Darryll here, and I'm back with another Behind the Scenes update for Last Train to Bremen. For this update, Caro will share more about the idea, various inspirations, and how the characters came together. Before we get to that, we wanted to remind backers that there is still time to vote for the 2025 ENNIES. Not only was Last Train to Bremen nominated for Best Game, but another great RPG offering from Possum Creek, Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, has received four nominations across various categories.
Click here to view the 2025 nominees list for each category, and click here to learn more about how to cast your vote!
Congrats to all of those amazing projects that received nominations this year, and we look forward to seeing the final selections.
Meet the Band
So you’ve heard a little bit about the gameplay and mechanics of Last Train to Bremen — but where did the original seed of the idea come from?
On its surface, two of the game’s most obvious touchstones sit pretty close to the surface:
The Town Musicians of Bremen, a Brothers Grimm story with all the trappings of any good folktale from the era (Talking animals! Encounters with bandits! Casual fear of mortality!)
And the classic Devil’s bargain, which has shown up time and time again in pop culture: from Faust, to Robert Johnson, to Charlie Daniels Band, and everyone in between.
The thought to cross these two first came to me in 2021, when Weaver and I were spitballing ideas for a project about folklore and cultural archetypes. We wound up putting that project on pause, but the idea of that crossover kept gathering dust in a notes document until…
In 2023, I had the chance to playtest The Prince of Nothing Good, a game by C. J. Linton about a heist crew pulling off one daring, final job. The game’s pregenerated characters have deeply entangled histories with one another, and that playtest really got me thinking about pregenerated characters as a way to give players dramatic action to play toward. The character entanglements also led to my third major touchstone — messy band history, in the style of Fleetwood Mac — and when I realized those interpersonal relationships could dovetail neatly with the Faust story, the pieces all clicked into place.
Okay, but really, who are the Musicians of Bremen?
Each bandmate starts from the jump with three very clear hooks: an animal, an instrument, and a band role. These archetypes all carry a lot of cultural associations: if I tell you that a character is a cat, you can probably start to get a picture of them in your mind. If I tell you that they’re also a bass player, and the band manager, that image comes into sharper focus.
In the earliest drafts of the game, character creation was more of a picklist, with players choosing their instruments and defining details about themselves. There was a version in which the band decided together what kind of quartet they wanted to play as (woodwind, strings, jazz quartet, or classic rock and roll).
Scratch notes from 2023. To date, I have yet to see anyone play Mule as a cajonist.
I ultimately locked things down to the four preselected instruments, to help streamline the player experience and keep the world feeling very cohesive. I also found it was a lot juicier for players to ask and answer questions about each other’s characters, rather than defining themselves on their own. This is a game about embroiling others in your own baggage, and I wanted to make that clear from the jump.
Writing the pregenerated character questions was a delightful design challenge. Every question defines a truth about the characters: we know that Cockerel is a bit of a hedonist, that they have beef with Hound’s brother, that they have a connection to the Devil’s book. But I wanted to leave plenty of wiggle room for the players to take those truths and make them their own. As the saying goes: the Devil is in the details.
Lightning Round
There are, of course, plenty of other touchstones and inspiration that wound their way into the fabric of Last Train to Bremen:
I owe a lot to Sangfielle, the gothic horror season of the tabletop podcast Friends at the Table (and specifically to the musical stylings of Jack de Quidt, who punctuated the show soundtrack with haunting microfiction about the setting).
From the tabletop space, I also found myself riffing on some of the classics — namely, Avery Alder’s infamous Ribbon Drive, and Yeonsoo Julian Kim’s Golden Cobra-winning The Long Drive Back from Busan. Both games tell compact stories about transformative road trips with deep, interpersonal character dynamics.
And when I first pitched the game to my friend Shannon, he responded by saying “oh, it’s a Phantom of the Opera Broadway pit orchestra story”, which helped me refine the exact tone of petty artistic sniping that the game seeks to elicit.
Next time, to round out the set of Behind the Scenes glimpses — we’ll be digging into art and illustration!
As we’ve shared on the main BackerKit page, the central backbone of Last Train to Bremen is a single, ongoing game of Liar’s Dice: roll your dice, place wagers, raise your bids, call and bust. It’s a fairly simple game, on the surface — so why does it make such an effective framework for Bremen?
It’s competitive. Every round of Liar’s Dice has a clear winner and a clear loser. You might try to play nice, but elimination is baked into the structure from jump. The engine drives toward a clear resolution point.
It’s fast. The number of dice on the table dwindles over time, which means there’s a built-in countdown clock. Every round takes just a minute or two, so even if you flub one round it’s easy to reset and brace yourself for the next one.
It has emergent narrative. Human brains are predisposed toward pattern recognition, and we like to make up stories to fit those patterns. Everybody teams up to eliminate one player? That tells a story. That one player stands their ground against the pack for several rounds? That tells a story. If your table gets down to the final round, and it’s only two players remaining, and each of them has only one die left? That tells a juicy story right there! Liar’s Dice leaves room for lots of those tiny little compounding moments.
So, we’ve got a tidy little death spiral of a game with built-in elimination, snappy gameplay, and the potential for emergent storytelling. That’s all great on its own, but can we add just a little more heat to the table?
