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Pistols and pine forests? Fights over tundra turfs? Bloodbaths in the sauna? Well, not quite. Mobsters is a role-playing game about prohibition-era crime syndicates. Or fifties' B-movies about prohibition-era crime syndicates, which seem to get their reruns on Finnish TV networks, too, because Mobsters is published by Burger Games in, of all places, Espoo, Finland. I don't know if there were Finnish Mafiosi in the Roaring Twenties, but it doesn't matter, since Mobsters is a solidly researched little game set in New Orleans. So no midnight sun and reindeer.

Mobsters uses the Scorpio system, a free RPG engine also by Burger Games --- or perhaps better called a RPG mechanics scheme, since the rules seem not to be rigidly enforced across the games. The Scorpio version of Kalle Marjola's cyberpunk RPG Syndicate, also available online from Burger Games, has quite a number of differences compared to Mobsters, e.g. only six attributes to Mobster's nine. This means the rules are subject to the game. In Mobsters, they are firmly grounded in the genre, with no superfluous or ill-fitting attributes and skills (e.g. no "magic"), and their names seem to be chosen for atmosphere (e.g. "hoofing" for dancing).

There are nine attributes with none (for Appearance) to eleven (for Intellect) associated skills for a total of 47 skills. Characters are generated by a simple purchase/distribution system, and the distractingly large amounts of points (called "slots" for no apparent reason) to spend are due to the cornucopia of attributes and skills. A player can choose a number of disadvantages (called "cons") limited by the character's age and buy advantages ("edges") or more skill levels for them.

What may come as a surprise to the players is that there are no professions. The PCs are assumed to be Mafiosi, though a crafty GM may extrapolate attribute and skill bundles for different occupations from the NPC list. Mobsters might look a trifle circumscribed in this respect, but the genre is basically cops-and-robbers and Mobsters focuses on the robbers. If you want to play Roaring Twenties' paranormal investigators, go play Call of Cthulhu.

Mobsters uses six-sided dice only. A general test is done by rolling two dice, adding an appropriate attribute or skill value, and comparing the result to a difficulty set by the GM. If it exceeds the difficulty, then the action was successful, otherwise it failed, with the margin allowing an interpretation of both outcomes. The die roll is open-ended: rolling a natural twelve allows the player to add another d6, and keep on doing so as long as it comes up a six. A natural two, on the other hand, means the character fumbled and the test immediately fails.

In a contest, two characters roll as above, adding an attribute or skill value, highest result wins.

Combat is resolved using the test and contest mechanics. The combat rules cover machine-guns, of course, as well as explosives. Who goes first is figured out by the initiative system, which also allows for multiple actions per round. If a blow cannot be parried or dodged, the resulting damage is compared with injury limits dependent on the defender's Health, causing restrictions on his or her next actions, imposition of injury penalties (which mount up rather quickly), unconsciousness, or death.

An average (successful) shotgun blast will just barely kill the average (surprised) character. And while Karma points make up for it, combat is deadly. Thankfully, the author provides us with a two-page section "Art of Murder" or "How to avoid using the combat system", with a lot of useful hints how to dispose of Mafiosi competitors with little danger to yourself. This information may be incomplete, and readily available in novels and gangster films, but spelling it out here for easy look-up is a great help for the GM. I like it.

To alleviate the deadliness of the combat system, Mobsters provides Karma points. A point can be spent anytime for a re-roll or to escape death. The characters get Karma points for fulfilling certain criteria on their way up in the gangster world. To put it in arcade-game lingo: For each level finished you get another life. Levels are large and few, though; an exemplary Al Capone has only four Karma points.

Adventuring, the characters gain experience in small amounts. On the average, a skill increase is just one or two gaming sessions away, and the points can be saved for increasing even attributes (about every five sessions).

NPCs are easy on the GM. They only have a primary (pertaining to their profession or role) and a secondary attribute (for everything else), and may excel in some talents as well as have a number of weaknesses. This nicely collapses the PC char-sheet (blank PC and NPC sheets are provided for Xeroxing, of course) without losing too much detail and retaining combat related statistics. A list of 25 sample NPCs from pimps to politicians rounds out the section.

The second half of the book provides the campaign rules. These form a small game of itself, a kind of strategy/economic simulation board game about the rise of a mobster family from street-level thugs to city- or nationwide crime lords.

The rationale for this is simple. While the adventures are to resolve "big scenes" in the campaign, the stakes are rising with the PCs' position. Taking over a brothel from a rival gang is a challenge for beginning PCs, but later in the game, such trifling work would be a boring task better left to NPC lieutenants. The "downtime" rules will keep the smaller actions role-played at the start of the campaign out of experienced PCs' hair, so the players can concentrate and enjoy more difficult "game actions" as adventures.

