Bubblegumshoe - Denouement

So, 5 mysteries and 11 sessions later, how did it go? 

Worldbuilding

I’ve never tried to run a full “session zero” before and a big part of what I wanted to do was let players drive the town setting. I pretty shamelessly stole the format that my friend Andrew used to setup his Gangbusters game, along with the notes from the rulebook and tried to come with as little pre-conception as possible as to what the town would look like. So as well as character generation (which by its nature drives some of the setting due to the “Relationships” mechanics) I also asked for additional NPCs, locations and so on as went though. And so Runston, a small town in the Severn Estuary, was born.

The key thing from that drives into the game is the sense of what is important to the characters and how that plays into the mysteries that I started to write. So we had a Furniture Factory, so that needed to feature at some point. A good few school-based relationships, so we can use them. One of the characters was related to the “Lady of the House” which coloured how the PCs knew each other and what their relationship was. All the PCs were on the young age (12-13 rather than 15-16) and that led to “coming of age” being more a theme than I expected. The war felt more like a foreground presence (we had a Navy Brat and Czech Refugee) than a background one. And so on.

I think in the end the players built a lot more of the games foundations than I did.

Mysteries and Systems

OK, so Bubblegumshoe is hard work. I think the key thing is that have to balance a good mystery (ie, its mysterious) with the fact that it needs to be soluble. It’s also got to be flexible enough that players have several routes in, so they’re not going to get stuck because they’ve missed something, and, in the end, several possible outcomes none of which are “failure states”. Its a tough balance.

I ended with a slight push-pull relationship with player-driven ideas, letting the story warp a little round where the investigations were going so that what mattered as players acting to move the story forward. So if my note thought a clue could be found in location X, but the players have gone to location Y and it could reasonably be there, then that's where it was. They still need to “get” it, they still need to act on it, its not changing the mystery or the culprit, but it is letting the players write their own story.

The system itself take a bit of getting used to. Gumshoe is really a resource management system; you don’t roll a lot of dice but there is only a set number of “spends” you have and these erode as you investigate. I think we all got better with how that worked; the last two scenarios offered a better work out of the system than the more hesitant first three. But it really is a good system for investigation, and the “skills list” is well thought out, and pretty flexible even though we were out of its intended period. I do think we would have felt the resource pressure more over longer sessions, as it didn’t “bite” much but from a GM perspective I feel I could tweak some of the mysteries to put a little bit more of that pressure on.

Relationships

Shorn of combat, the real cost of BGS for players is the mid-term impact on the town setting. This is another new experience for me; i can’t think of another game I’ve ran that is so resolutely set in the same place, and this means that how you solve a mystery and what you do with the knowledge is important. This meant that at least one scenario was a direct sequel to one of the others, picking up some lose ends, and at a couple key moments players were able to “call back” to favours they’d done.

The other thing the lack of combat as an option (these are kids, after all) mean that most of the resolutions ended up being pretty emotional. A stand-out moment is one of the kids talking down a damaged World War 1 veteran who was holding a downed pilot hostage, just a pure, emotional appeal that came from the information they had gleaned on him. The final showdown with the local Bully was driven from an understanding of his hostile home life and centred on the two characters with the most to be scared of from him. It felt like the highest of stakes, it felt like it mattered.

Concussions, or Am I Mad Enough to Do This Again?

I mean, yes. I feel like I’ve said a lot that I found it tiring and bandwidth intensive to run but also really rewarding. Players really engaged with it, added to it, messaged me in the week over it. That nature of the game, and the toolset it gives you, really made it feel like (if I may be forgiven the pretension) a communal story experience rather than a more traditional “GM and Players” structure, and god knows that kept me on my toes but it also meant that some of the games best moments (for me, at least) came out of that flattening of the session structure.

And did I hit my objectives? Yes, i think so. Mysteries featured War Profiteering, Teenage Pregnancy, Blackmail, the struggles of Evacuees. Class, gender disparity, that sense of the stratified society of the period, all came into play. I spent a lot of time tracking which NPCs turned up in which scenario, tried to roll in under-used ones, generally used a lot of the more "modern" tools in the rulebook. It certainly never felt twee or safe. 

Given that a large part of me was very worried the whole thing was going to flame out and crash in three weeks, the fact I got five mysteries run and my players sound hungry for me, I'm cautiously optimistic that it went well!

Finally, huge thanks to Alistair (Evelyn), Andrew (Marta), Steve (Horace), Robert (George) and Andy (Taiso) for all the work they put into the world and characters.