Heroes Modern
I told you guys about my Cajun combat troll way back when. Beauregard Saucier Dupré and his ridiculous accent remain my all-time favorite. The big guy is weirdly relevant today though, because Shadowrun is weirdly close to our own reality. Sure you’ve got dragons running for president and insect spirits swarming Chicago, but the Oval Office and the White Sox are still things that exist in-setting. They’re references that you can pull in freely. And that makes a world of difference when it comes time to populate a setting.
Case in point, I’ll never forget the time Beauregard et al. got hired for “The Beer Run.” Ours was a table full of beer snobs, so it was a pitch-perfect premise for the group. The evil Budweiser megacorp had stolen our favorite microbrewery’s proprietary yeast. We stole it back. But we weren’t satisfied with in-and-out corporate espionage. We wanted revenge on behalf of our local taproom.
GM: How do you prep for the run?
Me: I’ma eat a big pot of gumbo before the heist.
GM, nervously: What’s in it?
Me, very Cajun: Whole cow.
What followed was one of the silliest, middle schooliest exchanges of my gaming career. After the heist was successfully completed and the defeated GM’s face was firmly planted in his hands:
GM: OK. You successfully shit in one of the fermentation tanks.
Me: One? How man tank der is?
GM: There are a dozen.
Me: Gon’ fa nutha wan.
Table: What?
Me: I say, I’m goin’ for anotha one.
GM: OK. Make a roll to pinch it off.
God I miss playing that character. But it wasn’t just the hijinks that I loved. It’s the fact that we passed that Budweiser plant every time we drove down to Denver IRL. It was a local landmark, and it fit easily into our collective imagination. Inventing a scenario where we could head into an IRL place and be silly murder-hobos was a freaking blast. And it leads to our question of the day!
Have you ever gamed in The Real World (or some reasonably close facsimile)? Fiasco is a good one for close-to-reality one-shots. Both versions of the World of Darkness do the gothy version of Shadowrun’s shtick. Same deal with Egyptian ruins in Cthulhu or geopolitics in Top Secret. Did you write your home town into the setting? Pull in Google Maps for research? Tell us all about the real places that became fictional settings down in the comments!
MINI-DUNGEON TOME II: This sequel to the best-selling Mini-Dungeon Tome by AAW Games is live right freakin’ now on Kickstarter. And the Handbook’s own Claire Stricklin has a fistful of dungeons in the mix! These bad boys are designed to be grab-and-go, easy to run adventures with minimum prep. So what are you waiting for? Get in here and get delving!
ARE YOU THE KIND OF DRAGON THAT HOARDS ART? Then you’ll want to check out the “Epic Hero” reward level on our Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Like the proper fire-breathing tyrant you are, you’ll get to demand a monthly offerings suited to your tastes! Submit a request, and you’ll have a personalized original art card to add to your hoard. Trust us. This is the sort of one-of-a-kind treasure suitable to a wyrm of your magnificence.
….No comments?
….No AUTHOR comments?
Uh…. hello? Is this thing on?
….Should I be here right now?
The placeholder blog for posterity:
Love the fact that the computer is sparking and smoking when Wizard look at it… is this one of those settings where magic and technology don’t mix well?
And I do like Wizard’s look… a real corporate power-dresser.
Anticipating the questions you probably intended to ask in the author comments that aren’t there yet… I’ve never really played a lot of real-world modern games. The closest would be a few cyberpunk campaigns set in something approximating the near-future reality, or some modern-ish Cthulhu variants.
Always kinda wanted to do a Shadowrun campaign. Never was able to get enough people interested the few times I was willing to GM one.
Although I guess Scion also counts as a modern game; played a few campaigns of that, and while none of them actually finished, I had a good time every time.
Yeah, there are a lot of games that loosely approximate the real world… either overtly divergent like Shadowrun or most supers settings, or covertly so like Scion or WoD or Delta Green.
Shadowrun is a fun setting, but the system isn’t really to my taste… it’s the only game I’ve played where I’ve been forced to resort to a spreadsheet to figure out skill allocation in chargen, and the number of factors that affect the dice pool (injuries, recoil, etc) make it clunky when you’re trying to do fast-paced cinematic action. Porting to a different system has, on the whole, been more satisfying…
They must be playing Dresden Files.
https://evilhat.com/product/dresden-files-rpg-our-world/
…why do I get the feeling I stumbled onto a flubbed attempt at an April Fool’s joke?
