GlassJaw said:
Has anyone ran a campaign like this? What sourcebooks or materials would you recommend?
We ran just such a thing, twice, and at some point we'll do a third and final installment of the game.
We used GURPS, but without most of the fancier options. For magic (on par with Hammerite priests), we used GURPS Magic, but everything was subject to GM approval. To add a little cinematic flair (whcih GURPS in general tends to lack), we
incorporated the drama card system from the old West End Games Masterbook system. And finally, just for the hell of it, knocking people out with a blackjack was made much easier than it is under standard GURPS rules, and alchemical preparation of standard Thief: TDP potions was simple and commonplace.
It sounds weirder here than it was in play, believe me. Things moved very quickly and the system didn't get in the way, which is what we were aiming for.
The best source materials we found were the actual in-game text and concordances collected at
www.ttlg.com and
www.thief-thecircle.com; there's a wealth of interesting and intriguing detail in there. Beyond that, I personally found that reading tons of Dashiell Hammett (especially
The Maltese Falcon,
The Glass Key, and
Red Harvest) and Raymond Chandler (especially his Marlowe stories) was very useful. I also cribbed some really disturbing imagery from Paul Park (
Soldiers of Paradise and
Sugar Rain).
In our big Thief games, by the way, hardly anyone was actually a thief. We had a part-time burglar who supplemented his income from fencing jewelry with some theft on the side in the first game, and we had a Robin-Hood-esque swashbuckler in the second, but the other characters were a torch singer, a yellow journalist, and an eccentric noble heir. That's just how things worked out; the setting is big enough and weird enough that when the time came to make characters, everyone was more interested in the noir fantasy end of it than they were in the robbin'-and-stealin' part.
Later on, one of our other GMs ran a couple of one-shots using a toned-down version of the Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game, where everyone played Keepers. That also worked fairly well, though adjusting the power level of the system was kind of a pain in the butt at first.
--
tricksy manfool
ryan
