# Carved from Brindlewood tags: #game/rpg/carved-from-brindlewood **Carved from Brindlewood** — CfB to anyone standing around a convention table — is the mystery-first engine Jason Cordova built in **Brindlewood Bay** and then spent a whole family of games refining at The Gauntlet. It's a descendant of **[[Powered by the Apocalypse]]** the way BRP is a descendant of RuneQuest: same 2d6 bones, but the heart of the matter is an approach to investigation that makes the Keeper as much a discoverer as the players. If you've ever been annoyed that every mystery scenario wants you to read the author's mind, this is the antidote — and the hobby has been happily mainlining it since Brindlewood Bay won the 2023 Gold ENnie for Best Electronic Book. ## The Big Idea: Mysteries Without Answers The load-bearing conceit of CfB is that **the Keeper does not know the solution to the mystery.** A CfB scenario — whether Brindlewood Bay's cases, The Between's hunts, or Public Access's mysteries — consists of a situation, a set of **Clues**, and a **Question** with a **Complexity** score. There is no canonical answer written down anywhere. Players gather Clues (typically by rolling an information-gathering move, with a high roll turning up a bonus Clue), and once they've gathered Clues equal to at least half the Question's Complexity and reached a consensus on a theory, they trigger **Answer a Question**: a roll based on the number of Clues they've incorporated against the Question's Complexity. On a hit, their synthesized answer is judged *correct* and unlocks an **Opportunity** to resolve the mystery; on a hard miss, the answer is wrong and the Keeper reacts. The result is that the spitballing, brainstorming, and wild theorizing people enjoy about *watching* mysteries becomes the actual engine of play, instead of a race to guess what's in the referee's notebook. It's also remarkably low-prep — Cordova's own "7-3-1" prep technique feeds directly into the scenario structure, so a Keeper can read a scenario in ten minutes and be ready to run. ## The Shared Mechanics All CfB games share a recognizable core that echoes Apocalypse World: **2d6 plus an ability modifier** (a set of four or five abilities like Vitality, Composure, Reason, Presence, and Sensitivity), **moves** triggered by describing actions in the fiction, hits at 7+ and misses at 6− with success tiers at 7–9 / 10–11 / 12+, and **advantages/disadvantages** that cancel rather than stack. Two other signatures recur across the line: - **Occluded backstories.** CfB games make you avoid discussing your character's past, in or out of character, until a specific mechanic demands it. Whatever darkness your character is hiding becomes a mystery even the table isn't allowed to peek at. - **Resistance via alternate timelines.** Each game has its own name for it — Brindlewood Bay's and Public Access's Turning a Key, The Between's Janus Mask — where a player bumps a bad just-narrated roll up a success tier by experiencing and then discarding the timeline that didn't happen. ## Games in the Family - **Brindlewood Bay** — the flagship: *Murder, She Wrote* plus Lovecraft, played as the elderly Murder Mavens mystery book club of a cozy New England town, on a single shared character sheet. *Not in the library.* - **[[The Between]]** — the Victorian monster-hunting take, playbook-based with a day/night cycle and a Mastermind campaign spine. - **[[Public Access]]** — the 2004 analog-horror take, about Deep Lake Latchkeys investigating the vanished TV Odyssey station via its purple Odyssey Tapes. - **The Silt Verses** and the wider Gauntlet ecosystem — CfB keeps spreading into adjacent and third-party mysteries; Cordova has described the whole family as games that stay "in communication" with each other, each iteration feeding lessons back into the others. ## References - [Brindlewood Bay — The Gauntlet](https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/brindlewood-bay.html) - [The Between — The Gauntlet](https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/the-between.html) - [Public Access — The Gauntlet](https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/public-access.html) - [Jason Cordova on Public Access and Carved from Brindlewood — From The Hart](https://blog.alexrinehart.net/posts/jason-cordova-public-access)