Building your Mafia empire means careful balancing between Respect, depending on the number of your illegal businesses, and the Income generated by them. Control is exerted by the PCs' legwork skills but can be deputized to lieutenants --- for half of the income and the risk of a lieutenant suddenly changing sides in a mob war. The more (and more notorious) illegal affairs you operate, the greater is your risk of trouble with your neighbouring gang or with the law, which can be lowered by bribes. Once you start employing lieutenants, expenditure will quickly gobble up your income, so it seems outsourcing won't do you any good.

The "downtime" rules are not complete and rigourous, they are intended as a campaign aid for the GM, with a number of tables for randomly generated (Risk incurred) trouble that needs to be role-played, tying it back into the RPG. Any genre RPG actually, since the "downtime" rules could be used to provide background for any crime- and gang-related RPG. With a little work, it could even be a decent board or computer game.

There are a few notes about running long, GM-prepared adventures. Not much of advice, most of the two pages contain an elaborate example, which can be used as a sample adventure.

The last eight pages are taken up with New Orleans, the game's intended background. In my experience, gangster rhymes with Chicago, but I'm open-minded, so if they say the Crescent City was the USA's most corrupt city in the twenties, it's all right by me. What's more, the rules include random turf generation, so the game can be transferred to another city, if the GM or players are unhappy with New Orleans and its 31 turfs, each with a one-line description and a certain number of illegal businesses (protection rackets, brothels, drug pushing, etc.) going on.

The New Orleans background is perhaps the section most affected by the small size of the book. The list of important people and places is a farce, and the one-page description of the city and the completely illegible map provide no atmosphere at all. Useful, from the GM perspective, is a list of the top five Mafiosi families, with Respect stat, family lieutenants, expected behaviour, and a little background.

Mobsters comes in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), but you can't use it online, since the pages are already sorted for the production of a 64-page booklet. You print it (on normal-sized (A4) paper), stack the sheets, staple down the middle, and fold to get a small booklet. This is probably the best way to present a RPG of this size, avoiding an unstably thin sheaf of paper folding under its own weight and dropping into the salsa.

The layout and typesetting is utilitarian, a no-nonsense approach to conveying information, leaving the atmosphere to the language and illustrations. Sadly, the latter are grainy, low-resolution affairs, mostly reproductions of B-movie posters and stills. There is the occasional orphan and wasted block of white space, and more space is wasted on the New Orleans map and a table on page two, which essentially lists the multiples of 2. But Mobsters is a freebie, so you can't expect its author to go the whole nine yards of professional typesetting, and I'm not sure squeezing out another two pages of background would have made a difference for a city the size of New Orleans. However, there goes the Style rating.

What I am most impressed by is Vuorela's persistent effort to make life easy for the Mobster GM. I've already lauded spelling out the "Art of Murder" above, but that's not all. There is a page of tips for "refereeing" (I love nouning verbs, it weirds language. --- Calvin & Hobbes), mostly intended for the newbie GM. The difficulty levels are defined once, establishing a relation between the numbers and the terms (e.g. "easy") represented by them. What actual number to use must be figured out be the GM in most cases, so sloppy authors could be excused for never mentioning them again. Not so in Mobsters: The difficulty levels are provided several times, applied to the rules just explained. The gear list includes the fee for criminal activities and living costs at various social levels, the weapon list contains notes on concealment --- both things a GM could research or make up, but the author saves the GM's time and effort. He can't spell out everything in 64 pages, or 64k pages for that matter, but where the opportunity existed to give the GM a hand, the author did so. And this display of caring about the GM is one thing I like a lot in Mobsters.

A note about the RPG.net review statistics: After reading this glowing review, you'll probably ask why I only give average ratings. Well, I'd like to reserve the top marks for the truly outstanding works of RPG design. And I can't give Mobsters a 4 in Style for its typesetting. As for Substance, Mobsters is solid RPG writing, so I'll give it a 4. But keep in mind that it's just 64 pages of A5, or about 20 to 25 percent of your average GURPS supplement. About that comp copy: No, it isn't one, in the sense that Mobsters wasn't sent to me for reviewing. However, Burger Games gives it away for free, probably to gain recognition in the RPG world, which is the second half of the definition of comp copy, IMHO.

So follow the link, check out their home page, download Mobsters, print, staple, fold, and give it a try. It's fun!

