 Goto [ Index ] |
I don't own any of the other Bedlam City products, so I entered this purchase blind. I'd be interested in anyone more familiar with the "Brown Wrapper Universe" could clue me in on their value and content. In any case, this review will be from the focus of a man just getting into the game world and its value as a standalone product. As a Superlink Creator myself, I think it's important for game industry professionals to take time to do peer review. So, readers should bear these thoughts in mind when reading the following analysis.
Before we proceed to the content, we'll discuss the books editing and layout. This can be a killer to indie game designers but Bedlam City is up to professional levels. The book's organization is top notch and is extremely readable. So readers do not have to worry about that problem with the work. In my opinion, this automatically gives the people at Plain Brown Wrapper games major points since I can't stand books that are difficult to read.
Now that's out of the way, time to discuss the actual content itself. Bedlam City, the City of Now. Though I came up with my own appellation for Bedlam. "The City of Rust." The supplement could also be called "Bludhaven: The Sourcebook" since the city of Bedlam roughly fills the same niche that the Chuck Dixon Nightwing books' city did. Basically, it's just down the lane from a major city of your campaign world and is even more corrupt than Gotham City. Worse, it lacks the once great grandeur of Batman's world. Bedlam was also small potatoes and now its small rotten potatoes. All you need is stats for Dick Grayson and Blockbuster and this could be a perfect supplement for the DCU.
The book reminds me strongly of an old book called Chicago by Night. It was a fairly (in)famous and well loved book from my teenage years when I played Vampire: The Masquerade religiously. You know, before White Wolf said that my angry Brujah berserker with 5 Potence and Celerity was Bad Wrong Fun. The Old World of Darkness was filled with corruption and evil from the top down. It detailed everything from Police to Demons. I don't quite love Bedlam as much as Chicago by Night (for reasons detailed below) but if you own any of the old 1st or 2nd edition City Supplements then you have a rough idea how Bedlam works.
The book is squarely set in the Iron Age of Heroism according to its write up. Honestly, I'd argue that they're incorrect in this description. It's actually more of a Bronze Age/Iron Age setting rather than straight up Iron. In the Iron Age, you had a much stronger Punk element that made player characters like the Authority or Spawn able to rip apart truly awful enemies with no sense of guilt. Bedlam lacks the awesome "I am an evil bastarve" that characterized the Iron Age's best villains. Social ills are a much bigger threat to the city of Bedlam than BIG METAL COSTUMED guys like Stryfe or Deathstroke the Terminator. The bad guys in Bedlam are vile but they're vile in a human way. Wife beaters and Gangsters are the rule rather than Demons from Hell or psycho terrorists.
In fact, Bedlam is thoroughly corrupt. Not in a Punk fashion. Punk requires the EXTREME rebels to be correct and need to overthrow the evil bastarves that are rich, powerful, and decadent. The Punk genre is actually mocked in a very Modern fashion as the Punk scene is (symbolically I assume) dead in Bedlam city but still uselessly rails at the system. The people on the ground are victimized but also victimizers so there's no real point in a class warfare in Bedlam. The poor are just as mean and nasty as the rich. Oddly, the author makes a very good point that Green Arrow and Hal Jordan could do a lot of good with their idealism in Bedlam. Just as much as a Batman or the Punisher style hero.
The book, as befitting a work of 400 pages, is extraordinarily detailed. By the end of it; not only will you know Bedlam's small super villain and super hero population but you will also know every cop in the city, the local media personalities, and the local places to eat. If they ever do a Bedlam City 2.0, then they should probably remove the insistence that this is a place that people are meant to visit rather than campaign in. I think that much of Bedlam's charm comes from the fact that you'll be able to know virtually everything about the city by the time you finish reading it. No "visiting" game could possibly make full use of the information provided in the book. It's perfect for games that involve heavy immersion. Few game worlds can give such a perfectly detailed overview of everything from alleyways to the corruption in City Hall (or the equivalent since Bedlam's City Hall is abandoned).
