First Time Playing: The Between

The Between is a game I picked up a while ago but only recently got the chance to play. It's a PBTA game like its predecessor, Brindlewood Bay, and uses the same Carved From Brindlewood mystery system. As a big fan of said mystery system I was keen to see how it ported over to this game.

The intro page explains that the game is directly inspired by the TV show Penny Dreadful, with some minor nods to other works. I initially thought it might be a game where you could play an adventure akin to Dracula, but no. When you get to the playbooks it becomes clear that this is Penny Dreadful, the RPG, as each one maps directly onto one of the main characters. If you're looking for a more generic gothic horror game, this isn't it.

Fortunately it's not necessary to be a Penny Dreadful fan to play the game. While the GM was a huge fan, the players were a mixed group. I'd watched some of it but not the whole thing, while some hadn't watched it at all. The Penny Dreadful characters are for the most part public domain characters, and the playbooks make it pretty clear who it is you're playing. While Brindlewood Bay's requirement that the PCs are all part of a book club and fans of the same book felt overly restrictive to me (what if you want to be a gardening club, or members of the WI?) the idea here that we were all monster hunters and residents of Hargrave House made total sense and didn't require any show knowledge to understand.

I picked the Vessel, (Vanessa Ives), while the other players went for the Mother (Victor Frankenstein), the Undeniable (Dorian Gray) and the American (Ethan Chandler (actually Lawrence Talbot)).

Like most PBTA games we kicked off with assigning stats and special moves, deciding what we looked like, and choosing names. Then there were the Personal Quarters. We went around each character in turn, and every player described an item that was in that characters's bedroom in Hargrave House. This was both interesting and frustrating. Interesting, because it provided a bit of insight into each character's personality. Frustrating, because these are all things that go on your character sheet and can supposedly be used in the game - except that none of them actually were, because they were in our rooms, and the mystery we were investigating was not in our rooms. Not a single item got so much as a mention after that point.

"...anything from the Personal Quarters that might reasonably be on a hunter’s person in a scene, is."

But as instructed by the game, we were all thinking of things that might be in someone's bedroom, not something they might be carrying around with them. One item we had in the Mother's room was a tank full of living flesh, which was not exactly something portable. And that was something from an AP chosen by the game designer himself.

Obviously this is an easy fix if you're running the game. Instead of personal quarters, frame it as items the PCs might happen to have with them. Then you've got a more freeform version of the equipment lists used by Blades in the Dark, and the items might actually get used.

On to the actual game. The Between has a strict play structure. If you're familiar with Blades in the Dark then you'll remember how it alternates between missions and downtime. This initially appears to be a rather more extreme version, with the four phases being Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night. It's not actually as complicated as it sounds though, as Dawn is just an upkeep phase, and Dusk is pretty much deciding what's going to happen in the Night phase.

The Day phase was all about investigating the mystery, or Threat as the game calls them. We played Sally No-Face, one of the included Threats, about a serial killer who removes people's faces with surgical precision. We went hunting for clues at the morgue and the scene of the most recent murder. We found horrible things, encountered troublesome NPCs, and generally had the kind of spooky fun I was hoping for.

...With one caveat: the Janus masks.

In Monster of the Week each character has a number of luck points. You can spend luck to improve a dice roll. You have a limited number of these, and very few options for regaining them, and running out means trouble. What's more, in the version we're playing, most playbooks have some kind of negative consequence for using luck. It's a mechanic I like a lot.

In The Between, spending a luck point is called 'invoking the Janus Mask.' Mechanically, they're fine. You have a set number available on your playbook, and each time you spend one you have to narrate something from your past. This is a great fit for the TV show theme, as character backstories are typically something you experience as a series of flashbacks at critical moments.

No, my issue (beyond the ridiculous name) is that the GM is supposed to narrate the bad outcome of the roll, even if they know that the player wants to use a mask to negate it. Why? Fortunately the book has an answer.

"Answer: because it’s fun! The Janus Mask lets us glimpse different timelines, play them out, feel them, experience the anguish and terror, and then… do something different."

Only it wasn't fun. There was no anguish and terror because we already knew it wasn't going to happen. All I felt was that we were wasting time and the GM's creativity, putting work into something that was going to be immediately retconned.

Again, this is an easy fix if you're running the game. Our GM rapidly quit bothering with the additional narration. Screw the rules; if it's as un-fun for you as it was for us, don't do it.

But back to the Threat. Like in Brindlewood Bay, the scenario provides a list of somewhat abstract clues that can be found when the characters are successful in their search for information. This is where the game really shines. It was creepy and atmospheric, and lead to some fantastic emotional scenes between characters as they had to deal with the conditions picked up over the course of the investigation. At last we'd collected enough clues to gather back at Hargrave House and discuss our findings, and work out what to do next.

What the game isn't clear about is when this is supposed to take place. Our group came up with our theory at the end of the Day phase, and then spent the Night phase dealing with the threat. This worked well, but with an otherwise rigidly laid out play structure, it's a bit odd that this doesn't seem to have any specific timing.

Something new in The Between's mystery system is that the complexity (and therefore the difficulty of the Answer A Question move) can vary depending on which question you want to answer. In theory I like the idea. In practice, it didn't go so well. Here's the questions for the Sally No Face threat:

WHERE IS THE KILLER HIDING? (Complexity: 4)
Resolve the Threat by infiltrating the killer’s lair, then capturing or
destroying them.

HOW IS THE KILLER CHOOSING THEIR VICTIMS? (Complexity: 6)
Resolve the Threat by luring the killer to you, then capturing or
destroying them.

