Brindlewood Bay: A Review

21 Dec, 2025

I recently finished a short campaign of Brindlewood Bay and I had a number of thoughts while running it that I figured might be useful to others curious about the game or interested in running it themselves. Our campaign was not “ideal” in a couple ways: we had to conclude the campaign before I was able to introduce the Void Mystery, so we did a short epilogue at a natural stopping point instead.¹ There were also some scheduling issues with the players, so half the party ended up getting replaced by new players near the end of the campaign. But honestly, that’s the way the cookie crumbles and those logistical difficulties didn’t really impact my enjoyment of the game.

Brindlewood Bay, written by Jason Cordova and published by The Gauntlet, is a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game about elderly women solving murder mysteries in a small coastal town in New England. Over the course of the game, these women (the Murder Mavens) discover an eldritch conspiracy connected to various strange events in town. Essentially, it’s Murder, She Wrote by way of H.P. Lovecraft. Brindlewood Bay is probably best known for its approach to mysteries: instead of each mystery having a single predetermined solution, the mysteries have a bunch of vague clues that the players connect and “solve” with a PbtA Move. This has inspired a rich ecosystem of “Carved from Brindlewood” (CfB) TTRPGs; though if I’m not mistaken, this system was actually adapted from Apocalypse by Moonlight by Oli Jeffery.

The Good

• The vibes of this game are great. I love the conjunction of cozy small-town stuff, murder, and creepy supernatural stuff, and that comes through really well with mechanics the Cozy Vignettes and Cozy Moves. The art in the rulebook and Nephews in Peril (a book of supplementary mysteries) is amazing and very evocative and helps establish this kind of off-kilter tone.
• The mysteries are interesting. Each mystery gives you a list of Locations and Suspects, as well as Clues you can drop in anywhere in the mystery. This makes GMing the mystery easier, though there is a significant oversight I’ll address later. It’s also cool that the GM doesn’t know the solution to the mystery, so they can enjoy finding out the answer just as much as the players.
• The Dark Conspiracy (or as I prefer to call it, the Deep Conspiracy) is cool. Over the course of the game, the players can uncover “Void Clues” which are strange visions or events, and as they uncover more and more, they are able to learn more about the history of this mysterious organization seemingly connected to the strange happenings in town. Both the Void Clues and the lore of the town are super fun to introduce, and the players consistently seemed to love these moments.
• Paint the Scene questions are helpful. A lot of times, players will be asked to help describe a location or situation, and this is both a load off the GM as well as some cool things to work into the game. Some of these can end up being really important: in our campaign, one of the players narrated a framed photo of a Suspect and a mysterious man, whom I later established to be the town’s coroner and the secret leader of the cult.

The Bad

• The guidelines for introducing Day/Night moves are frustratingly vague. 90% of the rolls the players make in this game are for either the Meddling Move (trying to find a clue) or the Day/Night Move (overcoming some kind of obstacle). Making sure that the Mavens are rolling the right number of Day/Night Moves is very important, since the Mavens have a kind of metacurrency called Crowns they can spend to succeed on failed rolls, and this metacurrency never replenishes: introducing too many obstacles means the Mavens can get killed off early on, while introducing too few means the Mavens will be nigh-invulnerable in the late game. The problem is that both the core rules and the individual mysteries give you very little guidance on how and when to introduce these obstacles into the game. I found the best strategy was to try to have about one Day/Night Move per Meddling Move, so each Clue is somehow “blocked off” by an obstacle that must be overcome, but I often found myself skipping this step just cause I couldn’t think of anything. I feel like it wouldn’t have been that hard for each Mystery to have a list of sample obstacles and it would have made running the game a lot easier. I also wonder if this is less of a problem in other Carved from Brindlewood games, like The Between and Public Access, where scenarios seem to be a lot more inherently threatening and supernatural.
• There are too many Suspects. Most mysteries have about 8 Suspects, and some have as many as 9 or 10. This feels absurd to me, especially since it’s very difficult to introduce that many Suspects in a way that feels natural. In practice, I occasionally omitted Suspects, and when I didn’t do so, I found that the players ended up only interacting with the 4 or 5 that interested them. I would highly recommend sticking to about 5 Suspects, 6 or 7 at the most.
• Some stats are better than others. The Mavens add one of their 5 ability scores to the roll every time they make a Move (except for the Theorize Move). These abilities are Vitality, Composure, Reason, Presence, and Sensitivity. In practice, Reason and Presence are used far more than the other abilities, since most sleuthing in the game is either searching a Location (Reason) or talking to a Suspect (Presence). Perhaps I wasn’t imaginative enough to think of a use for the other 3 Abilities in finding Clues, and I definitely use enough Day/Night moves, which would have helped with the disparity, but I don’t think I used Sensitivity once in the whole campaign which is a shame.

The Ugly

After a couple sessions of this game, one of the players brought up that this game has some kind of weird and uncomfortable moments related to the way it portrays elderly women. I think it’s honestly really cool and bold to have a game where the PCs have to be older women, but this is occasionally undermined by the game’s own ways of speaking about these women.

The biggest offender that this player pointed to was the End of Session Questions, which the Mavens use to generate XP. These include the question “Did you behave like a woman half your age?” What is this supposed to mean? Not only is it vague, and thus difficult to determine whether it has or hasn’t been triggered, but it also seems to conflict with the game’s stated intention of portraying elderly women who are “whole characters and not caricatures.” This Question assumes that there is something fundamentally different about young women and older women when the game seems to be trying to make the point that older people, older women especially, are capable of anything their younger counterparts can do.²

I think some of the Mysteries can also be a bit strange in how they portray elderly women. “Jingle Bell Shock” is probably the worst offender, as one of the Suspects is Mother Hawthorne, portrayed as an ancient crone who continues to live on through vaguely supernatural means. Conceptually I think this is an interesting idea, but I again it kind of clashes with the game’s efforts to be sensitive to the experiences of older women. Overall, it contributes to the impression that Brindlewood Bay’s elderly female characters are kind of the butt of the joke in some ways? I’m sure this was not intended, but I feel that the game isn’t quite as sensitive as I’d like it to be, and this also caused a bit of discomfort among the people I played with.

Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed my experience with Brindlewood Bay. I’m sure a large part of that is due to the people I played with, who were funny and awesome and super supportive, but I think part of it was definitely a result of the game itself. That said, I was continually frustrated by the lack of support it gave me as the GM: it was my first time GMing a PbtA game, but I’ve also read other PbtA games that have more specificity in the Moves and more guidance for the GM. A lot of The Gauntlet’s advice to GMs in this game and other Carved from Brindlewood games focus on tips to be a “rockstar GM” but I would really rather have a set of consistent procedures or guidelines that I can use so I don’t have to be a rockstar GM. The amount of improv required to run this game, and the lack of certainty about how good of a job I was doing, made this a very mentally taxing GMing experience. I doubt that I will return to Brindlewood Bay, but I think it has probably made me a better GM in some ways, and I am still interesting in trying Public Access, as well as other PbtA games that are a bit more procedural.

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