So Apparently This Blog is For RPGs Now (Fiasco Playset for 19th Century Japan)

Apparently I've given up on the whole "research aid, look at me be scholarly" thing, and am just putting up RPG-related stuff now. That said, here's the playset I finished writing up recently for Jason Morningstar's excellent rpg Fiasco. It's set in my most recent pet obsession, Yokohama Japan, during the treaty port era when everything was crazy.

Google docs destroys all my pretty formatting, but it's what I have to work with here.
I present: A Fiasco in 1865 Yokohama

Walkers in The Witchery Way (RPG)

So this isn't what the blog's theoretically for, but I've been working on an RPG recently and I needed somewhere to post it anyway--so here goes.

Link to the Google Doc 


In terms of game-feel and mechanics it owes a lot to Polaris, In a Wicked Age, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, Apocalypse World, and the endless discussions about RPGs with my various excellent and similarly obsessed friends. I'm going for simple rules--perhaps too simple?--but I think it fits the atmosphere I'm trying to create for the game. And I'm trying to fight my overwhelming urge to map every detail out a la' Shadowrun.


Story-wise, I took a lot from Native American mythology, but am going for an ambiguous hyphenation between that and a sort of Middle-Eastern "cradle-of-civilization" feel. The goal of the game is flexibility, both for characters and for the kind of story--characters shift from one thing to another, characters' goals and motives in the game can just as easily be played by someone else in the inverse, that sort of thing. I  like the idea of characters that are very fluid in limited terms but never change for good, never advance or increase, but just keep making new mistakes.


EDIT: So, I changed the rules a bit and streamlined/fleshed out things (I hope) in response to the critiques from Gamechef and various of my friends who looked it over. I'm also adding a decent bestiary and GM repository, to make it easier to kick-start a game.