An Abbey, a Village, some Monks – Review: Rosewood Abbey

Scope used to be a big deal in TTRPGs. The Generic Universal Roleplay system (GURPS) proudly boasts “with GURPS, you can be anything you want,” and there’s still plenty of energy for 5e-based products trying to ride high on mastery of a known system. But I’m much more interested these days in the opposite. Games where the scope is so tight that the game provides a clear consistent experience. Games where everyone is likely to play the same kind of character, and do the same sort of thing.

Even D&D has gone this way – big hardback campaigns like Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frostmaiden provide cultural reference points among groups – how did you defeat Strahd? What did you do in Bryn Shander? Did you help the gnome mind flayers in their spelljamming vessel? (Possible spoilers there, I guess). And smaller, indie games have also tended to be successful when they’ve limited their scope to one approach, and hew closely to it.

Rosewood Abbey, from Kalum from the Rolistes podcast, is very tight in scope, and very good. You can’t be anything you want. You can be a friar, at a specific abbey, at the foot of the Alps between the 12th and 13th centuries. You can explore the abbey, you can go into the village nearby – you won’t be going any further. You’ll investigate mysteries that, despite their potential for supernatural origins – and other NPCs being sure that they are – have mundane solutions.

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This is a Carved from Brindlewood (CfB) game, where the mystery isn’t determined in advance but is co-created by the players from the clues they find. I’ve run this game as a one-shot – if you want to see it in action, it’s on the Unconventional GMs channel here – check it out.

Characters

So how are your friars different from one another? Well, you’ll have a role in the Abbey, like brewing or herbalism, and a special power (very similar to the Maven moves from Brindlewood Bay – these provide a quick boost or once-per-session power). You’ll have largely the same statistics as the other Friars. And you’ll have some objects you have squirreled away, which the rest of the group decide for you. 

In play, these become the things that define your character more than anything else – examples of their personality that lead to great roleplaying moments. There’s some character growth – additional Friar moves, or an attribute boost – but these are incremental, and won’t change how your Friar plays.

In Play

In Rosewood Abbey you investigate mysteries, following a familiar CfB structure of exploring, facing danger (action outside the Abbey is inherently more dangerous than inside), and finding Clues. There are three mysteries included in the book, with one an explicit introduction to the game (that’s the one you’ll see in the AP), and more in the works.

But behind all that there’s an ancient mystery in the village near to the abbey. As your players use Moves and trigger flashbacks to virtues or sins of their past, you’ll uncover some ancient legend from the village, and attempt to resolve it (as stated, it’s entirely mundane – your monks are rationalists – despite what the villagers and the rest of the church think). There’s a natural pacing to this, and unlike other CfB games I’ve seen, offers a wide variety of options for what this legendary problem is; you’ll introduce another NPC to it at some point, and there are lots of options. This will eventually trigger an endgame, where you may have to disprove that somebody is in league with this legend – or witness an NPC achieve sainthood!

On the page, it reads a little fiddly, but in play it was easy to make sense of it, and I can see it working really well as a campaign backdrop.
In short, this is an excellent game, and one of the most polished third party CfB games I’ve seen. You can certainly run it as a one-shot (see my advice on that here), or put a campaign of varying lengths out. I’ll be returning to it, for sure, and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone curious.