darkconspiracytherpg.info

Even though I have not yet played this, it does read like a fun game. It uses a D8 dice pool system which is pretty similar to the World of Darkness (what I remember of it anyway) with some insanity rules added for those who use such things.

This is a free test version and the insanity rules are partial in this version. The full system is another 150 pages of additional content though this version could be used for quite some time, as is.

Check it out if you have a mind to, it seems like a tight little system.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/137946/No ... ed+edition

I have an earlier edition of Noctum from back when the front cover was considered to be controversial by some of the politically correct crowd in the English speaking world. Back then it used 2D10 for task resolution if I remember right but with a task difficulty system kind of like DC.
I also found the game to be almost like DC in the basic concept as well but with a much darker, grimmer (and some might say nasty) version of humanity.

Cool, I was unaware of a previous version... of course, now I am curious about what was on the cover

Sorry for the extremely late reply, real life has been screwing me around for the last few months.
But anyway, the first & second edition covers I don't know much about but the edition I purchased is apparently the third edition and as far as I know, the one that caused the controversy but only, again as far as I can tell, in the English speaking world (and mostly from the USA).
It's cover can be seen on the wiki page here Noctum rpg

Again I'll say that the controversy to my mind was nothing more than a few of the politically correct crowd worrying what their mother might say if she saw the book. It's a game for a mature audience and the cover was no more horrific than the covers on any number of horror DVDs. There was a lot of speculation from the "worried" crowd to the point where they started to project their own ideas of what the cover represented - and just as has been proved time and time again, the human imagination can be a whole lot darker than any horror image or movie.

Just as a further comment about the cover of the 3rd edition.
I've recently begun watching the early 2000s US cop drama The Shield. Never saw it when/if it was on TV here but a friend gave me Seasons 1 to 3 as a present a few weeks ago.
I've gone through Season 1 and just started on 2 and one thing that struck me was that this cop drama has basically the kind of background that sets the world in Noctum. There's plenty of human evil in The Shield and the storylines they've had present images and ideas far worse than that shown on the cover of Noctum 3rd Ed.

So... I suppose I'm saying, take everything in context.
Noctum was based on the headlines and TV shows of the real world, the 3rd Ed. cover was part of that reflection. Some people said the 3rd Ed. cover was too "nasty" so I'm left to wonder that if the game is a horror game based on headlines and TV crime shows and all the "nasty" of the real world, why were those complainers interested in buying the game in the first place?

ReHerakhte wrote:Just as a further comment about the cover of the 3rd edition.
I've recently begun watching the early 2000s US cop drama The Shield. Never saw it when/if it was on TV here but a friend gave me Seasons 1 to 3 as a present a few weeks ago.
I've gone through Season 1 and just started on 2 and one thing that struck me was that this cop drama has basically the kind of background that sets the world in Noctum. There's plenty of human evil in The Shield and the storylines they've had present images and ideas far worse than that shown on the cover of Noctum 3rd Ed.

Much as I enjoyed The Shield it did stretch credibility at times - so many serial killers, nonces and other sickos all crowded into one district of Los Angeles? Hmmm.

Well yeah, that often seems to be the case with police dramas but maybe not quite as often as The Shield.

However...
There was a TV show from Australia called Blue Heelers that centred on the police station of a small (fictional) country town in the state of Victoria.
The population of this town was about 7000 or thereabout so while the number of officers stationed there might have been about right, with the massive amount (and type) of crime that happened in this small country town it's surprising they didn't have more officers and maybe a helicopter or tactical team (or both) as well!
It was pretty much the crime capital of Australia. A small country town with that level (and type) of crime? I reckon Blue Heelers stretches reality even more than The Shield does!

I think the UK equivalent would be Midsummer Murders - a bucolic part of England roughly corresponding to the Cotswolds and/or the Chilterns with a murder rate equal to South Central LA.

The thing I really liked about the Shield was the way every time Mackey and co thought they'd managed to get out of the clag something would happen to pull them in even deeper. Almost Shakespearean in its depiction of men's evil deeds catching up with them. There was a real commitment to sheer bloody grotesquerie going on under all that though - the bloke who kept bottles of his jubbly juice in the freezer springs to mind, as does the Armenian foot chopping hitman.

