#bubblegumshoe

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played BUBBLEGUMSHOE ?

By Emily Care Boss, Kenneth Hite, and Lisa Steele

Crime Solvin' Teens, your time has come! Whether your sleuths are inspired by Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars, the Famous Five, or Scooby Doo, Bubblegumshoe is a game of solving mysteries and navigating the social pressures of being a teenage detective. Building on the GUMSHOE mystery rpg framework, Bubblegumshoe adds an elegant Showdown mechanic for the perfect denonuement scena.

[thistlebeetle]

AT LAST, THE TRIFECTA IS COMPLETED!!! Ainsley, Antone Postminger, and The Gap from Hrose Camp Adventures! Yes, Hrose.

I updated Antone's art a bit before sending off the print of them for @legendlarkpod's Q3 Patreon mail. Had a lot of fun coordinating these two punk halflings and this fancy human, trying to make sure their styles came across strongly while also tying them together as group.

You can buy the print bundle at legendlark.store!

[taperwolf]

I have been pondering how best to run a Love Live-esque TTRPG and I'm currently leaning towards the opinion that the best way I know of to do it is to lean into the episodic nature, mix in some Josie and the Pussycats style mystery solving, and run it in Bubblegumshoe.

The next alternative I came up with would be to push harder into the intersecting-individual-quest nature of Nijigasaki and construct something in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine, if for no other reason than to take advantage of the Breaks from Reality, Ritual, and Transition mechanics.

(My subsequent thoughts were mostly that my knowledge of TTRPGs is — I don't want to say narrow or shallow, but it's kind of only deep in very specific places?)

[alexeisvase]

For my fellow Nancy Drew enthusiasts who also love TTRPGs:

You may have thought to yourself, "dang, we are a niche demographic of people, us Nancy Drew enthusiasts who also love TTRPGs. Surely there will never be anything that crosses over between my two interests :("

Well you would be WRONG! I've recently discovered a tabletop role-playing game released in 2016 called BUBBLEGUMSHOE, which is a niche yet award-winning game that is based specifically on Nancy Drew! Heck, the example town in the rulebook is called Drewsbury.

I have found the rules and mechanics very fitting for the teen detective genre, and while I can't personally speak to how it flows in actual play, there are a few youtube videos of people running oneshots or short campaigns, should you be interested. While reading the book, I have been so overjoyed and excited to see how the authors tackled so many different facets of the genre. Like, I can't contain how excited I am about my plans to run campaigns in this system.

The cheapest website I found for buying a copy of the game is DriveThruRPG for $7.95 (link). That link also can provide you with a better game description and a sample copy of the first 20 pages to get a feel for it, and it may occasionally go on sale. I could only find listings for PDF copies, but they do appear to have produced hardcover copies at some point, so if anyone could find a link to that please let me know!

I'm no expert on this game, but I'd be happy to talk with anyone about it! Either way, check it out, have fun, and stay sleuthy!

[lonelymmo]

Anyone know where I can find some pre-made (Bubble)Gumshoe cases? I'm planning to run a one-shot for my players this Thursday and am just hitting my head against a wall because my blue sky creativity is absolutely drained from work.

[susiephone]

note that this is obviously VERY skewed by which games i am familiar with and which games i personally want to see actual plays for. i only had so many slots!

[open-hearth-rpg]

Violence is Not a Solution: Great RPG Mechanics #RPGMechanics: Week Eight

I talked yesterday about systems, Star Trek Adventures in particular, can represent how moving to violence escalates a situation. But what if you couldn’t do violence at all?

Violence literally isn’t a play option in Monster Care Squad. There’s in-universe explanations for this, which present some striking ideas about world-building. But it's more importantly presented conceptually for the players. There’s no system for attacking and dealing damage in a conventional way. You can be injured and suffer harm, but that’s a byproduct of the actions you take. In trying to deal with the injuries and illnesses facing “monsters,” you can get hurt by the environment, by a creature pushing you aside when they react in pain, etc. 

Side note: “Monsters” in Monster Care Squad is a misnomer in the setting, these are great and fantastical beasts, often highly intelligent.

