Playtesting The Hardy Boys Mysteries RPG at CleriCon 2024!

The key to three days of amazing gaming with a bunch of online RPG content creators!

CleriCon2024 wrapped today! It was a wild three days full of gaming with great people and I hope we get to do it all again next year! I had many wonderful experiences over the weekend that I will talk about in another post, but for this post I want to focus on the answer to a question friend messaged me to ask over the past couple of days.

This year I stepped up my involvement by running a game on the Friday night. I took a risk and ran the playtest version of my own Hardy Boys Mysteries RPG, but it was a risk that paid off bigtime!

Something special for our top sleuth!

I ran the adventure I created for it called, "The Clue in the Missing Milk," and people loved it! I ran it once before at home so I wasn't going in unprepared, but I found playtesting at a Con stressful before we started. The lead-up was the worst, but once we got the session going we all sunk into Bayport and soon there was no room for my nerves. I was glad I ran it during the first session though, because I doubt I would enjoy any of the games I signed up to play before I was done with mine!

I had some worries about how a Powered by the Apocalypse based game would be received at an Old-School D&D focused Con, but the group that signed up for my game loved how the system helped it feel like the Hardy Boys! Everyone was there for the experience, and no one had any pre-existing notions about PbtA systems. It did what we needed it to do to immerse us in the kid-detective genre.

The first playtest confirmed the concept and got me some excellent feedback about how to deliver the information to the players, especially on the archetype playbooks/character sheets. The second playtest gave me a better idea of what tools the Editor (the person in the Master of Ceremonies/Referee type role) needs for smooth play. 

The feedback from the CleriCon game was positive and created a crazy buzz about the game that ran right through the Con! The players enjoyed it and talked about it so much I had people asking me questions about where they could get it and if I will run it next year even as I was leaving today! 

There is not enough developed for me to release yet, and plenty of work to do before that happens. The confirmation that the core of the game is fun to play and emulates those early, public domain, Hardy Boys books is wonderful, but far from the end of testing.

My amazing partner Mel helped create a clue for the CleriCon game with her Cricut!

I ran for a group of four. Two young people in their early 20s who had a familiarity with the Hardy Boys and two older players who grew up with the books and were thrilled to step back into something like the stories they loved so much. All four found solving the mystery a fun, satisfying experience. The one player they voted the Sleuth who contributed the most received a copy of The House on the Cliff, the second Hardy Boys story, in the tan hard-cover with the yellow-spined slip cover. Watching the look on his face while he untied the twine holding the wrapping closed and took out the book was a pleasure. He shared he had a subscription as a boy and received one of the blue-spined picture-cover books every month, and was amazed to have an older version. I apologize to the people in his life if you get dragged through bookstores, antique barns, and thrift shops as he rebuilds that collection.

I had provided pairs of dice and note pads for all the Sleuths but everyone gave those back for the next playtest. I took it as a good sign that they all kept their character playbooks and took their pages of notes out of the pads as mementos of the experience.

There was room for improvement and as I review the game I expect I will find more. I noticed spots that could be tweaked and that more needs to be done to get the pacing of the adventure more in line with the original stories. Maybe it's the nature of Con play, but the players focused on solving the mystery and foiling the criminal plot as fast as possible. They did not do much to engage with the character's regular lives. In the original stories the Hardy Boys and their friends still had school, homework, chores, and regular fun pursuits that came before investigating the mysteries. There's still some work to do to support that balance.

I also noted some difficulties in terms of organization for the Editor that could be solved by handling the clues better. I already have some ideas about how to make that flow better, but it will all need to be tested.

Write, test, rewrite... I'll be on that treadmill for while.

The positive feedback and absolute joy we had playing the game filled my tank with all the motivation I need to push on to the next steps. Once I have the game running the way I want it to run I'll need to try it out with someone else running it. Seeing how they use the material will let me know if I need to give groups more tools or guidelines to help them get to where we got on Friday. I'll let you all know when I get there.

I'm still feeling the high! I know I have something special, but I'm not fooling myself about how much work there is left. I'll keep folks updated here on the blog and see what else I can use to keep people connected to the wild ride this journey might turn out to be. 

I am grateful to the play-testers who took a chance on The Hardy Boys Mysteries RPG so far and everyone else expressing excitement for the project! 

Thank you all so much! 

The Hardy Boys Mysteries RPG at CleriCon!

I mentioned in my last post, my main project right now is The Hardy Boys Mysteries Role Playing Game. What I didn't mention is my first public playtest is happening at CleriCon tonight!

Look! A CLUE!

We'll be playing: "The Clue in the Missing Milk." It's an adventure I ran before to positive feedback so I'm hoping it works well again tonight! I only have a five-hour drive to Glen Williams, Ontario to second-guess myself.

CleriCon is an old-school RPG Convention with a focus on B/X and BECMI D&D. There are newer games running, like Mork Borg, but I'm fairly certain I'll be running the only RPG Powered by the Apocalypse. I tried a few systems, including a few of my own creation, but they didn't fit those original Hardy Boys stories the way a custom PbtA system did.

