Three years ago, I reviewed the initial release of Public Access by Jason Cordova, a tabletop RPG inspired by analog horror, found footage, and urban legends. I found it to be an amazingly evocative game with clever mechanics that encourage deeply collaborative play between players and the game master.

Cordova and his crew at the Gauntlet have been spending the past three years fine-tuning the game, adding content, and tweaking the rules, leading up to the recently launched Kickstarter campaign for a definitive physical edition of the game. I sat down with Cordova to hear more about the design that went into the game and the changes to expect in the new version.

According to Cordova, Public Access casts the players as a very specific group of people in a very specific time and place.

“Public Access is about a group of 20-somethings in the summer of 2004. They’re all on this forum called the Deep Lake Odyssey, and the purpose of the forum is to discuss this old public access TV station that people on the forum remember, but that no one else does. They decide they are going to go to the town that this TV station was supposed to have been in, and they’re going to investigate what happened to this TV station called TV Odyssey.”

Public Access Takes a Different Approach to Mystery

After a tape containing footage from the lost station appears on their doorstep, they find that TV Odyssey isn’t the only strange mystery going on in Deep Lake. These mysteries are solved using the system that Cordova created in Brindlewood Bay. The key ingredient to the system is something that seems counterintuitive for a mystery game – the game master, called the Keeper, doesn’t have a definitive answer.

“Unlike a lot of mystery role-playing games like Call of Cthulhu, where the Keeper has the solutions to the mystery and knows what happened, in Carved from Brindlewood games, the Keeper does not know the solution. The characters are gonna find clues, the keeper has a list of clues to distribute as the characters search around, but the players are going to, at some point, have a conversation and engage in some deduction about what they think happened…

In Public Access, you might be investigating why this family disappeared from their home ten years ago without a trace. So now, it’s actually really exciting that there’s not a set answer to the mystery. We’re going to explore, and we’re gonna tell our version of that story. So any time someone plays that particular mystery, they’re gonna have a totally different experience than someone else. There’s a lot of flexibility in that collaborative mystery solving system of Carved from Brindlewood that really works well for this strange cosmic weirdness.”

How Memory and Nostalgia Shapes Public Access

Some of the core themes of the game are nostalgia and memory, and the ways they shape us, even if we aren’t remembering things correctly. The seed of this idea comes from an experience Cordova recalls from when he was five years old. His family was travelling from Oklahoma to California with his aunt and uncle following in the car behind them. It was late at night, somewhere in a deserted stretch of the Southwest, when they drive by a man standing on the side of the road. As they get close, they realize he’s wearing a cowl and robe, looking to Cordova like a cultist. His mom slows down to get a good look at him before continuing to drive. At the next gas station, they pull over, and his mom and aunt get out of their cars, terrified by what they just saw.

“Every day of my life since, I have wondered who that guy was, what was he doing? Was he a part of something? Is there a cult out in the desert? My mind always wants to race and wander about what would have happened if my mom would have slowed down and asked him if he was okay. It’s a total horror movie setup.

In my later years, I’ve thought about why that memory is so powerful to me. I’ve thought a lot about memory in general as a concept, nostalgia as a concept, how childhood memory can betray you, how nostalgia can betray you. It’s almost equally horrifying to me that I’m probably remembering the story wrong. My mom barely remembers this; she kinda just let it go, but to me, it’s really stuck with me. So this is a theme of the game, and of me personally, and I’ve always wanted to find a way to put it into roleplaying game form.”

Over the course of playing Public Access, nostalgia acts as both a source of comfort for the players and also as something that can be subverted into the very terrors they find themselves up against.

“In my game, the exploration of nostalgia is fun; the pop culture part of it is fun. Each of the characters has the ability to reminisce about something that takes them back, like Artax and the Swamp of Sadness, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Waco, Texas, and, in having those conversations with other Latchkeys, they can clear conditions and have downtime. But where the idea of nostalgia becomes a problem in the game is when it’s more about what if your childhood memories were true? What if the things we were scared of were true? It’s represented by a lot of strange cosmic horror weirdness that happens in the game. There’s one mystery, for example, where there are these teenagers in the 80s who were playing the D&D analog in this world called Serpents and Sepulchres, and they all go missing, and there’s this idea that it was an actual satanic panic cult around the game that caused them to go missing. In the world of Public Access, there actually was a satanic panic cult.”

