Everyone that I have ever described Brindlewood Bay to has immediately loved the concept, whether or not they were into TTRPGs. The pitch of Murder, She Wrote meets the Cthulhu Mythos tends to just click for folks who have even the most basic understanding of the two properties. My Tuesday night group was no exception.

The Campaign in General

This game ran for 12 "Mysteries" across 14 sessions, including the finale. Big props to my players - they dove into this hard, making characters that perfectly fit the premise and showing up at gaming night with shawls and knitting supplies. Overall one of the most fun and memorable games we've ever played.

On the GM side of things, I started off using Docs but switched to Obsidian roughly midway (about 6 sessions in).

Docs Setup

My setup here was pretty typical - nothing too different from what I described in Google Docs For Rpg Prep. I had a single file, starting with an NPC roster in the form of a bunch of headings + text. Then a running section of session notes.

Digression - Prepping for Brindlewood Bay

Brindlewood Bay is really heavy on improv. In my experience it works as long as you embrace that and go with it, even when it seems scary. The included Mysteries provide great support for this, and I ran the whole game just picking and choosing pre-written Mysteries from the core book and the Nephews in Peril expansion. The finale was the only exception - to be satisfying, that needs to be unique to what has been going on your game. But as the core book notes, by the time you get to that point you've got so much practice running Mysteries and so much detail you've established about the town that it really isn't too hard to do.

This meant my notes were mostly centered around the intro "cozy moments" to set the scene, the kickoff of the current mystery, and then trying to capture the major events and details afterwards so I could try to use them as callbacks later.

Why Switch?

Somewhere early on in this game was when I first started using Obsidian for personal notekeeping and organization. Once you start down that path, it is pretty obvious how it can be useful in an RPG context (see The Nitty Gritty).

Docs also started to feel very heavyweight for what was going on. After a few sessions we started to realize that the pacing of Brindlewood is way faster than what we were used to - we were doing lots of smallish scenes and without needing to zoom in on 6 second combat rounds we just got through more of them than in other games. Rather than a paragraph or two to describe a session, I would need a page or more.

The Mystery setup contributes to this - each new Mystery is typically going to introduce 8 or more new characters (or bring back old ones). They'll be of varying importance, but you don't know which ones are going to be important until you see what the players do. Obsidian handles this gracefully - don't worry about it, just name them, and links and details will accrete around them naturally if they matter. If not, no worries, you didn't waste much effort.

As I realized that the cast of characters and interconnected story elements were just going to keep getting bigger and bigger, the cost:benefit ratio of changing tools in the middle of the game started to skew more and more towards Obsidian.

Obsidian Setup

I had a simpler folder setup in this game:

/
  /Characters
  /Locations
  /Mysteries

As mentioned above, Characters was the biggest by far, accumulating 41 NPCs by the end. I also included families¹ and factions as Characters. This became helpful as the PCs gradually uncovered the scope of the conspiracy and other relationships hidden in the town, letting me see at a glance who was related to each other.

I didn't get fancy with these folders, just lumping everyone together. Given the tight relationships it worked fine, but might have been a problem in a longer game or if the groups were less interconnected.

Unique Elements

Templates

I mostly kept things simple. I had templates for Characters, Locations and Mysteries, with the first two being bare bones and Mysteries essentially being per-Session notes.

I did try to get fancy with using structured metadata (file properties) in each note. The templates would automatically insert dates and a structured taxonomy of "type" information². None of that stuff mattered. It didn't hurt anything and I didn't spend much time on it, but I never once used it.

Plugins

• Dataview - I was just getting into Obsidian when setting this campaign up, which meant I was spending a lot of time playing around with plugins and figuring out what fit my workflow. The overall structure of Brindlewood Bay uses the discovery of "void clues" as a campaign pacing mechanism, so my natural thought was to try to keep track of them in notes. I had an index page with Dataview query that could go find any text tagged void-clue anywhere in the Vault and summarize it with a link back to context. It was nifty, but overkill - its just not that hard to keep track of at that scale we were operating at. For a short time I tried doing something similar for every normal clue as well, but that was just ridiculous overhead for transient details that don't really matter outside of the current Mystery.
• "Better Export PDF" - Somewhere towards the end of this campaign was when NotebookLm was released. Its a pretty neat service, but uses a structure that limits the number of individual files you can add. When you have dozens or hundreds of small individual text files, you hit the limit pretty quick. This plugin let me choose a whole folder and export it to a single PDF file. I could then upload just a few of these, let the LLM ingest the content, and listen to a pair of fake podcast hosts try to make sense of the ridiculous events described. This was mostly an experiment rather than an essential part of my GMing prep, but the results were amusing.

Summary

Switching tools mid-stream was a bit of copy/paste/refactor effort, but not too bad overall. The eventual setup worked great - once I was in Obsidian, it was sooo much easier than Docs.

As usual, a few things stayed in Google Drive for ease of sharing - for this game, a couple of Custom Moves.

I also printed each Mystery and used the physical copy at the table when running. This approach worked great for me and the way I run games. Each Mystery only takes a couple sheets of paper and not relying on any digital tools at the table made it much easier to stay focused and engaged with the players while still having the improv tools I needed right in front of me. Highly recommend this approach.

By the end, I saw concrete benefits from being in Obsidian. While prepping the final mystery, I realized that I had a few dangling plot threads that needed to connect and was stuck on how to kick things off. Bringing up graph view reminded me of the link between Murder Maven Tilly and Dani, the young reporter for the Brindlewood Beacon. That ended up being exactly the piece I needed to bring it all together, and having a way to browse and view relationships rather than a wall of text saved me from hours of wracking my brain to remember connections.

Previous: Obsidian and Shadowdark

Next: A brief pause to talk about AI usage

Footnotes

1. This is one of the brilliant things Brindlewood Bay does without calling attention to itself. A few sessions in, I noticed that some characters have the same last name as others from different Mysteries. Not a big deal, and can easily be ignored if needed, but starts to capture the feel of a small town where you're always bumping into folks that are in each other's business. ↩

2. Why yes, I do develop enterprise software for a large corporation in my day job, why do you ask? ↩