Campaign Toybox
The Story: In March 1974, Chinese farmers stumbled upon the long-lost temple of Qin Shi Huang, the first sovereign Emperor of China. What they didn’t realize is that the army of guards were there, along with the thick stone walls, to hold in the demons, dragons, spirits and the wild sorcery that the Emperor had defeated in pacifying his land. Now released, the demons and spirits fled to join the enemies of the Emperor, which in their minds was all those of other clans, and all their descendants. This ended up being 99% of all Chinese people, and more than a few non-Chinese. Inside China, the new magic further empowered Mao’s Red Guard and secured his centralized communist world. Outside China, however, things were very different. China is in the heart, but the Chinese were everywhere, thanks to a century-long diaspora. And nowhere had more Chinese than San Francisco.
In fact, Chinese culture was now so prevalent it was smashing into mainstream culture, thanks primarily to Bruce Lee and his films. Of course, the mainstream doesn’t exactly appreciate that prevalence. The freedom and rights movements of the sixties, and the ongoing anger at the outrages of the Vietnam War has led to all sorts of new and exotic lifestyles coming into the light and shouting for their piece of the pie. The city is rife with not just inscrutable Chinese but revolutionary blacks, promiscuous gays and long-haired communists. And all of these counter-cultures have members willing to operate outside the law, whether it be to forward their agenda, get access to the kind of drugs or sex the mainstream disapproves of, or simply get the protection the Man refuses to provide them because of who they are.
The city is sick with division and fear, crime and corruption, and on top of all the sickness, the Disciples of Scorpio hunt humans for sport, and the demons in the sewers get fat on the dead. This is your city though, and you have to police it. That’s your dirty, stupid, messy job, because you’re a cop in the SFPD, and this city isn’t going down without a fight.
Style and Structure: Chinese mythology is a rich and deep source for all sorts of stories, from family tragedy to lurid torture-porn to wacky fantasy adventure or pulp action. Tweaking the last into a gritty police procedural adds a different edge to the familiar, while the wackier elements of mythology can stop your game feeling like some kind of nihilistic dirge. Of course, if you want to run a nihilistic dirge of soul-crushed morally-grey noir-ish cops, be my guest (The Shield was awesome, for example); likewise this is also a fantastic setting for a game of balls-out gun-blazing Hong Kong action ala Feng Shui. Or you can meet somewhere in the middle and end up with something like Shadowrun, a strange brew of the gritty and the wacky. The trick is adding a new twist to whichever you choose by fixing it firmly in the seventies. Luckily, the seventies is a decade with a really unique style that influenced everything from architecture to underwear – and especially music.
Wherever you set your dials for weirdness and grit levels, don’t shy away from the concept of cops. Police officers make great PCs and cases make great plot hooks: there’s an immediate problem with a clear solution and a generally established pattern of getting from one to the other. Cops can have a reason to be sent into any situation in any part of the city, and are intimately connected with everyone from the mad homeless bum to the mayor and his wealthy campaign financiers. Cops are also great for presenting moral or political issues, or for ignoring them – both examples of the genre are legion and thriving.
PCs and NPCs: A whole party of cops could be a bit limiting, even if beat cops, detectives and undercover narcs could have widely different skills. As long as you’re not always in your police car or at the station, street contacts and associates – the Huggy Bears of the world - are easy to work in. Inside the station house you might also find lawyers, doctors, social workers and other city officials, not to mention reporters hungry for the crime scoop. Nearby you might even find helpful barkeeps or restauranteurs, or local kids with nowhere else to hang out after school. Said kids might have Old Uncles who have taught them kung fu or other mysterious arts.
For the flavor of the weirdness suddenly invading, you probably want to keep most of your characters without magic powers, and for political games, keep most of them middle class white straights. The schtick of giving superpowers and arcane knowledge to the minorities works so well in pulp because the respectable white guys get all the other breaks in society, and that’s just as true in 1975 as it was in 1935. Some might bristle at the racist undercurrent of making the Chinese literally a yellow peril or any other clichés you’ll encounter (cf Huggy Bear) so work out in advance what your players feel comfortable with. (and if you need more macguffins to empower other races, 1973 saw one of the longest solar eclipses ever seen, the Aracibo deep-space radio telescope begin transmitting and a massive meteor skipped across the earth’s atmosphere).