The Hardy Boys are adventures full of silly, campy fun where the characters stumble into clues and coincidences until they can't help but solve the mystery. Mysteries are usually difficult to run well in RPGs, but The Hardy Boys are more like adventures with a mystery as a plot device. The stories are full of outrageous coincidences and the action delivers clues to the characters with more efficiency than Amazon. That's how I ended up with PbtA. The Move structure is perfect for bludgeoning the players with clues as they move through the story until they have everything they need to solve the mystery and thwart the plans of the bad guys! 

The Clue in the Missing Milk follows the Hardy Boys formula, starting with an inciting incident to bring the Sleuths into the action and connect them to the mystery. After that there is a timeline for a few things that will happen with or without their involvement, and a huge collection of clues they can uncover as they move around Bayport.

Some goodies for my players at CleriCon, including one of the
first six Hardy Boys Books, WITH a yellow-spined slipcover. 
It's all wrapped up and ready for the top Sleuth!

I tested the adventure earlier this week with a mixed group of mostly strangers with all levels of experience with RPGs from none to decades of play. The laughter did not stop and it was the most fun I had running a game in a long time! When I first conceived the idea to start this project I could not have hoped for more.

So now it is fingers crossed for tonight to see how it tests in the craziness of Con play. 

Wish me luck!

I'm back!

After a few years of quietly playing, running, and (as always) tinkering with games, I have something to add to the conversation again. Instead of focusing on tweaks to existing games, I find myself diving deep into design. Like many people involved in the RPG community I'm always messing around with some idea for a game, adventure, or scenario, but this time it feels different.

No limits! Yeah!

I have a few design projects on the go. Some of it grew out of regular play and some addresses problems I see. I still favour the rules-light systems based in the old school tradition, but love how games have grown and changed. There are so many options and tools we have now to mix and match and get exactly what we want out of the experience at our table or online game-space! I also find my professional life crossing over into RPGs as new game-based therapies develop. It's all exciting!

Most of the RPGs I'm working on are somewhere in the middle of the write, test, rewrite cycle. I tend to follow the muse as it jumps around so they all move forward at a glacial pace. I'll talk about each as they come up but the project that caught fire for me right now is my take on the Hardy Boys adventures. Originally the Mid Century Mysteries, the core of the game was in the works long before I decided to take advantage of the original Hardy Boys Books entering the public domain. My connection to this material is strange and deserves its own post, so I'll expand on that later.

Source material for the Hardy Boys Adventure RPG!

With my brain hyper-focused on the Hardy Boys Adventures RPG, everything else is still taking up space in my brain, but more in the background. There will be more about them in the future, but it may be a while.

My home game that grew out of playing the original Black Hack continues to develop. It was something all its own by the time the second edition of the Black Hack came out. I'll get it all in order at some point. It would be nice to put a book together for my own use and to have a better reference for my players. The reactions to the bits of it I posted before also make me think there's room for it as an option in the RPG market. Based on my experience, it could be a good game to use to introduce new folks to the RPG hobby in a way that is more accessible. For it to be accessible, it needs to be more than a pile of Google documents and hand-written notes. I want people to have a great experience then have something they could take away to try out on their own. There's more to it than that, but I can expand on the story of that game later. My big lesson from that one is kids can be the best playtesters! 

I'm working on a sci-fi game that came out of play-testing an original system I had planned to use for sword and sorcery. At that stage of the testing I wasn't certain what I would do with magic, so I ran the test using the system for a sci-fi scenario so I could have fantastic elements without magic. The system performed well, and turned out to be adaptable. After using it for sci-fi though, I realised the system supported one of the best science fiction RPG experiences I ever had. I tossed out the whole sword and sorcery thing and dove into creating a sci-fi game that made use of the core game mechanics. Then there was a lot more work to do! I'll go into the details, hopes, and motivations for that one in a later post too. 

Obligatory dice photo! These dice come from the Threshold Diceworks Holmes Retro Collection

The other project comes from people asking me to run "D&D" for them and while I doubt I'll ever publish it, organizing all the changes into a handbook would make my life easier when I run it. I used to run fifth edition D&D for a few years after it first came out, as scrolling back on the blog will show, and I enjoyed it. I find D&D's grown into a monster of supplemental rules, new options, and there is too much to keep track of when running. I still like to play it, but I don't run it anymore.  The same bloat eventually weighed down second edition D&D so much the game almost disappeared! The bloat brought me back to B/X D&D and Old School Essentials. As much fun as I have with it, I started smoothing things out. I mixed in some new approaches while keeping the core rules, benefits, and play style of B/X. I know there are people who think B/X D&D is some kind of sacred text that is eternal. I have no problems with that view, and enjoy playing at their tables. After speaking with folks that look to the old school for a set of rules that can be modified without breaking, I know there people who would like to take a look at the changes I made as inspiration for their own changes. I'll post pieces of that as it comes together as well. The last time I ran it was a great experience!

I'm not sure writing a post about posts I will write later is a good idea, but I'm back, and I'm doing different things these days. We'll see how it goes.