Daniel (@dungeondive) returns to Gustavo Quo’s Little Town, now holding rare physical copies the designer printed and sent him, with the focus on the Eerie Town supplement. Where Little Town draws on the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, Eerie Town swaps in The X-Files: government cover-ups, little green men and cryptozoology.
His most useful observation is about the soap-opera logic those shows inherited. Because everyone in Twin Peaks is connected to the plot, you can roll a random shelter volunteer and simply decide he knows about the cover-up, and your disbelief holds. He also values that these games are not deduction puzzles. The mystery is a McGuffin that keeps you walking the plot.
The play example carries the video. He rolls up Sparksville, home of the SPARC facility — Special Paranormal Anomaly Research Center — and Derek Logan, an ex-security officer with a betrayal in his past and old friends now falling ill. Rolls are 2d6 plus an attribute against tiered narrative outcomes, with instability, wounds and a rising timer as the pressure. A failed sweet talk makes an old friend go blank and order him out; snooping her garden turns up both jokers, which he treats as licence to author what he likes, plus a clue card describing a small device emitting an energy signal. The fog around town, he decides, is being manufactured.
Daniel treats drawing both jokers as authorial licence to push the story where he wants — does a solo game need that permission written into it, or should you always feel free to take it?