OK, here’s a new problem.

What do you do when loads of people show up for your game?

What if you can’t split the party and you want to run a game for a large group?

For Brindlewood Bay, the rulebook says:

“Brindlewood Bay works best with one keeper and three players.

Avoid playing Brindlewood Bay with five or more players.”

So what’s it like running a game for way too many people?

And what is it about Brindlewood Bay that brings so many hardened TTRPG enthusiasts to the table?

This post is part game review of Brindlewood Bay, and part tales from the trenches on how to survive and potentially thrive in the chaos of a large table…

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Handbags off the shoulders of society ladies.

I’ve watched pearls and diamonds glitter in the dark, near the allotment gates.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

You may be wondering why I’m peppering this post with even more cultural nods and references than usual.

It’s because Brindlewood Bay is all about cliches and tropes.

It leans heavily on the murder mystery genre of TV and if you know Murder She Wrote, if you know Columbo or if you’re Scottish and you know Taggert, then you’ll have a strong idea in your head of the structure of an episode and what you can expect to enjoy for an evening’s entertainment.

Before we go any further, here is my speedy rules summary for Brindlewood Bay. Here we go:

You play as the Murder Mavens at a book club who have extended their remit into solving real life crimes.

You gather clues through exploring the world and interacting with the people you meet.

You do this by using the Day Move, the Night Move, the Meddling Move and the Cozy Move.

Mavens have five stats, vitality, composure, reason, presence and sensitivity to the occult.

You roll 2d6 plus your relevant ability score.

Base target number meets it, beats it.

If you roll badly, you can spend a Crown.

A meta-currency to turn a failure into a success.

At the cost of roleplaying out a scene from your character’s past.

At the end of the session, the Murder Mavens all come together to theorise on who dunnit with a target number based on how many of the clues they found.

If they meet or beat the target number, the person is the culprit.

If not, the mystery continues.

Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova does something funny to the brains of roleplaying gamers.

You know the saying “Never trust a man who, when left in a room unattended with a tea cosy, doesn’t put it on his head?” Brindlewood Bay is the tea cosy.

From a player’s perspective, at the beginning of the game it’s pretty much the same as any other TTRPG.

You come up with your status, you choose your ability scores. So far so good.

Where it gets fun though is that you choose your cosy activity and the rest of the group choose items which are in your cosy place.

In the first game I played, I made a character called Mildred.

Named after Mildred Hubble, the Worst Witch. (and also the very best story about a young person going to a magical school.)

Anyway, my Mildred, for her cosy activity, she decided to be an aggressive solver of crosswords with a personal beef against the setter.

Given that information and a bit more background stuff about her character, the rest of the players decided other things that should go into her house, her own cosy place.

This included an enigma machine, somehow. Don’t know how.

Anytime that Mildred really needed advantage on a role to make sure that something wen’t particularly well, I could argue how one of the things from her cosy place was relevant to help with a particular problem at hand.

This collaboration of who the character becomes because of what the other players around the table decide is really interesting to me.

It means that players are going to be invested in each other.

But also it encourages me to hold them to my character, but loosely, to really let them be part of the world and be affected by events.

In games and systems that don’t have this level of collaboration, you can often find as a player that you railroad yourself, that you’ve got one particular way in mind of playing the character, that they should be a certain way.

Brindlewood Bay forces you to let go of the reins a little and explore this character who is a deep part of the world.

Something that I love about role-playing games is playing as characters who are very much not like me.

So playing a retiree in a sleepy town on the east coast of the US, that’s very different to my usual lived experience.

You play as a character who has lived a life, and someone who’s lost someone as well.

We found when we were playing that we actually wanted our characters to be affected, to be still dealing with loss and pain and trauma, even if we chose for the ways that we wanted our characters to present this, to range from the heartfelt and profound to the very, very silly.

That sense of mortality, that sense of impermanence comes across as well in the Night Move.