We’ve seen other games where violence is not the best solution. Going to an all-out fight in Monsterhearts is probably going to cause you problems. You’re going to have to deal with the repercussions. The same thing applies in Bubblegumshoe– it doesn’t completely take violence off the table, but talks about it as something which can only make a situation worse. It’s a threat, but not really a PC tool. Tales from the Loop also tries to do the same thing, but it leaves enough wiggle room for players to create an aggressive character. Violence at the table in these two games usually comes from players not getting the tone and vibe of play. They’re perhaps stuck in a conventional mode. 

But MCS changes that up completely. It requires you to think about tensions differently. And, frankly, it requires you to imagine a game setting where the most common, go-to solution just isn’t there. 

It points to the ways in which changes in the environment and structure can change play and the feel of a setting. You can imagine how different an approach to magic would be where no magical effects may directly harm another living being. Expand that to make it more like the Laws of Robotics and have a structure where magic cannot cause harm indirectly, at least not with any intent to harm. 

There’s a lot of other things to love about Monster Care Squad. It has a brilliant play structure broken into three segments which build on one another and which individually have a set of unique moves. You begin with an investigation and diagnosis, observing in several different ways what ails your particular monster. Then based on that you ready and prepare your solutions– techniques, materials, set up, etc. Finally with those pieces prepared you work to carry out that plan and cure the monster of its ailments. There’s more, but overall Monster Care Squad is worth looking at as a game which builds a world that fruitfully limits options.  

[rationalisms]

Hi Alma, what are you up to these days? :)

hi!! absolutely nothing to be quite honest! it's cold and gross outside and i'm very tired lmao.

i'm spending most of my time these days playing various ttrpgs. my weekend group finished the cyberpunk red campaign (highly rec trying it, it's a gr8 system) and started a scum & villainy (sci-fi forged in the dark) game which is incredibly fun, i'm still in a d&d 5e group, and i just started a shadowrun 5e game that's really cool as well. plus, joined a new group with a friend of mine where we're gonna try a bunch of systems :^) we played a sentinels oneshot yesterday (superhero ttrpg with a really fun character creation system) and are gonna start bubblegumshoe soon (gumshoe is a mystery game and bubblegumshoe is specifically about teenage detectives which i love sm) so that's exciting.

i'm hoping to start GMing my own campaign soon which is based on greek myths (finagling together a powered by the apocalypse system for that) but scheduling is gonna be the issue with that one lol.

my friend is planning a halloween one-shot where we're gonna play dread (a game i've been wanting to play for aaaages and i'm so glad he agreed to use that as a system lol, basically instead of rolling dice you use a jenga tower to determine things) and it's gonna be a train mystery so i'm really hype for that!

i also finally remembered the name of the series of books i was obsessed with when i was like 11 (the bartimaeus sequence) so i'm re-reading those and feeling very nostalgic atm lmao

otherwise, uh, i have just been playing a frankly unacceptable amount of fortnite tbh. didn't have me getting into fortnite unironically on my 2023 bingo but It Is What It Is. tbh most of the fun comes from playing it with friends. it's kind of scratching the same itch for me o.g. overwatch used to except that fortnite is actually a good game lmfao

my friend and i also went to a cute bakery to get a rly nice cupcake today so that was nice :')

thank u for asking ur a sweetheart <3 i hope ur own life is going great and if ur in the northern hemisphere i hope the grody weather isn't getting to u too badly. pls do feel free to tell me what u have been up to as well. have a lovely rest of ur week!!

[jamesdavisnicoll]

Books Received, January 6 — January 12

Ten works new to me, from SF to fantasy, from novels to tabletop roleplaying games.

[companionwolf]

Note to future me: look at Bubblegumshoe and Smallville for Relationship part of chargen; staple to t-def expanded?

[thistlebeetle]

Finally sharing the design of Juniper's character, Ainsley, I did for the summer mail for $15 supporters on Patreon! Now u know why Slake simped so hard for them. 😔 Ainsley is a rude teen, full of powerful energies. Any resemblance they happen to bear to any other halfling characters I've designed for LegendLark is entirely coincidental, I assure you. >> You can experience the pleasure of listening to Juniper as Ainsley in our Hrose Camp Adventures arc on @legendlarkpod!