What makes or breaks a good cop show, though, is your back-up staff at the station. Don’t skimp on writing a good station captain, and dispatcher, and desk clerk. Make the station feel like home so they have some solace when the city feels like a jungle.
Plots and Villains: If you get bored chasing down your real world criminals like political dissidents, anarchists, drug dealers, cult leaders, gun-runners, serial-killers, pimps, racketeers and thieves, you can turn to Chinese mythology, which is stuffed to bursting with hundred-armed thousand-tongued demons and soul-devouring spirits. They’ve been gone from the world since 221 BC and boy are they angry about it, and keen to make up for lost time. Some of them will want to swallow the world as fast as possible, but just as many will be selling sorcerous secrets to the highest bidder or corrupting young maidens. And technically, a lot of magic is above the law – it’s a crime to run a guy over with a car, but is it a crime to curse him to be run over by a car? Or send an invisible demon instead of a hitman? Breaking through the mumbo-jumbo and getting an arrest will be not just a cultural struggle, but a test of faith and a confrontation with the boundaries of reality. And remember that the real-world seventies has plenty of its own rich source of supernatural inspirations – from the satanic murder cult of Charles Manson to the arcane cryptography of the Zodiac killer to the talking-dog-insanity of the Son of Sam. Sometimes it’s demons, and sometimes, your players should wish it had been.
Sources: There are almost too many to name. Dirty Harry and Bullitt are both set in San Francisco and both characters are based on the real-life detective Dave Toschi, played by Marc Ruffalo in David Fincher’s excellent film about the Zodiac killings. The Dirty Harry sequels aren’t great but continue to present the conflict-riven city of San Fran and all its criminal elements. Starsky and Hutch fought a much more light-hearted battle, but still on the west coast (“Bay City”, not to be confused with San Francisco’s Bay Area), as were Charlie’s Angels, and the guys in S.W.A.T. and Police Woman. Indeed, it became so de rigeur to set action movies and TV shows in San Fran that it was parodied in films like Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc. Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam takes us back east to New York, but gets the period perfectly, and New York is home to some of the best 70’s cop shows ever, like Barney Miller and Hill Street Blues (okay, early eighties). I won’t stoop to mentioning Life On Mars, because the American version wasn’t worth it. For Chinese myths, start with Big Trouble in Little China then move onto Chinese Ghost Story 1 to 3, Armor of God, Mr Vampire and Zu Warriors of Magic Mountain. Most wuxia films don’t feature much that is overtly supernatural (and when they do it’s often cheesy), but try and track down some of the old Shaw Brothers stuff from the 1970s to see what all the fuss was about – Enter the Dragon is a must. The episode of the Goodies which parodies the whole trend is also fantastic.
RPGs: Feng Shui is your absolute first stop. While the sourcebooks for it stopped coming, the CCG which inspired it, Shadowfist, has not, and even added its own seventies expansion set, Boom-Shaka-Laka, which is packed with cool ideas and images. In the same vein is Hong Kong Action Theatre, out of print but lots of fun. For the seventies themselves, you’ll want to look at Damnation Decade for d20 Modern. It’s set in a fictional country much like America, but wires in analogues of everyone from Richard Nixon to Hugh Hefner into its supernatural secrets. Shadowrun is also worth a look, for what happens to crime and policing when magic and demons show up. I also think its take on race politics fits better in the 1970s all round. . For Chinese mythology (and wuxia), try GURPS China, Outlaws of the Water Margin and Weapons of the Gods. For just wuxia, there’s of course Wushu.
For information on police procedure there’s the horribly dry GURPS Cops; for more cinematic fun, there’s the wonderful Vice Squad and not much else. To find the right kind of detectives, you might have to try noir and roll it forward in time: check out Stolze’s A Dirty World, Edge of Midnight, Mean Streets or Noir. Noir leads to private eyes leads to Harry Dresden and that particular RPG is the new hotness, just winning an Origins award for best RPG. With its clever city design rules, you can build your seventies bay city easily
