TedPro/Mobstergame

So, this is sort of a weird idea I got into my head yesterday, and I'm considering doing. It's Exalted, but only just barely.

The idea is a modern-day gang turf war story, using the Exalted: Fair Folk rules. Each PC plays a raksha, using all normal character generation. The game is set, effectively, in the Middlemarches, with two restrictions:

1. Nothing out-of-genre can be created. So, you could use Cup-shaping to make a fresh-faced youngster come around and attract the mob boss' patronage, or you could use Sword-shaping to bust up a place with an Uzi, or Staff-shaping to give them legal troubles, or whatever, but you couldn't turn your skin blue or breath fire or fly (except maybe in a helicopter or something). A behemoth could exist, but he'd be a big thug with two day's stubble in muscle T-shirt, or an old veteran mobster who's got a steady hand and a heart of lead. Oaths are pretty much unchanged. Spells would be amorphous dramatic effects.

2. Nothing from Creation enters play, either. So, Assumption Charms and a few others are basically useless, Exalted and mortals won't show up, and so forth.

The player characters are Noble Raksha. They're aware that they're being guided by story forces, rather than normal laws of reality, and they're existing in the story they script. Everyone else is stuck inside the story, unaware of the strange ebbs of Gossamer, Graces, Charms, and so forth.

Like canonical Exalted: The Fair Folk, death is a fairly negligible condition. You can continue shaping when killed, and can just work it into the story that you didn't actually die, or that your brother comes into town to avenge you, or your lieutenant takes on your mantle, or whatever other way you can conceive for coming back. Potentially, you could reinvent yourself after death - maybe as a detective who investigated the death and has decided to play dirty and live the good life, or a reporter who found out too much.

The game is played semi-competitively. The goal is to take over the business of a recently deceased city boss (an unshaped) - making and breaking alliances with other players while rebuilding a criminal empire is sort of the idea.

So it ends up kind of a Gangland story as mythic fairytale, with as much set dressing and plot twists as the players can pull into the story. I've been wanting to run a Gangland-as-myth game for a while now, and it seems like Fair Folk might be the right mechanic for it.

I'm not sure whether this is best done as a tabletop game or a play-by-email game. Or maybe even a play-by-Wiki game. Ideally, it would be played competitively, but with fully open information - no private declarations of actions or anything like that.

I think the shaping combat rules are flexible enough to support this.

Comments? Advice? Please?

Comments

That's a really interesting idea. Good luck! -- Darloth

This sounds SO COOL. If I had read Fair Folk, I'd want to play. --dissolvegirl