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Yora
2017-12-06, 10:47 AM
Before anyone gets super pedantic (and I am certain someone will, very soon): By Noir I am refering to the wider style, including contemporary Neo-Noir, and not only to 1940s detective stories. By High Fantasy I mean a self contained fantasy world with elves, dwarves, knights, and wizards, regardless of narratives and characters. No need to debate exact definitions. (Though I am certain someone will, very soon.)

Now to the actual matter at hand.The vast majority of my favorite works of fictions revolve around characters who live removed from normal society and have dealings almost only with the shady underworld, inhabiting a world where betrayal and deception are common and everyone is trying to outsmart everyone else, and if that doesn't work just kill them dead. Which for most intends and purposes could be summed up as noir. A nice thing about it is that it works in pretty much every time and in every place, including completely made up fantasy and sci-fi settings. Thief 2 and 3 are great examples of Fantasy Noir. Hellboy is a hugely succesful Fantasy Noir comic. Planescape Torment is as pitch black noir as it can get. Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell are THE big Sci-Fi Noir movies. Is Call of Cthulhu Urban Fantasy Noir?

It seems to me like something that should have a lot of potential for running an RPG campaign and setting it in an otherwise pretty normal looking fantasy world.
What elements are needed or highly conductive to running a campaign that feels noir and is fun to play? How would a GM plan and run a campaign? I would be very happy about any advice or even just ideas and thought that anyone might have to contribute to this.

I think that at the very core, noir is primarily about mood. It is dark, but it's not about ruins and squalor and not about gore or horror. An association that comes to my mind very quickly is decadence. People are indulgent, but often in a self-destructive way and you can easily tell that there's not going to be a happy ending at the end of the paths they are taking. Noir is about extreme selfishness. Villains will betray everyone if it benefits them in the short run, while heroes try to outsmart those who they think will betray them. The goal is not to defeat and kill your enemies, but to get the thing you want and get away with it.

Martin Greywolf
2017-12-06, 11:42 AM
I guess I'll get pedantic, then. Noir is one of those genres that suffers from being associated with a setting rather closely, and suffers for it, so you technically can't have noir in fantasy. But it's the JRPG problem - Dark Souls was made in japan and is an RPG, yet it clearly isn't a JRPG. So let's agree that standing definition of noir is a tad silly and move on.

What we want here is to basically look at the mood and the general message of noir and repaint it with elves. Noir as such thrives on the dichotomy between idealism and cynicism, and takes the stance that while a person may be a decent fellow, people as a group can't by their nature, and tends to focus on what the people as such do to the one decent fellow.

So I agree that Thief and Hellboy are noir, but I'm not so sure about Plansecape: Torment - the PCs problems are all of his own making. That said, genre borders are a fuzzy thing, and Torment certainly borrows from noir a lot.

Call of Cthulhu isn't noir as is, though, albeit it can be if the DM bends a few things. CoC is, at its core, about the inability of anyone to really matter in the grand scheme of things - Cthulhu does loose in that one novel specifically because of the fact that, while powerful, is is just as unimportant in the grand scheme of things as Joe Average - and that is a scary thought.

A good example of fantasy noir is the Witcher series - Sapkowski was more influenced by general post-Soviet cynycism (see Lukjanenko and Night Watch book series, or Strugatsky brothers for more) than straight up using noir as inspiration, but the games themselves took a touch more from them, and both noir and Sapkowski/Lukjanenko/Strugatsky style have a lot in common in the first place.

I don't think that you can have noir in high fantasy by definition - high fantasy means more or less Tolkien-like, and that kind of high level conflict of ideals doesn't mesh well with smaller stories noir thrives on. You can, with some difficulty, have noir and high fantasy in one universe, just not in one story - anyone familiar with fanfiction can wrap their head around this, I'm sure.

Zombimode
2017-12-06, 11:56 AM
Eberron, the city of Sharn to be specific, seems to be made for exactly this.

Tinkerer
2017-12-06, 12:02 PM
A sufficiently large city breeds several opportunities for noir style fiction. Waterdeep for instance was my go to for several noir style stories. Major players moving small pieces who are each trying to desperately clutch to their own scrap of something. Everyone paranoid due to not knowing who is actually connected to whom. Being stupidly easy to get in way over your XP level head. Yeah, I'd say a merchant city has tons of opportunity for a noir style adventure.

Yora
2017-12-06, 12:58 PM
So I agree that Thief and Hellboy are noir, but I'm not so sure about Plansecape: Torment - the PCs problems are all of his own making.
But isn't that also one of the main elements? Other people may be bastards, but in the end all the bad things that happen to you keep happening because of you. Noir is all about flawed protagonists who end up being the source of their own misery, after only a slight nudge from someone more ruthless than them at the beginning. As the Joker says it "All it takes is a little push".

Really not sure if you can make this work with a party of PCs. True noir is probably too much about individual introperspective for a group of players who play by talking. But it's something that could be very well captured by NPCs, both opponents and allies.


Eberron, the city of Sharn to be specific, seems to be made for exactly this.
It clearly was the intention, but did it actually do anything specific to support and evoke that effect? That would be most helpful here.

MintyNinja
2017-12-06, 01:29 PM
I would like to recommend reading the Dresden Files novels if you have the time for it. The first few are most Noir-esque, but the series bends quickly towards Urban Fantasy after that. I don't know how the Dresden Files system pans out, as I've never been able to play it, but maybe the novels will give you inspiration.

