Bubblegumshoe: The Case

“It's a mystery to me
The game commences
For the usual fee
Plus expenses
Confidential information
It's in a diary
This is my investigation
It's not a public inquiry”

- Dire Straits, “Private Investigations”

Since November I’ve been running Pelgrane Press’s Bubblegumshoe, the game of Teen Detectives, and this run of mysteries runs to a close I’m feeling a bit reflective and thought i’d put my thoughts down on what i was trying to achieve, before circling back to think about how it all went in play. I part this is inspired by my good friend “kehaar” (his blog here) who documents everything as part of his process, and makes for interesting reading. So, the question is, “what was I thinking?!”

Why Bubblegumshoe?

So first off, I just wanted to run a game. I enjoy playing but i also enjoy GMing and I don’t really get the opportunity much. But tied to this is an itching desire to just not run something “safe” because it feels like a lack of ambition given the opportunity. I know I can suffer from a short attention span, and if i’m not challenging myself, I worry I’ll lose interest. So, new, shiny games system, new shiny setting, please.

Secondly, I’ve been wanting to experience Gumshoe in some form for ages. I like mystery stories as a format and the idea of a game system designed for them is intriguing. It also integrates a lot of modern trends in the hobby; genre-focused, troupe-play and collective narrative design, that sort of thing. Hey, fellow kids, i hear this is what you are into now. Bubblegumshoe also has some interesting wrinkles - its essentially combat free, it has a lot of interesting notes on designing your setting collectively, and bakes the idea that its how you solve the mystery, not if you do it.

OK, But why 1941?

Because I am incapable of running a game in its default setting?

More seriously, my group is British, and our relationship to the teen crime drama is more Enid Blyton than Veronica Mars. I also have a big soft spot for golden age crime fiction, which also exceedingly English. From there, evacuees staying at a country manor house came out of a conversation with my wife, and between us we fleshed out the idea of a retired crime writer taking them in, as well as a possibly excessive amount of detail about the in-universe crime series she was the author of.

From there, it was just really working out what I wanted from the game.

The Setting

Outside of the loose framework, I wanted to let the actual setting be as player designed as possible. So, where is the town? Player decision. What sort of people live there? Comes out of Player Relationships. The stories should drive out of this; the age of the characters will define the sort of themes we can explore; class, gender and ethnicity will open and close doors, relationships bring with them locations and mystery hooks.

• This doesn’t mean I was letting players do all the work here, I had some pretty solid ideas of what tone I wanted to set.
• I really didn’t want to accidentally run the Famous Five, with a bunch of nice middle class kids catching dodgy foreign types.
• I wanted to keep the war a presence, but not dominant.
• I wanted to keep a sense of “social realism”; that life is messy and complicated, that this a shoddy era to be a woman or ethnic minority, that the class system is a very real thing, and that this is reflected in how the characters interact with the world.
• I wanted to make sure the players retain agency, so authority figures remain slightly distant, inept or distracted
• I didn’t want to “nerd-trope” it, so no magic, fairies, ghosts, weird tech or anything. This was very, very hard to stick to when planning.
• I wanted to make sure I was tracking the “players town”, trying to loop in as much as possible of their world, not just presenting mine.
• I wanted it feel, at least in part, faithful to the spirit of Golden Age Detective Fiction.

Not much to ask, right?

We can come back after the last session and see how it all went.