Midnight Boulevard

Oh, how I love the indie game market, since we get niche games for all sorts of amazing genres. Midnight Boulevard is a 2d6 game based on the classics of Film Noir, specifically from the book's list on the first page:

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Double Indemnity (1944)
• Laura (1944)
• Detour (1945)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• Out of the Past (1947)
• Gun Crazy (1950)
• In a Lonely Place (1950)
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
• Touch of Evil (1958)

That is a pretty narrow list of films, and it covers all the greats in the genre. The game gives very basic rules for characters, combat, vehicles, and equipment as it is only 29 pages long. The game does not need to go into detail, and if you ever needed survival rules, fire, poisons, diseases, carrying capacity, creature creation, or weather, you could pull them in from the Cepheus SRD, if needed.

 

If you are playing 2d6 games, you likely have a bunch of them, and you have a lot of rules to pull in from your compatible games. This is how we did it in the old days! If you want extra character detail, pull in the excellent Cepheus Light Traits book for a few special tweaks for your characters.

I wanted to see more in terms of art, style, tone, and how to put together a Noir Plot. Then again, if you are a Film Noir fan, you will already have a few books on these films in your library, and know it well, but it would be nice to see these things laid out to help newer referees or those discovering the genre. There are some tips, but I want a bigger section on the types of games, how to run a plot, more of the genre tropes, and the different types of stories and campaigns one can run. 

Oh, and I need The Killing by Stanley Kubrick on that film list, too. Speaking of campaigns, I get most of the games here will be one-shots, with multiple shots fired, and The Killing is a the perfect example of a heist plot in the genre, and a perfect movie to frame scenarios around. We have everything in this one, plenty of gun battles, double-crosses, a cast of iconic characters, and a complex job with many working parts the specialists all need to figure out and work through.

This is where simple 2d6 games shine. Since character creation is fast, people can get playing instantly. The character creation process also generates history and background, so players have something more to work with than a plain B/X character.

Also, it does not matter if a character gets killed, you could make a new one right in the middle of play in five minutes, come up with a quick backstory, and get playing. As the mobsters and criminal PCs get whacked, replace them with cop characters for those players to hunt the rest of the criminals down, and make it a PVP game.

And this isn't a set of 5E rules that requires far too much investment and involvement. What do you do with a level 20 mobster? How many powers will I have? How do I multi-class with warlock and paladin? 5E sucks for any other genre but its own superheroic fantasy one. D&D will always be D&D and nothing else.

But remember, crime does not pay. This is a game that should end terribly for all criminals involved, to keep with the genre theme, and just playing through this and "seeing what happens" is entertainment enough. If your players are mature enough to handle doomed characters, this type of game and genre will return a level of fun that far outweighs the scant amount of pages this is presented in.