All Night Breakfast at the Midnight Owl: Luna Grove

In a follow-up, I'll go into the gameplay design and how it felt to play it. But for now, I want to dive into the world of Luna Grove through the eyes of Olivia "Liv" Presley in 2019.

Liv's in her thirties and is a former corporate accountant. In some alternate reality, Liv is an investigative journalist and has won a bajillion awards for her work. But in this reality, Liv is in the midst of escaping her own crappy reality by exploring the strange occurrences of Luna Grove, British Columbia. (Yes, my home province. I decided this fictional town was going to be in the Kootenays near Creston.)

After winning the lottery, Liv makes her way to Luna Grove to investigate the bizarre nature of the town and make her podcasting ambitions a reality.

She'd heard that there was a series of odd power surges causing rolling blackouts... and a town that seems entirely unphased by it. There have been rumblings that Luna Grove is more than what it seems, crisscrossing ley lines that converge at the town's outskirts.

Liv doesn't know too much about Luna Grove outside of what she's read about on Reddit. She doesn't have much to lose, so she makes her way to the small town, purchasing a bicycle on the way in, and sets up at a cute rental cottage to begin her investigation.

She'd been there less than 24 hours when a person, whose identity could not reasonably be discerned, handed over an envelope with strange information about something called "Creekside". It's worth noting that this person had gloves on when they handed over the envelope. Liv made note of it in her journal.

From an investigative perspective, the lead sets the groundwork for the rest of the investigation. If you have a bad lead, you don't have anywhere you can go with it. If you have an obtuse lead, you at least have a chance.

Creekside would be the lynchpin that would throw the entirety of this little town into a swirling vortex of chaos, magic, and a bit of body horror.

Read Liv's Journal (and my gameplay notes)

Overall, the investigation had some pretty interesting twists and turns, complete with misdirection and red herrings. Liv did a pretty good job sorting through what was signal and what was clearly noise. She found herself in danger a couple of times and, somewhere along the line, she even lost an entire day. (She didn't realize this until she went back and re-read her notes later in the investigation.)

Gameplay for this section was about three things: go to a location, investigate said location for clues, resolve any events that might come up, and meet anyone who happened upon your path. Any and all of these things can be determined through rolling dice and drawing playing cards. How random you want your playthrough to be is entirely up to you. My playthrough was mostly randomized with a few instances of deliberately tugging on loose narrative threads to see where they'd go.

Once I got through 12 "turns" in this gameplay loop (although the game allows for 6 "turns" minimum), it was time to turn my investigation into a podcast episode.

While I've resolved the gameplay around the podcast listenership itself – to determine how many followers/fans Liv's podcast was going to have – I haven't done the podcast work itself just yet.

It requires an outline and then for me to sit down and actually produce a dramatic podcast based on the outcome of the events that I had journalled about as Liv. I'm planning on doing this a little later this week as I start to sink into my next Indie RPG A Week game.

You can come back here for an actual bespoke podcast episode where I play Liv Presley as a podcast host. I don't know how long it will be, but I'm excited to see where this leads me. Best way to be reminded about new posts is just to subscribe to the newsletter.

This was a very enjoyable setting to play in as a writer. It allowed me to flex my writing muscles in a very X-Files meets "weird horror" kind of way. Liv's writing style is sort of hemmed in, but campy in spaces. She's so desperately bored with the life that she'd been living that she often felt like she was trying to make up for it by chasing down potentially dangerous leads.

I got to play with some very interesting characters along the way, including Harper – a private investigator who was on the same trail as Liv was, but she was a professional and Liv was... not. Even Harper got driven out of town by how freaky Luna Grove was shaping up to be.

I like Luna Grove and I may end up using the variant gameplay of making a map and handing said map and setting information over to another player so that they might enjoy the worldbuilding, too.

(If you'd like that for yourself, please let me know!)

I'll reflect on the design side of this a little later this week.