So I have friends voicing a desire to be a part of a noir themed campaign, so I thought I’d try my hand at it using Starfinder.
The problem is, where do I even begin?
How could one approach that Genre with interplanetary travel being common place? What place(s) could one use to most easily capture this flavor? Suggestions of plot lines and plotpoints that would fit the flavor as well as the Starfinder/Pathfinder universe?
Obviously a great place for a noire style detective adventure (which is what I think you are going for?) would be Absalom Station itself, both as the station at the center of the universe and a bustling metropolis with a seedy underbelly it makes the perfect place to have some shady dealings and mysteries to uncover.
If you want to mix it with starships then Firefly is a decent resource to start with for the genre flavour.
Among the Pact worlds Akiton as a 'dying' world would be well suited to desperate schemes and hard-luck stories, but you could find those anywhere; just not as prevalent.
I recommend picking up the audiobook of Slab City Blues. It is a pretty classic tough guy police detective dealing with all kinds of lowlifes in a big city. The twist being the city is a space station. That should help get you in the right mindset.
You can also pretty much lift plots straight from Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op short stories, and change around the elements to a more sci-fi setting. Noir is all about the human condition (or inhuman depending on the setting), the rest is just window dressing.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I recommend keeping it urban, so Absalom Station, the Idari, or other big cities throughout the setting.
Story Elements and Set Dressing: rain, steam rising from sewers, slices of moonlight coming in through the window blinds, a femme fatale, fedoras, trench coats, jazz clubs, cigarette smoke, organized crime, crooked authority figures, immoral aristocrats, inescapable fate, impulse over logic, taboo, a MacGuffin, an unexpected visitor holding a gun enters the room, a base of operations, snappy dialogue.
Easy to Adapt Recommendations: Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049, Dark City, The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski.
A murder mystery on Eox would be hilarious.
What the Goat Lord said. Atmosphere is the most important aspect, and the characters need to accentuate that atmosphere. Maybe tell your players which films you're drawing on so they can get a feel beforehand, both for voice & PC builds.
Plus,
Players, you need players, and I don't mean the PCs or the gamers.
Who's in charge of which rackets? Which areas? Who's playing against whom and how so? Who's moving up? Who's getting too big? The show Gotham has much of that, as does Batman: The Animated Series. In most noir settings, the heroes are struggling to do a bit of good in a murky setting, trying not to upset anybody too big, maybe even gaining the respect or favors from the big guys. And noir isn't that great for villains either. They're struggling too, maybe are victims of circumstance, maybe need the heroes to help them out of a jam or do something under the radar from their own people. And those on top are maybe the least happy, as they're the targets, just like being the gunfighter everybody wants to shoot down.
Everybody's looking for a break, right? And they use this to justify what they do, and the bad people they do it to, corrupting themselves in the process. Continuing the cycle. That doesn't mean they don't have humanity, or don't want love or want to hope. But hope is hard when you're beaten down, and beating down is what keeps people on top, keeps you from being beaten down yourself. It's the system, the people are just caught in it, guilty of perpetuating it, victims of it.
What skills or positioning will the PCs have that makes them a notable cog in the machine? Or does luck, likely bad, drive their story? Or is it that they're nobodies that make them worth hiring? Nobody will notice them doing their jobs, nobody will notice them going missing, and nobody will rescue them when they're played for patsies.
I think the toughest issue might be for PCs to stay heroic. It's a struggle in the literature, it'll be even more of a struggle in play, when people are looking for a bit of escapism. How will PCs maintain their humanity (Vesk-ity?)? Who or what will be the glimmer of hope for them? And what might snuff that out? What makes them stay when leaving would relieve their burdens?
And how will the players respond? It's not easy being low on the totem pole, pushed around. What happens when they push back?
Anyway, good luck with that.
Cowboy Bebop has an awesome noir flavor and is about a crew of bounty hunters on a spaceship. Certainly look into the other suggestions, but I think Cowboy Bebop is the best place to start with sci-fi noir on a spaceship.
Well, now I have a great deal of material to watch and look over. Some I have watched before, but others will certainly be fresh and rife with ideas. Thank you, all of you. Though I certainly await more advice and ideas. I do think that an eox murder mystery could be entertaining..
Say, how well could the Nightarch on Apostae or some city on Akiton would do for Noir?
On a side note: Anla'Shok's name makes me want to build an order of Rangers under starfinder (or even see someone's take on such, official or otherwise). Or make an NPC who is a security guard that apparently reveres the Osirion god of frustration.. But that is a discussion for another thread.