Happy May Day!
Some of my favorite games have been set in the modern game, or at least modern dayish. Such as Call of Cthulhu. I sometimes find you can affect your players a lot more, by taking the world we all live in, and then twist it.
If you encounter a ghoul in a fantastical world of heroes and wizards, then its often just business as usual. If you encounter a ghoul in your local graveyard, then its suddenly a lot more freaky and out of place.
I have also tried a bit of a RPG series (I think it was called “The End of the World), where each scenario is its own end of the world scenario (The one I tried was zombies, I died quickly). You play as yourself and the story starts wherever you are playing. I remember it as being pretty fun, through I don´t know if it would be a good fit for a longer running campaign (especially since time is pretty important for it, with various events happening at specific days into the scenario).
And apart from all of that, I also find people just like being able to pretend to be someone else in our world. Be it someone incredibly rich and famous, well trained special forces or a gremlin living in a dumpster who are trying to hack the Pentagon with two potatoes and a bit of wire.
I tried an “end of the world” type scenario like you describe. We played ourselves as characters, and it was quite fun.
I felt awkward about the handicapped guy in the room though. He was just a normal character in mechanical terms, but it’s tough playing yourself in the gritty survival horror genre when you’ve got mobility issues.
Yeah, I can see how that can be awkward. I also know some people who would be uncomfortable with having to play themselves, in such a scenario. So most definitely not a game I would use for everyone, or without a proper introduction.
Also, completely forgot to add this, but I love Wizards whole deal in this picture. Really curious about what Thief would look like in this game.
You are not the first to express interest in the 80s-Verse. I suspect you will not be the last. I’ll have to see what kind of scripts I can wrangle.
This is the handbook equivalent of uncanny valley.
Getting some strong Lou Grant vibes from Cleric.
https://pics.filmaffinity.com/lou_grant-759323558-large.jpg
I assume this is a hiccup in an automated upload since it’s up a day early without a blog post?
https://media4.giphy.com/media/SwyTq2jJxc9im6BYnN/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47xxqpojpdshwzp11fgcg5krezwbe5dv47pbiwenv7&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g
I love that since it’s an ’80s corporate environment beards are a no-go for Clerical worker, but nowadays beards would be fine.
lol Clerical
I think this comes out earlier and that is why we got no comments from Claire 🙁
I like reading those 🙁
Possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.
Glad to say nice thing of your writing 😀
You always brighten my day, Schattensturm. 🙂
I played and ran a few “World of Darkness” games set in their twisted version of our modern world (Vampire, Mage, Changeling, Hunter) but that was an eternity ago.
Come to think of it, I’ve never played a sci-fi game either (well, Mage and Hunter did have some cyberpunk elements, but those weren’t really the focus). Medieval fantasy has been my only RPG fare for the last, what, 15 years maybe?
I need to find the passage in “Playing at the World” that explains the appeal of fantasy. Paraphrasing from memory, I think it’s to do with the narrative flexibility. “Historical” can be safely ignored because it’s not our world. “A wizard did it” really can serve to explain away logical inconsistencies. And the freedom to invent anything you can imagine without the constraints of reality is part and parcel of fairy stories.
That said, it is fun to change up the setting every once and again. You get new tropes and new situations when you get out into IRL. Case in point:
https://www.redbubble.com/i/ipad-case/Polka-will-never-Die-Riding-A-Rex-Harry-Random-Destruction-Dresden-by-idwearit/63906135.MNKGF
Big fan of the Shadowrun setting, but I definitely feel like at some point deep lore gets TOO deep.
I’ve even taken to reading rulebooks for Earthdawn for the shared lore, but that’s some seriously esoteric nonsense I figure most people aren’t prepared for and probably won’t use unprompted anyway.
It’s this weird thing about lore. The sense of depth is wonderful. Drowning in all that depth is not. So in that sense, I think it’s about feeding your players just enough to keep them intrigued (one concept at a time) without overwhelming them in data.
I ran a homebrew superheroes campaign using mostly D20 Modern rules set in our hometown of Huntsville, Alabama (aka Rocket City, USA). The Huntsville Emergency League of Power (H.E.L.P.) was said to be the successor to the golden-age team the Redstone Rockettes and even advertised on billboards (“Don’t worry, Huntsville. HELP has arrived!). Their headquarters was in an iconic office building (that in IRL has been for rent now for decades) visible from one of the city’s main arteries. The super-powered team answered police calls to quasi-real locations in very real parts of town, and the team was often invited to take part in the in-game counterparts to IRL events and parades (with varying levels of mundanity or explosive chaos). Crimes investigated ranged in intensity from Barney Miller to Wellington Paranormal to nigh-unto-Watchmen level intrigue and metahuman throwdowns. A rollicking weird time was had by all.
