share this opinion, because within the specific structure of Brindlewood Bay as a storytelling game it works great.

One key thing here is that the players must know what’s going on here: That the clues have no inherent meaning, that they are assigning meaning creatively as players (not deductively as detectives), and that the truth value of their theory is mechanically determined. I’ve spoken to some GMs who tried to hide this structure from their players and their games imploded.

Which, based on my experience playing Brindlewood Bay, makes complete sense. The game is entirely built around you and the players collaborating together to create meaning out of a procedural content generator stocked with evocative content. (If you’re looking for an analogy, Brindlewood Bay turns the GM’s creative process when interpreting a random wandering encounter roll into the core gameplay.) If the players aren’t onboard with this (for whatever reason), it’s going to be grit in this game’s gears.

But if everyone is on the same page, then the results can be pretty memorable.

For example, in my playtest of the game the players created a really great theory for how the circumstances of the murder came to pass. Then, on a roll of 8 for their Theorize move, I twisted the revelation of who was actually responsible for the death itself in such a way that the Mavens all collectively agreed that they needed to cover up the crime. Simply fantastic storytelling and roleplaying.

There are a couple niggling things about the game that I think merit mention.

First, instead of having the first scenario of the game be the Maven’s first murder mystery, the game instead assumes they’ve been doing this for awhile. (Sort of as if you’re joining the story in the middle of the first season, or maybe even for the Season 2 premiere.) There are kind of two missed opportunities here, I think.

On the one hand, the story of that “first Maven mystery” seems pretty interesting and everyone at my table was surprised we weren’t going to play through it. On the other hand, having posited that the Mavens have already solved several mysteries together, the game doesn’t leverage that during character creation. (By contrast, for example, the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game from Evil Hat Productions assumes the PCs have prior stories in common, but builds specific steps into character creation in order to collaboratively establish those events and tie the characters together through them.)

Second, I struggled to some extent running Brindlewood Bay because the game’s structure requires that the clues be presented in a fairly vague fashion. (This is explicitly called out in the text several times, and is quite correct. Like the rest of the group, the GM doesn’t know what the true solution of the mystery is until the Theorize move mechanically determines it. So the GM has to be careful not to push a specific solution as they present the clues.) The difficulty, for me, is that I think clues are most interesting in their specificity. And, for similar reasons, both I and the players found it frustrating when their natural instincts as “detectives” was to investigate and analyze the clues they found for more information… except, of course, there is no additional information to be found.

The other problem I had as the GM is that the Rorschach test on which Brindlewood Bay is built fundamentally works. Which means, as the story plays out, that I, too, am evolving a personal belief in what happened. But, unlike the players, I have no mechanism by which to express that belief, except by pushing that theory through the clues and, as we’ve just discussed, breaking the game. It was frustrating to be part of a creative exercise designed to prompt these creative ideas, but to then be blocked from sharing them.

These are problems I’ll be reflecting on when I revisit Brindlewood Bay. Which is a trip I’ll definitely be taking, because the overall experience is utterly charming and greatly entertaining. I recommend that you book your own tickets at your earliest opportunity.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Jason Cordova
Publisher: The Gauntlet
Price: $10.00 (PDF)
Page Count: 40+

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