Reviews
‘Public Access’ Brings Analog Terror to the World of Tabletop RPGs [Review]
When The Gauntlet published Brindlewood Bay, author Jason Cordova realized that he had a framework that could be applied to other tabletop roleplaying game settings aside from mystery-solving grannies that run afoul of fiendish cults. After the success of the Kickstarter campaign last year, Cordova returned to an idea he was kicking around in 2014 called Public Access, which had players narrating weird found footage horror scenes but didn’t have much in the way of game or story. Upon revisiting it, he expanded on the idea with lessons learned from both Brindlewood Bay and The Between, another game of his that uses the same system, while still retaining his original analog horror vision. After getting my hands on Public Access, it’s clear that this RPG sits at a perfect intersection of mechanics and theme, creating a unique experience for both players and game masters.
Public Access is a tabletop RPG set in 2004, casting players as a group of adults who return to the small town of Deep Lake, New Mexico in search of answers to strange mysteries. What draws them together is their memory of TV Odyssey, a public access station that became an internet urban legend after vanishing off the face of the Earth. As your investigation continues, you’ll run into numerous uncanny threats hidden under the surface of Deep Lake and come across Odyssey Tapes, VHS tapes that have recordings of the bizarre programming that aired on the infamous station. Your return to your home town resurfaces memories, both good and bad, so players are encouraged through mechanics to lean into focusing on the nostalgia of their childhood, providing a warm and inviting way to give a respite to the terrors that they’re facing.
As previously mentioned, this game is based on the Brindlewood Bay ruleset, which uses the resolution mechanics from the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games. Anytime you’re required to roll dice, you roll two six-sided dice and add up the total plus any relevant stat. Based on the results you’ll either get a full success, mixed success or failure. Failures and mixed successes are when the Keeper, this game’s name for a game master, gets to complicate the player’s lives, so rolling dice always carries with it an aura of tension, especially during more perilous situations. Thankfully, players have the option to ‘turn a key’ on their character sheet in order to improve a bad roll. Turning a key requires them to narrate a specific flashback in order to get the benefit, filling in details such as a time you realized your parents weren’t perfect or the moment you realized childhood wasn’t going to last forever. It’s a very clever system that gives the player mechanical incentive for finding ways to deepen their character through focused events in their backstory.
The majority of the game is focused on investigating specific mysteries in the town, following a pre-written and structured format that still leaves tons of room for collaboration and improvisation. Every mystery – there are eight included with this initial release with the promise of more to come – has a clear list of suspects and clues, but it’s up to the Keeper and the players how those elements are introduced and how they combine to form a solution. Players discover clues with rolls as they play, and once they reach a set number of clues they can formulate an answer and roll to see if they’re correct, which then gives them an opportunity to deal with the threat at hand. Each mystery has a sharp identity, with titles like Slumber Party Summoning Circle and The Deep Lake Lurker, but still feels completely unique to the unsettling world of Public Access.
Even though it works great in these one-off focused mysteries, the game also has a campaign structure that makes it easy to string everything together in a satisfying manner. As players collect clues during the mysteries, they have the chance to run across the Odyssey Tapes. When watching the tapes, which plays out in a neat little minigame where each player gets a section of the tape to narrate based on a prompt, they progress through the overall TV Odyssey Campaign. This framework provides Keepers with specific scenes to play out at certain milestones which shed light onto the history and mythology of Deep Lake. Afterwards the Keeper is asked to write down their continually evolving theory about what the tapes mean to the overall mystery of what happened to the station. The campaign has a specific end point that it’s working towards, and it’s up to the Keeper to write the final mystery based on everything that’s happened at the table.
While the looser structure and focus on improvisation may be intimidating to new game masters, Public Access does an outstanding job of including advice to guide you through every step of the way. Not only does it include full scripts for how to introduce the game and walk players through the setup session, but there’s also a plethora of pages dedicated to advice on how to complicate the players’ lives in intriguing and personal ways. It’s refreshing to see a game that’s so dedicated to making the game master’s experience as smooth and fun as possible. The character sheets and mysteries themselves also have excellent prompts that will help guide players into effortlessly fleshing out their characters and building the world collaboratively. By the time you make it to the end, everyone at the table has all the tools and experience needed to make the final mystery into a satisfying climax for both the characters and the overarching narrative.
Cordova and the rest of his writing team have combined the best elements of his previous games with one of the most unique and evocative settings I’ve seen in a tabletop RPG. Analog horror is often so defined by its visual aesthetic, but the combination of gorgeous art and superb writing bring the subgenre to life in a medium that’s so heavily reliant on theater of the mind. The one-two punch of nostalgia and terror is evident on every page, giving you a beautiful blueprint for a perfectly creepy campaign that’s fun for both players and game masters alike. Insert that tape, hit play, and tune into the Pure-White Signal, because Public Access is something special.
Public Access can be purchased on DrivethruRPG.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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