Hey, I remember you talking about this biz a while back. I love that it’s a small city rather than GENERIC NEW YORK or whatever.
When we ran our Old World of Darkness game in Cheyenne, the big bad wound up being a nuke spirit on account of all the local airforce bases. That bastard was all manner of sleeping, latent malevolence. And you couldn’t help but look out across the plains at night and wonder where his silo was hiding.
My first Vampire: the Requiem game was based in Cambridge, my place of residence for the last decade. Even though its been years since I finished that game, my partner and I still point out various buildings and landmarks to each other in reference to our campaign. “Its near the Nostferatu’s steak house.” “There’s the spa you took over.” “Oh no, the Prince’s haven has been converted into a swimming pool!”
I’ll have you know that I googled “Nostferatu’s steak house Cambridge” before realizing it was an in-fiction place.
having lived in the Pacific Northwest for more than half my life, Shadowrun was the easy answer to “close to home” with Seattle as a main event town in that setting, World of Darkness offered it’s own Seattle by Night supplement at one point (at least one point), but I kind of prefered Cyberpunk… if not the actual game, the concept of the setting, but rather than a far future dystopia, playing it as a near future, with less of the tech elements setting. A game of the now rather than the what if of the quasi future. Still set in Seattle of course, my go to city because it was a known quantity back then.
What landmarks did you use in-game in Seattle? I’ve got family out that way, so I’m curious what makes an “authentic Seattle game.”
The usual suspects. Monorail, Pike Place, the Space Needle, Columbia tower (or whatever it’s being called now, it was something else when I was there before that and I heard they changed it after I left), and the Kingdome was a thing when I was gaming, but hasn’t been for a couple decades now 🙁
I bet the monorail fight was cool.
Fun fact, the Monorail rails were redesigned after it was built to be closer together (there are two rails and two trains that pass each other on their routes) because they wanted a building to have corners that meant they “needed” to move the lines.
because they moved the rails closer together so that this building could have its corners (instead of just designing that one corner a little bit different), if the two trains pass that part of the rails at the same time, they can get stuck as they collide with each others sides.
The rail operators are given express instructions never to pass that point of the rails at the same time for this exact reason.
It happens more frequently than it doesn’t happen and all because some idiot decided that a building was more important than the safety of the monorail passengers.
What a great city.
Also, a more modern landmark is the HIDEOUS Experience Music Project, but similar to the teardown of the Kingdome, that was built after I stopped gaming in that setting.
Oh, and the Science Center is a potentially great place to set as well as visit (built for the World’s Fair. One of the last ones to be had in the 60’s) Elvis shot a movie there with a very young Kurt Russell.
You got my nostalgia all amped up XD
Now you go me all amped up to read Shadowrun setting books. Seattle is kind of ground zero for the setting, right? I wonder if they mention the Science Center at all…?
you should, it’s a great game! And yeah, Seattle has always been sort of the defacto main city, but they also have other big megasprawls.
Goblinization day is beckoning!
Damn I hope I’m an orc.
Given the 80s setting, personally I’d envision Mr Stabby as more of an executive letter opener than a pager… Or maybe one of those stationery guillotines?
Cigar cutter, lol
Regardless of the form, if you’ve ever used any of these, you KNOW he’s still getting his blood, blood, BLOOD
Plenty of V-LARP set in the real world.
But the closest to your Beer Run was also set in Shadowrun, we had a run that involved the local stadium (we played in the Shadowrun version of our city) and we ended up wrecking it. A month later in the real world parts of it were demolished for repairs (basically the faulting cement when it was built), so we had a few chuckles about having “blown it up good”.
Also, after our city hall was demolished (to be rebuilt*) we had a run where we had to end up blowing up city hall.
* But it’s demolishing was used in the movie Lethal Weapon 3.
You ever read “Hamlet on the Holodeck?” I wonder if these landmarks become a different kind of “threshold object” than the duck hunt gun Murray envisioned?
https://inventingthemedium.com/category/vi-onward-with-invention/virtual-reality-storytelling-vi-onward-with-invention/
I’m old, I admit it. My husband used to run Top Secret back in the day and we had a few adventures in Pittsburgh (near his home town). That was the closest though.
