When Brindlewood Bay came out it seemed to become an immediate darling of my TTRPG circles. Being a fan of both the Cthulhu Mythos and TV series like Murder She Wrote, Columbo, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and more, I figured that “old ladies investigating murders that lead into cosmic horror” sounded totally like my jam! Plus, there was some promise of a “novel take” on investigation games! So, as is tradition, I backed some Kickstarter, and waited to receive the books.

That’s how, back in 2024, I ran my Friday group through a handful of cozy mysteries from both the basic Brindlewood Bay book and the Nephews In Peril supplement. Here are some notes about how that went!

The old ElfQuest boxed set got the recent “revival” treatment by Chaosium’s excellent “Nostalgia Department” (aka the ever wonderful Chaosium president Rick Meints). After quite a successful Kickstarter campaign, the box was finally delivered this week to most backers. Since I’ve got nothing better to do this week-end, let’s take a quick look, and compare it to the old one!

These past few years I’ve been catching up on a lot of classic roleplaying games that I’ve never played before, despite having several decades of play behind me. One of those was Traveller, so I was happy to finally run that with my Friday game! We ran about 15 sessions, across four scenarios, plus the usual extra shenanigans in between.

I liked the game and would like to play more of it, but my players didn’t! Oh noes! They sent Traveller all the way down their list of games! I’m a bit sad but as we’ll see, some of the blame was on me as the gamemaster. Hopefully, these “Notes on Traveller” will be useful for someone introducing Traveller to their group!

Mausritter is a TTRPG in which you play little adventuring mice trying to survive in a world of big dangers. If you’re a fan of the excellent comicbook Mouse Guard, you should already be hooked! The system is as minimalist as its protagonists, with low-prep two-hours adventures, so we played this a dozen times as an “interlude game”: the sort of game you play when a key player is missing, or in between campaign arcs. I also played this several times with TTRPG newbies, with up to 8 players! Here are my notes on Mausritter!

Lately I’ve seen a bit of criticism about TTRPG “reviews” that are mostly about flipping through a book and sharing first impressions. I do agree that it’s wrong to call those “reviews” but frankly, most of their authors actually call them “first looks” or “unboxings” anyway, so I’m pretty sure they are aware of that.

What I disagree with is the criticism that they are “useless”. It generally takes this form: “they only read the back cover and flip through the book, and I can do that myself!” And sure, I could do that myself too… if I had the book.

Numenera is a science-fantasy game set in the far, far, far distant future, with some lightweight and somewhat original system, all written by Monte Cook.

On paper, it ticked a lot of boxes for stuff I’m interested in, so I brought it to my Friday group a few years ago. We played a dozen sessions or so and… well, we weren’t much into it and dropped it for something else. Still, there are a few cool things to take away from Numenera! Here are my notes!

Disclaimer: we played Numenera several years ago, using the game’s first edition. Since then Monte Cook published a new edition, called Numenera Discovery and Destiny. I have no idea what changed in that second edition.

In this second “Notes on…” article, we’ll look at another game my Friday group played for a few months on a weekly basis: Free League’s Mutant Year Zero (from now on referred to as MYZ).

I got my copy of Rosewood Abbey a couple weeks ago! This is a TTRPG based on Brindlewood Bay, in which you play Medieval European monks and other religious-adjacent figures investigating mysteries. Obviously, it’s heavily inspired, among other things, by The Name Of The Rose and Cadfael (both their literary and cinematic versions)

My friends over at the Titterpigs podcast did a recent episode on “played vs unplayed reviews”, and in a sort of interesting synchronicity, the Modern Mythos podcast just released an episode on actual plays. It’s interesting because I see all three types of content as being on the same scale of “game prep”. Let me explain.

I recently answered a question on Discord about Delta Green¹ and since I had seen that question a couple times before I figured I would post (and heavily edit and expand) my answer here for posterity². The question generally takes the following form:

Playing a character that’s a member of US Federal Agencies such as the FBI or the CIA raises many problematic aspects because of <insert reason here>. Is it possible to play Delta Green while also avoiding this?

This is a totally fair question as far as I’m concerned. There are indeed several good reasons to not want to portray a member of an American (or many other countries’) Law Enforcement organization as the hero of your story. But fear not! Well, I mean, do fear, this is Delta Green after all, but yes, I’ve got some hopefully helpful advice for you.