GMnastics 37

I’ve been sitting on this campaign idea for years, but no one in my group wants to break from our more generalized D&D setting.

Take film noir detectives and Hong Kong action cinema, but add elements of Metropolis-inspired dieselpunk in a pulpy Far East.

Set the campaign in Shanghai around the 1920s. Back when the city was a jumble of expatriates, deposed Russian aristocrats, and entrepreneurs. Imagine a lot of opportunity, but even more broken dreams and squandered fortunes. Make a game where everyone has an agenda and some serious baggage. All the NPCs are desperate, dangerous, or both, but made sympathetic by their personal tragedies.

Players can be anything from disenfranchised Boxers, Great War veterans, bitter White Russians, or locals compromising traditions to get by. Combat would be fluid and intense, Bratva thugs against Triad gangsters, thresher suit pilots brawling with snarky youxia, or masked vigilantes matching wits with hardboiled Zen monks.

Everything is breakable. Everything is moving. Everything can be used as a weapon.

Of course, the focus of the game would be on the investigation, political ties, and backstabbing. Navigating the web of deceit would be rewarded with small victories, either for friendly NPCs or the PCs in question.

The number of plots I could generate just off the characters would be open-ended, since I could take the game anywhere under the numerous factions operating within the city.

  • What’s left of Russia’s ruling class struggles to muster enough resources to oppose the Red Army.
  • Japanese spies scrutinize Chinese resources, contending with Shanghai’s underworld and big-business tai-pans.
  • British merchants control a volatile opium market, maintaining a tenuous monopoly as a new Bratva competitors stake claims on their hidden dens.
  • The locals are left in the middle, enjoying the spoils of conflict and contemplating, for the first time, an independent Shanghai to rival British Hong Kong.

I think many of the hooks would start off small, but eventually lead to more influential antagonists. Maybe the PCs frequent a jazz club and their favorite singer or bartender winds up murdered outside. I probably would ask them to have two or more connections with other characters and locations. One PC could own the jazz club, another related to the victim, and another a washed-up folk hero that was good friends with the staff.

The crime would point them to the various kingpins duking it out in the area, willing to exchange information for a few favors. That information might incriminate influential manufacturers or ex-nobility in the city, complicating their search for the truth. Eventually, it all falls into one of Shanghai’s larger conspiracies.

  • The Russians are consolidating their influence on legitimate and illegitimate businesses, practically annexing Shanghai to retake their home.
  • Separatists have manipulated the events to create a political incident that would give them cause to officially secede from fragmented China.
  • It turns out the British don’t like the idea of Shanghai competing with Hong Kong. They create a costumed patsy masquerading as a supervillain, secretly supplying him with weapons and a decommissioned zeppelin to rain fire from above.

If the party is clever, they just might survive the shady brothels, thwart Shanghai’s elite, and trace their way to the velvet-lined meeting rooms above Nanking Road.

/r/rpg Thread