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Mutant City Blues, from Pelgrane Press (The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulu) can be summed up as CSI with superpowers.
It mixes police procedural investigation with mutant powers. The emphasis is firmly on the investigation, rather than four-colour action heroes. The PCs are designed to be part of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, a division of the police dedicated to dealing with crimes that involve the superpowered, either as perpetrators or victims, with adventures centred around solving those crimes. The PC's themselves are expected to be superpowered, but this is actually optional rather than essential.
Setting & Background
The setting is close to reality, and the immediate area of play is the PC’s local city. World History is also largely unchanged, until today. The game is set ten years from now, with the changes that create Mutant City beginning in the present day. In the Mutant City Blues universe, a sudden flu like illness, the Ghost Plague, spread across the planet ten years before start of the game. It killed millions, it was a tragedy, but was not devastating to the world population. Just as mysteriously as the plague starts, it stops; leading some to suggest it was a biological weapon not a plague. Initially it was thought there were no lasting effects. Several months later however, the first superpowers started to manifest, with people round the globe, of all ages, ethnicities and social classes developing some kind of superhuman ability, a phenomena that became known as the Sudden Mutation Event.
Moving the date of play forward ten years detracts from an otherwise fascinating setting. Details could be worked backwards just as easily, so that the trigger plague occurred ten years prior to present day. Since Mutant City is supposed to be a setting local (or at least well-known) to the players, moving things on ten years detracts from that familiarity.
The setting continues to describe what is possibly the biggest anti-climax in world history - the lack of major reactions against mutant powers. This anti-climax is one of the setting's strongest features, emphasising the "normality" of superpowers. Instead of pogroms to wipe out mutants, or herding them into concentration camps, mutants have simply just got on with it, like any other minority.
Approximately 1 in 100 people in the industrialized world have some sort of power and only a handful feel the urge to put their underpants on over their trousers. Those that do are seen as jokes more than anything else. Most of those with "heightened" abilities live normal lives, doing normal jobs, in normal relationships.
Mutants are as assimilated in mainstream culture in a similar manner to gays and lesbians are in real life. Mutants are TV characters, movie stars, politicians. Professional sports leagues use mutants, hospitals use mutants who can lay on hands to cure diseases, fire departments use mutant fire-fighters who can control the flames, or are immune to smoke inhalation.
Powers are subject to the law like any other skill or ability, for example if you have acute hearing, or telescopic sight, you can fall foul of privacy laws just as easily as if you have a long range lens or have bugged someone’s telephone. Certain powers, especially those that cause major public safety or “national security” issues such as invisibility, mind-reading or blowing yourself up have to be registered with the authorities under a law referred to as “Article 18”, but otherwise individuals with those powers are not subjected to state control.
This acceptance and use of mutant powers extends to the police - which is where the PCs come in; characters are expected to be part of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, investigating crimes committed by or against the superpowered. Like the other GUMSHOE games, the focus is on investigation, and mutant powers gives players the chance to act as mobile crime science laboratories, finding and interpreting the evidence. The powers themselves also fit within this framework, with many leaving tell-tale evidence behind that can be tested for and used to solve cases. Powers are also organised in a specific way, meaning that powers can only exists in certain groups, meaning that the presence of wildly unrelated powers at a crime scene can indicate more than one perpetrator.
The details of the setting have been designed to slot into your local area, rather than in some created city or locale. It’s a nice idea, and would work well for any group based in a densely urban environment. For those of us who live in less urban areas there’s more work involved siting the various institutions, but nothing that should challenge a creative GM.
It also includes the development of various pro- and anti- mutant groups, from a rather middle class Lobby group, through to political terrorists and the lunatic fringe of a quasi-religious cult. These groups provide instant antagonists, but the given NPC’s fail to inspire, as they lack any sense of being either criminally cool or clever. A GM might be better served by keeping the organisations, and making their own NPCs.
A chapter is dedicated to the local Heightened Crimes Unit the players would be attached to. This chapter uses the American police force as its model, and would require work to turn it into another county’s police force. As well as senior police officers, the NPCs who form the regular support staff for PCs are also included here. On the whole, the allies presented in this section are more interesting than the enemies that PCs might face, coming across as having more personality than any of the antagonists.
As well as the direct setting material, there are chapters given over to subjects such as forensics and being a police officer that are useful to any setting, not just Mutant City Blues. The focus is again American, so players in other parts of the world may find they need to supplement the information to fit it into their setting.