Designing the World and Characters

Tabletop role-playing games are often seen as something where the possibility space encompasses nearly anything you can think of, but at the Gauntlet, they have a different idea when it comes to designing their worlds.

“My philosophy of role-playing game design is I prefer depth over width. There is this idea that we’ve been told about roleplaying games for many decades now that the sky’s the limit. You can do whatever you want, play any character you want, play in whatever world you want. Maybe some games do that, maybe some games deliver on that premise, but I find that personally to be mostly unsatisfying. I like focus. I like a structure that is hyper-specific, very, very focused. When you have that hyper-focused structure, it actually creates a permission structure for the players to go really deep with it. You know what the boundaries are – you are a 20-something in the summer of 2004 in this little town doing this. I find that structure, rather than being limited in prescriptive, actually creates a huge space for going really, really deep with backstory, with character interaction, with emotional bonding… In the market as it exists today, there are so many options, it’s okay if some of those options are really finely tuned to tell one story.”

Characters all share a common character sheet, rather than having specific classes, but they are differentiated by specific aesthetic choices and special moves. As you complete certain roleplaying triggers, you’ll be granted experience points that allow your character to grow and change as the campaign goes on, but that’s not the only way your character is fleshed out. When you fail a dice roll, you’ll often get a condition. Sometimes, you’ll just be horrifically killed. In order to avoid that, you can make use of a specific part of your character sheet called the Keys.

“Say you get a bad die roll and your character is killed as a result, some horror attacks them and kills them. Instead, what you can do is, like a “Choose Your Own Adventure“ book, you can take your thumb out of the page and go back and do something different. You mark one of these boxes on your sheet called Keys. There’s the Key of the Child and Key of Desolation; there are multiple boxes to mark under each of them, and whenever you mark one, particularly the Key of the Child, you are prompted to do a flashback. You tell us a specific story about your character’s past. Maybe it’s the first time they saw TV Odyssey. Maybe it’s the first time they realized that their parents were not perfect people. Maybe it’s the first time they experienced childhood trauma. In exchange for sharing something about their past, they get a do-over on the thing that just killed them. In that sense, the game has hit points because you can do this so many times before your character is ultimately truly dead. There’s another aspect called the Key of Desolation, which I don’t want to spoil here, but generally speaking, it starts to unravel reality around the Latchkeys. The more of those boxes you mark, things get strange.”

Characters aren’t meant to last forever in Public Access, as campaigns are meant to run about fifteen to twenty sessions. One of the big things that moves the campaign along is the Odyssey Tapes, which will give players clues to the overall mystery surrounding TV Odyssey. To make these tapes feel impactful, there’s a minigame you play anytime the Latchkeys sit down to watch one.

“Odyssey Tapes are probably most people’s favorite part of the game. In fiction, the Latchkeys are finding these tapes, and each of these tapes contains an episode of one of the programs that aired on TV Odyssey. In game terms, the episode is broken up into four narrative prompts, so every player, in turn, is assigned a prompt and has to narrate that part of the episode. So you go around the table, and essentially you’re telling each other a creepy campfire story of this weird episode of TV, and they’re very strange things. It’s a puppet show in a guy’s basement, and there’s a kid down there that’s clearly under duress. Or it’s a cooking show, and the host of the cooking show has pretty obviously just murdered someone offscreen…It’s very creepypasta, it’s very analog horror, it’s very found footage horror.”

One of the satisfying things about the game for both the players and the Keeper is incorporating details from the tape into their mysteries, creating a collaborative nature to the overall story.

