twin peaks – PopCult Reviews

Solo RP Actual Play – The Box and The Key

This game was made as part of Fix Your Hearts Or Die, a game jam tribute to the late, great David Lynch. I decided to continue honoring the artist by doing a solo playthrough of this game. The Box and The Key. I decided to play 10 scenes, regardless of where I ended. I also told myself to play intuitively, using the prompts and going with whatever emerged from my subconscious, the same way Lynch talked about his creative process of being open and letting it happen. I lightly tried connecting things when it felt natural, but otherwise, I let things happen.

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Farewell, David

On 16 Jan, 2025 we lost one of the greatest artists of my lifetime, David Lynch. I have said a lot about this man before on my blog. You know I admire him immensely. I can safely say no other artist on this planet has had a greater impact on shaping my personal tastes & sensibilities as David did. In reading & watching his thoughts on creativity I learned a lot about the work it takes to shape that initial idea.

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Movie Review – Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Written and directed by David Lynch

I’ve mentioned on the blog before how I discovered David Lynch as an eight-year-old who was somehow allowed to watch Twin Peaks. For a long time, I knew him as “the guy who made Twin Peaks.” Even in college, as I began to explore his greater body of work, I was like most people; I just didn’t understand the abstractness of it all. What shifted my understanding was reading Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with the director focusing on his work in chronological order up to Mulholland Drive. Through this text, I came to understand the source of Lynch’s creativity – from deep inside his subconscious and expressed through images without any implied context – and how intuitive his work is. This happened around the same time I was taking Literary Theory & Criticism, which was probably the most influential academic experience I’ve ever had.

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Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Little Town: Bright Hills Episode Five

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

For this session of Little Town, I decided to play around with the system a bit more. If you solo play tabletop RPGs, then you know this is what often happens. You have the idea of what you want and find ways to bend and twist the mechanics to fit that. For me, it was the idea of having another character I controlled connected to the mystery who could have parallel scenes to my protagonist. I have them sharing a Clock so as not to complicate things, and as you’ll read, they meet reasonably quickly. I was thinking of how Twin Peaks presented Dale Cooper as its protagonist, but many characters had side stories that didn’t always intersect with what he was up to.

Read the last episode here.

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Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Little Town Part Four

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

Last year, I came across this solo tabletop rpg inspired by the creator’s love of Twin Peaks. As someone who also thinks Twin Peaks is one of the best pieces of American media ever made, I had to buy and play it. It was a lot of fun, structured with a time mechanic & scenes, pulling bits & pieces from other games Gustavo Coelho liked. He recently contacted me with a revised edition of Little Town set to come out later this month with some revisions. One of those additions was a town backstory oracle, so I rolled on that and got: “The Town’s settlement traces back to dubious land deals,” a new detail I will incorporate as the story progresses.

I jumped back in with the story I had started last year, which you can read here, and probably should before you continue with this.

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Solo Tabletop Actual Play – Little Town Part Three

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

Read part two here.

For this second chapter, I decided to pick a character introduced in the last session and continue the story from their perspective. The one I settled on is Richard Robertson, the father of Liza, the girl who is currently in a coma after being struck by a car after she ran wildly out of the Twin Rivers State Park late one night. I knew he had secrets when I introduced him last session but didn’t flesh them out until this one. Rolling on the book’s table told me he had two, and I tied them both to his profession as a psychiatrist: 1) he’s currently having an affair with Lucy Hayward, one of his patients, and 2) he’s become an addict, and because this takes place in 1996, his drug of choice is OxyContin which had been seen as a miracle narcotic upon its release in 1995. Being an incredibly flawed & complicated character is more interesting to play than some perfect golden boy type.

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Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Little Town Part Two

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.
Read part one here.

Since our last post, Little Town’s creator Gustavo Coelho has updated the pdf with links. That has made navigating the book far easier and was a desperately needed quality-of-life upgrade.

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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.

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Twin Peaks: The 30th Anniversary

It was thirty years ago tonight that the world was introduced to the small town of Twin Peaks. I was only eight years old going on nine when I sat in my living room in Smyrna, Tennessee, and watched this scary, funny, strange thing unfold before me. I couldn’t quite understand it all at the time, but I knew there was something powerful in what I was seeing. This was like watching a fairy tale, the world was somewhat familiar but also another strange place. For the next thirty years, I would find myself obsessed with the show.

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Book Review – Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier
Flatiron Books, 2017
Written by Mark Frost

TheFinalDossier

The final piece of Twin Peaks, for the time being, has been released. This comes in the form of co-creator Mark Frost’s meta-novel The Final Dossier. The Final Dossier continues the investigation of Tamara Preston from The Secret History of Twin Peaks. In the previous volume, she is pouring through an archive of documents about events in the Twin Peaks area dating back to the time of Lewis and Clark. In The Final Dossier, she has remained behind in the town after the events of the finale to debrief Director Gordon Cole on what has become of the townspeople and her own thoughts on what exactly happened. Beneath the surface, I read this as co-creator Mark Frost’s personal interpretation of the series. David Lynch is known for creating incredibly enigmatic art that he wants everyone involved from the actors to the viewers to interpret for themselves. It’s not too big of a jump to assume even though Frost contributed to The Return he may have different readings of what happened in the show.

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