Before I blather on about nonsense, here’s a brief progress update for Twenty-One Palaces.
Revisions hit a huge snag, but it was a snag I knew was coming. Also: difficult. I had to take a few long walks to sort out all the reasons why this group of scenes were a bust. Then I went through them, making lists of necessary story elements. Then I had to come up with a new and interesting way to get all those necessaries incorporated into the new scenes.
Anyway, it sucks to be making such slow progress, but I knew going in that this segment of the book was going to need major work, so it feels good to be nearly done with it.
Once I do that, I put the book aside for a day or two so I can do taxes, then it’s back to revisions.
In other news, my family observes Tabletop Tuesday, in which all three of us get together to play a game (and not a computer game, which would be basically impossible for my wife and me). Board and card games, naturally.
Sadly, we don’t have very many, and it eventually became repetitive.
Happily, this gave me an opportunity to introduce a bit of ttrpg fun into our game night. My son tried tabletop role playing when he was 10. After a few sessions, he shrugged and went back to Minecraft. Many years later, he’s a young adult willing to have a bit of fun. As for my wife, she’s never had any interest in this kind of game, but she is all in for family activities, so I have a captive little group here.
Our first effort was A Town Called Malice, which I picked because it’s very structured for an rpg. Playing this let me introduce role-playing elements, but the progression of the story and the overall plot were basically programmed in.
They had real fun with it, so a few weeks later I introduced Brindlewood Bay.
BB is a mystery role-playing game that uses a system derived from the Powered by the Apocalypse rules system. The player characters are elderly women in a mystery book club who like to meddle in the murder investigations that pop up all too often in their little coastal New England town. It’s very Murder, She Wrote, in a good way.
Also, there’s a cosmic horror element, but that will be more important later.
Anyway, the game works like this: There’s a mystery, a set of suspects, a list of clues, and a murdered character. The GM is admonished not to start the session with a preconception about which suspect is the real murderer. That’s determined through play.
The clues are deliberately vague. They might say, for example: muddy boots in the wrong place, a perfumed love letter, a shattered award, a revised will. That’s all the PCs get.
The idea is that the players collect these vague clues and, when they feel ready to accuse a suspect, craft a murder narrative out of them, then roll the dice. Plus one for each clue the players find a way to use in their narrative. A successful roll means you’ve found the killer. A failed roll, oops.
Honestly, I was iffy about this game when I first read it. It sounded less like solving a mystery and more like creating one. Is that really what players want?
The verdict, for my family at least, is abso-fucking-lutely. I really could not have predicted how much they would love Theorizing about the murder and the murder suspects. They do it so much and so enthusiastically that I have to remind them to play the game once in a while. Talk to suspects. Gather clues.
Weirdly, this continues a long-standing trend for me. Games that seem like something I wouldn’t like become absolute favorites, while games I’m enthusiastic to try miss me somehow.
Anyway, I’d call BB a hit.
Speaking of mysteries, Veronica Mars (the TV series) has popped up on Netflix. It’s one of my favorite shows. If you decide to sit down and watch it (and you should) keep in mind that there’s a movie between seasons 3 and 4.
It’s a 20-some year old show, but it has great characters, the story really moves, and it’s highly recommended.
(The links above are DriveThruRPG affiliate links.)