Been looking forward to this game.
The Game: Noirlandia
The Publisher: Make Big Things Games
Degree of Familiarity: None yet!
Books Required: Just the one
Noirlandia is one of those dirty hippie indie games with no GM. Not only does it use index cards, but it wants a corkboard as well, because the whole point of the game is to solve a murder. It's calling itself noir when it's really closer to hard-boiled, but "Hardboiledlandia" doesn't exactly flow, and pedantry never solves anything anyway.
The first thing we'd do in a group is to create the city, but it's just me. Fortunately, there's a free download on that site with nine quickstarts, so picking one that looks cool, I wind up with Luck Harvest. The city of Santa Fria is where they bottle Luck at the LUCKY4U plant.
So, the city and its districts are already established, so all I have to do is make a character. Normally the way this works is that we'd draw N+1 cards from a deck (where N=the number of players) and roll N+1 dice, and use the tables to generate roles and drives, and then all claim one. The quickstart includes some sample characters, but I'm just gonna draw a card and roll a die and "claim" that character. I draw and 8 of spades and roll a 3, which gives me "cop/deputy of the Outskirts" and a drive of "Tell No Lie." Cool. Let's see what the Outskirts are like in this city.
So, kinda rural, suggesting my character might be a ranger, rather than a city cop. Ooh, the victim, Al Strickland, lived in the Sands himself. Well, that's nice. The suspicion is that he was dealing bootleg Luck. So, let's say that my character, Braxton Motts (please just call me "Motts") was on Strickland's payroll. Strickland slipped him a bit of cash to look the other way, but for all that, my cop doesn't know exactly what Strickland was up to. Motts insisted on that, actually, because he has a thing about lying. If you don't lie, no one can catch you in a lie, no matter how lucky they are.
Motts is in his 40s, and he likes where he lives and hates going into Santa Fria proper. He can't not, of course, partly because sometimes you just need to go buy shit, and partially because LUCKY4U is buying up land out in the Sands. He's trying to save up and move out of town, but it's slow going (partially because he won't drink Luck).
Last thing is to set my stats. One get set to...um, "black square," two are neutral, one get a white square (which is good). I'll set Rep to overlooked, Heart to Quiet (those are the neutrals), Body to vigorous (that's the white), and Mind to conflicted (that's the black).
And that'll do it, actually. That was easy.