I love the accent. The closest I ever got was with my Marvel Superheroes character that had an Irish accent that got thicker the more excited or upset he got.
Every time I want to ham up an Irish accent i watch Boondock Saints again. Did you have a go-to for picking it up?
Not really, just a lifetime of hearing bad Irish accents on TV 🙂
Being as the ‘Cajuns’ originally came from this very area and is very common in a mjor city about an hour from here, all I need to do is go a mall and hear this accent, or at work, we had a lot of people from that area working where I did.
It drives people from France crazy, most Acadiens speak both English and French, sometimes at the sametime, but the French sounds more like it did 400 years ago andf they can’t understand them in either official language so very often switch to English because it’s easier for them 😉
Case in point…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UObTOgYLBk8
I usually cant hear accents in other languages. Wild to hear the side by side like that.
Now try it in ‘English’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWqWqSfQhjM
Here’s another, the story is hilarious in itself but I’ve worked with many people who sound exactly like this 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jJcAibNls
Just about every WoD campaign I’ve been a part of has tried to take place in the our home town, only problem is we live in a tiny empty place called Casper, with just over 50k population, now that in itself is no problem. But why do my storytellers try to run it the same way as new york! we don’t have massive sprawling sewers for nosferatu to hide in and our local crime family is like six dudes. give me weird things happening in the plains, government black-sites deep in the mountain, anything that actually uses the location as it is rather than depend on the settings popular locations as a pure guide.
Shoot out ar the Irma sounds cool. Zombie taxidermy at the Buffalo Bill Center sounds lit too.
Edit: Dammit… Cody and Casper got crossed in my head.
So… Vamps nesting in the wind turbines maybe?
d20 Modern. Zombie apocalypse plot.
I played Mickey the Midget, a Small Human from a now-defunct circus, along with an IRL Christian missionary playing an in-game Muslim. I recall our game lasting about 1 session before we all died. That was that.
Was it the zombie circus animals that got you?
I’ve played the Dresden files RPG which runs off the Fate system, anyway though, the setting was the actual city we lived in, the rules suggest using important local landmarks as monster dens or dramatic locations where important sinister or plot relevant things are happening and I remember vividly our merry little bands of warlocks heading down to the local speakeasy for a pint and getting jumped by Wardens, that was a blast!
Also we turned the local tower into a den of harpies and now there’s a herpes/harpies in joke to be made every time we drive past haha.
I think turning your local city into a setting can be incredible creative fuel and it helps if you know the place well!
Also gives you a reason to go out and explore. I actually went out with a rock I’d spray painted with our tribal totem. Drove around the outskirts of town to take pics of it in different location, setting the boundaries of our pack’s territory. Good times.
Well, yes. We even blew up a whole block of it. this was in a CoC modern game. We were playing in our hometown (Nijmegen), in the 80’s, and, as the city was actually founded by the Romans around the start of the CE, of course there was this hidden ancient roman temple of some obscure, and obviously cthulhoid god there. And as we wanted people to NOT go there (we were actually playing more like Delta Green or the Laundry) we first filled the underground complex up with PUR, and added some radioactive material, which we stole from the scientific reactor lab at Petten (also in the Netherlands). That would almost certainly get the military involved. And for good measure we filled the sewers with natural gas, which we then ignited. Unfortunately that gas seeped down and we ended up blowing up the whole neighborhood next to, but lower than, the site. But all this did bring in the military, and the whole dutch alphabet soup, who promptly concreted the place over, and put a big fence around it. Mission accomplished!
Oh, hey! One of my favorite knights is from Gelderland!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygNdTxoHus
Way to save the town in any case. 😀
Our Shadowrun GM does his campaign in our hometown. Does Shadowrun counts as modern?
Hey, Shadowrun was literally the example in today’s rant, so I think it counts. What kind of metahumans you got in those parts?
Who would Thief be in this universe? A snarky, nail-filing secretary? A femme fatale HR manager? A Tech support? Or a clerk specializing in dodging assignments, responsibility and bosses (bad luck continuing to plague her)?
Let’s see… Thief is Unlucky and Greedy. Pretty sure she’s in sales and working on commission.
I’m in a campaign where out characters are characters in an mmorpg. My player is a Vtuber