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!