Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Little Town Part One

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

If you have been following this blog for several years, you already know I love Twin Peaks and David Lynch. I first saw the series when it originally aired, and I was only 9 years old. Despite being far too mature for my age, I was captivated by the show’s tone. It was unlike anything my little brain had ever experienced and has permanently affected how I approach art my entire life. When I saw there was a solo tabletop rpg based on Twin Peaks and using the Apocalypse World engine, it was like everything I loved was distilled down into a single object. I also discovered the existence of this game the week of my birthday. It was a no-brainer to purchase this one, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with how it uses elements from other solo game systems to evoke the feel of Twin Peaks.

Designer Gustavo Coelho’s introduction clearly lays out the source of his inspiration beyond the famed television series. Games like Dungeon World and the Mythic GM Emulator are familiar to me, but he also found essential elements in Paranormal Inc/Brindlewood Bay, Noir World, Call of Cthulhu’s The Solo Investigator’s Handbook, and more. Like all Powered by the Apocalypse games, the player’s actions are centered around a list of Moves. You have some expected ones like Face Danger, Investigate, Intimidate, or Brawl (the latter of which is considered rare in the game’s instructions, and that makes sense with the tone of Twin Peaks, not a lot of direct physical confrontation). Some less commonly used Moves evoke the flavor of Twin Peaks, like Remembering a Dream and Face Doppelganger. 

The game starts with the creation of your mystery. You can roll on a list of natural elements for your town if you don’t have anything in mind, which means this doesn’t have to play out in the Pacific Northwest. There is a table to roll on for the inciting Event, and we have our hook there. Creating an investigator is handled similarly with a table containing six options: Federal Agent, Vigilante, Student, Doctor, and Police Officer. It wouldn’t be Twin Peaks if your character didn’t have a Secret, which you also roll for. Attributes consist of Agility, Strength, Mind, and Presence, and you assign scores based on an array of +2, +1, 0, -1.

Three conditions mechanically track how your Investigator is doing from moment to moment. These are Luck, Instability, and Wounds. The latter two would be concepts taken from games like Call of Cthulhu, where mental health is as important to attend to as physical health. Luck is used to try and overcome a bad roll. If you roll less or equal to your Luck, you get to roll again and decrease the Condition by one. If you roll over your Luck, the stat goes down, but there is no reroll. The game also uses a standard deck of playing cards with Diamonds as Single Events, Clubs representing Anomalies, Hearts for Clues, and Spades for Dangers. 

Gameplay is done in Scenes where the player rolls or chooses a Location. The player chooses some sensory elements that stand out in this place to set the tone. It’s recommended you roll on the Scene Event table and insert at least one NPC in the scene. Many random tables are included to help quickly create characters and add to the scenario whenever you feel writer’s block hindering you. Like many solo games, Little Town includes an Oracle for Yes/No questions that is rolled using your Luck as a modifier. Luck is running out, so a ticking clock in the background paces the game. 

There’s also the Time Limit, an abstraction of how close you are to solving the case. The number starts at 8 and can only go as low as 6 or as high as 12. At the end of each scene, the player asks themself if the Investigator has progressed favorably in their investigation. A Yes lowers the Time Limit by 1, while a No raises it by the same amount. If a 12 is ever reached, things go very wrong, and the Investigator fails. When you believe the case may have been cracked, there’s a Move for that, which includes the Clues you’ve found, the current state of the Time Limit, and the Number of Ongoing Cases happening aside from the initial one. The game can continue if you haven’t hit 12 on your Time Limit.

Before I get into my setup and actual play, I found the book a little hard to navigate. It is the kind of rpg where you will be flipping through pages a lot. There are many random tables, which I am a big fan of, but that also means moving around in the text often. The PDF doesn’t have chapters or embedded links, so it can be challenging in certain moments to know which direction to go through the pages to find what you are looking for. There are also a lot of mechanics, not crunch, but many moving parts to keep track of. I know that when I am learning a system, that can feel overwhelming, and I often miss something when an opportunity arises. Overall, I felt like the book fits the definition of an “ashcan edition” because it is a robust prototype for a game. You could play with this for a long time without a problem. 

However, I would love to see the layout refined over time and some more development of the investigation mechanics. There are many examples, but they outline very short-lived investigations. If I want to play in the realm of Twin Peaks-style stories, I want to create a tangled mess of characters, secrets, and mysteries. Some elements (like drawing the Doppelganger card as I did) feel like a terminal point to the game. Once I was beaten by my Doppelganger, even the mechanics of escaping the “other place” felt fruitless. I guess that is to be expected when you confront the Dweller on the Threshold. There are optional rules that say they provide more of a possibility for a “happy ending” or an alternate Investigation Progress table. I didn’t try any of those in my initial playthrough as I wanted to adhere to the core rules. Those may provide the specific experience I was looking for. I’m not looking for happy endings to the story but something that can go on for a long time and get complicated, like Twin Peaks.

