Roleplay Style: Guided Sandbox
Genre: Superhero/Historical/Film Noir/Mystery
Time Period: 1954
Writing Style: Casual – Advanced
Party Size: 5-9 players
Story PremiseGotham Knights is, or seeks to be, what you might call an “interactive graphic novel,” in the vein of such titles as Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s
Batman: The Long Halloween or
Hush, with lots of characters and a large mystery to be solved.
Gotham City, Batman, and the characters associated with him hardly need any introduction, but some explanation is needed for the particular version of the world used for this game. Unlike the comics, where characters age much more slowly than in real time, this universe assumes Bruce Wayne was born in 1913, became Batman in 1939, and from there he and the world age in real time. As such, this is a historical game, in addition to a superhero game. Despite being set in 1954, this game does not reflect the campiness of the Silver Age Batman comics. Instead, it is the modern Batman of Year One and later, transposed to a more or less realistic 1954.
Your CharactersYour character should be a member of DC’s Bat Family, not an OC. I would prefer that the more central members (such as Batman, Robin, Batgirl, or Catwoman) be PCs before more secondary ones – it’s a lot easier to have a Batman game without, say, Cassandra Cain than Bruce Wayne. The GM reserves the right to refuse any character submission.
Themes of the RPThe “feel” of this game comes from Film Noir and other detective fiction of the 1940s and 50s, along with Batman titles such as
Year One and
Hush. Every Batman fan has “their” Batman, and “my Batman” is the World’s Greatest Detective version of the character. As such, this game is set on the mean streets of Gotham, with one of the major focuses being investigation and detective work, as your vigilante studies blood-spattered concrete and bullet-riddled corpses, seeking to piece the clues together.
This is a superhero game, and as such action will play a role, but players should take care to keep their characters’ abilities relatively grounded, in keeping with the street-level nature of this story.
Another important aspect of this is that I would like to “stage-manage” the characters as little as possible, allowing the players to decide what their character ought to do in a given situation.
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