Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Con Game Preparation IV: A Dirty World - Bucknell 13, Delaware 7

A Dirty World is the one Dollar original I'm running. I had actually had plans to run a second original design, a pulp era game, but frankly it was coming in a bit long to really run at a con, and I was hesitant to cut it down as just too perfect. So I'll torture my group with it at an unspecified future date. Let's just say Dinosaurs, World War II era Japanese super-soldier experiments, zombies, and chimera were just too much awesome for one four hour session. But that's a topic for another post or two. :)

A few weeks ago I reviewed A Dirty World, go read it if you need a refresher on what the game is like. The beauty of the one-roll engine, in any flavor I've seen, is that it's an easy game to teach. I taught it to my current group in the space of about ten minutes. This makes it basically ideal for a convention game, where time is at a premium, and one would rather not spend the first hour of a four hour block teaching game rules.

The biggest reason for creating a game for A Dirty World is that I truly love film noir. I've got a sizable collection of films from the era, as well as later films that really seem steeped in the atmospherics of it. The trouble is, I tend to let my id run wild in creating such games.

My first original scenario was a sordid tale in the depression era South involving white slavery, bigamy, murder, and blackmail. If Bucknell 13, Delaware 7 is any indication, I was just getting started.

It's an ambitious scenario. The players can interact with a good dozen and a half NPCs (though I suspect several of them the players may never meet directly, some of whom are red herrings, some of whom are vital to the plot, and all of whom are pretty much horribly messed up human beings. The PCs themselves are a mess. Every one of them is horribly flawed, most of them are pretty well despicable, and in some cases, the possibility of character conflict is almost inevitable.

In other words, it's one of my Dirty World games.

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