“I am a big believer in distributing narrative authority around the table. In a traditional role-playing game, a GM is responsible for delivering all the world details, all the lore, and the players just kind of say what their character does. There’s nothing wrong with that; we’ve been playing role-playing games that way for years. I actually like a structure where the players are also invited to create world details and to say things that are true about the world, and it’s the Keeper’s job to take that stuff and reincorporate it into the fiction. The outcome is that the players are so much more invested in what we’re all doing here. Whenever the Latchkeys enter a new space, there’s usually a question that the Keeper poses to everybody at the table called a Paint the Scene question. By answering that question, the players are telling you what that space looks like, what that space sounds like, and, importantly, they explore an idea connected to that place. In the first mystery, the House on Escondido Street, you might go into the basement of the house, and the Paint the Scene question is “what do you see that tells you that the kids were scared to come down in the basement?” That’s a really powerful question because it causes the players’ minds to start racing. The point is the players get to say the truth of that, and then, as the Keeper, you get to work that into your narration, and it becomes true in the world. When you invite the players to create details like that, they get invested, but also it makes everything feel honest and like their contributions are being respected.”

Between the Paint the Scene questions, the Odyssey Tapes, and the mystery system, Public Access creates a living, breathing world that everyone has a say in, making for something wholly unique to your play group, even if you are using prewritten mysteries included with the game. To make the world feel even more alive, the Latchkeys will be dealing with multiple mysteries at the same time.

“I like the idea of there being multiple active mysteries, up to three, because it gives the whole campaign a better sense of place. These aren’t just mysteries happening in isolation; they’re mysteries happening in this strange town and county where lots of weird things are happening. It gives you a lot of space as a Keeper to make connections between them and have side characters from one mystery wander into another or make reference to things going on. It also increases pressure on the player characters. They suddenly have all these plates to keep spinning in the air. If they want to split up and go do other things, they can. If they want to have their own little story, they can, but they also can come back together when they need to. It makes everything feel interconnected, like a living, breathing place.”

What’s New in the Complete Version of Public Access

Years of playtesting since the initial release have helped shape the new, complete version of Public Access that’s currently crowdfunding. Not only has Cordova revamped the campaign structure, making the TV Odyssey mystery more central to the experience, but he’s also added a new type of mystery to add variety to the campaign.

“In the Kickstarter version, we’re introducing a brand new type of mystery called a Lost Transmission, and Lost Transmissions are like side mysteries that can be used to tell the story of the setting in a prologue story in the past. They don’t have a direct connection to the TV Odyssey campaign, but it’s a way to expand the campaign a bit. You can take a break, do a lost transmission, learn a little more about the world, and then go back to the main campaign. The Lost Transmissions are all triggered by something in the world. Maybe in order to trigger this Lost Transmission, you have to have a conversation with a certain character, or you have to find a certain object. It’s kind of this weird, dimensional, timey-wimey, cosmic weirdness thing where we get to go into the past of the setting. Your characters still solve the mystery, but it’s an alternate timeline, an alternate dimension version of your characters, so you also get to see your characters in a different context. It’s just another way of expanding the setting and creating more space to do more mysteries that are not a great fit tonally for the core TV Odyssey campaign.”

For the Kickstarter campaign, the Gauntlet will be producing two books for Public Access. The first is the core rulebook, which features the main rules, the campaign structure, and eight mysteries. This should be all you need to run a successful campaign of the game, but if you want more material, there’s the second book. “Signals from the Other Side“ features additional mysteries, including the aforementioned Lost Transmission mysteries, along with more information on an enigmatic element of the setting known as the Chromatic Desert.

To help smooth out the process of the Odyssey Tapes, they’re also creating a deck of cards that contains all the narrative prompts, housed in a sleek VHS-styled box. Stretch goals for the campaign include additional mysteries, a digital companion app, an original synthwave soundtrack, and a new section of “Signals from the Other Side“ called the Degoya County White Pages, which features more characters and locations for you to draw from.

The crowdfunding campaign is live, but if you want to check out other recent games from the Gauntlet, they launched a line of smaller titles using the Carved from Brindlewood system that are more focused experiences, intended for two to three sessions of play. By Endurance We Conquer is inspired by The Terror, telling a tale of survival on a frozen wasteland. Beach Blanket Body Bag is a murder mystery inspired by teen beach party movies and surf rock.

Finally, the recently released Dead-Pilled is about right-wing Manosphere influencers getting picked off one by one in a tongue-in-cheek slasher story. You can also follow the development of their upcoming Elden Ring-inspired dark fantasy game, The Lands Remaining, on their podcast feed.