Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Public Access Part One

Public Access (The Gauntlet)
Created by Jason Cordova
You can purchase this game here.

Read part two here.

This is not a solo game. However, I was very intrigued by this game because of its concept and tone so I decided to attempt to play it solo. In the great tabletop rpg family tree there is the branch of Powered by the Apocalypse originated by Vincent & Meguey Baker. The PBTA games are not meant to be universal systems, but curated genre-specific systems that encourage a specific type of play, mainly that the fiction comes above any sort of fiddling crunchy number bits. The PBTA games would eventually inspire a variation that would become its own subgenre, Blades in the Dark. Forged in the Dark games follow Blades play framework which is not a 1:1 copy of PBTA. Additionally, The Gauntlet created a couple PBTA variations, mainly Trophy and Brindlewood Bay. The latter has spawned its own Carved from Brindlewood which is where we get Public Access.

Public Access is a horror-mystery game with a very specific setting and play structure. It takes place in the town of Deep Lake in Degoya County, New Mexico. The area is home to around 5,000 people so it’s a fairly desolate small town. The players are the Deep Lake Latchkeys, a group of people who met online and have a shared history centered around TV Odyssey. This was a public access television station that broadcast in the 1980s and 90s before the building physically disappeared one day in 1992. The local authorities called it arson even though there was no trace of the building left and the adults moved on, not wanting to wrestle with what it all meant.

The children remembered though. They couldn’t forget the strange low-budget programming that came across the airwaves, sometimes surreal and others threatening. It’s a modern urban legend clearly inspired by creepypasta like Candle Cove. Years later when the internet became a regular household utility, these now young adults, congregated on a forum where they shared memories of the shows. They aren’t aware that they have shared trauma, something that emerges in play that links back to this strange possibly occult tv station. When the game begins some of the Latchkeys have decided to rent a house in Deep Lake for the summer and move back to conduct an investigation in person. The people on the forum have discussed the existence of Odyssey tapes, recordings of programs that aired on the network. No one on the forum really has any but the stories persist that they are out there somewhere.

Game is structured in four parts: Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night. Each of these pieces is more potentially dangerous than the next. Most of the actual roleplaying happens in the Day and Night with Dawn helping conclude the events of the Night and Dusk giving players options on how they want to set up things for when the sun goes down. The biggest choice made in the Dusk phase is whether or not an Odyssey tape will be watched. These tapes come from a list that give players prompts to each describe a successive scene. They could be twisted kids shows or strange news reports, and the GM is encouraged to find ways to reincorporate elements the players describe into the clues they discover. The mysteries also come as two page scenarios with a key Question, imagery, NPCs, rules about spaces if they are investigated and things that can be permanently unlocked depending on how the players solve the mystery. 

Unlike most PBTA style games there are not many Moves here. The Day Move and The Night Move are essentially the same thing except the lethality of consequences is higher in the Night Move. The Meddling Move is how players search for Clues or gather information. The Nostalgic Move acts as a form of healing, allowing the player to share a moment with another and check off one of the objects from their childhood they keep in their corner of the rented house. Finally, when the players think they have solved the mystery they roll a number of Clues discovered equal to at least half of the Complexity the Mystery is rated at. If they are right an opportunity arises, if they are wrong things can get much worse.

There are no playbooks, instead a general character sheet where players do some customization including one Move specific to them. There are lots of boxes with the potential to be checked during play that will further differentiate the characters. I would say this is not a game you can just hop into if you have a familiarity with PBTA. Instead, it offers a new take on those ideas in a far more structured system. There is an endpoint built into the game but the answers to mysteries and what the players learn about TV Odyssey will be different for each group. In many ways, this feels like the tabletop rpg equivalent to the legacy board games that have become popular in recent years. 

Because of the structure, I felt like this might be a good solo gaming experiment but you’ll ultimately have to be the judge of that. I didn’t feel confident playing a single character and relying on the other Latchkeys as NPCs only. I did center the point of view on a single character but did some simple stats for the two others in my story. I also took the GM Moves, which increase as mysteries are solved and tapes are watched, put them into an RNG and use them like Pay the Price in Ironsworn. I do not think it’s a perfect 1:1 correlation but it does work. The GM section of Public Access encourages you to go harder with the player characters than you might, including killing them. The reason for this is that they have the ability to “turn a key” which can reverse what just happened, however, based on which key they turn on their character sheet it can have consequences later. 

Here was the opening writing I did in parallel with character creation to set up who my PC was and why they were from Deep Lake. Next week, we’ll get into the actual play.

We met in the fall of 2003 on the forum. By the following summer, we were moving into a rundown house on Rodenbecker Street, in a suburb that used to be one of the wealthiest in Deep Lake, or at least what passed for ‘wealthy’ in that nowhere place. I had graduated college and had no idea what to do with my life. An undergraduate English degree isn’t something that immediately transitions into a decent paid job. I was autistic but didn’t know it at the time, just assuming I was a loser who couldn’t figure out how the world worked. Friends and classmates all seemed to know what to do and went smoothly from being a student to a 9-5 working towards buying a house. I stayed up late lurking on message boards about creepy shit. This was in the days when the Internet was still a wild & occult place. There were so many dark little pockets back then. I guess they are still around but when you get older maybe you stop remembering how to get there. Like Narnia?

After chatting for months with Amber & Nathan, we decided the only way to get to the bottom of TV Odyssey would be to go where it all started, to Deep Lake, New Mexico. I had left there once I started school in Bellingham, Washington, trying to find the furthest point I could flee to get away from my hometown. Why did I come back? Even now, twenty years removed from that summer I struggle to answer the question. Horrible things happened over the course of those three months. But good things too. I met people who changed me forever. I saw things that changed me too, things that still make me wake up with a jolt in the night staring into the pitch black corners of my bedroom, imagining the shape of something forming in all that murk. 

I actually remembered watching TV Odyssey on Channel 94 from when I was a kid. The other people on the message board were sharing descriptions of episodes they’d heard second, third, or fourth hand. I could recall some of them, but it always seemed that what came to me was fragmented. That’s how my whole childhood feels now. I can remember the things I watched or the stuff I played with, but my parents…they’re like a void. We don’t talk anymore for a variety of reasons and I don’t feel bad about that. Life is better now that I don’t communicate anymore. But a part of me still wants to know what those early years were, what happened to me. 

When I was eleven years old TV Odyssey disappeared from Deep Lake. The building literally vanished. That’s a vivid memory: looking over my dad’s shoulder as he sat at the kitchen table for breakfast and seeing the photo of the empty lot. The outline of the building’s foundations were still there. The whole channel had felt like a dream so a part of me thought it made sense something like TV Odyssey would just evaporate without warning. But we all know, that’s not what happens in reality. Soon after I’d hear people talking about the “tragic fire” but I never saw anything in that photo that looked like arson. I’ve tried to find that copy of the Deep Lake Tribune but they don’t have a digital archive even now. That became the “truth”, the local tv station that burnt to the ground and all the tapes of its weird, unsettling shows with it. But the summer of 2004 taught me the truth. The tapes were not destroyed. We watched many of them. They find you when they want to be discovered, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading into the mouth of some vicious nasty thing.