Brindlewood Bay: The Gold Crown Con

One of my favorite developments in the TTRPG world over the past couple of years has been the maturation of the Carved from Brindlewood mystery-centric take on PbtA games. Of course, this inevitably meant that I would create my own scenario...

Brindlewood Bay: The Gold Crown Con
Murder She Wrote Meets Twin Peaks Meets Call of Cthulhu

One of my favorite developments in the TTRPG world over the past couple of years has been the maturation of Jason Cordova/The Gauntlet's Carved from Brindlewood mystery-centric take on PbtA games; as soon as I heard about Brindlewood Bay, I started a campaign—one that is, after 16 awesome scenarios played across almost two years of real time, wrapping up. For the most part, I used published scenarios: either the ones in the kickstarter material or from the unofficial Brindlewood Bay scenario supplements available on DriveThruRPG. Naturally, over time, one ends up tweaking them to fit and eventually, to repurposing huge chunks of them. There is only one inevitable destination here: that I would create my own scenario—or at least one that is mostly my own. I loved Alexi Sargeant's A Throng of Vice and Liars scenario, although I never found the time to include it in our narrative. So I riffed on it and came up with the idea for a scenario at a fan convention for the "Gold Crown Murder Mystery" series... a fan convention with some very big news about a TV adaptation... and shadowy forces aligning to enact a nefarious plot!

Stressed-out TV producers, cosplayers, strange panelists, overworked agents, potential rivals, and a Maven Look-a-Like contest all provide a backdrop leading up to the dramatic arrival of Robin Masterson herself, ostensibly to read a chapter from her forthcoming story, which features the Mavens themselves!

Oh, and there is, of course, a twist.

This was our penultimate story—the very last scenario prior to the Void Mystery sequence—and so my version of it includes a lot of portentous Void Clues and is laced with opportunities to call back to previous scenarios. It is probably best, therefore, to run it later in a series. A massive thanks to my wonderful players, who aced the scenario and were afterwards delighted to discover they'd been helping me playtest.

You can download it here, gratis. I hope you like it!

I am not, of course, affiliated with Jason Cordova or The Gauntlet Publishing.