[silvertoruby]

I also read through the book for the tabletop rpg Bubblegumshoe in June. It interested me enough that I actually started running it for my friends and we've been really enjoying it.

[blackmagickboi]

Hey anyone with experience with Bubblegumshoe, could you tell me if it'd be good for a teen horror movie style game or if its just meant to be mundane mysteries and scooby doo stuff

[gameabledisneypodcast]

GSM AU (Star Trek)

I couldn't resist adapting the Star Trek power trio in an AU episode, so I invited Katrina and a special guest to help me recast Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as teens at an elite charter school in Enterprise, Missouri. What conflicting impulses are tearing teen Spock apart? What's the high school version of an old Southern curmudgeon? And what about tribbles? Bubblegumshoe character creation is a blast, so give this one a listen. Check out the episode here!

[savevsfacemelt]

Post-game Musings - Bubblegumshoe

Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there. 

Please, come in and explore this new blog feature - an intermittent series where I break down a few thoughts and impressions that come to me after running short arcs of various games.

Hmm? You think that sounds a lot like the ‘Rule of Three’ writeups I’ve done in the past? Hah hah, no, these have two key differences:

1 - they don’t necessarily go for three sessions

2 - I absolutely cannot be fucked writing up the session details.

See? Completely different.

Anyhoo, I just finished a short game of Bubblegumshoe, a game focused on teenage detectives solving an arson case in a small-ish town near Melbourne. It went pretty well and everyone had fun, so hooray for everything!

But what have I learned from the experience?

--

Turns out I hate the Gumshoe system. I was surprised by this, as I own many Gumshoe sourcebooks from multiple game lines. They’re almost uniformly great - well-written, well-researched, evocative and interesting. Nonetheless, this was the first time I ran the actual system, rather than using the books with different rules, and uuuhhhhh I hate it a lot. It’s fiddly and bitty, requiring lots of record-keeping; the rules are ‘player-facing’ to the point where the NPC rules basically don’t work; it doesn’t provide enough tools for players to change/affect situations, rather than just gathering information; ultimately, it’s a boring, flat system with not enough game or story to make it fun. I think the core GMing principle at the system’s heart is solid - don’t make players roll to find clues, give them clues and let them work out what to do with them - but the system built up around that principle ticks all the wrong boxes for me. There’s still plenty of non-system-based goodness in my various Gumshoe books, so I’m not letting go of them, but I’ll never touch the system again.

Mysteries aren’t necessarily enough to sustain a story. It’s not that difficult to come up with a mystery concept, and Bubblegumshoe has some good advice and structures for that. But a mystery on its own is a static thing, a question with a single correct answer, and I don’t find that enough to keep a game going. You have to introduce more - confrontations, digressions, character-focused scenes, moments of tension - and have those build up energy that moves story along. My GMing style works better if I set a mystery up like a puzzle - something that can be solved in many different ways, with no specific answer - and then use players’ attempts to solve the puzzle to birth new complications and changes in direction. I can see more mystery stories in my future - they’re easier to run online than fight scenes - but I’ll need to prep them a different way in order to make them pop for my players.

Short games sometimes need rules changes. Bubblegumshoe starts off with group creation of the setting/town, which is something I love. But you create a lot of that town, and its locations, and its NPCs, and etc. Which would be fine in a long-term game - but for a single arc, you end up with far more content than you can use, which can be frustrating if strong hooks go to waste. Long-term mechanical balance can also cause short-term issues, like having a wealth of bonus/arse-saving points that players use freely ‘cos there’s no need to conserve them. While GMs can adjust systems and principles to accommodate short-term play (or the changed dynamics of online play), that’s hard to do without experience and foreknowledge; it’d be better if designers did that work for them. (It’s noteable that a lot of indie designers do; it’s the bigger publishers that tend to stay focused on face-to-face campaign issues above all.)

Damnit, Discord, pick a lane. Just work the same way two weeks in a row, that’s all I’m asking. Don’t introduce new problems, or new fixes, or new fixes that cause new problems, every time I log in of a Tuesday night. I’m begging you here.

--

This concludes my Bubblegumshoe musings. 

Come back next time, which will be... ah, fuck knows.