When The Gauntlet published Brindlewood Bay, author Jason Cordova realized that he had a framework that could be applied to other tabletop roleplaying game settings aside from mystery-solving grannies that run afoul of fiendish cults. After the success of the Kickstarter campaign last year, Cordova returned to an idea he was kicking around in 2014 called Public Access, which had players narrating weird found footage horror scenes but didn’t have much in the way of game or story. Upon revisiting it, he expanded on the idea with lessons learned from both Brindlewood Bay and The Between, another game of his that uses the same system, while still retaining his original analog horror vision. After getting my hands on Public Access, it’s clear that this RPG sits at a perfect intersection of mechanics and theme, creating a unique experience for both players and game masters.
Public Access is a tabletop RPG set in 2004, casting players as a group of adults who return to the small town of Deep Lake, New Mexico in search of answers to strange mysteries. What draws them together is their memory of TV Odyssey, a public access station that became an internet urban legend after vanishing off the face of the Earth. As your investigation continues, you’ll run into numerous uncanny threats hidden under the surface of Deep Lake and come across Odyssey Tapes, VHS tapes that have recordings of the bizarre programming that aired on the infamous station. Your return to your home town resurfaces memories, both good and bad, so players are encouraged through mechanics to lean into focusing on the nostalgia of their childhood, providing a warm and inviting way to give a respite to the terrors that they’re facing.
As previously mentioned, this game is based on the Brindlewood Bay ruleset, which uses the resolution mechanics from the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games. Anytime you’re required to roll dice, you roll two six-sided dice and add up the total plus any relevant stat. Based on the results you’ll either get a full success, mixed success or failure. Failures and mixed successes are when the Keeper, this game’s name for a game master, gets to complicate the player’s lives, so rolling dice always carries with it an aura of tension, especially during more perilous situations. Thankfully, players have the option to ‘turn a key’ on their character sheet in order to improve a bad roll. Turning a key requires them to narrate a specific flashback in order to get the benefit, filling in details such as a time you realized your parents weren’t perfect or the moment you realized childhood wasn’t going to last forever. It’s a very clever system that gives the player mechanical incentive for finding ways to deepen their character through focused events in their backstory.
The majority of the game is focused on investigating specific mysteries in the town, following a pre-written and structured format that still leaves tons of room for collaboration and improvisation. Every mystery – there are eight included with this initial release with the promise of more to come – has a clear list of suspects and clues, but it’s up to the Keeper and the players how those elements are introduced and how they combine to form a solution. Players discover clues with rolls as they play, and once they reach a set number of clues they can formulate an answer and roll to see if they’re correct, which then gives them an opportunity to deal with the threat at hand. Each mystery has a sharp identity, with titles like Slumber Party Summoning Circle and The Deep Lake Lurker, but still feels completely unique to the unsettling world of Public Access.
Even though it works great in these one-off focused mysteries, the game also has a campaign structure that makes it easy to string everything together in a satisfying manner. As players collect clues during the mysteries, they have the chance to run across the Odyssey Tapes. When watching the tapes, which plays out in a neat little minigame where each player gets a section of the tape to narrate based on a prompt, they progress through the overall TV Odyssey Campaign. This framework provides Keepers with specific scenes to play out at certain milestones which shed light onto the history and mythology of Deep Lake. Afterwards the Keeper is asked to write down their continually evolving theory about what the tapes mean to the overall mystery of what happened to the station. The campaign has a specific end point that it’s working towards, and it’s up to the Keeper to write the final mystery based on everything that’s happened at the table.
While the looser structure and focus on improvisation may be intimidating to new game masters, Public Access does an outstanding job of including advice to guide you through every step of the way. Not only does it include full scripts for how to introduce the game and walk players through the setup session, but there’s also a plethora of pages dedicated to advice on how to complicate the players’ lives in intriguing and personal ways. It’s refreshing to see a game that’s so dedicated to making the game master’s experience as smooth and fun as possible. The character sheets and mysteries themselves also have excellent prompts that will help guide players into effortlessly fleshing out their characters and building the world collaboratively. By the time you make it to the end, everyone at the table has all the tools and experience needed to make the final mystery into a satisfying climax for both the characters and the overarching narrative.
Cordova and the rest of his writing team have combined the best elements of his previous games with one of the most unique and evocative settings I’ve seen in a tabletop RPG. Analog horror is often so defined by its visual aesthetic, but the combination of gorgeous art and superb writing bring the subgenre to life in a medium that’s so heavily reliant on theater of the mind. The one-two punch of nostalgia and terror is evident on every page, giving you a beautiful blueprint for a perfectly creepy campaign that’s fun for both players and game masters alike. Insert that tape, hit play, and tune into the Pure-White Signal, because Public Access is something special.
Public Access can be purchased on DrivethruRPG.
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