A Double Feature, Carved from Brindlewood

The mission is never over, but it has been on hiatus since my last update, and the stars are not yet right for its return. In the meantime, two background projects of mine have come to fruition.

I'm a big fan of the Carved From Brindlewood framework developed by Jason Cordova and featured in several games published by The Gauntlet. If you're not familiar with them, Carved From Brindlewood games are emergent investigation games where mysteries don't have predetermined solutions. Instead, each scenario provides lists of NPCs, locations, potential dangers, and clues the GM can insert anywhere the players go looking. When the players gather enough clues, they form a theory of what's going on and roll dice to see if they're correct, which gets easier the more clues they incorporate. I wasn't sure I'd like it the first time I played it, but once we got to theorizing, my brain lit up just the same as when I figure out any trad mystery.

Which is why I've been writing my own scenarios for some of them.

Art by Joshua Clark for Public Access.

Let the Devil Out

Before I go on, you can read the final scenario here.

Public Access is a CFB game set in the strange little town of Deep Lake, NM, during the summer of 2004. In March, The Gauntlet announced the Double Feature Writing Contest, a scenario-writing contest for Public Access with two twists. First, submitted scenarios had to be set in the past, a potential future, or an alternate reality of Deep Lake and the surrounding Degoya County. (These are "Lost Transmissions" in the game's terminology.) Second, everyone who wanted to join had to pick a movie, then pair off with someone else and together write a scenario inspired by both movies (or get assigned a second movie if they preferred to work solo). I picked A Field in England, about military deserters in the English Civil War who fall under the spell of a cruel sorcerer, and partnered with Nicolas "Gulix" Ronvel, whose choice of Sorcerer is about desperate men who volunteer to drive a truck full of volatile dynamite through hundreds of kilometers of wilderness.

We decided on the premise quickly: replicate the setup and structure of Sorcerer, but replace the dynamite with a literal sorcerer. Which was a fun bit of design, as something Sorcerer does extremely well is, when the truck is in danger, it cuts to a shot in the back where the boxes of dynamite are half-buried in sand. These shots fuel so much dread, a ticking clock that makes you think this is the moment all the characters will be blown up. To create that same feeling in gameplay, the wizard has a timer that can quickly fill up and prompt magical backlash as the players fail dice rolls, until he regains full command of his powers. This isn't a failstate, but it makes forward progress much more difficult, as he expects the player characters to do as he wishes and tries to force their obedience if they refuse. People who read our entry responded very favorably to this mechanic, and while we didn't get a chance to playtest it, I'm eager to see if it works as well as we thought it would.

We didn't win the contest, but it's hard to be upset about that when it produced so many bangers. Seriously, if you're interested in CFB design, check out the public folder of submissions and read through them all. It's a fantastic way to learn what the system can do, and participating in the contest inspired me to get back to my solo CFB projects, such as...

Art by Amanda Lee Franck for The Between.

Jacob Goldenkind and His Twin

And again, you can read the final scenario here.

The Between is a CFB game set in Victorian London and the game that convinced me CFB is a revolution in investigative horror design: this blog doesn't exist without The Between. Unlike in Public Access, where player characters are ordinary people, characters in The Between are exceptional individuals employed by a private organization to hunt monsters. And because The Between draws from Gothic horror fiction, scenarios draw from well-known monsters types like vampires, ghosts, masked serial killers, etc. Doppelgangers are a Gothic classic, so when I realized it doesn't have a scenario with a supernatural case of mistaken identity, it seemed obvious to write one myself. It'd be an excuse to stretch writing muscles that had gone cold, to familiarize myself with the particulars of writing for CFB, and to write something nobody else in the community had done before.

In Dostoevsky's The Double, the doppelganger isn't meant to be read as literally real but as a sign of the main character's deteriorating mental state. But the joy of writing genre fiction is you can make the metaphor literally true. In thinking of a fun angle I could explore with a doppelganger, I realized you could portray it as a proxy for self-loathing. Take the parts of yourself you hate and wish you could destroy, then externalize them into a physical thing you actually can destroy: the darkness implied by a man trying to murder a perfect copy of himself is right there at the surface. That's why one way of resolving the Threat is to figure out how to tell them apart, because the "real" Jacob and his "monstrous" Twin look and act exactly the same, and why the alternative is to reject the premise that they're separate beings but one person in distress.

Something I struggled with was trying to mechanize this conflict for the player characters, so they could get hunted and harassed by their own doppelgangers. For a long time, it was tied to a special Condition that could only be cleared after marking every box on the Mask of the Past, but in the end I just abandoned mechanics for it altogether. Instead it's one possibility suggested in a paragraph on using player characters' dark secrets (which every player character in The Between has) against them.

This one I have playtested, both in a four-session arc and as a one-shot, and I'm happy with it. Some parts need a full campaign to playtest completely, but the Question & Opportunity structure works: one to tempt the players to resolve the Threat quickly, one to tempt them to linger on their characters and the themes. I get writing for CFB games now, which is what I really wanted, and I have four more ideas for Between scenarios and two for Public Access. Watch this space for however those end up.