Los Angeles By Night

"SARAH: Roland thinks LA is a place for the braindead. He says if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert.
But I think...I don't know...it's not what I expected. It's a place where they've taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I've seen a lot of LA, and I also think it's a place of secrets. Secret houses. Secret lives. Secret pleasures. And nobody is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right."
---Steve Martin, "LA Story"--

[Seal of the City of Los Angeles]

End of Game!>

This game actually ended many months ago, and the last few episodes were a bit too complicated for me to put together web pages about. Hope you all had a good time cruising around what I did put up, and I'll leave it up a while.
[Picture from Rodney King video]The current "paper" roleplaying game that I'm running is a Los Angeles By Night game. Like all LA by Night games, it's called "Angels." For those of you unfamiliar with the White Wolf conception of LA (and why did you choose this link anyway?), here's the basic idea: the player characters are Anne Rice-ean vampires except (hopefully) with better hair. Vampire society is divided into several sects: these sects vie for control over the world. There's the Camarilla, which is run like a Mob familiy crossed with an Italian Renaissance princedom, there's the Sabbat, which is run like a rave crossed with a rogue Special Forces unit in Vietnam, and there's the anarchs, who aren't run, and that's why everyone else hates them. The anarchs control LA, pretty much, so the game is going to be very different from a "standard" White Wolf Vampire game.

Since the published Los Angeles by Night sucks rocks, I wrote my own. Some of it is here. Some of it is not...yet. We'll see how much gets thrown on the page, depending on how useful my players find this.

[Picture from 'Pulp Fiction']"You're sending the Wolf?"

The Coterie

In order to make my job easier, I insisted that the players make their characters be in a coterie, a cheesy gothic-sounding word that means "passle of vampire what hang around together." I noted that Los Angeles was a big place, and that there were plenty of niches to be occupied. Since two of them had just seen "Pulp Fiction", they decided they wanted to be the "Winston Wolf" coterie. For those who haven't seen the movie, Winston Wolf is the fellow on the far right of the picture. Yes, that is John Travolta in the middle, and yes, he does dance during the movie. The function of Winston Wolf is to come into a truly dementedly bad situation (I won't spoil your video-watching night by telling you what it is), and fixing it. And so the coterie idea was born...

Members of the Coterie

Here are some interesting statistics about this group of characters: [Picture of LA skyline] More info on player characters as I type it in.

Here's The Coterie Page, where eventually, pictures and descriptions of the player characters and their various backgrounds will be done.

Non-Player Characters

I generally like to have some image in mind for my NPCs: this often translates into "actors" for them. You can look at the Los Angeles by Night NPC Page to see who I picked for what part.

UPDATE: The Campaign Begins!

Check out the First Instalment, the Second Instalment, Third Instalment, or Fourth Instalment of the campaign itself!




You might also want to take a look at LABN Miscellany, my ongoing brainstorm project to help keep me interested in running the game.

Frying Up The Anarch Cookbook

The Anarch Cookbook, another of White Wolf's lousy publications, was (and is) the subject of an ongoing satire/refutation of mine. You can look at Part One, Part Two, Part Three, or Part Four.

That Darn Packet!

Here is a copy of the handout I gave my players for the background of the game.
Here are some links of interest regarding Real Life LA:
Take me back to Jason's homepage.
Jason Corley -- corleyj@cobweb.scarymonsters.net