Justice Inc. by Aaron Allston, Steve Peterson & Michael A. Stackpole

[james_davis_nicoll]

Justice Inc. by Aaron Allston, Steve Peterson & Michael A. Stackpole

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

I poked through Lands of Mystery... It's not so much that the source book aged badly as the genre it focused on aged badly.

[thewayne]

I remember unloading those from the truck at Flying Buffalo when the initial order came in! Of course, since Buffalo was part of the deal with Hero, we got 'em before anyone else did.

[chrysostom]

I think Allston was doing game reviews in Dragon magazine for a while?

[roseembolism]

As far as guns all having similar stats, I recall the game Feng Shui having a long list of guns, so your assassin character could extol the virtues of his signature weapon. But after a while the descriptions said, "Yeah, this is yet another 9mm automatic."

[estrevan]

The stats were all just small/medium/large pistol/rifle/shotgun but the descriptions were stuff like “if this is your character’s gun she probably uses phrases like ‘fine German craftsmanship’ a lot” and “when the bad guys visit the professor and he reaches for the gun in his drawer but they get the drop on him, this is the gun he’s reaching for”.

[austin_dern]

I like this description scheme. It's one that I can understand.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, that sounds excellent. Lots of in-character flavor, simple out-of-character mechanics.

[roseembolism]

Honestly, for a pulp martial arts game these are the best possible descriptions. One could easily adapt them to be aspects in the Fate system.

[ffutures]

Tried to comment on the article page, for some reason it was blocked "for security reasons"

Re footnote 2: Given the glacier slowness of 1984 RPG production - we're still in the era of offset lithography, specialised typesetting languages, and physical cut and paste - and the need to have sufficient cash to pay for things like printing - no POD - I think it's probable that writing and editing of Justice Inc and Danger International ran more or less parallel. A year's difference in copyright date may simply mean that they finished both at more or less the same time, tossed a coin to see which they'd print first, then had to wait longer than expected to get the other out.

[(Anonymous)]

specialised typesetting languages

I would readily believe an RPG set with troff or TeX, but I have never encountered one with their spoor in the wild.