Jonas Ferry’s blog

The Noir front cover illustration.

I’m soon to be published as a contributor to a new Swedish roleplaying game called Noir. It’s a film noir inspired game set in a dystopian alternate world, a kind of mix between The Maltese Falcon, Sin City and 1984. There’s a huge empire ruled by different noble families, but the focal point of the setting is the capital of the empire called Sandukar. Sandukar has parts that are heavily controlled by the all-ruling State, and parts that are left to criminal gangs, enemies of the state and other people left out of the system.

Speaking of system, the basic rules are simple and quick. They are still traditional enough to have a fixed list of skills and abilities and a combat system that’s more detailed than the rest of the game, but experimental enough to have escalation rules in social conflicts inspired by Dogs in the Vineyard and a scenario preparation method from Sorcerer.

The chapter I wrote is on story preparation, and I rewrote the introductory story to follow the method. Marco Behrmann, one of the main guys behind the game, wanted the stories to be centered around the characters and their choices, and asked me if I were interested in helping out.

Of course I was, and immediately thought of relationship maps and bangs used in Sorcerer and later games. The Swedish roleplaying forum Rollspel.nu has a similar method they call “fish tanks”, but as far as I can tell that model doesn’t include events to set things in motion.

This makes it very interesting to see what the reactions of Swedish roleplayers will be. Do people want a non-railroaded scenario design method bad enough or are they too comfortable in the old ways of preparation?

Oh, and when I talked about “traditional” and experimental above, I definitely don’t mean “traditional = bad”. I like the combat system a lot, it feels somewhat like a computer game in that you don’t have complete control of the character. You might say you want to fire suppressive fire towards someone hiding behind a crate, but how many bullets you waste and your initiative the next round is based on the result of the dice.

If everything works out with the printing house the game will be in stores late November or early December. It’s 2500 copies and will be distributed by Neogames, but if you want to catch an early copy or want the limited edition you can pre-order now.

The Noir back cover illustration.

You can find the above pictures as wallpapers for download, and excerpts from the game, at the Noir download page.

Ron Edwards saved my Sorcerer actual play report from falling off the third page, and I’m thinking about what to answer. I haven’t read up on orthogonal conflicts yet, but it sounds like something that generated one of the two rule discussions during the game.

One thing I didn’t mention in my play report was how wonderfully effective it is to cut between scenes in a rapid manner. The three players had their characters in separate scenes most of the time, but because I kept cutting between them no one had to wait for long before their turn. Good places to cut are right after something new or cool has been revealed in the scene, or right before jumping into a conflict. I would say stuff like “he doesn’t agree… so that’s a conflict, but first…” and then cut to someone else. That means that the game is full of mini cliffhangers, which in turn means that the players and me are eager to get back to the scene to know what will happen.

You don’t have to decide if you cut away because the scene is over or because you want to keep the tension up, you can decide when you get back to the scene. I would say something like “your wife says she’s been seeing someone else… (evil grin) Cut to…”, and when we got back to the scene the player could either say he wanted to confront the wife directly or play a scene where the character complained to his friends.

On another note, right now there’s Stockholm’s Spelkonvent (Stockholm’s Gaming Convention, page in Swedish) where Anders Sveen and Jonas Möckelström are game mastering four games: AG&G, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, Polaris and Shock: Social Science Fiction. I think that’s cool.

Now there’s an actual play thread on the Forge from my Sorcerer game. It’s long, even though I avoided a lot of stuff I could’ve talked about. The GM rewards are summarized at the very end of the post, and I guess sprinkled through it.

I’m interested in decision making, both in general and in roleplaying games (see The importance of decisions). That makes the game Hero’s Banner highly interesting, and I’ll have to check it out. Don’t know if I’ll buy it just yet, but I’ll definitely try to dig up more info on it.

I had a fantastic Sorcerer weekend, and I’ll write a play report as soon as I find some time to type it up (or down, how is it?). The sense of reward as game master was one of the best I’ve had, but totally different from anything I’ve experienced before.