Some Notes on Brindlewood Bay

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 Ugly Stepsister is a brilliant retelling of the Cinderella story, refocused on the titular stepsister and changed into a beautifully shot body-horror black comedy about living up to beauty standards in a patriarchal society. Loved it.

12 April 2026 ∞

I finally saw Black Hawk Down and, apart from the obvious few problems everyone knows about, it’s still an amazing war movie, and a technical tour-de-force. Impressive.

11 April 2026 ∞

Last year I watched all the James Bond movies in order and my summary is that they’re rather mediocre movies, but with some fun intro, catchy credits sequence, and occasionally there’s a good set piece or character or moment.

10 April 2026 ∞

If you’re old enough to remember the good old days of WAREZ, the demo-scene, and everything else from back when the internet wasn’t 99% shit, you may enjoy this great homage by the Razor1911 group for their 40 years! Or if you just like chiptune, it’s catchy too!

10 April 2026 ∞

Hey, how about you shut-up, Health Canada.

A "helpful" sticker from Health Canada that indicates how junk food has "high levels of saturated fat" (other items on the shelf had similar stickers for other things like sugar and so on)

7 April 2026 ∞

Well that aged well 😒 From Mission: Impossible S01E10, the crew are undercover in a Russian (I think?) training program for sleeper agents in the US. They are “tested” by being fake-arrested by the police, and reprimanded for not resisting arrest, which is “the American Way”!

Rollin Hand (Martin Landau), Roger Lee (guest star George Takei), and Barney Collier (Greg Morris) are undercover in a training camp for sleeper agents in the US. They were just fake-arrested by Russians posing as US police, and only Rollin had the sense of protesting arrest, screaming about warrants and civic rights until the police backed off.

Yanosh Passik (Arthur Hill), the mastermind and "US culture specialist" behind this training program, shows up and reprimands Roger and Barney:

"You were much too quick to be bullied by authority"

Yanosh Passik continues:

"That is not the American way. Americans are not afraid of their police"

7 April 2026 ∞

I haven’t posted about the good fluffy boy in some time, so here he is, still doing his thing!

Sunrise over Deer Lake Park in Burnaby, BC.

The good fluffy boy is waiting by a trail, with the sunrise behind him

7 April 2026 ∞

Oh hey, the US is now on track to start censoring their internet (sure it’s about piracy now but it will take about, like, 5 minutes for the authoritarians in charge to make use of it?) Make sure you don’t use US-owned DNS servers I guess?

6 April 2026 ∞

We finally played the Spectaculars #TTRPG last week-end and it was pretty interesting! I’m not sure that it’s our jam past a one-shot or two, but it was fun! I had to spice up the rather bland first issue scenario though.

Table with a whole bunch of Spectaculars cards, dice, and character sheets... plus some empty plates from eating apple and/or blueberry pies!

6 April 2026 ∞