System & Character Generation
They system powering this unique background is the GUMSHOE system. The defining philosophy behind GUMSHOE is that in investigative games, players should just get the clues. Game time should not be wasted and plot not derailed because the PC’s don’t roll high enough to spot the clues and therefore go around in circles missing vital data. In GUMSHOE, the PCs are supposed to spend their time interpreting clues, not finding them.
I’m not entirely convinced that the GUMSHOE philosophy of automatically providing clues to the players is justification for writing an entirely new games system. It is entirely possible that the whole setting could be produced as a generic standalone product for use with any superpowers based system, with the idea of providing clues automatically written into the GM notes.
But the system is as it is written sounds simple and straight forward, requiring only a single D6 to play. GUMSHOE is a skill based system, with investigative skills bought separately from general, more action-orientated, skills. There are no secondary statistics to calculate, and when I tried to gen some sample characters, it took less than 10 minutes each.
Instead of rolling for investigative abilities, the basic clues are handed out automatically in each scene. Instead, points spent on Investigative skills are used to generate more details about the clues and evidence beyond the basics.
Whilst investigative skill use is automatic, the action based skills are not. To make a general skill roll, players roll a single d6 and add points from their skill pools to beat a difficulty (typically 4), which should allow for some variation whilst allowing PC’s good control over their actions, though I look forward to seeing if this is actually the case in real play.
Details on the use of each skill are quite light, not giving example difficulties for particular tasks to guide a GM, just the overall level, and even that is not particularly detailed. GM’s familiar with setting difficulty numbers will probably be able to cope, but more structured examples of play would be helpful in speeding the learning process.
Most superpowers common in comic books and films are replicated in the setting, with one notable difference. Unlike most superhero settings, you can't have random combinations of any power. Certain powers are related to each other, detailed in an in-game hand-out called the Quade diagram. By organising powers into groups and relationships, it fits superpowers into a scientific/forensic framework that keeps it inline with the investigative system.
The Quade diagram is also used for character gen, with powers being costed based on the number of steps along the Quade diagram you take. You can take as many powers as you have points for, or use all your points on a single power, giving players the option to play low powered, broad ability heroes, or single-power ubermensch. Even then certain powers, such as teleportation and telekinesis, are still kept low powered. This may disappoint players who fancy being Nightcrawler with a badge, or want to save the bus falling off the bridge with only their minds, but is in keeping with the street-level power of the Mutant City Blues setting.
Powers automatically come with a downside – almost all powers end up linked to certain disabilities and mental defects, which can become debilitating with continued use of powers, and in many cases result in the death or otherwise enforced retirement of the character. This is designed to provide sub-plots for players, and more clue/motive/plot fodder for GMs. Whilst I personally like it, it may make the game a hard sell for players who like iron control over their character development, and don’t find these defects “cool.”
Difficulties for power usage are slightly more detailed than for general skills, but not by much, and all work on the same system, of spending points from each power to improve the roll. Whilst it all sounds simple enough, I’m yet to be convinced this simplicity of the system can handle action well, or if the points for augmenting rolls will just run out too quickly, leaving my players feeling cheated that they can’t do enough ‘cool stuff’, superpowered or not.
Appearance
My copy is a black and white PDF of the print book, which is scheduled for release in early 2009. The layout is generally clean, without excessive borders or overcrowding. Some box outs haven’t come out so well, being white text on a pale grey, so they are quite hard to read, but I consider that a small issue. The art is only average, but is satisfyingly noir in feel.
Another good feature of the game is that the contents pages run into a high level of detail, and the index appears thorough, making it very easy to track down information you need to reference.
Conclusion
Mutant City Blues has a few minor flaws, and its densely urban America focus means that any GM who isn’t from densely urban America is going to have to do more work to make the setting fit. But that is the worst I can say without playing it, and its work I’m prepared to do to play the game. Even if you feel the GUMSHOE philosophy is just that - a game philosophy rather than something to hang a new system off - it is worth buying for the hundred odd pages of the setting, which is refreshingly different and quick to digest for both players and referee (since it’s your backyard with a few extras).
The system as a whole is comparatively rules-light, and the episodic nature of criminal investigations means that the game is ideal for pick-up sessions or convention play, though that same rules-lightness may be problematic when dealing with action orientated scenes and powers, but I look forward to finding out.
For the first time in months I’m excited about running a new game. I can’t wait for the new season at my local games club so I can get stuck in. And I think this is because Mutant City Blues is one of the more original settings I’ve seen in a while. It adds a decidedly grown up spin to the superhero genre, getting away from Spandex and silly names of X-men and other similar comics, as well as their save-the-cheerleader-save-the-world plots. I can’t wait to get my hands on a hard-copy.
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