Archive Delving - Noir World

 It's time to go digging again! Today I'm reading through John Adamus's Noir World.

Noir World began crowdfunding in 2017. I don't know why it's lodged in my brain so strongly, but when I think about crowdfunding ttrpgs, Noir World is usually there, lurking in the back of my mind. Part of it is that I don't know if I can say it's exited crowdfunding yet - the last update is from last year, a post from the layout designer saying that if anyone is still waiting for their printed copy, they have a chance to get one at an upcoming convention. But this is hardly unique - Blades in the Dark, of course, funded earlier and still hasn't fulfilled its stretch goals. Dungeon World is getting a second edition, theoretically - maybe they'll fulfill the promise of a supplement about war/large scale conflict (Inglorious, which I believe was meant to be the supplement fulfilling that goal, was never made public). So Noir World is not the first or last among ttrpgs in having a long tail towards completion. I think it's something sadder that's cemented it in my mind - this was the first ttrpg I remember in which I saw crowdfunding really ruin a person's life. John Adamus is still out there, but it looks like he's out of game design, maybe forever. I think that's too bad, and I hope life-after-kickstarter is possible.

But I don't really want to speculate on the lives of internet strangers, even if I'm engaging with their work. I'm more interested in reading the pdf, and that's going to be what we talk about in a second. I wanted only to mention that the other thing I think of is how I only discovered the game through the One Shot Podcast. I'm not really particularly interested in noir films or the noir genre broadly. So I'm pretty sure I wound up backing the game because 1. it was pbta and I wanted to read every pbta game and 2. it was advertised to me specifically (and I'm grappling with the fact that I am susceptible to advertising). I wanted to take a moment with its kickstarter story because I think it's indicative of a way the world has changed, or seems to have changed from my perspective. This game did alright, 32 thousand dollars, though it's nowhere near the blockbusters we see today, and is not really exceptional for the time. My sense is that we don't see a lot of games in this category any more though - mid-weight, bespoke systems that make a modest five figures and get about a thousand backers. A quick review of some of the hyped up zine quests from this year suggests one or two that hit it "medium" like this, darlings (this year's was Cloud Empress) hit six figures, and the other stuff kept pretty small.

Anyway, that's enough speculation. We're far enough removed from those dark days of 2017 that I have essentially no memory of how the game works or what it promised, beyond the idea of film noir tropes and a pbta structure. So what I'll be looking for is primarily whether Noir World does anything special with the pbta framework - it would be great to return from the delve having found a hidden jewel.

The introduction immediately catches my eye - Adamus cites Jason Morningstar and Avery Alder as inspirations, in addition to the Bakers! That's interesting - in 2017 I think the thing you'd be thinking of Alder for is Monsterhearts (maybe 2, maybe original flavor). Technically it's possible you could be citing the early version of Dream Askew but that would be pretty wild. I have no idea what Adamus might be pulling from Jason Morningstar yet. Maybe Fiasco? The credits also say that the system is a "modified Apocalypse World engine" which in 2024 reads to me like a bigger promise than I was imagining - nowadays, if someone said something like "a modified Apocalypse World engine" I'm imagining Flying Circus or something else that really messes with the mechanics, but in 2017 maybe it just means you added a fun little counting minigame. Ok now we can actually read the thing sorry I just was surprised.

The pdf says it's 183 pages long, but they're all spreads - this thing is 366 pages!! Ack! I didn't intend to read that much. Also I'm on my fifth paragraph and we haven't even started reading yet. I'm gonna try to keep this short. Luckily, it's only about half of the book for the "rules" - which includes an "Introduction," a "Getting Started" section, and then a section for "Playing Noir World." Woof! Then notes on being the GM ("Director"), the basic moves, and the playbooks. The other half of the book, 100+ pages, is given to "Featurettes," which look to be little settings you can jump into, and appendices, which have even more settings and one "toolbox," plus some extras. Let's take a look at our introduction (and I might get to loop in the other introduction-esque sections).

The introduction begins with a page of special italicized text which I mostly like, and works pretty well. Unfortunately, the first words are "Noir World is a world of blacks, whites, and grays" which... probably didn't read that great in 2017 either, I don't think. I think you could communicate this differently. But the rest helps set the tone - this is a game (and a genre) where there might not be heroes or villains, and if you're one then you're probably also a little bit of the other. Strong ethos to start on! The first page of rules text is given to the disclaimer that the media Noir World pulls from are full of bigotry - but that's not a reason to include bigotry in your game. These are pretty common now, and I think they were in 2017 too, which honestly is not that long ago, but this seems like a fairly well done example of its kind. There's a "what you need to play" page with the boring stuff, but it says that you can double up on playbooks ("roles") - "you can have multiples of the same Role in a Movie."