I'm curious to learn if you went forward with an idea for a noir adventure and how it turned out?
I'm curious to learn if you went forward with an idea for a noir adventure and how it turned out?
Regretfully, it has not started yet. People having schedule conflicts, largely family related given the holidays, has been the greatest obstacle. Odds are it will be starting up early next year and i'll gladly give an update then.
Atmosphere is by far the most important aspect of any noir story, although in space, it doesn't necessarily require atmosphere. As others have said before, Blade Runner is a fantastic example of sci-fi noir. Firefly is a bit grittier, less noir and more western.
I don't think travel fits in with Noir. There's too much freedom.
Noir is the dying town nobody can escape from, or the big city that traps those few who have escaped. If the PCs are on the road already, they've won. Noir is a maze, with no correct choices, just less wrong ones.
Firefly is seldom Noir. It has enough genres going without trying to tag on another one! It does have some good femme fatales though.
Noir is being low, but high enough to help out someone lower, to be of use to a player, but still low enough to be played. This, of course, means characterization is paramount. Since the stakes aren't large by nature, the stakes have to be personal. If a friend's knuckles get busted, this has to matter. That friend has to be established. When NPC #5 gets her break in the movies, that has to mean something. And when it ends up she's just being used, that has to hurt. She's got to have been striving too. And while you may not be able to lift her back up and renew her dreams, at least you can take down the fellows who hurt her. Or can you? Maybe you can play some other shark against them, being too small a fish yourself. Or maybe her break did pan out, and you can expect never to see her again. She might be the one success.
There has to be a cast of characters, so that they aren't just tossed in at the last minute and just as easily discarded.
I really don't know how you'll juggle being noir, where the protagonist has few resources other than wits & guts with an RPG which relies on resources to advance. Then again, if it's immersive enough, the time between leveling might be long. Favors might get them that new shiny, even if it can't get them credits (nor the freedom that comes with that.)
Nine weeks from Boston to Vegas. Nine weeks with three friends, a truck and that mysterious crate. What was so special about it that couldn't go by train. Three times somebody tried to rob us, all different people but twice we were sure it was the same crew. We made the delivery and they couldn't even put us up for the night in a cheap motel. We thought about staying here, land of dreams they say, but when you start at the bottom you just move from one hole to another. At least back home we had people we could rely on. So in three days it's off to Boulder then San Diego to catch a ship to Honduras. Boss doesn't trust the locals, or maybe he doesn't trust the suits we supposed to meet there.
What a dump, never would have believed anyplace could be worse than home. At leas food is cheap and people will do anything to be paid in American dollars. Well except for some of the villages, some look like they only recently discovered fire. Boss was right not to trust the suits, or the local politicians, or the police. We have no idea what is so special about this thing but lots of people are willing to kill over it. If we can make it 100 miles down the coast without being followed there is a fishing boat waiting to take us to Brazil and then a plane back home. Who makes backup plans that far ahead and how rich do you have to be, we'll never know. Word is the payoff for this job is going to be huge. We talked about starting our own shop but who are we kidding, schmucks like us are always going to be working for somebody else.
Just because you get out of your town does not mean you win. In fact traveling can be even worse than home.
Lane, yes, creative fiction can be creative. Once the rules (um...guidelines) are known, they can be toyed with, tweaked, or even discarded. As a norm, travel denotes a measure of freedom & possibilities. Notice how you have drained travel of both to make it function in genre. It's not just a crew working as guards on a journey, now it's a slog, a gauntlet of attrition where the heroes hardly even know their purpose or what resources there are. The whole backdrop has been altered to suit this need. Awesome, right? But also difficult to juggle, difficult to keep consistent NPC interactions, to build a suite of flavorful settings, all with subsettings within should the PCs search for aid & resources. And since you've implied the PCs have better resources back home, it'll difficult to keep them stuck unless you force them onto a railroad plot. Even in a Noir genre, an RPG needs player choices, even if all the choices are bad or worse.
To take an example from my play history, one of my groups played a cyberpunk game (so a similar dark tone to Noir) where we journeyed cross country, the country being a mess of corruption & hazardous wastelands. Before the main campaign arc began, we ran quite a few missions to learn the game mechanics, setting, and our own PCs. This was all run with published material & modules (and the GM had spent a year or so prepping!), so lots of details, NPCs, & factions were in play. We made contacts, girlfriends, rivals, & enemies over a dozen or so sessions.
