Over the last months I was semi participating in the German pen and paper community, at least at Mastodon. I’m interested in pen&paper role playing games for years now. It started as a listening hobby via podcasts and ended with me wanting to play these games myself. One of the rule sets I came across is “Brindlewood Bay”, where the players role play as old ladies solving criminal mysteries in the adorable village of the same name. The original takes place somewhere in the east cost of the USA, in an old whaling town. There is also a little bit of “Lovecraftian horror” going on, similar as in the “Cthulhu” game. The whole game is of the “tell tale role play” (“Erzählrollenspiele” in German) category. It requires the players to create the world and even the story together with the DM. Heck, even the actual murderer is not fixed and can be anyone whom the players meet or hear of in the session.
I liked the idea of old ladies walking around, moaning about their broken hips and engaging in “old people” hobbies, like baking or crocheting (no offense, my wife loves this as well and is still young). I bought the German pre alpha version from SystemMatters, but never played it due to timing issues and missing people to play with. However, a friend and me pushed the idea of a “Rollenspiel-Stammtisch” (regular meetup of role players) and I finally got around to look into the old ladies again. As most of the players are newcomers I looked for a version that was a little more familiar for the German villager.
I found Lange Schatten in Bad Bründlholz, bought it for 12€ and prepared our first session. The main difference to Brindlewood Bay is the location, as it plays in the City of “Bad Bründlholz” in Bavaria, Germany. The author prepared 10 cases that can be played standalone or as part of a campaign. I chose “Ein Strohut im Schilf”, where the victim is the manager of an unsuccessful indoor swimming pool, who wants to extend the area at cost of the natural water reed, the last living place of an endangered bird. We were three players and me, originally only two wanted to play this setting but we could convince a third one away from his hopes and dreams of the DND adventure that was prepared by the other DM that evening. Let’s recap the evening a bit, starting with:
What I liked
The manual is truly a result of handcrafted love for role playing. While the 130 pages seemed a bit much at first, it heavily helped me prepare for the game. There even is a separate chapter how to speak the Bavarian accent correctly. I tried and failed miserably, switching from “high German” to Saxonian, to Bavarian, to Austrian, to even Swabian, I think. The players liked it, however no one tried maintaining a dialect on it’s own, making my attempts look even more desperate.
For my story the NPCs were fabulously written and very interesting. Age ranges between 15 and 50+, interesting backgrounds, indications of relationships towards each other, a little but very concise description of look and appearance, all that helped a lot in getting my brain running high in theories, ideas and suspicions. The players liked them as well, even though only five of the nine characters were even encountered by them in our 2,5 hours of playtime.
Also the creation of the characters of my players were supported very intelligent, props to the author I even got a free template for each of them to fill out. One highlight of the rules certainly is the fact that each player gets a special item proposed by one of their team mates and by the DM. That made a very pleasant situation when a player who had never played any pen&paper in his live before, got an amulet with the picture of a cat engraved on the outside. I told him that the amulet may be opened and asked him, what word is engraved on the inside. It was “Trau dich” (dare to) which, ironically, is one of the two main game moves. He spoke it with a very silent whisper and I could see amazement in his eyes. I dare to believe that it was this moment which later made him say good by with the words “Until next time” (which I very much hope becomes true).
We had many great moments because of the “Hinweise”, clues that can be found whenever the players roll a successful investigation check. While the clues may look fairly random (we found a pink flip flop next to the dead body) they started creating story arcs on their own (did they teenager steal them from his crush because of his feet fetish?) They encouraged my players to think out of the box. At least until I threw to many clues at them, which changed creativity to confusion, but more on that below.
With all these points, all seems great and fine. We open our hearts and let sun shine in them, listen to the birds sing their lovely song in awe of the goodness of the world. This is what you are gonna need it when we go to the dark side together. Because the next points are the:
Things I didn’t enjoy
Let’s start with the little nit pickings. One of the four key attributes of your investigator is “Gespür” (intuition). It is described as an instinct of the visible but also supernatural world, also it allows to see through lies. While it reads fine, in the game I was a little unsatisfied whenever I had to decide between this attribute and the one for charisma or the one for intelligence. Especially as the game includes very minimal supernatural activities, most of the time none at all, this attribute feels unnecessary.
I also struggled a bit with the concept of “Beeinträchtigungen” (annoyances). These should be given to the players when they fail a dice roll and will give some permanent effect (bleeding, drunk, fearful) to them, which will decrease their chances in other rolls and interactions. If they fail the dice even worse, a catastrophe happens. While great in theory it lead to unauthentic situations. The players were investigating the mansion of the victims family. Because of good ideas they made it in and had a talk with the snobbish daughter of the deceased manager. They even rolled a good dice and pulled some information out of her nose. Long story short, the grandmas and the stunning beauty get drunk of high quality egg nog and one of the players tries their luck again, only to completely fail the dice roll. The rule book expected me to give a heavy negative outcome so suddenly we have the teenager shouting at the group to get out of their mansion and never come back. Yes, in retrospect, I COULD have had them spill the booze all over the couch. I could have had them threw up at the fine clothes of the host. Well, I should have done that. But this didn’t came into my mind and I want to keep scenes rolling and not sit there and think for a couple minutes. So I screwed that up and got angry at the rules. This one’s on me.
Another one that’s probably my fault is the confusion that where caused by to many different clues. The rule set says to keep situations open and ambiguous, to not rule out any theories of the players in advance. I think I did great on that, maybe to great. At the end we could not rule out a single person that we met as potential murderer. The DM has to look very closely who the players trust and distrust and plant an idea on how and why the murder might have happened in their brains. I’m a little disappointed in the rules that this guidance was never given. The grandmas are no police, so a lot of the clues are no real facts, but rather tales heard from NPCs or random items. This encourages blaming the main suspect without any safe evidences. That’s not something grandmas do. Well, at least mine doesn’t.
By far the most unhappiness and also the reason why I won’t lead this game again in the near future is the missing excitement. As the murderer, the murder and even the motives of the suspects are the result of the creativity of the players the final result is a giant story telling sandbox but no emotions, no fear, no uncertainty, no tension. My players weren’t really afraid of anything. They were describing scenes and acted them out. But from my perspective they did never feel the scenes. There was no fear of old granny falling victim to a slimy sports teacher, leading them deeper into the darkness of the reed. No hope to catch the suspect in a swimming race across the lake. No hearts beating faster when hearing the steps of the owner of the house coming closer, while inspecting the secret documents in the office.
Part of that may also be because the players are acting out grandmas. No buffed fighter, no mischievous rogue, no badass with a sad backstory. Just a grandma that didn’t take her pills today or put to much sugar in the cake of her grandchild. I can see it working out in theory. In practice it didn’t work out for me.
Conclusion
I like the idea of “Lange Schatten in Bad Bründlholz”.
I like the idea of “tell tale role plays”.
I like the idea of creating an engaging murdercase together with my friends.
Maybe more experienced DMs and players can really turn these ideas into reality.
I can’t, for now.
So I’ll go back to the stuff that I can.
Explore a car wreck in Mausritter.
Get the players out of the basement alive in Wintertod
Find treasures and kill bandits in DnD.
Thanks for reading!