There's one quality that the City of Rust has shared by virtually all of its inhabitants. EVERYONE has a Dark Secret. Unless you visit David Lynch's Twin Peaks, you're unlikely to find such a thorough collection of unpleasant human beings. Wife abusers, rapists, murderers, and general scum all around. There's a serious argument in the book that goes sadly underused, which is the question whether Bedlam deserves to be saved. I think there's like two or three decent human beings in the entire book; Father Dennis and the Ratcatcher being the only ones who come to mind with maybe the failed superhero Blacktop. Everyone else has more or less earned their damnation. Bedlam is a city of victimizers rather than victims.
Which comes to my one major problem with Bedlam City as a source book. The book goes to elaborate lengths to describe how bad it is in Bedlam City. This leaves the city somewhat at a loss for what exactly player characters are supposed to latch on in order to provide them a reason to want to protect the city. It lacks the "sexy" of the Iron Age and that's something that is rather terminally missing. There's a cool factor that Bedlam City is in desperate need of in order to make player characters feel glad they're doing these jerk asses a favor. There's a couple of possibilities in the Los Furies and maybe the saner member of the Murder Club but you're not going to find a Lois Lane or Steve Trevor in the city. There's a mistake that James Thomson makes that even Frank Miller would shy from and that's he makes even the sex workers in Bedlam out to be hideous. Sin City at least had Jessica Alba and All-Star Batman has Vicky Vale. That's just a matter of personal taste though.
But enough about my thinking that the ugly world of Noir that is Bedlam City could use a bit more gloss. What works? Pretty much a lot of the world does. Almost all of the characters are memorable, so that player characters will be able to identify the police officers of Bedlam City right off by physical description. While the book may go overboard with the darkness, you can pretty much have an adventure ANYWHERE in Bedlam. Churches, Juvenile Hall, Local Radio Stations, the Subway to nearby cities, and so on.
The book also does something that I'm grateful for in going to elaborate lengths to describe the structure of organized crime. While it's not a scholarly treatise by any means; you'll know how to run the structure of Sicilian Mafia, Latin Gangs, Jamaican Gangs, Russian Bratva, and Triads. Even if you don't use Bedlam as a whole, this work could be greatly useful to steal parts of for existing cities if you want to run a serious low level Streets Game. Need an obnoxious Rush Limbaugh figure? Try Rod Anger. Need an utterly corrupt Mayorial candidate? Councilman Czernik is your man. All together, they make a thorough cesspool of a city but Bedlam's residents could be greatly useful spread out in a more saner city. Hell, they even have a Ron Burgandy/Kent Brockman figure in Obediah Brick.
There's also some deliciously fun black humor spread throughout the book. There's a nightmarishly powerful evil Egyptian wizard-mummy in the city museum but he's tormented by the museum's curator who is just an unsympathetic witch (except replace the w with another letter). Plenty of other characters are just so bizarre that it's difficult to take them seriously. The book contains stats for Hitler's brain, for example, but the actual object in question has been dead for 6 decades. It's just people pretend its alive in order to venerate it or use it as a propaganda device (Not that anyone would be able to recognize Hitler's brain anyway). Sometimes, the book verges on the uncomfortable. The Black Eagle, for instance, isn't funny despite the attempts to play him as a super villain. The real world atrocities he's associated with can't be played for gaming enjoyment.
Still, overall, the book is an extremely useful resource and its one of the few truly satisfying "meals" for my money that I've received. I'm willing to pay 35.00 for a lot less content than I received with Bedlam City and it took me a few days of constant reading to finish the book. That's something that I can't say about a lot of works and its a pleasant feeling. Bedlam isn't entirely to my cup of tea and I wouldn't use many of the super villains or similiar characters for their sheer vileness. Still, a lot of the characters are interesting enough to incorporate as is. The Murder Club makes much better use of "bored sorority girls get into murder" than say Meta-4's Clique.
Please help support RPGnet by purchasing the following (probably) related items through DriveThruRPG.
