Hey!
What’s a good, light system for running a Twin Peaks type game?
If anyone has experience running/playing Something is Wrong Here by Kira Magrann or Tall Pines by Ahva and Miles Gaborit I’d like to hear how you got on with them.
May contain traces of small town murder mystery/cosmic horror beneath the surface/soap opera melodrama.
I briefly was working on hacking Monster of the Week to make a Twin Peaks-flavored game … but ultimately the focus of MOTW is too specific and I didn’t have enough energy to start from scratch. I did end up creating a Special Agent playbook, but that’s the only thing I really have to show for the whole attempt.
I think it’s possible to use PBTA to create a Twin Peaks type game, but the issue is that Twin Peaks is so many different things to so many different people. What element of Twin Peaks do you want to highlight? Something is Wrong Here is a very specific slice of Lynchian surrealism. If you’re looking for the soap opera melodrama, I wonder if Pasión de las Pasiones could be used? I don’t know what it would take to add in those other elements, though. I think Twin Peaks is hard to capture in TTRPG form because it’s so eclectic.
Another option is my game, Wayfarers’ End. It’s about unsettling mysteries in homespun towns (and vice versa) and played using a vintage cookbook.
The 200 Word RPG version is here.
The full version is in Codex: Void, which should hit DriveThruRPG sometime soon, I think?
There’s The Town which is basically a small Twin Peaks inspired game. You could also give Kult a try, maybe?
Tall Pines is excellent. For my group, it created a slightly more grounded-in-the-real-world conspiracy story of murder and an FBI agent questioning his own sanity.
Check out the (out of print?) RPG “Heaven and Earth,” which was the unofficial Twin Peaks RPG of the late '90s - early '00s
I’ve played Something Is Wrong Here. I really enjoyed it. It’s very easy to facilitate with the cards acting as instructions, playbooks and scene prompts to guide the whole process. The actual play tends to consist of 2 to 4 players at a time (often only 2) acting out short scenes. The scenes are not always clearly connected, unless players choose to introduce elements from prior scenes. There is a build in set of final scenes that push each character to confront their inner conflict.
I played it as an in person LARP. However, I suspect it would work very well for online play too.
I have thoroughly enjoyed Tall Pines the couple times I’ve played it. Highly recommend.
Something is Wrong Here has a nice mechanic to help capture the Twin Peaks uncanny vibe. For each scene, a player draws a card with a suggestion for something they can do to create a subtle but disquieting uncanniness to the scene.
I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but A Town Called Malice is also written to tell Twin Peaks-ish stories.
I’ve yet to try Something is Wrong Here, but I loved Tall Pines. The Symbol deck is a great mechanic. The first session self like the group had a couple of issues of trying too hard to solve or make sense of things. The second time was a bit more relaxed, a bit more fun and having my experience with the first group meant I could balance expectations going in. Somehow despite not being as eager to solve the crime but cover it up, we discovered more about everything as we went.
Just as a side note, one of my group from that game borrowed my copy to run the X-Files expansion and had a really good time with that, too.
@Alexi_Sarge’s Wayfarer’s End is perfect for this! It came out in Codex - Void, which is now on DTRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310137/Codex--Void-Issue-38?term=codex+void