Dark with something more than night

American GIs returning home from the war found their society had changed in disturbing ways. The homecoming boys found women's new confidence and independence both alluring and threatening. At the same time the soldiers had to adjust from being brave heroes to nine-to-fivers -- if they could find work at all. And they brought back their own demons, the aftereffects of having faced death and being expected to kill. The tough masculinity that was so prized in wartime was out of place and brittle in peacetime America. And over all of that hung the shadows of the atom bomb and the almost unimaginable monstrosity of the Holocaust.

No wonder it was the heyday of noir.

Noir and hardboiled fiction are adjacent and often people get them mixed up. Author Megan Abbott explains the difference:

"The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the wild west and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. [...] In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable. In that sense, noir speaks to us powerfully right now, when certain structures of authority don’t make sense any longer, and we wonder: Why should we abide by them?"

The best noir game I can think of is the original Max Payne, which is a long way from the hardboiled 1930s background that is the default setting for Cthulhu roleplaying. Paweł Dziemski and I have drawn on noirish elements for our upcoming Cthulhu 2050 gamebook, locating them a century on from classic noir's origins. There are some RPGs like Gumshoe that lend themselves to the hardboiled milieu, but up till now there haven't been many specifically for noir in a mid-20th century setting. Which is why Alexander and Mina Stojanovic's Infinite Night looks so interesting.

Here the world is definitely a morally murky one. To paraphrase the rulebook, the game takes place in a Los Angeles that reeks of desperation, betrayals, and deals gone wrong. Infinite Night has an elegant dice pool system based on three stats: Brutality, Cunning, and Seduction. Rolls are quick and simple, modified where appropriate by Reputation (War Hero, Driver, Night Owl, etc). Instead of tracking hit points, injury and emotional trauma impose conditions that reduce some rolls. Personal contacts provide a roster of supporting characters to ease PCs into adventures. I like it because it's a system that is there when you need it but that doesn't get in the way of the story.

Currently it's only available as an ebook -- Kindle link here; Apple version here. I don't know whether there'll be a print edition, but Future Pixels who publish it have an Infinite Night MMO in the works. Noir gaming has a bright future ahead.

And... while we're talking about ebooks, this is a good time to mention that The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun, the first two books in the Vulcanverse open-world gamebook series, are now out on Kindle and on DriveThruRPG at a special low introductory price. If you've been thinking of giving the Vulcanverse a try, now is the perfect time.