Brindlewood Bay: Cozy vignettes and move

#1

Hello!
I just bought Brindlewood Bay and plan to run a session soon.

Going through the rulebook, I have a few questions (and will likely have more in the near future). Sorry if the answer is obvious, I just couldn’t find it.

There they are:

  • Cozy Vignettes: they are just for the atmosphere, right? Seems like they have no impact on the game at all.

  • Cozy Move: The cozy move is triggered during investigations, when two or more Mavens request a downtime together, right? Is there a limit to how many times a Cozy move can trigger in a single session? Once per day? Giving out a clue seems pretty powerful, especially if you have like 4 Mavens and they do 2 couples of cozy moves at the same time.

  • Is the Meddling Move implicitly tied to a mystery? You could have characters/locations that are connected to more than one mystery. Will the Maven know to which mystery is the clue connected to?

Thanks!

#2

Yes - they give players a chance to play up the ‘cozy’.
No - there’s no limit defined but my advice would be to follow the fiction and if it looks like it’s getting silly intervene as GM to move the narrative on.
My view is that BB operates on the basis of ‘one mystery at a time’ (The Between explicitly has multiple ‘theeata’ in play at the same time) … so I wouldn’t introduce a new mystery until the current one is solved.

#3

Yeah, while the original BB suggested having multiple mysteries is possible, the Nephews in Peril supplement revisits that and suggests doing a single mystery at a time. In my play, and that of many others, doing one at a time allowed breathing room for the mystery and kept the focus. It’s especially true given that you have the Big Conspiracy in the background kind of tying things together.

If you are doing two at a time, I’d have the Maven make explicit which one they’re investigating and then associate the clue with that one. In our online keepers, we generally keep a page per mystery so you would be able to keep track which goes with which.

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