Jewish RPG Content

[bulletmeat]

I can play a dwarf casting spells with runes or an elven samurai with an ear-piercing kiai, but I can't play a wheeler-dealing merchant traipsing between rival kingdoms or a scholarly kabbalist magic-user plumbing the occult mysteries.

I am trying to use OpenQuest for characters like this because I see a skill based system is better for those ideas vs. a class based one from D&D. A merchant w/a little or lot of magic or warrior ability. The BRP forum had a suggestion for it:

Biblically inspired Jewish mythology perfect for a historical/mythological game!

If anyone is running something either historical or mythological in any game world, then the Book of Enoch will be perfect to use as an out of game and in game resource. Get my printing of it here.

basicroleplaying.org

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Back in the late 80s, there was an adventure for Champions called Wings of the Valkyrie where 5 jewish victims of the holocaust go back in time to 1931 to kill those responsible for the rise in power of the Nazis. Things go horribly wrong and things get worse for everyone. So now the heroes need to decide whether to save Hitler and others or not. It was controversial, for obvious reasons. I believe it was pulled quite early.

The actual adventure as written had the world being better than the real wold because of the actions of the survivors. The publisher (ICE at the time) decided to change it, because they felt GMs would be mad at them because they thought a lot of PCs would just stay in the new timeline, and it wouldn't sell, as it obvioated the GMs world. When the altered version was finally released the Canadian Anti-defamation group got a boycott on all ICE products (Rolemaster, HERO, Spacemaster) until it was pulled from the shelves and destroyed.
I was a HERO fanatic at the time, and bought one the day it came out. One of my few gaming sorta-rarities.

 

[corwyn77]

Two-Gun Cohen - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This fellow was in GURPS Who's Who (I forget which one), but could easily be an extra in your Call of Cthulhu game...

It was Who's Who 1, which also contained:
King David ben-Jesse
HP Lovecraft (wife was jewish)
Tesla (not jewish but I'm so happy he's in a book I own; and would also make an interesting CoC NPC)

Both volumes are great resources for a historical or time travel game.

 

[corwyn77]

The actual adventure as written had the world being better than the real wold because of the actions of the survivors. The publisher (ICE at the time) decided to change it, because they felt GMs would be mad at them because they thought a lot of PCs would just stay in the new timeline, and it wouldn't sell, as it obvioated the GMs world. When the altered version was finally released the Canadian Anti-defamation group got a boycott on all ICE products (Rolemaster, HERO, Spacemaster) until it was pulled from the shelves and destroyed.
I was a HERO fanatic at the time, and bought one the day it came out. One of my few gaming sorta-rarities.

I'm not sure I knew it was a Canadian group - I didn't think they would be that much of a threat. I have pretty much a complete 3e Champs collection as that was my supers game then.

 

[Carlsen Chris]

I would have assumed that everything in DnD from an Old Testament source would be considered Jewish??? And golems.

There is no "Old Testament." There is only the Tanakh. The Tanakh is a testament to nothing.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

There is no "Old Testament." There is only the Tanakh. The Tanakh is a testament to nothing.

I am sure of two things....

1. You know more about it than I do.
2. You know what I meant.

 

[Blue Orange]

It was Who's Who 1, which also contained:
King David ben-Jesse
HP Lovecraft (wife was jewish)
Tesla (not jewish but I'm so happy he's in a book I own; and would also make an interesting CoC NPC)

Both volumes are great resources for a historical or time travel game.

Thank you! Who's Who 2 has Maimonides, Harry Houdini (yes, he was!), and John von Neumann.

Who's Who 1 also has Einstein.

It's worth mentioning in a thread on Jewish RPG content Lovecraft was something of an antisemite, though unlike Pound or Eliot he didn't really put it in his writing, and unlike Celine he didn't write nasty antisemitic pamphlets for the Nazis--it's mostly in his private letters. (Now if someone went through every email I ever wrote in 2090 I hate to think what they would find...)

Still, it was enough to cause his wife to leave him, so if you want to drag his wife into it you have to decide how you want to deal with that. Perhaps there's a historically unacknowledged love child who becomes a successful author, swaps stories with Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow, and undergoes psychoanalysis to figure out why they can't get these weird dreams of tentacled monsters out of their mind...

 

[Morrus]

I'm closing this as it's about real-world religion.