We fairly quickly do get into the one thing I thought I remembered, which is that Noir World is technically a GMless game! Maybe it's pulling on Dream Askew after all. Someone will be the Director in each scene, but it rotates. Cool! The other thing I'm picking up on is that this game bakes into the system the "filmic" language / writers room approach you often see when talking about games, but most of the time it's metaphorical! Even when a game declares a "Scene" to be a game-mechanical term to describe a period of time, the sense I usually get is one of comparison, rather than emulation.

Okay I know I said I'd try to be fast and we're not past page 5 of the intro, but Noir World does one other thing that I think is interesting - it tases something like the principles/agendas that you see in pbta and makes it part of the intro, to describe what the game is/what the game is about. It wants to communicate a way of thinking about how to play, and what it means to be playing; what you'll be doing in a real way. They're quite direct, too, which has the benefit of not ever being mystifying (they're statements about what the game is or is not, and the motivation behind each is pretty easy to understand), but it also makes it less... artful? Like, the principles in Apocalypse World are pretty direct, but they're also kind of poetic to me. Maybe that's unfair - AW doesn't ever break "character" and maybe that's all I'm responding to. Noir World does kind of read like Adamus is talking to me, but the tone comes across as a little dry, like it's trying to be as objective as possible, like you'd expect of a neutral rules document.

There's a page that's titled "Playing Noir World" but it's not the section by the same name, we're still in the intro. Hm. It breaks apart a "move" although here they're called "actions." It's pretty good! There's also a little heuristic to the aid uninitiated, breaking down the "success bands" and what they mean (although I'd quibble with the way they're enunciated here). That leads directly into the Roles, and there are 20 of them! 20! I figure they must be pretty small. They're also, interestingly, broken into two categories - more proactive ("Movers") and more reactive ("Shakers"). There's a Good Cop role and a Bad Cop role; there's a Disgraced Doctor role; there's a Musician role. Kind of a lot! And apparently the Featurettes include more roles, more specifically tailored to their subgenres. I'm curious to see if this has impacts on how cohesive the game feels to me. 

This takes us to part 2, Getting Started. Pretty simple procedure, although some load-bearing character creation rules show up on the very first page quite briefly, and then don't show up again for several pages. I won't get too much into all the procedure happening here. I will pull out the timelines - Noir World wants to give you the freedom to set it in any time period, which I think is ambitious, but ultimately I'd kind of prefer it just sell me really strongly on the original genre, and explain what it was doing and where it came from. That's what I really need, I think, if I want to make a modern noir. This quick treatment of the decades reminds of what Curse of the House of Rookwood did, too. Also the write-up for "the future" era has this rather gnomic line - "But there will always be a struggle between have and have-not, good and evil, right and wrong, action and inaction." I guess the vibe I was getting out of noir was that it wasn't really about good vs evil, but more importantly, what the heck is action vs inaction doing here? Are we star wars? Is this Yoda talking to me? Also GOD there's a Hamilton reference and one of the eras is the 1770s. This might be my cue to go to bed for the night and pick this up in the morning.

It's a new day and I'm leaving the eras behind - it's not a piece of the text I'm much interested in anyway. The next subsection is on character creation, and it's pretty simple. The item tag rules are right here too, which struck me as an odd choice. The stats are called "Motivations" but you also have a "Motives" subsection. Step 3 of getting started is making locations. There's always exactly one more location than player characters - having played games that make similar moves like this (like Fiasco, which is looking more and more like it must be the Morningstar citation), I think you need more! Dream Askew/Apart get by because instead of locations you have themes; iterations on that design, like Wanderhome, have made it easier to generate new locations quickly. But I do like the gist of what makes a location run; it needs a character we care about and a fact that's important.

Step 4 is the crime. It's another fiasco-ism; it uses dice drafting to determine the crime, which is fun. There's something interesting in making this kind of enormous game that can only be played in one shots - it's "filmic" rather than "episodic." Even if you get sequels, each one is expected to stand on its own. The text downplays the centrality of the crime to the proceedings, which I think is kind of weird - I like flexible rules, and I often chafe against things which feel "unnecessary" to what I want from a game. But compare with Fiasco's twist - even flexible as it is, that procedure is providing a useful scaffolding structure. It divides the "movie" in two, and gives everyone something major to respond to and bounce off of. Here, the crime winds up feeling like it could be kind of superfluous. Maybe that's true to the source material, but as a rule it seems kind of deflationary rather than liberatory. The text calls it part of the skeleton of the movie, but leaves it up to you how central it is. I'd rather it provide some examples of ways to think about it, eg, is it the motivating force that throws characters together? Is it the mid-movie disaster that sends us rocketing towards the climax? Is it in fact the central action of the movie, that we'll want to devote a lot of work to setting up?

