Brits on Bikes

Brits on Bikes is an actual-play podcast: a tabletop role-playing campaign run on the 'Kids on Bikes' rules and shared as audio. Jimmy sits in the game master's seat, greets the audience with 'Good day bikers' and narrates the world around the players. Eve and Sean play Dee and Alex, the two teen investigators at the centre of the story. Its premise is bleak. In Marsh Haven in 1974, six children have vanished from their homes in as many days, and the authorities have next to no leads. Dee and Alex go looking anyway, without much thought for their own necks. A narrated recap lists what that has already meant: scrutiny from the police, a bargain with a pensioner who may or may not be a crime lord, a conversation with a demigod and a fight against what it calls the rising tide of corporate fascism. This stretch of the story pushes toward the lair of Black Anise, taking in a time portal, a mirror puzzle built around diamonds, a gold coin and a wooden sword, and a scrap with rats settled by a spiked bat. The dice stay in view. Players call rolls for grip, fight and brawn, debate which stat an attack should use, and ask to spend adversity tokens to keep their footing in a rising wind. Jimmy hands description back to them, so the killing blow on a rat becomes a full golf swing narrated by the player who made it. At one point he compares the moment to a scene in Raging Bull, while wondering aloud whether the film is even out yet. None of this is solemn. That same wind yields a pun bad enough to get a player called childish, and a tangent about corded telephones and the family 'phone zone' is allowed to wander wherever it likes. The edges of episodes carry extra material: 'Previously on' recaps, a narrated scene-setter, spoof ads such as a 'wall fluid' spot whose side effects run from rickets to levitation, and a promo for The Danger Club, described as the team's Pathfinder chums. Politics runs through the fiction, and it does not stop at the edge of the game. In one cold open Jimmy speaks on behalf of the team about the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. Another episode carries a political conversation from the start of a session, moved to the end rather than cut. That exchange includes blunt anti-police language, which is worth knowing before pressing play. Anyone arriving partway through can use the cold open of 'S2E12 A seasoned witch could call you out from the depths', which recaps the case in a single narrated passage. What a listener gets is a small-town mystery with real stakes, played by a table that jokes its way through it.