ORE Noir
Hammett and Chandler gave us the hard-boiled detective, brought brilliantly to life in the movies through film noir. The cliches are the dame walking into the P.I.’s office to light striped by Venetian blinds as he looks her over with cynical eyes and longs for the scotch in his bottom drawer. But noir is more than that.
The black and white images conceal a world of baffling gray moral complexities. Noir is about secrets, deception, betrayal and hidden vice. “A Dirty World” rebuilds the One Roll Engine from the ground up to support those themes. Action has consequences, but it’s the only way to make progress. But be careful: Your character’s effectiveness hinges on the choices he makes. It doesn’t matter how nice you say he is: If he acts like a rat, soon a rat is all he’ll be able to be.
Caleb Stokes, the mastermind behind Hebanon Games, has written an adventure for “A Dirty World” set in partition-era Berlin. Play “The Dangers of Fraternization” as a German, an American or a Russian. Just make sure you know whether you want to solve the murder, or if it might be better to just beat the others. Download the characters here.
A free noir mystery for the game, “Shades of Gray” is now available as a free download.
“A Dirty World” is available from Lulu.com both as a print volume and as a .pdf download. Both formats are available bundled from Indie Press Revolution.
An audio preview of “A Dirty World”
is available through IPR and RPGNow.
A .pdf Dirty World “character sheet”
is now available.