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!
