Here's the High Concept - Murder She Wrote Meets a Cthulhu Cult. The players take the roles of elderly women living in a small New England town. They're members of a book club known as the Murder Mavens, and they solve mysteries. And in the process they discover a deeper conspiracy underlying it all.
It's a really good game concept, and I was pushing our regular group of veteran gamers to try it out, and despite some challenges, it worked out pretty well.
Let me hit the biggest challenge first - the rule set is a complete mess. It is well-produced, a digest sized hardback, but the contents could stand a complete revision. RPG rules are challenged by two conflicting purposes. One is to teach the game, and the other is be a reference when playing the game. This book does neither well.
Part of it is that the game is Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), which is a new style of play. Its got some really cool ideas, but Brindlewood assumes that you're already familiar with them. The vibe I got on the first reading was akin to reading the original Chainmail or original D&D rules. There a basic assumptions to the game that are assumed to be common knowledge, so a newcomer will just bounce off them.
Further, you absolutely need to have the characters sheets available to understand the game. There is a description of characters sheets in the book, but vital information that only exists on the sheets (which are not in the book). I was part of the Kickstarter, so I could dig up the files, but for everyone else, you have to go online (no, they don't tell you where to go, or even that you really need the characters sheets to understand the game). The further downside of this is that, once the site holding the sheets go down (because the Internet is both eternal and ephemeral), you're high and dry.
The organization of the book does not help. Definitions, when provided, are in a couple different locations. The explanation of what happens in the first play session shows up 140 pages after we're told about what is a typical play session consists of. There is no index. We had three hard copies of the book and an e-book at the table, and we were still flipping through pages, muttering "I'm sure it's here elsewhere".
Powered by the Apocalypse runs differently than your traditional RPG game (like D&D or CoC). Players are much more empowered to determine what happens, defining both the results (and penalties) of their actions. The basic mechanic is two six-sided dice. You role for success. On a 6 or less you fail (and you or the Keeper can describe what happens) on a 7-9 You succeed but at a cost (the Keeper decides with your input). On a 10 or better you succeed, but we advance the meta-plot a bit (the Meta-Plot involves a creepy cult of a supernatural being - we just started digging into that after the second scenarios, but have not gotten too far)..
The players have a lot of input, and as a result always have to be on their toes and ready to engage (as opposed to the more traditional, initiative driven systems where you wait your turn to do something). The Keeper also has be on their toes, in that one has to continually figure out what goes wrong on those all-too-common rolls. Sometimes this results in dead spots where players (and/or the Keeper) are trying to figure out what happens next.
Further, while this is a mystery game, you the Keeper don't know whodunnit. The players gather clues which tend to be rather open ended, and let the players fill in the blankes (real conversation from the game - ME: You find a steamy letter. PLAYER: Who is it from? ME: Who do you want it to be from? PLAYER: I HATE this game!). After they have gathered sufficient clues, they piece them together and roll to see if they are right. As one player put it "OK. Who are we pinning this on?"
I know. This all sounds like this is a heavy lift. How did it work out in play?
Well, we had a marvelous time over about five game sessions. The character creation system required a lot of engagement - they effectively had to write the introduction to the TV show, where each character got their moment and a description of their "cozy place" home. As a result we created characters with much more depth than the your standard 1st-level dwarf warrior. Again a favorite interchange: ME: Tell me about your late husband. PLAYER: No one ever suspected a thing
The format is very much 80's television, right down to the jump-scare (getting locked in a freezer, or sliding off the deck of a ship) and going to commercial. There are a multitude of ways to damage or kill the characters, and a multitude of ways for the characters to unwind that and take another path. The setting is a small coastal town in New England, but many of us had worked in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, so the small-tourist town flavor came naturally to us. We ran through two adventures - one involving a wealthy family patriarch getting pushed off his yacht, the other being a Halloween party where the victim was drowned in a tub used for bobbing for albums. It was goofy in places and a lot of fun.
The flavor is great, and the players rose to the occasion. This is definitely a case of a good game, but a challenging explanation of it, and we had to mentally unwind a lot of traditional role-playing assumptions and mannerisms in order to get to the heart. And yeah, I'd like to see a few other examples to see where this game did and did not adhere to the original PbtA rules. But a good time was had by all.
More later,
