Two free literary RPGs: The Drones, and Wuthering Heights

September 8, 2015 4:36 AM

Here is The Drones, a free "light-hearted after-dinnerish roleplay game" based on Bertie Wooster's social club from out of P.G. Wodehouse. And here is Wuthering Heights, the free roleplaying game about tortured brooding Byronic heroes.
posted by JHarris (21 comments total)

The Drones is one of those things I've had stored up for a long long time. I would have posted it much sooner except I was convinced for some reason I had already posted it! It is a real gem. (Hmmm, a Steven Universe role-playing game....?) And I just found out about Wuthering Heights a couple of hours ago!

Of course it is wrong to declare how one hopes the thread will go, but you know I don't think I could be happier than if the thread turned into people coming up with RPG rules for living in various literary works.
posted by JHarris at 4:41 AM on September 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's rather marvelous.
posted by Artw at 4:53 AM on September 8, 2015

What! No brooding rules? I would think their would have to be a mechanic, with bonuses for the lanscape tags: cold, desolate, windswept, and moor at the very least. Maybe ruined and abbey/castle/manor as well.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:59 AM on September 8, 2015 [4 favorites]

01-04 You are without a family
05-08 You are a republican
09-12 You are a socialist
13-15 You are a baptist / methodist
16-18 You are a monk or pastor
19-22 You are an homosexual
23-25 You are an alcoholic (5 pints a day)
26-28 You are a drug addict (1 hour a day)
29-31 You are honest
32-35 You are in love with someone from your family (Mother, Brother ...)
36 You are a sex addict (once a day)
37-38 You smoke (12 hours a day)
39-40 You gamble (2 hours a day)
41 You play the bagpipes (1 hour a day)

Woah, woah, woah... you can take things too far!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:06 AM on September 8, 2015 [7 favorites]

100 You are an albino (without a big sword)


This was fairly kicking, until I got to the very end.
posted by newdaddy at 5:22 AM on September 8, 2015

MetaFilter: in the French version, you'll find rules about large battles, psionic powers, vampyres, martial arts and more
posted by Rock Steady at 5:34 AM on September 8, 2015 [5 favorites]

Ah, I fished the dead page Jeu de Rôle dans le monde romantique de, which I think is "Role play in the romantic world," off of the Internet Archive, and put it through Google Translate.

Original French - Google Translate English

These text files are hosted from my Dropbox, so as always in such situations, if you care about things like this, you should probably save a local copy.
posted by JHarris at 6:55 AM on September 8, 2015

Does genre fiction count? Because Call of Cthulhu really captures the sense of immediate doom (notice I didn't say impending doom) in HP Lovecraft's fiction. You either die, go mad, or refuse to play the game in the first place...
posted by Mogur at 6:58 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Does genre fiction count?

I am now imagining a Call of Cthulhu Hack for the Drones, where Sanity is replaced with Sensibleness, which is eroded by making good decisions until your character does something unutterably silly. In good Wodeshouse fashion, characters with low Sensibleness often slip into minor Silliness, but it takes a very Sensible character indeed to go off the deep end. (Jeeves, of course, has infinite Sensibleness, and is never Silly.)
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:08 AM on September 8, 2015 [4 favorites]

Oh God. I'm currently working my way through a subset of Wodehouse's material: basically all of the stuff that he did that might be said to constitute a "series". So I will note in passing that Rupert (Ronald?) Psmith is also a member of the Drones, and that basically that puts it in continuity with Blandings Castle and all the rest of it.

Which is just to say that an RPG based on this material might well turn out to be the thing that finally destroys my social viability.
posted by Ipsifendus at 7:12 AM on September 8, 2015 [4 favorites]

Mogur, not only do I know of Call of Cthulhu, but I once ran a web game of it for a few Metafilter members.

One could make a good case that the first (popular) RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, was in its original form a pulp fantasy pastiche game much in line with these.
posted by JHarris at 7:16 AM on September 8, 2015

GenjiandProust, I like it. I imagine Sensibleness as being a statistic like Rage and Despair in the Wuthering Heights game, not wholly good or bad, unlike CoC's Sanity, where it's pretty much always bad to lose SAN. Higher Sensibleness means being more able to succeed at general tasks, but low Sensibleness would have a charismatic effect among other Drones.
posted by JHarris at 7:20 AM on September 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Byronic heroes, eh? Hope there's a Dangerous Knowledge table where we roll d26 twice to decide if we're playing a Sad Fad, a Rad Cad or the Lads' Nads.
posted by comealongpole at 7:40 AM on September 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm going to note here that there's an Alan Moore related post also on the front page right now, and that in some issue or another of "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", he had a prose piece called "What Ho! Lords of the Abyss" that involved Bertie and Jeeves dealing with Lovecraftian horrors.

I'll also thank you all not to be hashing out mechanics with which to expand the game right here where I can see it, for goodness' sake, because I have to WORK today.
posted by Ipsifendus at 7:43 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sensibleness, which is eroded by making good decisions until your character does something unutterably silly. . . .

I imagine Sensibleness as being a statistic like Rage and Despair in the Wuthering Heights game . . . . .

Perhaps you could borrow the Sense and Sensibleness from Jane Austen World [SLRD].
 
posted by Herodios at 7:53 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Main thing I learned from the Moore story is that Mi-Go brain extraction has only a moderate noticeable effect on the Old Grey Matter stat.
posted by Artw at 7:56 AM on September 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ipsifendus, that story is in the LoEG "Black Dossier."
posted by JHarris at 8:12 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

you could borrow the Sense and Sensibleness from Jane Austen World

You joke, but I once wrote an Austen playset for Fiasco. It included two different stately homes and a few optional gothic touches for anyone looking to run a Northanger Abbey-style session.
posted by Iridic at 9:31 AM on September 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Having properly perused the links these look good fun, although like most RPG-nerds I've read far more systems than I've played and I'm unsure how well they'd actually work. The scenarios for The Drones put a grin on my face.

Mining literature for RPG scenarios is as old as the hobby, although I've usually seen them punched-up (ahem) to suit a trad fantasy, fights-mean-xp campaign. I'm proper stumped coming with any ideas for lit/genres which might make interesting games rather than punny, throwaway in-joke mechanics.

[E.g. your reluctant adventurer is buffeted around by worldview-shattering events in C18 Europe. You suffer from PANG (the sole statistic and one which results in temporary horrible character death if it gets too high). PANG is gained by failing quests, injury to the buttocks, killing the wrong monkey, etc. Happy reunions result in PANG loss. Truly the best of all possible systems!]
posted by comealongpole at 10:07 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

What! No brooding rules?


Roll to save against enervation. What's your Melancholy stat?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:42 AM on September 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

I now want to play these in twine!
posted by dreamling at 7:39 AM on September 9, 2015 [1 favorite]