This happens at night time when the stakes are higher and the risks are greater.

In a risky situation the Game Master will ask you, “What are you afraid will happen if this fails?” In the starter adventure, Dad Overboard, Mildred was looking around where she should not have been.

She was on the Krauses’ yacht meddling wonderfully.

And Salty Nick, the Game Master asked what I was afraid would happen if I failed.

I said, “Well, I’m afraid that Mildred will get caught by one of the crew.” To which he said,

“Nay, it’s worse than that. If you’re caught, you’ll be thrown overboard, tied to a concrete block.”

This is such a fun way of raising the stakes and making every dice roll matter!

One of the many fun mechanics in Brindlewood Bay is the commercial break.

Speaking of which, this video is sponsored by, well… I suppose… my Patreon?

It’s got some exclusive articles, interviews, as well as long-form versions of my actual play. I ran a beginners game of Daggerheart recently and there is so much cool stuff planned.

Meanwhile, back to your regular scheduled reading.

So how did my game of Brindlewood Bay for people actually turn out?

Well… it was good. It was genuinely a ton of fun.

And everyone around the table was super good about sharing and giving spotlight to each other.

I could imagine things would have gone very wrong if I’d been playing with a group of less emotionally mature people, shall we say.

But everyone who came was there for the story, for the adventure and to find out what would happen.

Having a group of min-maxers and completionists probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the game much anyway, even at a smaller table.

We ran the adventure Dad Overboard, the first one in the book.

And I didn’t modify much at all in terms of the structure or the events that happened.

But the only time that the entire horde of little old ladies was together was at the very start in a little nook above the bookshop and at the very end to theorise and to point the finger at the suspected killer.

For the rest of time, I made sure the group split into three little parties.

One group went to the marina where the body was found, another to the fish market where EVERYBODY flirted with Etienne, and the third group went to the yacht where they were able to speak to the rest of the Krauses.

I did my best to make sure that no group was out of the spotlight for too long, maybe ten minutes at the outside.

But again, absolute kudos to my players who were kind, respectful and quiet when it wasn’t their turn.

I also made liberal use of theatrical scene edits.

If it seemed like a group had everything they needed from the location, I just shouted “And scene! We cut to over there!” And that avoided some of that awkward time you get at the end of the scene where everyone’s finished what they’re up to, but no one knows how to end it.

I learned that trick thanks to a blog post from Bully Pulpit Games, the makers of Fiasco.

That experience that I had at the table with my large group, I could not guarantee that anyone else would.

I think I just got lucky with my players, but I’m also glad that I did a few things right as well, which avoided too much trouble.

As a player, if you find yourself at a big, big table, do your very, very best to be present.

You know you might not get to say anything for a few minutes, but do your best to pay attention and really notice what’s going on around you.

You can use that time to decide what you’re going to do next.

When it does come to your turn, try not to ask too many questions.

Master of Dungeons. It’s a fine rope over there, but how many strands would you say it contains?

Hello Game Master. Would it be fair to say that technically chalk was once alive?

Master of Games… What volume of blood would you say is contained within a mouse?

A much more useful thing to do is tell your Game Master what you’d like to do, and hopefully they’ll tell you if it’s something really unreasonable.

Lastly, as a player, enjoy the show.

Treat it like you’ve got the best seat in the house to some live, immersive, improvised theatre, and appreciate and notice the clever moves, the interesting stuff that your fellow players are doing.

Game Masters. The more players you have, the fewer NPCs are necessary.

With lots of players around the table, there’ll be no shortage of conversation, and adding yet more moving parts is only going to cause you trouble.

You might then think, “Well, how am I going to get information to my players? How are they going to get story hooks? How can I lead them in a direction that they need to go?”

There are a ton of different ways of presenting clues to your players, and Brindlewood Bay will give you a crash course in finding them, especially with the Void Clues.

