Depending on where and how much you follow me, you may have seen me extolling the virtues of the Teatime Adventures RPG. It’s a “cozy RPG” where you’re solving mysteries and getting to know the community of NPCs around you. If you get into a fight, you’re doing it wrong. The core rulebook even has a bunch of cozy recipes and tea pairings. I’ve done YouTube Shorts on the Corncake and Oakenbread, and plan to do more! What I haven’t done is a proper review. It will happen, I promise. But I finally figured out why I can’t seem to do it. As a reviewer, it can be difficult to come back to games that I’ve reviewed, without more books or comparable games. I don’t want to put Teatime Adventures down. I want to keep pulling it out and doing more with it.
How did I come to this conclusion, you ask? I read Cozy Companion, Issue #1, Snowbright Studio’s magazine of cozy games and fiction.
I burned through the issue in a single night and, instead of not wanting to put it down, I’m excited to crack into Issue #2. I want to move on, so here I am banging out a review so that I can find that closure and move forward. Are you ready? I am.
Cozy Companion Issue #1 is, as the number would suggest, the first issue of an ongoing periodical. As such, what I think and say about it may change with future issues as the Snowbright team find their stride. I expect the tone and overall format to stay fairly close, but there are always things that could change.
The issue opens with a Letter from the Editor, as many such magazines do, entitled “What We Play in the Shadows”. If that title sounds familiar, it should. It’s a play on a very popular vampire television series. There are plenty of other reasons that the title is applicable, even though this issue of Cozy Companion has nothing to do with vampires.
Next up is an interview with Joel Sparks, designer of Harvest Hoppers. The interview is an edited down transcription of the interview, and you can actually watch the entire thing on the Snowbright Studio YouTube page!
The next article is The Great Mushby Mystery: What We Know by “Dr. Magus ‘Meeps’ Morrell, Mycohistorian of the Amber Academy.” Every corner of the Verdant Isles has at least one legend about “Mushbys.” Dr. Morrell a distinguished Snootling with decades of knowledge on this mysterious ancestry of sentient fungi. If it wasn’t clear, the good doctor and his treatise on Mushbys is entirely a work of in-world fiction and a delightful one at that. At the end of the article, we are given a much-too-short sidebar on playing a character of Mushby ancestry. This was one of the few disappointments in the issue. the sidebar is 1/4 of one column. To be clear, this isn’t terribly out of line with the ancestry descriptions in the Teatime Adventures Core Rulebook, which doesn’t make it any less disappointing in either publication. A point you would know if I had put out a review on said book (He says, not-so-subtly self shaming his inability to get it done.)
From the world of the Verdant Isles, we come back to the “real” world, with a Snowbright Science Corner on Fascinating Fungi. Snowbright’s resident life sciences expert, Sarah Rivera, takes a concise, yet detailed and fully annotated (which is nice to see) look at the various types of fungus in the world around us. This is followed up by some crafty ideas using mushrooms. Are you seeing a theme yet?
Stepping across into the world of their new game, ink, Grace Collins presents the first part of Shadow in the Night. Billed as “A spooky, cozy mystery set in the world of ink” it remains to be seen just how many parts this story will be. The pacing of this chapter makes it feel like this will be a serialized novel, after the style of old pulp magazines. I’m a big fan of many such stories, but I’ve always had the modern day privilege to binge these tales of mystery and adventure as a complete novel. Not unlike how streaming services have begun doling out episodes one at a time, having to wait for the next issue of Cozy Companion for the story to continue may drive me a bit mad. Those readers who have met me in person have likely already thought to themselves “too late” and to them I retort with “We’re all mad here” and “All the best people are”.
About half the issue is dedicated to Precious Things, an adventure for the Verdant Isles RPG system or easily adapted to most other d20-based systems. Designed to run 1-3 sessions, the length is largely dependent on how interested the players are in meeting new and interesting NPCs and collecting new and interesting mushrooms. It is also suggested that the adventure is best paired with a pot of Russian Caravan or Lapsang Soughing tea. The adventure and associated materials could honestly warrant an entire review to itself. Maybe down the road, I’ll focus a Cozy Companion review more on that adventure, but for today I want to give you an overview of the full issue. But in short (and spoiler free) the players are tasked with searching the Night Market for at least four varieties of mushrooms (although more will make the climax more satisfying) to help a new friend cast a Harmony Magic spell to contact her family through the Mycorrhizal Network. The Mycorrhizal Network and different mushrooms are real things in the real world. Dropped in throughout the adventure are sidebars that teach the reader/GM more about the real world versions, which a wise GM could easily integrate into the game to make this not just fun but EDUCATIONAL. Ick, right? But seriously, the adventure is exceptionally well done.
The issue closes with Knight Moves Board Game Cafe in Brookline, Massachusetts. Remember way back at the start of this review, when I said that Teatime Adventures has recipes in it? Well, the interview closes out with Knight Moves’ recipe for their popular Green Monster smoothie.
I’m excited. I’m excited about Volume 2. I’m excited about Volume 3. I’m excited about Volume 4. I’m excited… well, you get the idea. Back in “the good ol’ days” you could subscribe to comic books directly from the publisher. Nintendo Power Magazine opened the eyes of the young video gaming industry. Dragon Magazine expanded what D&D was at the time. All of these would come to us in this antiquated system of information transfer called “the mail” or “post”. As the internet grew, physical magazines seems destined to be relegated to gossip rags and ad-ucational industry pitches. Cozy Companion is something special. Yes, you can get it digitally. But you can actually subscribe and have every issue physically delivered to your doorstep, every other month, but your friendly neighbourhood postal worker. Imagine that, getting mail that’s not a bill or a flyer. Shocking.
You can all sorts of cozy things from Snowbright Studio online at www.snowbrightstudio.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/SnowbrightStudio.
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