EDIT: Specifically start with Storm Front, the first book and the most Noir of the series.

Scripten
2017-12-06, 02:40 PM
Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. series is probably the most precise example of what OP is looking for. It's nothing more or less than The Big Sleep meets D&D.

2D8HP
2017-12-06, 03:44 PM
Before anyone gets super pedantic.....
You rang?

:smile:

Sword and Sorcery (as named by Fritz Leiber in the 1960's to describe the type of fantasy adventures written by Robert E. Howard in the 1930's for Weird Tales magazine) does have some resemblances with the "hard-boiled" detective stories such as those written by Dashell Hammet for Black Mask in the '20's and '30's, which were the inspiration of "noir" films such as The Maltese Falcon.

The "pulp" ethos of characters like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe isn't that far from characters like Conan and the Gray Mouser.

I would straight up steal be inspired by the set-up of The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, etc. The trick is to make them properly Swords & Sorcery you need a hint of "uncanny" supernatural elements, but even then there you don't need much, like in Leiber's Two Best Thieves of Lankhmar story which could quite easily be a 20th century pulp crime short story.

Cyberpunk, Noir, and Swords & Sorcery share a certain atmosphere of corruption that makes stealing plots worthwhile.

Anonymouswizard
2017-12-06, 05:39 PM
To me noir means a (relatively) small setting and a conflict with (relatively) personal stakes, with a tendency towards the unsavory elements of society.

This means that for fantasy noir (ignoring the high fantasy bit, as the inclusion of other races doesn't change much) I'd focus on a city instead of a kingdom, and have one plot dominate the campaign. Work with the players to give them personal stakes in the story, and keep it low key. They're not fighting to save the city, their goal is to recover an item or five a missing person. Sue, there maybe be something bigger connected, but the PCs are interacting with it on the small scale.

I'd also significantly cut down available equipment, but maybe add some more in. Heavy armour is out of this is taking place in a city, as are most heavy weapons. This points towards a swashbuckling aesthetic, with rapiers and daggers, so let's add pistols to the mix. Most NPCs either wear no armour or a buffcoat, wielding a dagger in your off hand gives +1 defence in melee, and other minor touches gives us a swashbuckling noir setting. So lets add in some fantasy elements, illusionists that disguise illegal establishments, PI clerics, and maybe a mixture of elf and dwarf inhabitants to the city. Goblins employed to keep the sewers clean, all that stuff.

Scots Dragon
2017-12-06, 05:53 PM
It might be worth looking at the Discworld, Thraxas, and Bas-Lag novels for ideas on how to merge the two tones, since some of those do it extremely well.

Mechalich
2017-12-06, 06:09 PM
The problem with Noir in gaming is that most people want noir elements and consequences to be things that happen to other people, not themselves and not their characters.

Take Planescape: Torment as an example - the better you are at the game (or if you use a walkthrough) the less the noir influences you and the more you can outsmart the various traps and bypass nasty compromises you are intended to make, to the point where you and utterly own the final boss and send all your companions off with a smile (okay you can't save yourself, but you can save a bunch of other people from damnation). The better Planescape as noir example is the novel Pages of Pain - which is noir to the max but would be an incredibly miserable adventure.

Gamers are not good at embracing 'life sucks, you will lose, your characters will suffer' as a gameplay model. This is how Vampire: the Masquerade was originally intended to be played - every character would eventually lose all their humanity and go mad. It's also how almost no one actually played the game at table and went off to have crime-fighting 'vampions' adventures with katanas under their coats instead. The novella Ill Met in Lankhmar (arguably the most famous of these stories since it won the Hugo and the Nebula) involves Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser losing they only women they will ever truly love because they offended a sorcerer and there is not a thing they can do about it. Just try pulling that kind of stunt at a gaming table and see how it goes over.

Being able to do noir-inspired stories in a tabletop environment is far more dependent on your players being willing to accept it than all other factors put together. You can find a piece of almost any fantasy setting where decadence reigns and the dominant characters are self-indulgent and self-destructive - you can even do this in FR, just set the campaign in Zhentil Keep - but you have to make it clear that 'start the revolution!' is not in the cards when you do something like this.

As such, if you want to go down this road, find some players you trust and tease them with something moderately noir-ish to make sure that producing a noir campaign won't result in flipped tables.

Yora
2017-12-07, 01:31 AM
Cyberpunk, Noir, and Swords & Sorcery share a certain atmosphere of corruption that makes stealing plots worthwhile.
Corruption certainly is a must. But in the context of fantasy, what does it mean? Bribery and neoptism should certainly be part of the game, no question there. But when we also have supernatural forces at work then we can also work magical or demonic corruption into it. Maybe we can even blend the two together?


To me noir means a (relatively) small setting and a conflict with (relatively) personal stakes, with a tendency towards the unsavory elements of society.

