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Mean Streets
This contains details on the isolated city of Albredura as well as gamemastering tips for the Bloodshadows roleplayer. Also included is the Bloodshadows Gamemaster Screen, containing many of the necessary charts and tables included in the Bloodshadows WorldBook and MasterBook.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Stephen Crane
1,488 books1,057 followersStephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel, The Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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January 14, 2025How? I bought a complete lot of Bloodshadows a bit ago because (a) I remember being curious about this when I first saw it in 1994; and (b) I love a complete lot.
Now that I am reorganizing my shelves and making a spreadsheet, I am making time for things I bought but haven't read. Will I make time to play more? Probably not!
What? Here's my theory: West End Games put out the multi-genre RPG TORG in 1990, where multiple realities were crashing into Earth and your PCs could hop from, say, cyberpunk Japan to Arthurian England. After the fun of that multi-genre work, they decided to put out a generic system, called Masterbook, which was released in 1994, launched with two different campaign settings: Indiana Jones (keeping in mind that WEG also had the Star War rights) and Bloodshadows, which was itself a genre mashup: fantasy horror noir.
Fantasy: on a separate planet (for some dumb reason), a war between Order and Chaos raged hundreds of years ago, unleashing all sorts of monsters. Now there are cities separated by uncrossable wilderness, and magic takes the place of most technology.
Noir: And that technology level? It's about, say, interwar America. Not just that, but the cities themselves are run by the greedy and corrupt, with bought-off cops, and mob warfare in the streets.
Horror: And the rich get rich on the backs of the little folks, whether living or dead, with zombies and skeletons toiling away in factories.
Like TORG, the Masterbook system uses both dice and cards (or at least I know TORG uses cards, I think it uses dice too?). And this complete lot includes two city guidebooks and a wilderness sourcebook, a GM companion, a monster book, a magic book, two adventure anthology-type books.
Yeah, so? There's some nice art here and some interesting ideas, but, gah, this game line is a good example of the 90s excess of RPGs, with too much stuffed in, and not enough guiding vision. Like, take the cover of this book, a GM companion which nicely adds some generic locations and advice -- but has a cover that totally misses the noir aesthetic, instead going for something that looks more like queer-coded 80s to me.
The system does have some interesting ideas, like the use of cards to help drive subplots (as well as act as a sort of hero point, so players can juice their results on the dice they get); but some of the system is overly dumb in the way of RPGs, where you have to roll one number to get another number which you add to a third number to get a result -- unless you want to modify that result with a card.
Like I said, there are some good ideas here but... life is too short to put every imaginary world invented into my head. I think there's some things worth mining here, though ...
OK, let's do it, let's fix Bloodshadows: What you want out of a game like this is vampire gangsters shooting tommy guns in an attempt to rob a blood bank; you want corrupt businessmen whose feckless children have gotten in too deep with fish people and need rescuing; you want gargoyles murdering people in their buildings. In other words, what you want is Universal Pictures -- the classic 1930s monster movies but set in the 1930-50s gangster movies.
So, first, get out of here with the Order/Chaos war stuff, and, in fact, most of the fantasy stuff that isn't recognizable. Yeah, it's fun to have a variety of demons walking around the city, but when you mix classics like succubi in with stuff you've created that has less staying power, you get a watering down of everything. Let's stick with the classics.
And there's fights, but the stories are also mysteries, so let's use the Gumshoe as the system -- an option that wasn't available at the time.
So: who are the PCs? They are non-aligned troubleshooters or busybodies (as they are in this game, to an extent), who keep getting pulled into one mystery after another, which always involves some gang violence, institutional corruption, and monsters. Maybe they are monsters themselves. Do they hop around from city to city? Probably not, so you don't need to worry about the wilderness all that much, just place all the action in one city that has everything you need for a gangster/monster B-movie.
Now that I am reorganizing my shelves and making a spreadsheet, I am making time for things I bought but haven't read. Will I make time to play more? Probably not!
What? Here's my theory: West End Games put out the multi-genre RPG TORG in 1990, where multiple realities were crashing into Earth and your PCs could hop from, say, cyberpunk Japan to Arthurian England. After the fun of that multi-genre work, they decided to put out a generic system, called Masterbook, which was released in 1994, launched with two different campaign settings: Indiana Jones (keeping in mind that WEG also had the Star War rights) and Bloodshadows, which was itself a genre mashup: fantasy horror noir.
Fantasy: on a separate planet (for some dumb reason), a war between Order and Chaos raged hundreds of years ago, unleashing all sorts of monsters. Now there are cities separated by uncrossable wilderness, and magic takes the place of most technology.
Noir: And that technology level? It's about, say, interwar America. Not just that, but the cities themselves are run by the greedy and corrupt, with bought-off cops, and mob warfare in the streets.
Horror: And the rich get rich on the backs of the little folks, whether living or dead, with zombies and skeletons toiling away in factories.
Like TORG, the Masterbook system uses both dice and cards (or at least I know TORG uses cards, I think it uses dice too?). And this complete lot includes two city guidebooks and a wilderness sourcebook, a GM companion, a monster book, a magic book, two adventure anthology-type books.
Yeah, so? There's some nice art here and some interesting ideas, but, gah, this game line is a good example of the 90s excess of RPGs, with too much stuffed in, and not enough guiding vision. Like, take the cover of this book, a GM companion which nicely adds some generic locations and advice -- but has a cover that totally misses the noir aesthetic, instead going for something that looks more like queer-coded 80s to me.
The system does have some interesting ideas, like the use of cards to help drive subplots (as well as act as a sort of hero point, so players can juice their results on the dice they get); but some of the system is overly dumb in the way of RPGs, where you have to roll one number to get another number which you add to a third number to get a result -- unless you want to modify that result with a card.
Like I said, there are some good ideas here but... life is too short to put every imaginary world invented into my head. I think there's some things worth mining here, though ...
OK, let's do it, let's fix Bloodshadows: What you want out of a game like this is vampire gangsters shooting tommy guns in an attempt to rob a blood bank; you want corrupt businessmen whose feckless children have gotten in too deep with fish people and need rescuing; you want gargoyles murdering people in their buildings. In other words, what you want is Universal Pictures -- the classic 1930s monster movies but set in the 1930-50s gangster movies.
So, first, get out of here with the Order/Chaos war stuff, and, in fact, most of the fantasy stuff that isn't recognizable. Yeah, it's fun to have a variety of demons walking around the city, but when you mix classics like succubi in with stuff you've created that has less staying power, you get a watering down of everything. Let's stick with the classics.
And there's fights, but the stories are also mysteries, so let's use the Gumshoe as the system -- an option that wasn't available at the time.
So: who are the PCs? They are non-aligned troubleshooters or busybodies (as they are in this game, to an extent), who keep getting pulled into one mystery after another, which always involves some gang violence, institutional corruption, and monsters. Maybe they are monsters themselves. Do they hop around from city to city? Probably not, so you don't need to worry about the wilderness all that much, just place all the action in one city that has everything you need for a gangster/monster B-movie.
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