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My Little Town mystery takes place in the fictional setting of Bright Hills, Tennessee. Nestled in Watkins County in Northern Middle Tennessee, Bright Hills is perpetually behind the times. It is a quiet rural community that has been built up over the decades. The first economic boom came in the late 19th century when the region’s fertile land produced so much tobacco that Watkins County was the 8th largest producer of the plant at the time. This Tobacco Belt stretched from Watkins to southern Kentucky and made millionaires out of those willing to do nasty things to their competitors. Trouble began when the Farmers Protective Alliance (FPA), formed to help growers with sales, failed to raise prices adequately. In protest, some of the tobacco farmers formed anonymous hooded gangs and would wreak havoc, killing rivals & burning shipments to be loaded onto the trains that passed through Bright Hills. While this violence raised tobacco prices by artificially creating scarcity, it also turned the once quaint community into a somewhat barbaric one. When state authorities finally intervened, these masked “night riders” took to the dense forest in the west. Some would eventually be found and arrested, while half a dozen were never accounted for. In the following decades, no bodies were ever recovered. Those woods are dark and deep.

Tobacco still remains a minor cash crop, but life changed dramatically with the industrial age. In our game’s period (late 1990s), there are some major employers in Bright Hills outside of cash crops. The Talbot family came to power through tobacco but dropped it after World War I, opting for oil. They now own Talbot Oil focused on providing oil to business clients and seeing to the maintenance of large companies’ fleets of vans and trucks. The Talbots also own a Department Store in the town square, one of the few old-fashioned stores of its kind that remains in Bright Falls. Finally, there is Luxury Machines, a factory that specializes in building dishwashing machines that came to the area in the 1980s via a Swedish appliance manufacturer.

Into Bright Falls, we inject some mystery. On the night of May 16th, 1997, at approximately 12:30 AM, high school student Liza Robertson, 17, ran out of Twin Rivers State Park onto State Highway 46, where she was accidentally struck by Wayne Edwards. Edwards was working in his capacity as a dispatch technician for Talbot Oil. He’d been called to the farm of Hoyt Jones when Jones discovered an oil tank he kept on the premises had been punctured and drained the previous night. After a long day of work, Jones was driving back to Talbot Oil to drop off the company truck when Ms. Robertson emerged from the tree line. In Jones’s statement to the police, portions of which were shared in The Bright Falls Standard, he said for a brief moment he remembers seeing Ms. Robertson look behind herself as she ran with what he described as “terror.” 

Ms. Robertson survived the accident but is in a coma at Frost Memorial Hospital in downtown Bright Falls. She was in the ICU when the fire started. This was not an accidental fire. It was intentional. Hospital staff acted quickly, and the fire department arrived in record time. Ms. Robertson was the only patient in the ICU at the time. Firefighters on the scene could immediately tell this had been set deliberately. Police are questioning hospital staff, but it is apparent none of them had anything to do with the fire. 

Our Investigator is Lily Davis, 17, Liza’s best friend. Lily’s secret is that she betrayed Liza. Liza worked after school and on the weekends at The Tip Top Diner. It wasn’t a job she needed, her father is a very successful psychiatrist, and her mother is a professor at Highland Rim University one county over. However, Liza wanted a job like the other kids she knew, the ones who didn’t come from her level of privilege. So, Liza was a waitress at The Tip Top. 

Liza also dates Alex, a senior at Bright Hills HS. Lily came by the diner on the night of May 16th with a group of friends from school. They often stopped by when Liza worked until closing because she gave them the remaining donuts that would be thrown out anyway. After chatting and eating a donut, Lily left with her other friends, and Liza walked home, promising to meet up after a brief rest and shower. Lily eventually separated from the friend group and paid a visit to Alex. The two of them were having sex behind Liza’s back. They had sex the night Liza came running out of the woods, terrified about something.

Then a week later, the fire at the hospital. This is where our story begins. But we need a theme song and soundtrack to do it. Hence, my Spotify playlist. I immediately thought of Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs (continued)”

The sound and the lyrics evoke a sense of memory and menace. And those lyrics helped me develop a seed of the real evil in the woods…but more on that later. And more of this story next week as we discover what Lily is doing to help her friend and if her betrayal will be discovered.

Read part two here.