This means that for fantasy noir (ignoring the high fantasy bit, as the inclusion of other races doesn't change much) I'd focus on a city instead of a kingdom, and have one plot dominate the campaign. Work with the players to give them personal stakes in the story, and keep it low key. They're not fighting to save the city, their goal is to recover an item or five a missing person. Sue, there maybe be something bigger connected, but the PCs are interacting with it on the small scale.
I would say noir is inherently urban in nature. Noir is perhaps the total opposite of the classic fantasy journey quest. Every adventure is centered around a single place, though I think short trips to the outskirts up to a day's travel away could still work very well. But after that it's straight back to the city where all the various strands are coming together.
For a longer campaign, I think moving between different cities would be possible. But there is a huge benefit from having established contacts with known NPCs. That's something that would get lost when moving between cities and not revisiting them regularly.


Being able to do noir-inspired stories in a tabletop environment is far more dependent on your players being willing to accept it than all other factors put together. You can find a piece of almost any fantasy setting where decadence reigns and the dominant characters are self-indulgent and self-destructive - you can even do this in FR, just set the campaign in Zhentil Keep - but you have to make it clear that 'start the revolution!' is not in the cards when you do something like this.

As such, if you want to go down this road, find some players you trust and tease them with something moderately noir-ish to make sure that producing a noir campaign won't result in flipped tables.

I think it needs to be established that the campaign is going to have a pretty flat power curve. Either by picking an appropriate system, or when playing something like D&D restricting the campaign to E6 or Heroic Tier, or something like that. One of the fascinating elements of detective noir stories is that the balance of power in a scene can completely flip at any time, depending entirely on who is holding the gun. Characters that are otherwise weak or seemingly helpless can have complete control over a scene when they hold a gun and the other characters do not. It's the opposite of a steep power curve and long level progression.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-12-07, 08:41 AM
I wouldn't think it's hard to do. Any intrigue-heavy game in an urban setting is about halfway there. Keep the stakes low, stay in the shady side of the setting, make sure there are plenty of twists, and you're about there.

I dunno about decadence as a normal staple, but "self-destructive characters" certainly is not. "Suckers for a pretty face," maybe, but classic noir at least usually features good men struggling in a seedy world.

Fri
2017-12-07, 08:59 AM
I have a description of the genre, which even if it might not be entirely accurate or always applicable (what is?), I always like.


If a private eye is hired by an old geezer to prove his wife’s cheating on him and the shamus discovers long-buried family secrets and solves a couple of murders before returning to his lonely office – that’s detective fiction. If the same private eye gets seduced by the geezer’s wife, kills the old coot for her, gets double-crossed by his lover and ends up shot to death by his old partner from the police force – I can say with complete assurance: you are wallowing in NOIR."

Add mood music, sprinkle your campaign with elaborate description about ceiling fans and smoke, and give players who do private eye monologue before an act a bonus advantage, and you're golden :smalltongue:

Yora
2017-12-07, 09:30 AM
Well, that's not really going to work in a standard fantasy setting or in an campaign. But getting pulled into other peoples' plot is certainly the bread and butter of noir.

Anonymouswizard
2017-12-07, 11:19 AM
I would say noir is inherently urban in nature. Noir is perhaps the total opposite of the classic fantasy journey quest. Every adventure is centered around a single place, though I think short trips to the outskirts up to a day's travel away could still work very well. But after that it's straight back to the city where all the various strands are coming together.
For a longer campaign, I think moving between different cities would be possible. But there is a huge benefit from having established contacts with known NPCs. That's something that would get lost when moving between cities and not revisiting them regularly.

Yeah, I was kind of more focused on the single story/arc, because that's my campaign experience, but I can totally see that working.


I think it needs to be established that the campaign is going to have a pretty flat power curve. Either by picking an appropriate system, or when playing something like D&D restricting the campaign to E6 or Heroic Tier, or something like that. One of the fascinating elements of detective noir stories is that the balance of power in a scene can completely flip at any time, depending entirely on who is holding the gun. Characters that are otherwise weak or seemingly helpless can have complete control over a scene when they hold a gun and the other characters do not. It's the opposite of a steep power curve and long level progression.

Hmmmm... a bit more magic than your average setting might help here. If everybody is a weak mage, then being the only one with a wand at the ready might be a major advantage, as nobody else can effectively launch offensive spells.

2D8HP
2017-12-07, 11:48 AM
Corruption certainly is a must. But in the context of fantasy, what does it mean? Bribery and neoptism should certainly be part of the game, no question there. But when we also have supernatural forces at work then we can also work magical or demonic corruption into it. Maybe we can even blend the two together?....
Well I'm big on the use of magic is corrupting itself.

One way is that dark deeds are used to effect magic (the classic is human sacrifice), another is that the use of magic changes reality in unsettling ways (Dark Sun had using magic blight nature), and there's always the staple of the use of magic attracts demons. The Call of Cthullu RPG, just had learning magic driving one insane (similar to going "cyber-psycho" in the old Cyberpunk RPG), so that's an option, perhaps Sorcery eventually turns one into a demon?

Combine the ideas!

For "greater good" or ill motives a sorcerer commits dark deeds to effect a spell. The spell leaves a residue of pollution, and a monster (ghost) inhabits where the spell has wrought.

To make it more "Noir-ish" make the motivation to cast the spell lust.

Think of a classic, Merlin's transformation of King Uther into a semblance of Duke Gorlois so that Uther could have a night with Igraine, besides siring Arthur, could that spell be what "enchanted" Britain (giants etc.)?

Another option is make magic a non-renewable resource ala The Magic Goes Away by Niven (though IIRC Necromancy could temporarily replenish manna), so that "great spells" deplete magic.