In the first adventure, Dad Overboard, “a fish, seemingly dead, speaks a single word, “void””, “or a group of people praying near the spot where Mr Krause’s body was found. They will not interact with anyone and disperse if someone gets too pushy.”

If you’re looking for system-neutral ways of delivering information, then one of my favourite tools is the Game Masters Compendium of Explosive Creation.

At the back is a table of a hundred ways of delivering information, including “letters forming on a steamed up mirror”, “a note tied to a bird’s leg with a teal ribbon”, or my personal favourite, “a very large print book by giants.”

Managing a large group is always going to be a bit of a juggling act, a game of spinning plates while swallowing fire, also noticing who isn’t speaking just as much as who is.

You can simplify things for yourself and impose just a little bit of order among the chaos by splitting the party into two.

This will mean that there will be players who aren’t present in a particular scene, but those who are know they will be included at regular intervals.

One of my favourite things to do when running a game for large groups is to wander off and have a cup of tea.

Often I’ll do this at moments where the players are planning or preparing something, maybe a heist or figuring out a puzzle where there’s no more information I can usefully give them as a Game Master, so it’s all down to them to figure out what to do in that situation.

I’ll often do this and just leave a timer ticking down, or maybe minutes for a large-scale knotty problem.

I’ll leave the timer facing the players and it focuses their minds wonderfully.

There’s no side chat, there’s no nonsense, they’re straight down to business.

And I get a cup of tea.

The Theorise move in Brindlewood Bay is the perfect opportunity to do this.

For my horde of little old ladies, I set a timer for 20 minutes and left them to figure out who done it.

It seems to be a fundamental truth universally acknowledged that any role player in possession of good fortune must be in want of an opportunity to be a little old lady solving crimes.

For me, the special sauce of Brindlewood Bay, and that thing that it just does so well, is that it is so, so strong on that premise.

When you rock up for a game, you know exactly what you’re going to get.

You’re going to be a little old lady, you’re going to solve some crime.

The fact that you get something so specific from the game is why I keep on recommending it to everybody that I meet.

And if you’ve been on the Renegade Rolls Discord recently, you’ll know I will not shut up about it.

Brindlewood Bay leaves out a lot.

There are so many mechanics you might expect in a TTRPG, you just don’t see here.

There’s no specific combat system, you just keep on using the same mechanics as you’re using in the rest of the game.

What you’re left with is a gem of a system.

It’s lean, it’s efficient, it’s one less thing to worry about.

With enough bending and breaking and hacking, yes, you could run a murder mystery of little ladies solving crimes in D&D.

I’ve certainly got enough books behind me where I’m sure I could figure it out.

But Brindlewood Bay gives me everything I need out of the box.

It empowers me to have this very specific experience, which would be hard to replicate in other systems.

And this is really what I look for when I come across another TTRPG.

It’s allowing me to tell a story with my friends around the table, which I would not have done otherwise.

From the Game Master or Keeper’s side of the screen, I have never seen a game with such good and clear onboarding.

Brindlewood Bay gives you a -step guide on how to run your first session, including timings for how long it’s expected each part of the game will take.

This takes so much of the risk away from picking up the game and giving it a go.

It allows you to have solid expectations.

You know that this game will go for a certain amount of time, it’s not going to be finished in two minutes, and likewise there’s no way that a single mystery would take much longer than you expect.

What that means is it’s a very safe bet to pick up and play it as a one-shot, but you might well find that as you do that you’ll be more and more curious about the Void Clues and want to create that larger campaign.

Because there’s no definitive right answer, the GM has free range and do basically whatever they want.

As GM or Keeper, you can make a character as weird and wonderful as you like.

You can make someone as suspicious as you like.

You can make all the clues point towards that shifty-looking butler.

But because it’s the player’s decision who to accuse, it doesn’t matter.

This flexibility, this space to improvise and flex your artistic muscles is refreshing and something I’ve not seen a game deliberately give you space to do before.

There is no intent in a design behind any of the adventures, just interesting people to meet and interesting clues to discover.