We're nearing the end of the long "introduction" - the next chapter is for "Playing Noir World." The logic makes a little more sense to me now, but I do think set-up is part of play. The major structural procedure imparted here is that the movie will have a three act structure, but the structure is again pretty loose. Each act gets a few paragraphs describing what the purpose of the act is, and two or so bullet points of requirements before the game moves on. These largely don't work for me! The paragraphs are not particularly illuminating - in Act 2, for example, we're told that "The strength of Act Two is in its ability to let the Movie develop through the combined efforts of all Roles and Directors." We might think of it as "rolling a snowball down a hill" but we also shouldn't give in to "temptation" and "[think] that the plot will play out in a certain way." I'm all for the fundamental piece here - I want to play to find out, and if I know how the movie's going to go by the end of Act 1, that's probably kind of boring! But this language isn't helping me get there. If the set-up in Act 1 is like putting a snowball at the top of the hill in preparation for it to roll down to the bottom, what happens in Act 2 to make that snowball's course deviate in fun ways? What can we do as players to inject interesting diversions, that change the direction the plot's gravity pulls?

Now, this suggestion is maybe because I've been Heart-pilled lately, but I think Heart's Beats would be an incredible steal here. What if acts were structured around players hitting particular, act-specific moments? That kind of scaffolding immediately puts the game back in the players' hands I think (and it fits with my understanding of movies, which are often written around hitting particular character beats by certain stages).

There's some scene-work instruction that has a sidebar on Paul Czege, and his "principle," which I think I've encountered before. The gist is that it's boring to dictate both the trouble a character is in and the resolution of that trouble. I think I have some counterexamples to the principle, but largely it reminds me of Jay Dragon's Rules are a Cage article - there is, or can be, something fun about having to grapple with a structure, rather than just getting what you want. The principle is deployed in defense of Noir World's rule that you can't direct a scene with your character in it, which makes the whole thing doubly funny to me - yes, all us theater kids probably roll our eyes, having experienced someone who was directing a show they were starring in, but you can't say that it's impossible or even particularly uncommon, or maybe more importantly that it doesn't work. There are definitely reasons why it might not work so well! But movies are their own counterexample here. The problem Adamus is working his way up to propose is "what if you get a 6- and the director has to offer you a hard choice? How hard a choice can you offer yourself?" I'm capable of a lot of things! And what's more, the game is collaborative anyway - couldn't my friends pipe up and say "hey that choice seems kinda weak actually, what if we did this instead?" Anyway the scene-directing text is basically fine but not super exciting to me.

Next is a quick overview of the basic moves: there are four, one for each stat and one for helping. These are extremely bare bones, and, not to sound like a snob, they don't seem to really be using the pbta "engine" - there's no sense of "director moves" to complicate the conversation. Instead, 10+'s just work, 7-9's have choices, and 6-'s have bad outcomes and usually a bad choice. The move for reading a situation has some cool choices on a 7-9, like your discovery "makes things more complicated for everyone in the movie." Is the implication that 10+'s shouldn't complicate things? Fights will apparently track Injuries, which is not very exciting to me (although earlier text in the items rules does say that wounds stay with you for the whole movie, which I do think is genius). The written trigger is not exciting, but the longer explanation for fighting is fun - the move happens the moment someone pulls out a weapon, which includes making finger guns at the table.

Combat rules! Injury is dealt either 1, 2, or 3 at a time, and although the text calls this "tiers" it doesn't seem like there's any difference between taking 1 Injury twice (the ol' one two punch) and getting hit in the face with a brick (the text's example of a tier 2 weapon). You die if you take more than 3 injuries, which means no weapon is immediately fatal - but all guns seem to be tier 3. About that wound rule I really liked - the text here mysteriously chooses to say each wound imparts a "tag" but directs you back to the item tags. You know, the ones like "lots of ammo" or "expensive." Some of these tags could describe people (and in fact some appear to best describe people), but only a very small few could be reasonably describing harm.

A little more on locations - the maximum is now given as twice the number of people, but the text doubles down on the idea that all scenes must happen in one of the predetermined locations. Apparently we're allowed to make new locations, but first we have to decide if it should be a secondary location instead. I wouldn't have put this much stock into this procedure!

