BUBBLEGUMSHOE - Not So Hard Boiled Teen Detectives From Evil Hat

GUMSHOE is an investigation-based roleplaying system by Robin Laws, and used by several games published by Pelgrane Press. Evil Hat Productions is the company which brought you Fate, Spirit of the Century, and the Dresden Files RPG. Together, they fight crime! Evil Hat has announced a GUMSHOE-powered game called Bubblegumshoe - a "teen detective story game". It's coming in June from game designers Emily Care Boss, Kenneth Hite, and Lisa Steele, and will be available as a 272-page hardcover, black-and-white book.

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What types of adventure do Bubblegumshoe character face? Bicycle thefts, sabotaged pep rallies, and Homecoming queen character assassinations, according to the product blurb. The game features teenaged detectives in small-town America solving mysteries. To help with that, it includes a ready-made town called Dewsbury, and an introductory adventure called Hey! That's My Bike!

The GUMSHOE system (which has been slimmed down a little for this book) is focused on investigations. One feature of the system is that the characters pretty much always find the clues they need; the fun part is interpreting those clues. The system powers a range of games, often written by Robin Laws or Kenneth Hite for Pelgrane Press, including Night's Black Agents, The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, the upcoming TimeWatch, and several more.

This sounds like the sort of system to run a Scooby Doo game, or perhaps a light-hearted Buffy scenario.

Expect to see it in June!

 

[Henry]

Zoinks! Sounds pretty cool.

And [MENTION=29468]jaycrockett[/MENTION] , Encylopedia Brown was, even before Scooby Doo, the first thing I thought of.

 

[Xavian Starsider]

Why not go back even further? Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Boxcar Children...

Make sure the villain drives a black sedan. The Hardy Boys a nd Nancy Drew stories taught me that the villain always drives a black sedan.

 

[jaycrockett]

When I was in middle school way back in the day my jam was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. I loved that stuff!


The main issue in mysteries is how to make the solutions non-obvious without being completely ridiculous. How does a RPG support this? Does it rely on player skill or character abilities? Or both?

 

[Umbran]

The main issue in mysteries is how to make the solutions non-obvious without being completely ridiculous. How does a RPG support this? Does it rely on player skill or character abilities? Or both?

Well, both. I am currently running a campaign of Ashen Stars, another GUMSHOE-based game.

Most RPGs make it very difficult to find clues - the basic failure mode of a mystery in D&D is for the players to not find information. GUMSHOE, in contrast, is based on the idea that the act of finding clues is less interesting than the act of interpreting what clues mean. In your favorite TV police procedural, or in mystery novels, you don't see competent investigators *miss* clues, and struggle just to collect data. Instead, they may have information, but not understand what it means yet. So, in GUMSHOE, if you are in a place where there's a clue to be found, and you apply an appropriate skill, you *will* find the base clue. No die roll required, no chance of failure. If you spend some resources (you have point pools to spend) you may get even more information, if it exists.

The game then leaves it up to the players to figure out what the information means.

As an example, from the Bubblegumshoe session I mentioned earlier, the basic scenario is that three young girls have gone missing. There is a very swift and deep river, with rocks out in the middle, and an overturned rowboat on the rocks, along with a few articles of clothing. Characters with skill look over the area, and automatically find that the denim jacket by the boat is dry, not wet. Clue found!

What does this mean? Well, if the jacket is dry, then it wasn't ever in the water. The jacket was then probably *placed* there. Who placed it, and why?

The effect is rather more "mystery-like" than the typical D&D-type scenario, in which the players must explicitly search each 5' square (or even describe exactly how they rip apart the bedstead to find the message hidden in the cavity in the bedpost) that spills the entire beans of what's going on.

The rules of GUMSHOE games typically give good advice on how to construct a mystery for the game, so the GM isn't left hanging.

 

[Matchstick]

When I was in middle school way back in the day my jam was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. I loved that stuff!

Loved those books, read them over and over! I still have a few, but they're difficult to find.