Mobsters
Mobsters Capsule Review by Clemens Meier on 26/03/02 Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 4 (Meaty) One and a half games about prohibition-era gangsters. Product: Mobsters Author: Ville T. Vuorela Category: RPG Company/Publisher: Burger Games, Espoo, Finland Line: Cost: free Page count: 64 Year published: 1998 ISBN: SKU: Comp copy?: no Capsule Review by Clemens Meier on 26/03/02 Genre tags: Other	Pistols and pine forests? Fights over tundra turfs? Bloodbaths in the sauna? Well, not quite. Mobsters is a role-playing game about prohibition-era crime syndicates. Or fifties' B-movies about prohibition-era crime syndicates, which seem to get their reruns on Finnish TV networks, too, because Mobsters is published by Burger Games in, of all places, Espoo, Finland. I don't know if there were Finnish Mafiosi in the Roaring Twenties, but it doesn't matter, since Mobsters is a solidly researched little game set in New Orleans. So no midnight sun and reindeer. Mobsters uses the Scorpio system, a free RPG engine also by Burger Games --- or perhaps better called a RPG mechanics scheme, since the rules seem not to be rigidly enforced across the games. The Scorpio version of Kalle Marjola's cyberpunk RPG Syndicate, also available online from Burger Games, has quite a number of differences compared to Mobsters, e.g. only six attributes to Mobster's nine. This means the rules are subject to the game. In Mobsters, they are firmly grounded in the genre, with no superfluous or ill-fitting attributes and skills (e.g. no "magic"), and their names seem to be chosen for atmosphere (e.g. "hoofing" for dancing). There are nine attributes with none (for Appearance) to eleven (for Intellect) associated skills for a total of 47 skills. Characters are generated by a simple purchase/distribution system, and the distractingly large amounts of points (called "slots" for no apparent reason) to spend are due to the cornucopia of attributes and skills. A player can choose a number of disadvantages (called "cons") limited by the character's age and buy advantages ("edges") or more skill levels for them. What may come as a surprise to the players is that there are no professions. The PCs are assumed to be Mafiosi, though a crafty GM may extrapolate attribute and skill bundles for different occupations from the NPC list. Mobsters might look a trifle circumscribed in this respect, but the genre is basically cops-and-robbers and Mobsters focuses on the robbers. If you want to play Roaring Twenties' paranormal investigators, go play Call of Cthulhu. Mobsters uses six-sided dice only. A general test is done by rolling two dice, adding an appropriate attribute or skill value, and comparing the result to a difficulty set by the GM. If it exceeds the difficulty, then the action was successful, otherwise it failed, with the margin allowing an interpretation of both outcomes. The die roll is open-ended: rolling a natural twelve allows the player to add another d6, and keep on doing so as long as it comes up a six. A natural two, on the other hand, means the character fumbled and the test immediately fails. In a contest, two characters roll as above, adding an attribute or skill value, highest result wins. Combat is resolved using the test and contest mechanics. The combat rules cover machine-guns, of course, as well as explosives. Who goes first is figured out by the initiative system, which also allows for multiple actions per round. If a blow cannot be parried or dodged, the resulting damage is compared with injury limits dependent on the defender's Health, causing restrictions on his or her next actions, imposition of injury penalties (which mount up rather quickly), unconsciousness, or death. An average (successful) shotgun blast will just barely kill the average (surprised) character. And while Karma points make up for it, combat is deadly. Thankfully, the author provides us with a two-page section "Art of Murder" or "How to avoid using the combat system", with a lot of useful hints how to dispose of Mafiosi competitors with little danger to yourself. This information may be incomplete, and readily available in novels and gangster films, but spelling it out here for easy look-up is a great help for the GM. I like it. To alleviate the deadliness of the combat system, Mobsters provides Karma points. A point can be spent anytime for a re-roll or to escape death. The characters get Karma points for fulfilling certain criteria on their way up in the gangster world. To put it in arcade-game lingo: For each level finished you get another life. Levels are large and few, though; an exemplary Al Capone has only four Karma points. Adventuring, the characters gain experience in small amounts. On the average, a skill increase is just one or two gaming sessions away, and the points can be saved for increasing even attributes (about every five sessions). NPCs are easy on the GM. They only have a primary (pertaining to their profession or role) and a secondary attribute (for everything else), and may excel in some talents as well as have a number of weaknesses. This nicely collapses the PC char-sheet (blank PC and NPC sheets are provided for Xeroxing, of course) without losing too much detail and retaining combat related statistics. A list of 25 sample NPCs from pimps to politicians rounds out the section. The second half of the book provides the campaign rules. These form a small game of itself, a kind of strategy/economic simulation board game about the rise of a mobster family from street-level thugs to city- or nationwide crime lords. The rationale for this is simple. While the adventures are to resolve "big scenes" in the campaign, the stakes are rising with the PCs' position. Taking