This chapter ends with a section on troubleshooting, with some advice that's pretty fine, if unspectacular. Some of this is usually put into the GM moves/principles and I see some of it now in player agendas/principles, but I do think there's something nice about breaking kayfabe this way.

Chapter 4: Directing Noir World! We open immediately with some big headlines that are something like Agendas; they all seem fun and dramatic and genre-focused, although they're not all totally actionable. There's a Director's Code with a similar mix of principle-like items; the first, "Breathe the Noir" has a good write-up, but isn't particularly evocative to me by just its headline. Some of the items are more like gm moves than principles, too (like the code item "Tell Me More" - it would be easy to translate this into a principle, but it's interesting that it's more of a specific conversational maneuver, than an organizing concept). There are also gm moves ("director actions"), but they're kind of toothless, compared to the earlier agendas & principles - sure, you have a move to "harm someone" but is that really paying off the principle that "pain and suffering are on the menu?" Most of them are also called "limited" which is maybe to suggest that they're 6- specific, but the use is never explained and doesn't appear again. Actually, there's almost no text to support the idea of what the director actions are doing, or how to use them, or the idea that they relate to / are specific ways to enact the principles. From a pbta design standpoint, I'm not that enthralled with this piece, and if I weren't steeped in the lore of apocalypse world, I don't know that I'd be able to use this very much at all.

Chapter 5 has the playbooks! The stars of the show are the secrets and hooks, which are pretty punchy. I could do with more secrets, or more hackable secrets - three isn't quite enough, or maybe they're just missing a little something. It's the right number for the goals, though. The moves are mostly ok, with some fairly uninspiring ones, although there are some that do really sing thanks to "movie logic" - the Dirty Cop has a move that solves the age old "how do we mechanize talking" quite elegantly; "they believe you for now but you'll have to do something you don't want to do before the end of the movie." Beyond just being uninspiring, the trouble with nearly all of these moves is that I as the GM basically never prefer the 10+ to the 7-9s, which usually have a pretty good complication. If the GM moves were meatier, I wouldn't mind! But here, the best text for making interesting things happen is in the mixed successes.

A little more about the moves: a lot of the triggers are in a tricky place for me. They're often a little detached from the specifics of a character's action. Sometimes. this is cool - the Fatale has a move for "double-crossing" and the 10+ is "nobody suspects you when it succeeds." The move doesn't really sound like it "takes care of" the double-cross - it's just a little piece of text that says what will happen after the betrayal. It feels like setting the tone in a movie (although I think the implementation leaves a little to be desired). Others, though, are detached enough that they feel kind of weightless - the Good Cop has a move about berating people, and the success doesn't really seem to me to guarantee anything but the moral moment. Maybe that's powerful in the movie, but I think it's harder to sell in the game, where we have to imagine the music swelling and the shot composition with heroic framing.

A little deeper in, I'm getting more used to the idea that sometimes the moves aren't things your character does, so much as the movie does. This is especially clear in the "Shakers" playbooks, which now make more sense - these are roles that will get thrust into particular situations by the plot, and then you roll the dice to determine the feeling of that scene's resolution. "Especially clear" might be overselling it - there are still plenty of playbooks that feel very mover-y, both in fiction and moves, but are maybe just not the kinds of characters who get to be protagonists in noir movies as they were made. Anyway, the moves continue to land in the "ok" to "not great" zone (with the rare star breaking containment into "cool!"), but I think I can appreciate a little more of what they're doing.

The last pieces are the Featurettes. I thought I'd skip these entirely, but they're kind of packed full of design. I'm not sure that I buy the premise, though - featurette #2 is "The Prom," for example, and I just don't think that the usual Noir World rules are that applicable to this. Featurette #1 is "Narwhal" and it took me until the end of this paragraph to realize that it's punning on Noir World, and force me to come back up here and insert this sentence, but at least now I understand better why it's in the book. It is interesting to see the "pre-built" locations that each come with their own particular moves - it's reminiscent of locations in Wanderhome, although my bet is that that's convergent evolution, rather than a line of descendance. The last one of these is "Star Noir" which is doing star wars, and it ultimately just isn't up to the task - not that star wars is particularly complex, but the structure is simply not here. It's neat to imagine the ways Star Wars is like noir movies, and the ways in which George Lucas would have been inspired by them (the prequels, in particular, I think are an interesting case with investigation, corruption, complicated protagonists) - but I don't really want to simulate those movies with these tools. The Luke Skywalker playbook has a move about whining - I mention it not to dismiss it out of hand, because yeah, Luke whines a lot in those movies, but instead to point out that if you're playing Luke, you get to choose a total of two moves out of a list of four. If I choose "whine" as one of my two moves, am I going to get to hit all the star wars beats I want? It's the kind of muddiness that makes the whole thing look less focused - are these rules for noir games, or is this just a "movie" framework?

