Got this as part of the Palestine charity bundle. I ran it for two of my friends and it was my first time DMing (or playing any TTRPG) ever.
We had a great time! Overall I think it's a really easy game to pick up and play. The mechanics are easy to understand and I think there's a lot more collaboration to be wrung out of coming up with a theory of the crime that implicates persons of your choice rather than trying to solve a predetermined mystery.
Some notes about the game we played for other players:
- The cases included with the game were really easy to modify, which I did. I replaced some of the clues with ones that implicated an outsider as the murderer to encourage my players to fabricate. They didn't, but they did figure out how to use those clues in an unexpected way.
- We played pretty fast and loose with whether traits applied, and allowed one detective to gain dice from the other's traits. That might be against the rules, but it was fun! Might not be feasible with a bigger group though.
- Suspicion is completely optional as the game is currently written. If we play again or I had a bigger group I think it might be fun to experiment with making it more of a problem for them, but I also thinking keeping it optional lets the game be casual and lets the characters really focus on the catharsis of fucking up bad people.
- I modified clues on the fly but even so my players often needed clarification on whether certain facts were clues or not, since they were incorporating details from the setting that I was improvising on the fly into their theory of the crime. (For example, I described the police commissioner's terrible Ikea furniture and that became their motive for why he'd committed a crime, and they wanted to count that as a clue.) We were playing virtually, so I ended up just pasting all the clues they'd found into a shared document so they knew what they had.
Overall we had a great time and I felt like it was a great game to run as a complete novice! Definitely plan to play again.
That sounds delightful! I'm glad you had such a fun time with it, especially with it being your first time playing a TTRPG! So congratulations!
And honestly, my policy with changing rules on the fly is that you should absolutely feel free. TTRPGs are a collaboration, after all, so when running it at a table with friends, its really your game as much as it is mine. That said, these are some really interesting modifications and I'm glad you commented so that future players can take inspiration!
I love how you've distilled the Brindlewood moves and mystery system, swapped in my fave dice rolls (d6 pools from BitD), and made something so evocative and cathartic. It'll probably be fun to mix LJBD back into Brindlewood Bay and get some grandmas pinning murders on rich people!
Thank you so much! Actually, to do some unrepentant self-promo, I did actually write an unofficial Brindlewood Bay mystery, The Mavens Stop A Presidential Assassination, in which the Mavens can decide the future of America by how they solve the mystery.
But also, the trick is that you can ALWAYS just frame terrible people in your TTRPGs...
← Return to Mystery TTRPG
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Got this as part of the Palestine charity bundle. I ran it for two of my friends and it was my first time DMing (or playing any TTRPG) ever.
We had a great time! Overall I think it's a really easy game to pick up and play. The mechanics are easy to understand and I think there's a lot more collaboration to be wrung out of coming up with a theory of the crime that implicates persons of your choice rather than trying to solve a predetermined mystery.
Some notes about the game we played for other players:
- The cases included with the game were really easy to modify, which I did. I replaced some of the clues with ones that implicated an outsider as the murderer to encourage my players to fabricate. They didn't, but they did figure out how to use those clues in an unexpected way.
- We played pretty fast and loose with whether traits applied, and allowed one detective to gain dice from the other's traits. That might be against the rules, but it was fun! Might not be feasible with a bigger group though.
- Suspicion is completely optional as the game is currently written. If we play again or I had a bigger group I think it might be fun to experiment with making it more of a problem for them, but I also thinking keeping it optional lets the game be casual and lets the characters really focus on the catharsis of fucking up bad people.
- I modified clues on the fly but even so my players often needed clarification on whether certain facts were clues or not, since they were incorporating details from the setting that I was improvising on the fly into their theory of the crime. (For example, I described the police commissioner's terrible Ikea furniture and that became their motive for why he'd committed a crime, and they wanted to count that as a clue.) We were playing virtually, so I ended up just pasting all the clues they'd found into a shared document so they knew what they had.
Overall we had a great time and I felt like it was a great game to run as a complete novice! Definitely plan to play again.
That sounds delightful! I'm glad you had such a fun time with it, especially with it being your first time playing a TTRPG! So congratulations!
And honestly, my policy with changing rules on the fly is that you should absolutely feel free. TTRPGs are a collaboration, after all, so when running it at a table with friends, its really your game as much as it is mine. That said, these are some really interesting modifications and I'm glad you commented so that future players can take inspiration!
I love how you've distilled the Brindlewood moves and mystery system, swapped in my fave dice rolls (d6 pools from BitD), and made something so evocative and cathartic. It'll probably be fun to mix LJBD back into Brindlewood Bay and get some grandmas pinning murders on rich people!
Thank you so much! Actually, to do some unrepentant self-promo, I did actually write an unofficial Brindlewood Bay mystery, The Mavens Stop A Presidential Assassination, in which the Mavens can decide the future of America by how they solve the mystery.
But also, the trick is that you can ALWAYS just frame terrible people in your TTRPGs...