I'm enjoying the show for pretty much those same reasons, it definitely is the most Shakespearean cop show I've seen in its elements of tragedy & fate and yes, certainly one of the most grotesque (in that "almost comedic although absurd & ugly" manner).

I haven't "met" the Armenian hitman yet but he's likely to feature soon however I have seen the guy with his jubbly juice and his self-appointed mission to ensure fertile women became pregnant, yeah he was a right nutter but I think the best part (speaking grotesquely) of that story was when the cops discovered just what it was in those jars

And an episode I watched last night had a young Thai-American savagely beating up a Thai national because they were from opposites sides of an 800 year old feud between two families so the show's been interesting for doing such things as bringing the "sins of the father" motif as well.

ReHerakhte wrote:
I haven't "met" the Armenian hitman yet but he's likely to feature soon however I have seen the guy with his jubbly juice and his self-appointed mission to ensure fertile women became pregnant, yeah he was a right nutter but I think the best part (speaking grotesquely) of that story was when the cops discovered just what it was in those jars

And an episode I watched last night had a young Thai-American savagely beating up a Thai national because they were from opposites sides of an 800 year old feud between two families so the show's been interesting for doing such things as bringing the "sins of the father" motif as well.

I do find myself wondering if any of these storylines were based on real life...Law and Order does a fair amount of restaging real cases, I can think of two episodes that were based on events that occurred in the UK (and that was before the British spin off).

ReHerakhte wrote:Sorry for the extremely late reply, real life has been screwing me around for the last few months.
But anyway, the first & second edition covers I don't know much about but the edition I purchased is apparently the third edition and as far as I know, the one that caused the controversy but only, again as far as I can tell, in the English speaking world (and mostly from the USA).
It's cover can be seen on the wiki page here Noctum rpg

Again I'll say that the controversy to my mind was nothing more than a few of the politically correct crowd worrying what their mother might say if she saw the book. It's a game for a mature audience and the cover was no more horrific than the covers on any number of horror DVDs. There was a lot of speculation from the "worried" crowd to the point where they started to project their own ideas of what the cover represented - and just as has been proved time and time again, the human imagination can be a whole lot darker than any horror image or movie.

OK, I can't see what the hubbub was either. Thanks for the link!

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were based on or at the very least inspired by real cases. Someone I worked with many years ago made the comment that (paraphrasing) the Americans make some very good police and hospital drama shows, probably because of all the real world material they can work from.

Now that I've seen a few more episodes from season 2, I can see the "Shakespearean fate" approaching the character Vic Mackey. There's been a few seemingly unconnected comments about getting married and not keeping secrets from your wife because she will find out and a comment about holding a grudge where it was said "15 years is nothing to a woman".
Mackey has kept many, many secrets from his wife and his co-workers and it seems it's rapidly coming back to bite him.


Probably should have taken this to an off-topic thread!
However... the seemingly unconnected pieces (or threads if you will) are coming together to make a larger piece in regards to Mackey. These threads are exactly the sort of thing I used to try to do in my earlier games. The idea being that all those seemingly disparate threads, once found, could be woven together to reveal more of the case the PCs were working on.
Unfortunately some of the people I was running DC for, were more action orientated and the campaigns lost steam (my DC-London campaign being a prime example).

It's probably a bit much to ask a GM to analyze a TV show to learn ways of constructing game campaigns but I reckon just a little bit of attention in the right place (i.e. a relevant TV show) could really help in that regard.

ReHerakhte wrote:

Probably should have taken this to an off-topic thread!
However... the seemingly unconnected pieces (or threads if you will) are coming together to make a larger piece in regards to Mackey. These threads are exactly the sort of thing I used to try to do in my earlier games. The idea being that all those seemingly disparate threads, once found, could be woven together to reveal more of the case the PCs were working on.

I try to do that as well, the PCs don't exist in isolation. Things they do have an effect on the wider world and may come back to haunt them. It can be a lot of work though, keeping track of all the various threads, but I think it does make for a better game.

P.S. If you're just getting to the Armenian episodes, watch out for Cletus Van Damme

Well, I got to the Armenian foot chopper and Cleetus Van Damme (who then changed his last name - if I heard right - to Lundgren).