First Time Playing: Brindlewood Bay

Brindlewood Bay is a game where you play elderly women investigating mysteries while a Lovecraftian cult lurks under the surface.  I've been wanting to give this a go since I first heard about it, so was very happy to see it offered in the MK RPG club short block.

By chance, all three players were women - or was it that this game particularly appeals to women?  Either way we were soon busy creating our Mavens, discussing our careers pre-retirement, our dead spouses and our cosy hobbie.  It took quite a large chunk of the first session as there's a lot of things to think about and not all of it can be done by the usual PBTA box ticking.

What can be done by box ticking is selecting your special ability.  Each of these are named after well known characters - I went for MacGyver, and later used it to pick a lock using only some hairgrips, elastic bands and a bit of metal trim.  Rather disappointingly for a game about women, the abilities all seem to be named after male characters.  I would have liked to have seen some iconic female characters on the list - although I appreciate that making them all women would have likely have resulted in a rather short list.

But eventually, Rosemary, Gladys and Hyacinth were created and ready to solve mysteries, and off we went to investigate the death of a man who'd fallen off a yacht.  The way this game works differently to most mystery solving RPGs is that there was no correct solution.  Instead we had to assemble a number of clues, and then towards the end of the adventure we had a discussion where we put together a theory of what happened that made use of said clues.

This all gave it the feel of a TV show where not everything is revealed at once.  At one point my character found a diary with a dramatic phrase on the last page.  What wasn't specified is who the diary belonged to - which meant that we were able to decide between us whose it was when we discussed our theory.  I could just picture the scene where the character pulls out the diary, opens it, and the camera switches to her shocked face without showing the audience what she's just read.

There was one mechanic we didn't use, and that was crowns.  In Brindlewood Bay your character can 'put on a crown' which allows them to change something about the narrative in exchange for narrating something quite specific about their character.  Trouble is, part of the charm of PBTA is that failure is often as interesting as success, and the point where my character unexpectedly got tasered and shoved in a cupboard was such a cool dramatic moment and made for such a good cliffhanger (given that it happened at the end of the first session) that I didn't want to change it.

Something else we didn't use was the dark occult conspiracy aspect of the game.  Partly that was because we only played one mystery and our rolls weren't generally high enough to start digging into that.  But I also don't feel the game needs it.  Cozy Mystery is a perfectly good genre on its own without shoving tentacles into it.  As someone with a great fondness for things like Miss Marple and Rosemary and Thyme, I was far more interested in the 'mature ladies solves mysteries' part of the game.  Part of what's so great about this genre is the contrast between the twee setting and the deep dive into the darkness of the human soul, and I feel like adding the Cthulhu Mythos into that detracts from it rather than adding anything.

Overall I really enjoyed the game.  Mechanically it's solid, with the tweaks to the PBTA engine really suiting the mood.  All three characters got a chance to shine, and the attempt to assemble the clues into some kind of coherent narrative was great fun.  We all enjoyed it enough that we're going to try another mystery in the next short block.

What I'm not quite so sold on is playing it as a longer term campaign rather than these brief one-offs.  Presumably that's what the dark conspiracy stuff is supposed to be for, but given that that aspect just doesn't interest me, that's not going to work for me.  Perhaps it would be possible to reframe it into something a bit more genre-appropriate (Hot Fuzz springs to mind) but cozy mysteries to me are inherently episodic.

But treated as an occasional episodic game, focussed on the cozy mystery and not the occult, I think I'll continue to have a lot of fun with this game.