Each NPC gets a sentence worth of description and then a one-line quote.

These are dense in connections and worldbuilding, so read them ahead of time to know where to place each character in the adventure.

But other than that, you’ve got the space and freedom to make them completely your own.

In a video I made recently about what I think the best system is for new players and GMs, I ranked Brindlewood Bay pretty highly, but the newbie experience would be much easier as a player than it is as a game master.

If you’re brand new to the hobby, you don’t get the luxury of those big blocks of box text that you see in other systems.

Instead, you’re relying on your own creativity to flesh out a space.

In a recent video, I spoke about whether we should have rules for role-playing.

And Brindlewood Bay answers this question with a strong case for “yes, yes we should”.

It says that you can role-play in exchange for mechanical bonuses, but you don’t have to.

You’re never forced to do one of the Crown Moves.

If you’re a game master who enjoys improvising and thinking on their feet, lateral problem solving in a way which is usually only reserved for players, you’ll get a lot out of Brindlewood Bay.

The real stories that you’ll tell in Brindlewood Bay won’t be about the cases, the individual adventures.

They’ll be the specifics of who this person is, the life they’ve led, and the life they’re now leading.

Every single character that I’ve played and every single character that I’ve seen around the table has been nuanced, has been interesting.

Even if they’ve started as some joke premise, that little lady that keeps on making special brownies for all the neighbourhood, you’ll find that through the Crown moves, whether you like it or not, you will find yourself caring about these characters, and identifying with their pain, their loss, as well as their hopes and dreams for the future.

If you’re familiar with this channel, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of Secrets and Clues, one of the many methods and bits of wisdom in the return of Lazy Dungeon Master by Mike Shea, where the individual bits of knowledge which come out of clues are not connected to any one location or a particular NPC or gated behind some skill check.

Brindlewood Bay gives you this by default, gives you a million opportunities to test it out.

You’ve got a list of clues, you’ve got the situations of switching falls at the table, now go find out where it takes you.

As a new GM, you might well find that daunting, but Brindlewood Bay has a lot of GM support, especially on how to run the horror aspects of the game.

It reminds me of Mothership in that way, and instructs the Game Master to keep dangerous characters occluded, and then how to go about presenting those mysterious, Void Clues.

For players, Brindlewood Bay could be a perfect introduction.

But for Game Masters new to running games, you might feel you’re left hanging without anything solid to grab onto.

Luckily, if you’ve seen any of those murder mystery shows, you know, sooner or later, all of the suspects are going to have to be gathered together in one room, and the detective will lay out exactly who done it.

Brindlewood Bay is all about expectations, and meeting and beating them in wonderful ways.

As a player, the little overachiever of me wants a right answer.

At the end of a session, the group look at all the clues and decide who done it, then roll a dice to see if they’re right.

This openness, this letting the players just decide who they think did it, is an interesting choice.

It means as a player, you’re robbed of that.

Haha, I’ve solved it, I’ve figured everything out, I am very very clever.

But what you lose in smugness as a player, you gain massively as a Game Master.

In a classic mystery setup, the GM has to come up with a huge amount of detail for each character to give them signs of being shifty, to give them signs of being honest.

This is a hell of a lot of work, and for a game which I want to pick up and play in an evening and do for a one shot, I wouldn’t be able to do that if I had to spend all that time planning and being meticulous in laying clues and red herrings.

So that gripe from a player’s perspective is actually more of an acknowledgement of a design decision which has been made by the developer, who decided not to make a definitive answer at all.

And that gives the game a massive amount of replayability.

You can play that same scenario times and get different answers on who the murderer might be.

It all depends on your players, the connections they make, and the connections they maybe miss.

So if you want to be a medieval fantasy heroic hero every night at game night, well this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, this one as well, I’ve all got you covered.

If you want to be a little old lady solving crimes for the night, Brindlewood Bay is the game for you.