over a brothel from a rival gang is a challenge for beginning PCs, but later in the game, such trifling work would be a boring task better left to NPC lieutenants. The "downtime" rules will keep the smaller actions role-played at the start of the campaign out of experienced PCs' hair, so the players can concentrate and enjoy more difficult "game actions" as adventures. Building your Mafia empire means careful balancing between Respect, depending on the number of your illegal businesses, and the Income generated by them. Control is exerted by the PCs' legwork skills but can be deputized to lieutenants --- for half of the income and the risk of a lieutenant suddenly changing sides in a mob war. The more (and more notorious) illegal affairs you operate, the greater is your risk of trouble with your neighbouring gang or with the law, which can be lowered by bribes. Once you start employing lieutenants, expenditure will quickly gobble up your income, so it seems outsourcing won't do you any good. The "downtime" rules are not complete and rigourous, they are intended as a campaign aid for the GM, with a number of tables for randomly generated (Risk incurred) trouble that needs to be role-played, tying it back into the RPG. Any genre RPG actually, since the "downtime" rules could be used to provide background for any crime- and gang-related RPG. With a little work, it could even be a decent board or computer game. There are a few notes about running long, GM-prepared adventures. Not much of advice, most of the two pages contain an elaborate example, which can be used as a sample adventure. The last eight pages are taken up with New Orleans, the game's intended background. In my experience, gangster rhymes with Chicago, but I'm open-minded, so if they say the Crescent City was the USA's most corrupt city in the twenties, it's all right by me. What's more, the rules include random turf generation, so the game can be transferred to another city, if the GM or players are unhappy with New Orleans and its 31 turfs, each with a one-line description and a certain number of illegal businesses (protection rackets, brothels, drug pushing, etc.) going on. The New Orleans background is perhaps the section most affected by the small size of the book. The list of important people and places is a farce, and the one-page description of the city and the completely illegible map provide no atmosphere at all. Useful, from the GM perspective, is a list of the top five Mafiosi families, with Respect stat, family lieutenants, expected behaviour, and a little background. Mobsters comes in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), but you can't use it online, since the pages are already sorted for the production of a 64-page booklet. You print it (on normal-sized (A4) paper), stack the sheets, staple down the middle, and fold to get a small booklet. This is probably the best way to present a RPG of this size, avoiding an unstably thin sheaf of paper folding under its own weight and dropping into the salsa. The layout and typesetting is utilitarian, a no-nonsense approach to conveying information, leaving the atmosphere to the language and illustrations. Sadly, the latter are grainy, low-resolution affairs, mostly reproductions of B-movie posters and stills. There is the occasional orphan and wasted block of white space, and more space is wasted on the New Orleans map and a table on page two, which essentially lists the multiples of 2. But Mobsters is a freebie, so you can't expect its author to go the whole nine yards of professional typesetting, and I'm not sure squeezing out another two pages of background would have made a difference for a city the size of New Orleans. However, there goes the Style rating. What I am most impressed by is Vuorela's persistent effort to make life easy for the Mobster GM. I've already lauded spelling out the "Art of Murder" above, but that's not all. There is a page of tips for "refereeing" (I love nouning verbs, it weirds language. --- Calvin & Hobbes), mostly intended for the newbie GM. The difficulty levels are defined once, establishing a relation between the numbers and the terms (e.g. "easy") represented by them. What actual number to use must be figured out be the GM in most cases, so sloppy authors could be excused for never mentioning them again. Not so in Mobsters: The difficulty levels are provided several times, applied to the rules just explained. The gear list includes the fee for criminal activities and living costs at various social levels, the weapon list contains notes on concealment --- both things a GM could research or make up, but the author saves the GM's time and effort. He can't spell out everything in 64 pages, or 64k pages for that matter, but where the opportunity existed to give the GM a hand, the author did so. And this display of caring about the GM is one thing I like a lot in Mobsters. A note about the RPG.net review statistics: After reading this glowing review, you'll probably ask why I only give average ratings. Well, I'd like to reserve the top marks for the truly outstanding works of RPG design. And I can't give Mobsters a 4 in Style for its typesetting. As for Substance, Mobsters is solid RPG writing, so I'll give it a 4. But keep in mind that it's just 64 pages of A5, or about 20 to 25 percent of your average GURPS supplement. About that comp copy: No, it isn't one, in the sense that Mobsters wasn't sent to me for reviewing. However, Burger Games gives it away for free, probably to gain recognition in the RPG world, which is the second half of the definition of comp copy, IMHO. So follow the link, check out their home page, download Mobsters, print, staple, fold, and give it a try. It's fun!