One story had a werewolf try to prevent the use of spells, because with manna gone all werewolves (passed genetically) would stay wolves, not human.

Swords & Sorcery has uncanny supernatural elements.

Noir looks askew at human morals.

Make the motives and the magic "dark".

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-07, 12:12 PM
I think you can have a noir atmosphere without being confined to a strict noir plot formula.

Fiction and gaming are related, but they're not the same thing. In fiction, the author(s) can decide that the characters make the bad choices that lead them to ruin, and have those choices play out. No real person's fun is tramped on by this creative course.

In a game, however, forcing the players to act out a "formula" of predetermined hopelessness just isn't something that's going to be universally enjoyed. It's one thing to give them opportunities to fail, to make the wrong decision, to slip and hurt something they care about... it's another thing entirely to make this inevitable no matter what choices they make.

Going back to the VtM example, most people didn't play it that way because melodramatically chewing a giant angstburger while going through the motions of inevitable doom is, IMO, boring as hell, and maybe even a bit juvenile.


One problem that might be encountered with running a noir atmosphere in a typical high-fantasy setting is avoiding powers (spells, etc) that insta-solve mysteries and uncover lies. Divination, always a problem with mystery plots in such settings, could easily become a plotwrecker, for example.

Yora
2017-12-07, 12:31 PM
I like the idea of magic being poluting. When you use it, it stays around in the place it was used and it sticks to people who are passing through even later.

In the Stalker games, the anomalies are not actually caused by radiation but happen to appear in an already irradiated area. You could make it that magic messes with the rules of nature and weakens them so you can detect the spells even weeks and months later. And people who have been to highly corrupted areas not only get weird, they also spread the corruption around
It's a great setup to make magic highly illegal in many places, which makes magical items great goods for high value smuggling. Mysterious lead lined caskets are great quest items.

Regarding guns and magic wands, you could also have various miscellaneous magic items that anyone can use, even with limited arcane knowledge. Pulling one out can instantly change a whole encounter.
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/d/d1/RotJ_Leia_holding_Thermal_Detonator.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/200?cb=20150128060443

Grod_The_Giant
2017-12-07, 03:21 PM
One problem that might be encountered with running a noir atmosphere in a typical high-fantasy setting is avoiding powers (spells, etc) that insta-solve mysteries and uncover lies. Divination, always a problem with mystery plots in such settings, could easily become a plotwrecker, for example.
That's a setting thing more than anything else. And even then, modern forensics can be pretty impressive (at least when fictionalized), and you can still tell modern mysteries. As long as the divinations operate by a knowable and foil-able set of rules, you should be fine. "Damn, he cut the security feed before going in" becomes "Damn, he laid down a salt circle before doing in."

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-07, 03:22 PM
That's a setting thing more than anything else. And even then, modern forensics can be pretty impressive (at least when fictionalized), and you can still tell modern mysteries. As long as the divinations operate by a knowable and foil-able set of rules, you should be fine. "Damn, he cut the security feed before going in" becomes "Damn, he laid down a salt circle before doing in."

Ironically, the way Hollywood treats security systems and computers as "magical", those tropes might work better with actual magic.

Nifft
2017-12-07, 03:26 PM
There was a decent investigation system by Robin Laws called Gumshoe.

There are links to the various games built with it here: http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/the-gumshoe-system-reference-document/

IIRC there was some good advice in at least one of those about running an investigation game in a magical setting.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-07, 03:47 PM
There was a decent investigation system by Robin Laws called Gumshoe.

There are links to the various games built with it here: http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/the-gumshoe-system-reference-document/

IIRC there was some good advice in at least one of those about running an investigation game in a magical setting.

That's interesting, will take a look.

E: post below mine makes me less enthusiastic. ;-)

Grod_The_Giant
2017-12-07, 03:48 PM
There was a decent investigation system by Robin Laws called Gumshoe.

There are links to the various games built with it here: http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/the-gumshoe-system-reference-document/

IIRC there was some good advice in at least one of those about running an investigation game in a magical setting.
I was not particularly impressed by Gumshoe, actually. The much-vaunted focus on investigation boils down to "everyone has to take investigation skills off a big list, which automatically find you clues," and the rest looks clunky and un-fun. You're probably better off grafting that one idea into a more interesting system.

Yora
2017-12-07, 03:53 PM
I would say that noir tends to be very plot heavy and concentrates on a small cast of memorable characters in a confined setting. Transposing this into an RPG, I think that such elements as random encounters and resource management are mostly out of place. In this particular style, the journey really isn't the destination. When the players want to go to a place, you can just skip right to the front door and take it from there. If the party runs into someone along the way, I think it has to be someone who is looking spcifically for them. You don't run into random bandits, but into bandits working for the villain. Watchmen don't appear randomly, but when there is a risk of them reporting the PCs presence to a villain.
When it comes to monsters, they would be very much underused if they just appear randomly. When a monster appears, then it better be serving a villain, be a villain, or appear in response to something nasty that has been done. The monster should be story relevant and it's presence mean something.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-07, 04:01 PM
I would say that noir tends to be very plot heavy and concentrates on a small cast of memorable characters in a confined setting. Transposing this into an RPG, I think that such elements as random encounters and resource management are mostly out of place. In this particular style, the journey really isn't the destination. When the players want to go to a place, you can just skip right to the front door and take it from there. If the party runs into someone along the way, I think it has to be someone who is looking spcifically for them. You don't run into random bandits, but into bandits working for the villain. Watchmen don't appear randomly, but when there is a risk of them reporting the PCs presence to a villain.

