Brindlewood Bay

 Brindlewood Bay is the PbtA game of cosy murder mysteries by Jason Cordova. The players are members of the Murder Mavens book club and are all widows in their 60s and 70s. Think Murder She Wrote combined with The Golden Girls.

While play is episodic (each episode features the players solving a murder), a darker theme emerges in campaign play as a larger, overall mystery introduces occult elements.

Brindlewood Bay takes an emergent approach to solving the mysteries. The solution to each mystery isn’t predetermined; it is uncovered during play. Key to this are two moves:

• The Meddling Move—used to find clues
• Theorize – for determining whether the PC’s solution is correct.

(Jason Cordova explains how the investigation works here.)

From a distance, Brindlewood Bay looks very similar to other investigative games: the PCs go from place to place and find clues to the mystery. They then work out the solution. But I found it runs quite differently.

I’ve now played Brindlewood Bay twice. Unfortunately, for me, there are more misses than hits.

Dad Overboard

We took about four hours to play through Dad Overboard in two sessions. We followed the process, the players did their investigating, and we solved the murder.

My two players (Jon and Terry) enjoyed playing little old ladies solving murders. But while Jon bought into the “play to find out” approach, Terry hated it.

Terry struggled with the concept that the solution to the mystery was whatever they invented. He prefers RPGs where the GM has a world or scenario for him to explore. He had no problem with the system or other concepts, but he hated that I (as GM) didn’t know the solution.

I found running Dad Overboard surprisingly unsatisfying. It was easy to run—it needed virtually no preparation, and all I did during play was react to what the players were doing and offer them clues. But it was too easy—there was no sense of struggle or challenge. Moreover, when I did put obstacles in the way, they were never significant and easily overcome.

Jingle Bell Shock

Although I came away unsatisfied by Dad Overboard, I thought I’d give Brindlewood Bay another shot. Maybe things would be different with another group. So, I ran Jingle Bell Shock (a Christmas episode) for Becky, Jon (again), Liam and Thomas.

Character generation was more involved with four players and took longer, but we still took about four hours to work through the mystery.

Again, the players enjoyed being little old ladies investigating a murder—that core premise is delightful.

I struggled with some mechanics. For example, if a player rolls a 7-9 when Meddling, they receive the clue but there’s a complication. I struggled with complications, as I couldn’t immediately think of any that were relevant. And so I stored them up, and when I got to four complications, I killed off one of the suspects. (I also locked one investigator in the basement.)

And while four players are better than two during character generation, the investigation feels heavy-handed with four. For an investigative game, I much prefer smaller groups (also more genre-appropriate).

When it comes to solving the mystery, Brindlewood Bay felt like a parlour game. Once you have collected sufficient clues (such as a secret crawlspace, a bottle of pills that has been tampered with, unpaid bills), then the players merely have to stitch them all together to create a coherent(ish) story—and then roll Theorize to see if they are correct.

Once again we had a successful investigation, but once again, it felt flat.

What works for me

There’s plenty to like in Brindlewood Bay. Things I particularly liked:

• Playing little old ladies solving murders.
• Items from your Cozy Little Place. The last step of character generation is for other players to name one object that can be found in your home, and these were effective in how they changed how the players saw their characters.
• Lovely establishing questions for the locations. For example, What do you see in the grand dining room that shows just how lonely Amelia truly was? I’ll use that in other games.
• Very easy to run. Running Brindlewood Bay is almost effortless—the most straightforward published scenarios I’ve run ever. (But running a game well? I think that’s harder.)

What doesn’t work for me

• Emergent mysteries. I didn’t really enjoy running Brindlewood Bay—I didn’t like not knowing what was going on. Maybe that’s my lack of experience, but it didn’t work for me.
• Mechanics such as complications (which were fiddly), conditions and the moves I didn’t use as while they made sense when I read them, they didn’t seem relevant during play.
• I was disappointed in the occult element that Brindlewood Bay bolts on for campaign play. Nobody tries to justify the high murder rate in Oxford or Jersey or Midsomer, and giving it an occult spin felt unnecessary and not at all true to the source material.)

In summary

I doubt I’ll return to run Brindlewood Bay. However, I’d happily try playing it—perhaps it simply doesn’t suit my GM style.