At the very end of the book are the appendices. Most interesting to me are the breakdowns of classic noir movies, scene by scene. It makes me appreciate a little more what the rules are trying to accomplish, although it also to me drives home how arbitrary some of them are - The Third Man has, by my count, 12 locations (more double the main cast), the first act goes for 14 scenes, and there's no third act at all! The Maltese Falcon hews a little more closely, but act 3 remains miniscule and mostly montage'd, one of the "roles" doesn't appear until the end of act 1, and appears in only about 2 scenes. and although some people get hurt, the combat rules don't seem to matter much. It shouldn't surprise me at how many scenes movies have, but drawing it this clearly does give me pause - with a game like Noir World, I think I'd be lucky to get 8 scenes out of a one shot. Perhaps like the legendary Harper "3-score" sessions of Blades in the Dark, there's just a way of playing that I can't imagine, but I genuinely do not  know what it would look like to play a game like this and blitz through 15-20 scenes in (ideally) 3 hours. My takeaway would be "maybe it's not worth trying to mimic the structure of movies too specifically - maybe we need to abstract a level beyond scenes." But I digress. The last "rules text-y" appendix is the toolbox promised earlier, which winds up being a fairly simple but nice-to-have list of buildings/businesses to drop in.

The last appendix of note to me is a personal note from Adamus, talking about the process of making the thing. The big standouts to me are how he talks about the "systems" he went shopping around for. He didn't like Fate for this (I don't like Fate either), and he says Gumshoe was too technical for his purposes (I'd been wondering previously about Gumshoe, and how good of a fit it seemed). Adamus also mentions that he found Apocalypse World too intimidating, and wasn't sure how to make it his own, but eventually abandoned that endeavor, in favor of instead tried making a game "way more about a shared experience given to the players." He also puts forward two guiding questions: "“What do I want people to feel while playing my game?” and “Are there things I’m really enthusiastic about that can rub off on people playing the game?” I like both of these, although the first one does seem kind of contradictory with his insistence that he's abandoned the authorial spotlight.

My read, as someone who might be kind of a snooty elitist about pbta and thus part of the problem, is that Noir World does suffer because it doesn't understand what Apocalypse World is doing or trying to do to make itself legible as an experience that's ultimately in the players' hands. I won't argue that Apocalypse World succeeds unequivocally at that goal - obviously not. But the pieces of AW Adamus has disposed of, apparently in the name of better giving the game to the players, seem to me to often be the pieces that actually explain what the game is and what it's doing, or instead the critical structure that makes it run. I think it has led to a fundamental difference of position - Apocalypse World can lend itself to a writer's room-y approach, but is ultimately about player agency, shaped by genre. "What do you do?" Noir World doesn't seem to me like it's quite the same - I think the Noir World question is closer to "What happens next?" I think this is a cool question, and I broadly like some of the ways the scaffold helps me get there! But the tools it gives me wind up feeling a little blunt or dull.

These days, I think you'd probably make Noir World closer to a No Dice No Masters game - I think those games have a lot of ways of collaboratively making drama and helping you sort of step out of the single character you're playing and into the role of the collaborator, deciding what happens together. But I think there is an under-explored thought here in Noir World, where so many moves are about finding yourself in a situation, and rolling the dice to see how it turns out for you. I think ttrpgs are very often about choosing uncertainty, and a lot of the time we choose to be uncertain about how a character's action "resolves" - but it seems just as interesting to me to choose to be uncertain about how a moment is framed, or about what a character actually does next. 

The personal note ends with Adamus relating the rest of his design story: he was so nervous as to be nauseous (multiple times), but he got over it - he played the game and had a fun time, and it seems like other people did too. My name is on the very next page, in the list of all 1000+ kickstarter backers (the font is quite small).

I went into this delve hoping to find a hidden gem of pbta design, or at least writing, and in that regard, I count this venture as a success. Genuinely, I think the animating piece of Noir World is worth grappling with, and I enjoyed trawling through its enormous number of moves, to see if I could puzzle out how the game tries to express its central ideas. I concede that I think the design the game wants to have is under-realized, and that the result reads a little clunkily. And it's probably not the game that's going on the top of my "to-play" pile, but that wasn't really what we were reading for anyways. Another delve completed, more of the archive sorted, and new treasures in hand - that's exactly where I hoped to be. Thanks, Noir World!