When it comes to monsters, they would be very much underused if they just appear randomly. When a monster appears, then it better be serving a villain, be a villain, or appear in response to something nasty that has been done. The monster should be story relevant and it's presence mean something.


With noir, perhaps most of the opponents should be "humans" (or the like) and more (not all or even most, just more) of the challenges should be constrained in that they aren't solvable with open bloodshed (as the authorities tend to look askance at people killing each other in broad daylight even in "medieval" cities).

Which isn't to say that opponents should all be linked to the plot or the antagonists directly. Trying to question someone in a seedy tavern might tick off the other patrons who just don't like nosy people poking around in their favorite dive, leading to a "bar fight", which attracts the watch, which etc.

Yora
2017-12-08, 05:24 AM
Focusing too much on one narrow situation is indeed probably not a good idea. A common theme in noir is that the protagonists find themselves in a situation where they can keep going on the offensive and probably get killed, or they can save themselves by accepting they've been beaten and walk away. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." is a great ending. Both outcomes can be the "good ending" for a story, but either way you won't get a happily ever after.
However, to make the option to leave things be and walk away a reasonable choice in an RPG, it can't just be the option to "stop playing the game". Players need to have a range of other things thery can continue focusing on and continuing the campaign.

I am suspecting that the best setup for such a campaign would be a City of Adventure where there are multiple factions having different goals and are simultaneously working on their plans. If the players cede defeat in one conflict, they should still have work to do with some other ongoing conflicts.You want an ongoing continuity instead of basically disconnected oneshots. You can do that with regular detective stories, but those tend to have clear resolutions and closure. The lack of these and the prominence of ambigous endings is one of big aspects that shapes the noir style for me.
But since you don't want to have every potential plot hook be completely obvious with a big red arrow, you probably do need some encounters that are actually totally random and not directly relevant to anything. And the players could always make a friend or enemy for the future. And if nothing else, random confrontations are opportunities for players to discover and define their characters. How they react in charged and dangerous situations will shape how they see their characters as persons in the future.

Joe the Rat
2017-12-11, 10:53 AM
I would like to recommend reading the Dresden Files novels if you have the time for it. The first few are most Noir-esque, but the series bends quickly towards Urban Fantasy after that. I don't know how the Dresden Files system pans out, as I've never been able to play it, but maybe the novels will give you inspiration.

EDIT: Specifically start with Storm Front, the first book and the most Noir of the series.
Some of the later short stories keep this, particularly those with the not-Harry POV. Check out Side Jobs.

On the system; Dresden Files uses a modified version of FATE (and Fate Accelerated), which at base can do Noir relatively well via FATE points. The GM can offer you extra points for playing to your foibles or forcing your ideals, which gives you more juice for the finale. Or you keep yourself untarnished, but you will struggle more to win. But as with all things FATE - and really for this kind of theme in general, you really need the player buy-in.

And you also need to resolve how to deal with an "every man for himself" theme with a semi-cooperative game. A small group (2-3) is thematic; more than that, and the party really ought to be an alliance of convenience.

Yora
2018-01-08, 04:17 PM
I would like to come back to Planescape Torment: I still think that this game is aesthetically as pitch black noir as it can get, even if the plot might not be classic stereotpical noir in the most narrow sense. Whatever you want to see it as, I don't think anyone would deny that it does look and feel very much like noir. It's been ages since I played the game and I never completed it, so my memory isn't that great with all the details.
What would you say does the game do that are adding to the noir atmosphere and that one could adopt into a campaign?

The most obvious parts I would say are that the game mostly takes place in a filthy city with an eternally grey sky. The one part I remember that takes place somewhere else is a filthy desert town. This certainly sets the stage.
The companions you meet are all weird. They don't fit into what is normal for Planescape. Even in this strange environment that mixes everything between heaven and hell, they don't belong. A fallen succubus? A rogue modron? Morte, Ignus, Vhailor, and the Nameless One shouldn't exist by the established rules of D&D. A tiefling from the gutter is the most normal character in the whole group, and you probably can't get any lower than that in Sigil.
Also, people who helped you with information latter getting mysteriously killed.

Another case of noir in fantasy that I remembered turns out to be Dragon Age II, particularly the second act.
Everyone is scared by a company of Qunari, basically giant fanatical warrior monks with a history of large scale conquests, setting up camp in the harbor and not making any moves to go anywhere. Things go sour when they initiate two wanted murderers into their religion who killed someone who had been threatening their sister and the city watch couldn't do anything to keep him away. The Qunari say that they are now Qunari and they deal with their own people and city law doesn't apply to them. The city has been very accomodating to the Qunari to not piss them off, but they can't let them openly shield wanted murderers so you have to pursuade them to hand them over. Nice morally ambigous situation where you really don't want things to escalate because you're dealing with a hundred or so fanatical elite warriors who are super touchy.

