Tea urn?
So a long-term ambition has been to play Sue Savage’s Matrons of Mystery. It’s a genteel take on Brindlewood Bay, a new wave of PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) games, where the players define the ending based on the build-up of clues & secrets versus suspects and other factors. Other examples of this style of PbtA are The Between and Public Access.
I’d played Public Access run by ace GM Guy Milner, check out his blog and Patreon, and it was a bit of a revelation of how a group of players can define an adventure, building the story to a satisfactory conclusion with minimal prompts from the GM. But more than this, Matrons of Mystery is the first RPG that my partner has expressed an interest in playing, a fan of Columbo, Murder She Wrote and various other cheesy eighties comfort-crime shows, it really appealed. But I felt I needed to play it first, before being confident enough to run with a bunch of non-RPGers.
So, what an opportunity! Sue, the author of Matrons, offered to run and we, members of The Raspy Raven Discord, jumped at the chance. A big thanks to George (Patience), Benet (Rosemary) and Auto (Eunice) for helping shape the story.
The good thing about a review of this type of game is that there are, mainly, no spoilers, as the players define the flow, the scenes and the ending. So, we entered the introduction, attending a dress rehearsal of Cinderella, the star of the show, Willow, lying dead in a pool of blood. Looking up, we saw a frayed rope hanging in the flies, but that wasn’t all, an exposed electrical cable. The local constable of Little Meddling (our invented English countryside village) was called for but he resided in Greater Meddling, or was it Middle Meddling? So with hills between the villages and just a bike to get the constable here, we had time to investigate. Edith and the other Matrons were in their element and got to work.
The rest of the scenario focused on investigating a cast of pantomime characters - Coco the Cat, Buttons, The Ugly Sisters plus technical staff. We slowly realised that Willow was at the centre of a series of liaisons and revenge ploys. We tried an ambitious approach, discovering a water bottle with some partially dissolved Penthahol (truth serum) pills, we snuck it into the tea urn downstairs and Edith and Rosemary started offering up tea and rock cakes to the suspects. The combination of the horrendously dry rock cakes, a cast with their nerves fraught and some overly insistent octogenarians led to all the suspects zonked out of their gourds. Success! Of a kind, as Edith and Rosemary had forgotten about the Penthahol in the tea and also imbibed.
Eunice and Patience came to the rescue and through a series of investigations into the cast’s dressing room items and some fairly forthcoming interviews, a theory was proposed (and the dice rolled) - Willow was of course at the heart of this but the party seemed to tie their various threads into knots and the resultant bad roll was probably well deserved, but at least one of the suspects was ruled out. A few more rummages in the handbags of another suspect and a clue that linked everything together, in an even more complex and confusing way!
And so it was that Coco the Cat was caught bang to rights and whilst the Matrons sympathised, I mean Willow was a nasty piece of work, the law is the law and she was handed over to the local plod, arriving just too late.
So an excellent and entertaining game to pass the three hours, the lovely interplay between the Matrons, with inventive interpersonal scenes and some creative play to link the multitude of secrets and clues into a cohesive outcome. I do think this is a great game to introduce non-RPG players to, whilst there is plenty for experienced players to hook into to roleplay and come up with creative scenes, actions and an ending. It’s very different to the mechanical, rule-driven play of say, D&D5e, so does take adjustment, it definitely needs player buy-in to work and a series of strong prompts for the GM to react to and possibly a few play-throughs of this type of game before it clicks. All round cosy Sunday afternoon entertainment, and just remember folks, in the words of Miss Marple, “The worst is so often true.”
Looking forward to more mysteries from Sue, you can pick up Matrons of Mystery here.