The Devil’s Die
I first learned to play Liar’s Dice on a family vacation: packed in a snowy cabin up in the mountains, I crammed around the kitchen table with roughly a dozen of my cooler, older cousins and we gambled dice into the wee hours of the morning. The game that I learned included a bonus, wild die: an element of chance that made the game that much harder to predict.
Only years later did I learn that Liar’s Dice has many variations in gameplay, and that the more common rulesets don’t include that wild die. It adds another layer of uncertainty to the game that fits the precarious tone I wanted with Bremen, but it shakes up strategy at the table quite a bit! When writing out the rules for this version of the game, I wanted to make sure that those mechanics were communicated clearly, to establish a consistent baseline for everyone at the table.
(One more fun little twist: Liar’s Dice is often played with hands of five, but I pared it down to three dice each for a couple of reasons. The first was to keep the story moving briskly; the second, because the rule of threes gives each player a good dramatic arc; and third, because “the thirteenth die is the Devil’s Die” was simply too good to pass up.)
Last Ditch Efforts
Early playtests of Bremen unearthed a lot of great feedback about narrative pacing and flow, but the biggest recurring question was a consistent sticking point: sometimes one player gets knocked out of the game right out of the gate, and sits diceless for a substantial portion of Act II. How do you accommodate an early-game disadvantage?
Secret twists were baked into the game from jump, but it took a while for the special abilities to click into place. I always wanted to add something in the game to serve as a blue shell, a power-up to let players clutch their final die just one bit longer. Once we landed on special abilities, it became clear pretty quickly that every secret needed to include its own bespoke ruleset.
I had a lot of fun coming up with each character’s unique mechanics, and matching those mechanics to their corresponding secrets! I wanted to land on a good balance between abilities that felt a little friendlier to newcomers and abilities that required a little more complex calculation. Some of these moves might seem more powerful than others on first read — but if played strategically, every single one has the potential to upend the game in a player’s favor, and to radically change the final arc of the game.
I’m a firm believer that the best part of keeping secrets in a tabletop RPG is when you get to reveal those secrets to your fellow players. It was a fun exercise in game design to create a framework where those revelations are guaranteed to be bombastic, game-changing surprises.
Up next time… you all get to pick! Meet the Band vs A Sight for Sore Eyes.
Greetings, Backers! We have some incredible news to share as the Last Train to Bremen campaign continues to gain momentum. Things are moving fast, and we're absolutely thrilled with the progress and recognition the game is receiving.
Steaming Past Funding Goals!
First, we are beyond excited about the response to the Last Train to Bremen campaign! Thanks to all of you, we've officiallysurpassed $50,000 in funding! We're just over one-third of the way through the campaign, and the response we've seen so far has been great. Every pledge helps us bring this unique experience to life, and we're excited to see where the remaining time takes us.
Last Train to Bremen Hits the Airwaves & the Awards Circuit!
The good news doesn't stop with funding! We're proud to announce that Last Train to Bremen has been nominated for a Best Game 2025 ENNIE Award! What an incredible honor, and a huge thank you to those involved.
If you haven't already, be sure to check out the My First DungeonLast Train to Bremeninterview. It's a fantastic listen that dives into what makes this game special. Check your favorite podcast app to listen!
And mark your calendars! An Actual Play of Last Train to Bremen is set to premiere on July 17th. Get ready to see the game in action and catch a glimpse of what to expect.
Congratulations to Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast!
Speaking of awards, we're incredibly proud to share some fantastic news forPossum Creek.Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, hot off its Origins Award win for RPG Core Product, has now garnered four ENNIE Award nominations, including Best Writing, Best Art Cover, Best Family Game / Product, and Product of the Year. Huge applause for the Possum Creek team for the well-deserved recognition!
Your Vote Counts! Behind the Scenes Poll
We want to give you a peek behind the curtain . . . For our next update, we want your input! Help us decide what "Behind the Scenes" look at Last Train to Bremenyou'd like to see:
Meet the Band: A look at initial touchstones, inspiration, and the four main characters.
Rules and Mechanics: Designing the game and the playtesting process.
A Sight for Sore Eyes: Illustration, layout, and visual design.
Please let us know which selection sounds the most interesting in the comments below, and we'll share an update for the most popular choice later this week.
Thank you for your incredible support. If you have any questions or need assistance, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below or contact us directly through our help site.
This is Jay, just letting you know that a Kickstarter I helped work on (Galactic 2E and Going Rogue, by the longtime friends of the creek Riley Rethal and Jess Levine) is in its final hours! If you like Possum Creek's other work (such as Venture & Dungeon or Sleepaway) you'll love these two games of belonging outside belonging, focused on traversing the stars in a galaxy far, far away.
Hi everybody, Caro here — wow, I'm blown away by the astounding success of our first day of funding!
I'm deeply grateful to my collaborators, Weaver and Conner, who have helped me refine my artistic vision for this game every step of the way; to Jay, Ruby, and the team at Possum Creek and Steve Jackson Games for championing this work; and to you all, for checking out this campaign! Whether you've been around since I first self-published Bremen last year, or you only just learned about it recently, your support means the world to me.
We've still got plenty of time left in this campaign, so if you're excited, please spread the word — tell a friend (or two, or three, or four...), and let's keep this train rolling!