Great parts of the local church really don't like the Qunari on principle because they are heathens who are just as agressively at forced conversion of the whole world as they are. There is a great sidequest line about a priestess inviting you to a secret meeting accompanied by her big bodyguard and she would like you to help her smuggle a mute Qunari mage out of the city because he wants to abandon the Qunari ways and his brothers would kill him for that. It's all a lie and a setup to make the qunari think you murdered a patrol and kidnapped a mage. Later she organizes a mob to lynch qunari and whip the city up to kill the whole group. She escapes and is an overall horrible person about it. You can report her to the high priestess who doesn't approve at all and wishes peace with the qunari, but who won't punish her to not get on the bad side of the mob. In a very nice scene she turns around to leave and a Qunari assassin shots the traitorous priestess dead with an arrow in the middle of the temple. The high priestess just continues her way out the door. A great story about an elegant lady asking for your help with a charitable mission that turns out to be a big political conspiracy that ends in massive bloodshed and counter betrayal.

In the end, it turns out that the Qunari have been in the city the whole time because someone stole a most holy relic from them. That someone turns out to be one of your party members. Who needs it to buy off a bounty on her head by a crime lord. Again, a desparate character willing to sacrifice others to save herself while being in trouble for having had a moment of noble consciousness after chosing a life of crime.

There is also a related questline about stolen plans for advanced chemical weapons and an unrelated questline about a fantastical version of a Buffalo Bill style serial killer. And a second main storyline about a macguffin artifact that pops up now and again to make people murderously insane. And of course that WTF moment that triggers the end game.
Where a supposedly good and noble friend blows up a public building during business hours. For a good cause.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-08, 06:46 PM
I think a major problem is player-buy in and DM preparation. The Noir game probably works best with a smaller, tighter cast and limited locations. Powerful foes are also going to win in some way even if they don't win in the end. Communicating these ideas is going to be essential.

The DM might have more prep work. Getting player characters to care about potentially volatile NPCs is going to be an issue. Establishing a Noir game is going to make people jumpy about anyone and everyone. And what happens if an NPC just doesn't click? You can't as easily just abandon or kill off unliked NPCs. Emotional connections are hard enough, overcoming natural PC insticts is just adding to the hurdle. I'm not saying Yora's players are all metagaming jerks, but its going to be a tendency that even seasoned roleplayers are going to have to overcome.

Yora
2018-01-09, 03:07 AM
I wouldn't try to fight the players' instincts on what they want their characters to do. If they don't end up playing a Raymond Chandler character, that's fine. I find it much more worthwhile to focus on how you present the world, the NPCs, and their problems to evoke basically any style you want to go with. If players want something from NPCs, they have to learn to talk the language of the world they are in. When you make use of a lot of well known archetypes, players will quickly grasp in what kind of world they are and instinctively fall in step with it. They might very well not fall into a specific role common for protagonists of that setting, but it will be a role that is fitting into that environment.

Florian
2018-01-09, 06:24 AM
I wouldn't try to fight the players' instincts on what they want their characters to do. If they don't end up playing a Raymond Chandler character, that's fine. I find it much more worthwhile to focus on how you present the world, the NPCs, and their problems to evoke basically any style you want to go with. If players want something from NPCs, they have to learn to talk the language of the world they are in. When you make use of a lot of well known archetypes, players will quickly grasp in what kind of world they are and instinctively fall in step with it. They might very well not fall into a specific role common for protagonists of that setting, but it will be a role that is fitting into that environment.

I think the big point is the dichotomy between how the world works and how we want the world to work. "Noir" paints a very honest but bleak picture on capitalism, power and the Rule of Law, how those interact. Part of it is about how unfair it is that "the cheater" will always be ahead of "the honest guy" because of the difference in how thing work and how things ought to work.

Lvl 2 Expert
2018-01-09, 07:47 AM
Underworld stories in general work well if there's something to be gained, but more to be lost. Get rich or die trying, basically. A world where with the right talent, education, connections or items you can cast world changing spells certainly has things to be gained. So I'd probably suggest a pretty dark flip side for that coin to balance it out. A crowded inner city, with more people pouring in every day because life in the country isn't safe, and farming doesn't bring home enough dough. Half the city lives in unsafe apartments, in a shed at the rivers edge or on a rooftop somewhere or in a dark and dank basement with a hole in the side of the street as its only entrance. Competition is cut throat, figuratively in the still relatively clean world of a simple street merchant, but as soon as you get into a bit too much debt, **** becomes very real.

Is that still noir? Not sure. The high fantasy side steers the whole thing towards being on steroids, while noir is often relatively subdued. The cool private eye looks at his gun but closes the drawer again, it's easier to get shot when you're carrying. In a high fantasy RPG (or any RPG really, because players) that detective would probably bring the hardest hitting thing they could find, plus a bunch of backup wands if he can get them, everything from cure x wounds to smoke screen and entanglement spells. Because have you seen the dangers in this world? But you can definitely do a mobster story like that.

To bring home how bad the odds are maybe limit the PC's unfairly. Play E6 in a world which clearly has higher level characters. Not the average goon coming to deliver a sharp message in a dark alley, but certainly the crime boss running the show, and the corrupt nobleman, and the unhelpful court wizard. You're more likely to stay in the shadows if people are looking to cut your head off.

Florian
2018-01-09, 08:03 AM
@Lvl 2 Expert:

Itīs not "underworld stories". Itīs getting told that a "good job" will be a "good living", but contrasts that with the war veteran or average joe only driving an old beater while the drug lord and pimp drive the Porsche.

