LOW LIFE: an RPG Campaign

(To ring in the new year; this probably wouldn't run until after Mid-Feb. since I won't be around for the start of that month.)

Low Life is centred about low lives, the disenfranchised and the unfranchisable. The PCs all live in a housing project that the police try to avoid when possible – it’s the kind of place where even those who live there would consider a carpet bombing to be a civic improvement, the sort of housing that it’s a crime to live in but somehow not a crime to own and rent out. Landlords are delinquent at best, malicious at worst, and it’s the last step before the streets for many families. The Everway Housing Project started life as an attempt to boost the lives of the destitute, back in the day when living in the projects just meant you were in a slump and being on welfare wasn’t seen as a moral flaw. Now it’s the kind of place the city likes to pretend doesn’t exist, one bad apple in a bunch scattered together like boils in the heart of what once was a vibrant downtown core. You live in a place of the violent and grubby desperation that lies under all the grandiose ambitions of the world, and you know just know wrong the american dream can be and just how ugly those who can help really act once the media can’t see them.

No one admits to living here if they can avoid it; many employers write off anyone who comes from it as a matter of course. If the police come, it’s in riot gear and in the knowledge almost no one is going to be stupid enough to try and video them. Not everyone is a criminal – far from it – but it’s easier to be one than anything else, and too easy to fall when you’ve got nothing left to live for at all. Most TVs have been sold to pawn shops, many others are broken as a result of items being hurled through them after seeing another report about affluenza or another TV show set in some mythical America that doesn’t exist at all.

Only something has changed. Perhaps an accident, or some government weapon. One day you were normal, and now – now you’re something more than human. You can do things other people can’t. Things out of stories and comic books, are an impossibility walking about a world of drab possibilities.

Longfellow wrote that ‘One half the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream’... only now it is far more than half, and your groans have been among them. You have power. And those in charge are probably shitting themselves right now...

System: Unsure, at the moment. The Cypher System Superhero variant might work well because it would work better for more gritty games. I think? The OVA-Risus variant could work as well (and require less work on everyone’s part).

Note: PCs will have 1 or 2 powers. Power ceiling will be at weak-marvel range. In other words, you can have Invulnerability, but it will have limits. Be super strong, but only to so many limited tons of weight. Be fast, not still visible to people. Etc.

If you have one power, you can pass entirely as human if you want to. If you have two, you don’t pass as human anymore. (Exactly how far you want to take that is up to each PC; consider Nightcrawler in the x-men as a rough starting point – you need to hide your appearance.)

Optionally, you can have your power be stronger than the norm, but when you push it your appearance changes etc.

Theme/Tone: This game is about what happens when the least in society gain power, and how society responds. It is up to the players if their characters decide to be villains, heroes, or inhabit the shades of grey everyone else lives in their lives in. We live in a digital age, and that will affect everything for good or ill – you won’t be able to hide, but neither will the regular media be able to smear you quite as easily as they would otherwise.

Note: this will be a superhero-style game if players want that: my default assumption is that PCs will take steps to improve their own lives via power(s) – ideally with the aid of others, since they aren’t that powerful on their lonesome – and no one is going to put on suits to fight crime. Which doesn’t mean PCs can’t do that, only that it should be run by other players and such as well as to what tone people want the game to take.

The arc the campaign itself takes will be determined by the players and GM prior to the start of the game so that everyone is roughly on the same page.