WHAT IS THE TRUE IDENTITY OF THE KILLER, AND WHAT DROVE THEM TO THIS MADNESS? (Complexity: 8)
Resolve the Threat by empathizing with the killer, then bringing them in
peacefully.

And this became a problem. Because we were all the kind of players who want proper answers. We didn't just want to find the killer, we wanted to understand them! So obviously we were going for the third question. Except having answered that question successfully, we were now expected to empathise with the killer and bring them in peacefully. And there was not a lot of enthusiasm for that. We understood their motivations, but they were also a serial killer going round London cutting people's faces off. We wanted to take them down! And being told we weren't supposed to, just because we wanted to properly understand things, was bloody irritating.

If you've read this far you'll probably already have guessed that we did in fact end up taking them down when our efforts to bring them in peacefully failed due to a) them being a derranged serial killer, b) bad dice rolls, and c) not all of us actually wanting to do that.

There was a brief and somewhat unwelcome interruption to the dramatic finale in the form of the Unscene. This is a scene that takes place somewhere else in London while the Night phase is happening, and has absolutely nothing to do with the PCs, the threat, Hargrave House or anything else from the actual game. It consists of a series of prompts where the players take it in turn at intervals during the night phase to read out a prompt and then do what it says, usually narrating a scene.

The purpose of this is to provide a cinematic play experience and show parts of London's seedy underbelly. What it actually did for me, as the first player to get picked, was suddenly drag me away from the fun game I was having playing my Vanessa expy and shove me into something entirely unrelated. Doubtless someone finds this fun. I found it frustrating and tedious.

Another easy fix. If you also find the Unscene to be an unnecessary interruption to the game you were trying to play, throw it out. Our GM didn't ask any further prompts after mine.

So that's my experience of playing The Between for the first time. Incredibly atmospheric, innovatively designed, full of the kind of gothic horror I've loved since I was old enough to read Dracula, but at the same time extremely restrictive in what characters you can play and how the story unfolds, and hindered by weird design choices that kept pulling me out of the atmosphere and story.

It's something I'd consider playing again, because when the game wasn't getting in the way of its own fun it was genuinely excellent. And I'd consider running it, but only with all the changes I've described above. And probably after I get round to watching the rest of Penny Dreadful.

Matrons of Mystery

The first copy of Matrons of Mystery out in the wild has been sighted, so it seems like a good time to reflect on this project.

This all started with a general dissatisfaction with Brindlewood Bay.  Its mystery system is one of the best examples of game design I've seen in years, but for various reasons, when I thought about running some games inspired by the British cosy mystery TV shows I'm so fond of, it didn't really work.  Sure, you can run it without the void mystery aspect, but that's quite a chunk of the game to cut out.

So I decided to change it up a bit.  It's not a long rulebook, and hacking PBTA is pretty much a tradition at this point.  I changed things, and changed things, and changed things...

Until I realised that what I had wasn't Brindlewood Bay any more.  It was its own cosy mystery game, using the mystery system from Brindlewood Bay (which Jason Cordova has generously granted permission for other people to use) which meant I now had my own game.

Playtesting began.  I started off using the adventure 'The Great Brindlewood Bay Bake-off'.  Three games and a lot of imaginative biscuit creations later, I was confident I had a solid foundation and began assembling my disparate notes into a single document.

How was I going to get this thing out there?  I initially planned on doing a kickstarter.  It would be nice to get it properly edited.  (I've seen some absolute horrors from games that weren't edited.)  A kickstarter would allow me to pay an editor and maybe get cover art and stuff as well.

But the more I looked into it, the less I liked the idea.  I realised that what I actually liked doing was writing and running the game.  Kickstarters take work.  You've got to do budgeting, to work out what your costs are, how much Kickstarter take for their cut, how much you're going to have to pay in tax for this one-off payment and so on.  I didn't want to do any of that stuff.  I just wanted to write my book.

So ultimately editing got done by the group of playtesters I'd assembled, who pointed out typos and made helpful suggestions.  Taking all their feedback on board, I was finally happy with the end product.  I made my own cover using a royalty-free stock photo from Pixabay, and found a few line drawings from the same site to sprinkle through the text.

Now to publish it.  I'd formatted my Word document in line with Lulu's requirements, as they were easy to get hold of and easy to follow.  With an actual in-person convention coming up, I knew I needed a physical copy in my hands, so I submitted the files and bought a single copy.

 

The cover was a little darker than I wanted (a side effect of making my cover image in RGB rather than CMYK, I later learned) but other than that it was perfect.

For RPG passing trade though, I really needed to get the game onto DriveThruRPG.  I signed up for a seller's account, and by way of practice, published my one-page RPG Silencers.  But when I downloaded the requirements for print-on-demand files, everything suddenly got a lot more complicated.  It talked about layout tools I didn't have.  I re-installed Scribus, this being the one I had actually looked at before, and rapidly remembered why I'd never bothered installing it when I changed computer.  I opened up their template and was then entirely unable to add my own actual content.

But the black Friday sales were on, and Lulu were offering a 30% discount.  If I couldn't figure out DTRPG, I could at least make it available somewhere.  I tried to figure out what to do about that cover image - how to make it brighter without losing the colour palette.  But ultimately I gave up.  The cover was fine, and I should not let perfect be the enemy of good.  I could fiddle with colour balance for ever, or I could press the button and let people get their discounted copies.  So that's what I did.

I will put the PDF version of the game on DTRPG in the not too distant future, as I know I can meet those requirements, and maybe eventually there will be a POD version there as well.  But for now, the book is available to buy and that's what I really wanted.

I've had a wonderful time writing and playtesting this game, and I hope everyone who picks it up has just as wonderful a time playing it.

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.