Yora
2018-01-09, 08:18 AM
I think the big point is the dichotomy between how the world works and how we want the world to work. "Noir" paints a very honest but bleak picture on capitalism, power and the Rule of Law, how those interact. Part of it is about how unfair it is that "the cheater" will always be ahead of "the honest guy" because of the difference in how thing work and how things ought to work.
Nobility is an inherently unfair system. I think this could be used to really great effect. The PC's can't be nobles or top rank clerics because that puts them at an advantage over the majority of people. The one way to get into the elite classes is through money and that comes with a lot of strings attached. Both merchant guilds and criminal gangs can easily be made very troublesome if players make any advances to take business to a level that brings them political power.


The cool private eye looks at his gun but closes the drawer again, it's easier to get shot when you're carrying. In a high fantasy RPG (or any RPG really, because players) that detective would probably bring the hardest hitting thing they could find, plus a bunch of backup wands if he can get them, everything from cure x wounds to smoke screen and entanglement spells. Because have you seen the dangers in this world? But you can definitely do a mobster story like that.
The temptation is always there, but it becomes much less attractive if your criminal and political underworld really works on the basis of favors. Oddly enough, the most important currency is trust. Or at the very least the trust that the other party is not going to stab you in the back over this specific thing you're dealing with right now. If you go to have a talk showing off your full offensive arsenal, the other side will very much be aware of the implied threat.
Maintaining appearances seems to be a high priority for a great lor of noir characters, even if it's all very obviously dishonest.

Which makes me thinking that another nice noir trait for fantasy would be somewhat absurd honor codes for the various underworld groups. Everyone is in it for power and money, and most of the time they desire to maintain the status quo. After all, it's an unfair society that very much puts them at an advantage. They might want to take out rivals and take over thir turf, but nobody really wants to threaten the stability of the system. Open war between any groups is bad, and it's also bad for the all the other groups who might be inclined to join forces against the troublemakers so that things can go back to normal again. I think when the PCs are invited for negotiations, the GM should never have the NPCs attempt to murder them in an ambush. Do that once and the players will always assume that every invitation is a trap and be very reluctant to agree to the rules of any honor code. The invitation can still be a trap to set them up or blackmail them, but the players should never feel like it could have been avoided if they came heavily armed and killed everyone who was waiting for them. When NPCs murder other NPCs at a negotiation, it should be made to be a really big deal by all the other NPCs who are massively outraged about it so the players know that this is something very uncommon.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-09, 09:54 AM
@Lvl 2 Expert:

Itīs not "underworld stories". Itīs getting told that a "good job" will be a "good living", but contrasts that with the war veteran or average joe only driving an old beater while the drug lord and pimp drive the Porsche.

This is true in certain circumstances, but not universally true -- neither side of that coin is universally true. I know (or have known) people who fall into all four boxes of that intersection.

A certain sort of noir (and several of the _____punk genres) operates on presenting the "good guys finish last, cheaters always prosper" aspect as a universal truth rather than a thing that sometimes happens.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-09, 10:01 AM
Nobility is an inherently unfair system. I think this could be used to really great effect. The PC's can't be nobles or top rank clerics because that puts them at an advantage over the majority of people. The one way to get into the elite classes is through money and that comes with a lot of strings attached. Both merchant guilds and criminal gangs can easily be made very troublesome if players make any advances to take business to a level that brings them political power.


The temptation is always there, but it becomes much less attractive if your criminal and political underworld really works on the basis of favors. Oddly enough, the most important currency is trust. Or at the very least the trust that the other party is not going to stab you in the back over this specific thing you're dealing with right now. If you go to have a talk showing off your full offensive arsenal, the other side will very much be aware of the implied threat.
Maintaining appearances seems to be a high priority for a great lor of noir characters, even if it's all very obviously dishonest.

Which makes me thinking that another nice noir trait for fantasy would be somewhat absurd honor codes for the various underworld groups. Everyone is in it for power and money, and most of the time they desire to maintain the status quo. After all, it's an unfair society that very much puts them at an advantage. They might want to take out rivals and take over thir turf, but nobody really wants to threaten the stability of the system. Open war between any groups is bad, and it's also bad for the all the other groups who might be inclined to join forces against the troublemakers so that things can go back to normal again. I think when the PCs are invited for negotiations, the GM should never have the NPCs attempt to murder them in an ambush. Do that once and the players will always assume that every invitation is a trap and be very reluctant to agree to the rules of any honor code. The invitation can still be a trap to set them up or blackmail them, but the players should never feel like it could have been avoided if they came heavily armed and killed everyone who was waiting for them. When NPCs murder other NPCs at a negotiation, it should be made to be a really big deal by all the other NPCs who are massively outraged about it so the players know that this is something very uncommon.

Agreed -- restrained violence, and the veneer of honor and civility, and punishing those who "get out of line", make for better noir atmosphere and tension than completely unrestrained chaos. The implied violence fits better than open violence.