Yay.
And the campaign imploded immediately after we left on the journey. As competent agents & resourceful players, the story couldn't hold us. "Why don't we just _____?" became a norm whenever the story tried to railroad our options. Attack us with a helicopter? Good, now we have a friggin' helicopter and can just fly away! Oops...
Have time to investigate side stories? How can we when we're in a time crunch for our main goal and being pursued? We're the fish out of water, so why are you asking us to help, "stranger I have no emotional connection with"? And who knows what direction we'll go to evade pursuit because of course we don't want to go the obvious direction, right? GM headaches abound. We even revamped to a new game system to try to keep the story alive. Nope.
Oddly enough, we're now in a fantasy setting in a published adventure with an epic scope where we're on a journey again (as pursuers this time). So why exactly are we supposed to be caring about a random village's missing chicken when the empire's about to erupt into a religious civil war? Awkward...but hey, we need to level up, right? (And yes, published by a major company.)
So while travel could work as the backbone of the story arc, I wouldn't recommend it, especially not for the OP asking for advice in a genre which relies on background & recurring NPCs so very much. I'd recommend building locally, with lots of note cards for NPCs. And faces, download some pictures. Of course, locally in SF could be large, depending on how far one wants to spread the misery and whether you really need Starship battles.
Cheers.
Lane's stuff
My stuff.
1. It's not the real world, it's Starfinder fantasy science. Travel isn't stressful and neither is changing jobs (unless the GM takes pains to make it so, which might backfire). For an adventurer, both are to be expected. What steps would a GM take to make travel stressful, but also appealing, and a choice rather than forced? Sure, packages need to be delivered, but why so far? And if so far, isn't the travel becoming the main arc? The best parts of the story you gave could take place in one city, even up to being cut off from resources by circumstances.
2. Apply your road trip example to the setting at hand. Are you suggesting getting rid of drift travel? Less tech? Different economics? How does not being able to afford travel match up with being able to afford level appropriate gear? Wouldn't Icons & Outlaws be able to get the resources? How iffy is communication or transport?
3. I agree travel could be a regular part of Noir, but we're at square one here. I wouldn't recommend it until home is home (as cruddy as it might be, it has its charm, etc, etc). And if traveling, no side quests. Seriously, they're a distraction that degrades the story to video-game level. This doesn't mean there can't be a lot of stories interwoven, but they shouldn't be patched on like side quests tend to be. Any story idea worth pursuing (and worth heavy-handed tactics like stranding the PCs) could most likely take place on their home turf where consequences have deeper and more long term repercussions. (Note: I wouldn't call all of your examples side quests because some are woven into the main arc.)
4. I actually like wandering monsters if the setting warrants it, but I don't see much of that in Noir unless there's just a freakin' lot of crime in the city. And then it should likely be orchestrated, even if seemingly random, each encounter tied to some faction, or with some sense of backstory. "That nameless hood you offed down by the port, turns out his sister's a major smuggler and he was just getting his thrills while waiting for a big shipment."
5. I'm not sure I agree there can be lots of travel without travel (or vagrancy) being the focus. The large story you mention where each stop can take days or weeks, that seems fine on paper (and great for a written story), but I don't think would work well here. (See examples I gave in previous post.) You don't want the players to feel shuffled along a railroad. And in Noir, the PCs should have enough problems to deal with without having to take on the burdens of every locality they stumble into.
6. Yes, there are patches & variants & success stories & so forth. But we're giving advice, so I suggest again the OP stick to one setting & a plethora of players & nobodies for the PCs to interact with. As they say, there are millions of stories in the big city. Now weave them together.
Blade Runner had off-world colonies and starship battles with androids.
I believe scarcity is really the key to play a noir campaign, just rein in the extravagant technology and keep the players grounded in a single planet - due to lack of resources to move out.
The Pact Worlds setting has a place for that: the planet Akiton.
Blade Runner had off-world colonies and starship battles with androids.
I believe scarcity is really the key to play a noir campaign, just rein in the extravagant technology and keep the players grounded in a single planet - due to lack of resources to move out.
The Pact Worlds setting has a place for that: the planet Akiton.
I agree. Creating a noir Starfinder campaign is likely to involve a lot of choosing what not to include from the Core Rulebook and other setting guides and materials. The setting has a lot of flexibility. I'm focusing my own on the conspiracy hunter genre and retro-fitting a lot of material from the d20 Modern Dark*Matter campaign setting, for example.