#bubblegumshoe

The next alternative I came up with would be to push harder into the intersecting-individual-quest nature of Nijigasaki and construct something in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine, if for no other reason than to take advantage of the Breaks from Reality, Ritual, and Transition mechanics.

You may have thought to yourself, "dang, we are a niche demographic of people, us Nancy Drew enthusiasts who also love TTRPGs. Surely there will never be anything that crosses over between my two interests :("

Well you would be WRONG! I've recently discovered a tabletop role-playing game released in 2016 called BUBBLEGUMSHOE, which is a niche yet award-winning game that is based specifically on Nancy Drew! Heck, the example town in the rulebook is called Drewsbury.

I have found the rules and mechanics very fitting for the teen detective genre, and while I can't personally speak to how it flows in actual play, there are a few youtube videos of people running oneshots or short campaigns, should you be interested. While reading the book, I have been so overjoyed and excited to see how the authors tackled so many different facets of the genre. Like, I can't contain how excited I am about my plans to run campaigns in this system.

The cheapest website I found for buying a copy of the game is DriveThruRPG for $7.95 (link). That link also can provide you with a better game description and a sample copy of the first 20 pages to get a feel for it, and it may occasionally go on sale. I could only find listings for PDF copies, but they do appear to have produced hardcover copies at some point, so if anyone could find a link to that please let me know!

Those of you who are mail-tier patrons on http://patreon.com/legendlark have already seen this friendo, but for everyone else, may I present to you The Gap, Noel's incredible, iconic character from Hrose Camp Adventures on @legendlarkpod.

Poison of Prophecy is currently on a season break, so now is a great time to catch up!

In the mean time you can also enjoy Dead Letters, a short mystery adventure about queer romance, small towns, and learning how to live in a place new to you without any friends.

Here's a preview below. Catch the full episodes on the Crow's Codex podcast feed available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartradio, Spotify, Podcast Addict, Crowscodex.com or wherever podcasts are free!

Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there. 

Please, come in and explore this new blog feature - an intermittent series where I break down a few thoughts and impressions that come to me after running short arcs of various games.

Hmm? You think that sounds a lot like the ‘Rule of Three’ writeups I’ve done in the past? Hah hah, no, these have two key differences:

1 - they don’t necessarily go for three sessions

2 - I absolutely cannot be fucked writing up the session details.

See? Completely different.

Anyhoo, I just finished a short game of Bubblegumshoe, a game focused on teenage detectives solving an arson case in a small-ish town near Melbourne. It went pretty well and everyone had fun, so hooray for everything!

But what have I learned from the experience?

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Turns out I hate the Gumshoe system. I was surprised by this, as I own many Gumshoe sourcebooks from multiple game lines. They’re almost uniformly great - well-written, well-researched, evocative and interesting. Nonetheless, this was the first time I ran the actual system, rather than using the books with different rules, and uuuhhhhh I hate it a lot. It’s fiddly and bitty, requiring lots of record-keeping; the rules are ‘player-facing’ to the point where the NPC rules basically don’t work; it doesn’t provide enough tools for players to change/affect situations, rather than just gathering information; ultimately, it’s a boring, flat system with not enough game or story to make it fun. I think the core GMing principle at the system’s heart is solid - don’t make players roll to find clues, give them clues and let them work out what to do with them - but the system built up around that principle ticks all the wrong boxes for me. There’s still plenty of non-system-based goodness in my various Gumshoe books, so I’m not letting go of them, but I’ll never touch the system again.

Mysteries aren’t necessarily enough to sustain a story. It’s not that difficult to come up with a mystery concept, and Bubblegumshoe has some good advice and structures for that. But a mystery on its own is a static thing, a question with a single correct answer, and I don’t find that enough to keep a game going. You have to introduce more - confrontations, digressions, character-focused scenes, moments of tension - and have those build up energy that moves story along. My GMing style works better if I set a mystery up like a puzzle - something that can be solved in many different ways, with no specific answer - and then use players’ attempts to solve the puzzle to birth new complications and changes in direction. I can see more mystery stories in my future - they’re easier to run online than fight scenes - but I’ll need to prep them a different way in order to make them pop for my players.

Short games sometimes need rules changes. Bubblegumshoe starts off with group creation of the setting/town, which is something I love. But you create a lot of that town, and its locations, and its NPCs, and etc. Which would be fine in a long-term game - but for a single arc, you end up with far more content than you can use, which can be frustrating if strong hooks go to waste. Long-term mechanical balance can also cause short-term issues, like having a wealth of bonus/arse-saving points that players use freely ‘cos there’s no need to conserve them. While GMs can adjust systems and principles to accommodate short-term play (or the changed dynamics of online play), that’s hard to do without experience and foreknowledge; it’d be better if designers did that work for them. (It’s noteable that a lot of indie designers do; it’s the bigger publishers that tend to stay focused on face-to-face campaign issues above all.)

Damnit, Discord, pick a lane. Just work the same way two weeks in a row, that’s all I’m asking. Don’t introduce new problems, or new fixes, or new fixes that cause new problems, every time I log in of a Tuesday night. I’m begging you here.

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This concludes my Bubblegumshoe musings.