GungHo
2018-01-09, 11:45 AM
As Martin Greywolf notes, there's quite a bit of noir (in the way you've defined it) in the Witcher games, even though they primarily sit in the realm of dark fantasy. You're dealing a lot with monsters, but some of the monsters are the sack of crap humans you do business with. Geralt's narration of the cut scenes after major decision points isn't done without stylistic reasons. The parallels to a hard-boiled Chandler novel aren't just limited to just doing the investigations of what killed who, but down to being used by people (and using people) to further their (your) agenda or hide their (your) true crimes. It's not all limited to an underworld or a low-level baron, either, but also by kings and sorceresses, and is happening just as much in the intrigues of the city, within a hamlet, or in the the encampment of an invading army.

Yora
2018-01-09, 12:10 PM
One of the most compelling things with the Witcher is that there's almost always a monster involved, but the monster is never the real problem. It always starts with a human who thought using a curse or a monster to sneakily get themselves some personal benefit and blaming it on something else. Or it's humans who stirred up a monster to distract from a purely human problem. That doesn't make the monsters innocent victims free of evil, but none of the tragedy would have happened if a human had not tried to exploit or harm another human.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-09, 12:15 PM
One of the most compelling things with the Witcher is that there's almost always a monster involved, but the monster is never the real problem. It always starts with a human who thought using a curse or a monster to sneakily get themselves some personal benefit and blaming it on something else. Or it's humans who stirred up a monster to distract from a purely human problem. That doesn't make the monsters innocent victims free of evil, but none of the tragedy would have happened if a human had not tried to exploit or harm another human.

I've only played Witcher III so far (gifted to me), but I did notice that's very often the case. Monsters either come from or feed on human actions and emotions -- if humans were even decent to each other most of the time, there'd be about 1/4 as many monsters it seems.

Florian
2018-01-09, 12:50 PM
I've only played Witcher III so far (gifted to me), but I did notice that's very often the case. Monsters either come from or feed on human actions and emotions -- if humans were even decent to each other most of the time, there'd be about 1/4 as many monsters it seems.

As usual, the games are just a shadow of the books and don't cover their depth all too well. Loved the Witcher series when I first stumbled upon it, pretty brilliant to handling "simple" monsters off scene and focus on there real monsters instead ...

Yora
2018-01-10, 01:27 PM
Today I was wondering if noir is compatible with horror? And I think it does, at least for a certain branch of horror. I think both ultra violent gore horror and cosmic Cthulhu horror both are right out. I feel like noir, even with its corruption and touches of bleakness, is still a very aesthetic style. It's decadent, rotten, and violent, but it also maintains this appearance of civility that has been mentioned. And part of the bleakness is that the corrupt system is extremely stable. Society seems to change a lot, but the rich and well connected getting away with everything is a constant that remains in place throughout all of history. Always has been, always will be. This just doesn't line up with a horror that destroys all and makes no exception for anyone.

As mentioned with the Witcher, the true evil are humans. And I think you can create a, comperatively low key, horror that is about the evil humans do. And the horror that they can get away with it if they have the right connections. The heroes can take out the murderers and perhaps also their employer, but they can't put an end to the conspiracy and prevent the horrific events from happening again. Two examples I can think of are Sin City and True Detective, which are both far more appalling than I would ever want to get with a game. And they both have clear Neo-Noir influences.

I think it should be possible to take aspects of this kind of horror into a campaign, and also at a lower level, with less extreme cases of torment and sufering. The Witcher 3 does it a couple of times with the most outstanding questlines. And the isolation and paranoia that come with it are a very appropriate element to the whole noir asthetic. I can't think of any specific examples right now, but I believe that many of the old 40s movies also used a good number of techniques you would find in horror movies. Like the dark alleys, or sneaking around a dark place and realizing there is someone else there.

Florian
2018-01-10, 03:21 PM
Hm.... Iīd say that a huge part of it is the difference between the world as we want it to be and the world how it actually works. The law-abiding working-class Joe will never have the money, or social status gained by it, a measure of success, that Joe the pimp, drug lord or guns dealer has.

This will have a huge impact on "Horror" and where the actual shock value comes from.

LibraryOgre
2018-01-10, 04:00 PM
Grab The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust (http://amzn.to/2mfJ8ql)

Vlad Taltos is a human assassin in an empire of elves*. Early in the series, which is supposed to end up at 19 books long (book 15 was released in October), Vlad is a member of organized crime, and most of his assassination targets are other members of organized crime who have crossed someone, or people who have crossed organized crime. There's a heavy air of noir, though Brust will frequently veer into other genres with different novels, and the series is not in chronological order (Hawk, book 14, takes place right after Vallista, book 15, and Tiassa, book 13, might have hints as to what happens in the as-yet-unwritten Chreothra, and several of them reference a separate series he wrote, a trilogy which has 5 books in it)

However, the Dragaeran Empire, at the time of Vlad Taltos (in the reign of Zerika the First, that is), is a very high-magic place. Teleportation is common, as is bringing someone back from the dead (provided their brain wasn't destroyed, and their soul wasn't eaten) is possible (and, in fact, "Dead but able to be brought back to life" is a kind of assassination that Vlad has done in the past), and any citizen of the Empire can learn a variety of simple spells, if they care to try. There's also psychic communication, and Eastern Witchcraft is an application of psychic power. Gods make occasional appearances, and Vlad is shockingly casual with them.

A very noir-styled series, which lots of common magic coupled with sardonic humor.

*Confusingly, the elves refer to themselves as "human" and the humans as Easterners, and sometimes "dwarfs", while the humans sometimes call themselves Easterners and usually call the elves Dragaerans).