So I asked this question earlier, but it was way too long-winded, so I'm asking again and paraphrasing. I'm going to start a campaign where the players will investigate the crimes of the terrorist organization, and the theme will be similar to those old noir detective movies. I'm looking for tips and suggestions to really make it something special.
I went back and read your other, longer, post and it definitely is an interesting premise for a campaign. I'm not sure though that I would frame "The Arms of Creation" as the explicit villains though, and here's why:
To me one of hallmarks of the noir genre is the moral ambiguity inherent in characters scrabbling to survive in a broken or unjust society. That could be challenging to achieve if you have an explicit bad guy who has an obviously evil plot - in my opinion the tension required for a noir feel would immediately dissipate because there is a clear right and wrong.
What I think might work better is if all of the player characters were on the same side of the prison bars - have them come from different, maybe even conflicting backgrounds - an honest private investigator who crossed a corrupt cop, a common street thug, a rich person who has been benefiting from the current social order but was scapegoated for something, etc. Doing this would let you set up a political situation where both the existing government and this other organisation are both potential enemies and allies for the players - and let the players navigate a world where there are no good guys. I think this would capture that noir spirit pretty well, and could lead to some interesting character roleplay as people from different backgrounds might genuinely have different opinions on which group represents their interests best.
To begin the campaign, I'd use the attack on the prison to let them escape, and introduce the two central factions at the heart of the conflict - but then spend at least a couple of sessions doing small-scale stuff, looking at how the average person in this world lives and what their struggles are. Maybe something like helping a starving village ambush the trade caravan of a rich merchant - then flip the script and give them the opportunity to sell out the village for personal profit.
Last thought - the campaign description in your other post had a real small c cyberpunk feel to it - you could check out some modules/adventures from TTRPGS in that genre like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk Red (or Cyberpunk 2020)
I'll be honest: I know "noir" is one of those words that people use to distinguish Eberron from, say, the Forgotten Realms; but I'm not sure why. The books I've read might have a detective in them, but they seem pretty morally clear-cut. The only way I can give advice on "noir" is with references to the movies. As far as I can tell, the only really consistent element in film noir is a morally ambiguous female character who isn't the protagonist, but keeps the plot moving. If you want it to have a noir flavor, start with her and make sure no one is sure which side she's on. The rest of it has limited applicability to D&D. You can be Orson Welles describing a beautifully composed black&white shot full of Dutch angles, but your players will imagine it however they like. The flashbacks and experimentation with narrative structure you see in something like D.O.A. will never work in an ttrpg. Most tables already have a fairly flexible set of ethics and relatively few noir stories are about an ensemble of characters. Usually, there's one protagonist (the stereotypical voiceover narration doesn't work with multiple characters). The story spends a fair amount of time on their inner psychological life. Usually, the goals are substantially grubbier then in high fantasy: a life insurance policy; or the takings from a pawn shop robbery, rather than a dragon hoard.
If you're interested in tips, you might take a look at one of my favorite noirs: Kiss Me Deadly. It could very plausibly be tweaked for a group of investigators chasing terrorists. This Gun For Hire might also have some useful ideas for you. Also I know there's a podcast out there that has Keith Baker talking about noir elements in Eberron. He seems like he'd know what he was talking about.
Thank you so much for the detailed response, And here's my thoughts. I really like the idea of having all the characters behind bars, I'll probably use that. And I will have the government be a conflicting force in the matter as well, But the Arms of Creation, as noble as their goals may sound to themselves, their goal is to destroy the city of Sharn and it's people for what it represents. And so yes, there will be conflicting morals due to the injustice of the society, but it seems like the Arms of creation must be stopped. So should I change this, or change how I think about this?
I don't think you need to change too much - my only worry would be that if you describe the Arms of Creation as a "terrorist" group, that has the potential to immediately turn your players against them because of the connotations of that word in 2020. I think you might have more success if you made the group and their aims a bit more nuanced - yes, their goal is to destroy the city and it's current government but because they believe that it will lead to a better future for the common people of the city. I would instead maybe describe them as revolutionaries, who believe that the ends justify the means. For instance, have them commit attacks against the government but show that they don't particularly care if bystanders get hurt, because they think that what they are doing will hurt fewer people in the long run. I think the key would be to have it so that a character who came from the gutter (or was magically inclined) might support the Arms of Creation in principle, but a more upper class character would find them instinctively horrifying.
For a bit of historical inspiration, I'd recommend looking at the SR party in late Imperial Russia (wikipedia), or the Committee of Public Safety during the first French Revolution (wikipedia).
Adjacent to this, and to make room for "higher stakes" noir (as mentioned, the gumshoe type detective fiction a lot of people associate with Noir's origin are usually small potatoes conflicts), I'd argue all iterations of Watchmen are in fact noirish in tone. You also kind of have an ensemble, albeit a broken one.
I guess that's the big problem with truly doing noir in a game like D&D, noir usually has a sort of cynicism that's predicated on the idea that the protagonists, despite whatever heroic or redemptive turn they take, are either small cogs or worse agency-lacking outsiders to a much larger power game for which their actions don't really matter, other than the internalization of harsh life lessons. Casablanca rehabilitates Noir tropes for an inarguably heroic tale, but a better guide to Noir tropes in general would be IMHO The Third Man ... and there's only so many times your PCs will want to go atop your iteration of a ferris wheel to go over the cuckoo clock speech yet again (though the Ferris wheel and cuckoo clock speech just now made me realize how Eberron can make claims to Noir, never saw it or was skeptical of it to just now).
Also agree, that some of the larger write ups and thoughts you've put out here seem to lean more toward "heroic cyberpunk (steampunk)" than hard boiled noir (think Walter Jon Williams and maybe Neal Stephenson more than Gibson) ... I mean you wouldn't mind seeing your PCs actually win in a impactful way, right?
Okay, let's tie all this together. Destroying a city is a pretty maximalist goal for a noir villain, but instead of rewriting the Arms of Creation, let's add another villain or two, with their own motivations. And then your players can be the ones with the moral clarity to stay on task, like Philip Marlowe. Say there's a representative of law, an inspector breathing down the party's necks. Also, a representative of some other enemy of the Arms, or even a potential defector from the Arms with valuable information. One of these characters should be the femme fatale I mentioned.
These will be the people your party bangs up against while they're trying to chase down the Arms of Creation. At some point, the character on the law and order side will sell them out, at some point the character representing naughtiness will betray them. Each of them has a secret that compromises them and which your players can learn about. One of them talks like a jerk, but is actually a good friend, one of them is friendly and helpful, but is scheming against the party. That kind of thing. Over the course of the campaign, you can try to turn one or both into a true (enough) ally for the final confrontation with the Arms, or something like that.
Adjacent to this, and to make room for "higher stakes" noir (as mentioned, the gumshoe type detective fiction a lot of people associate with Noir's origin are usually small potatoes conflicts), I'd argue all iterations of Watchmen are in fact noirish in tone. You also kind of have an ensemble, albeit a broken one.
I guess that's the big problem with truly doing noir in a game like D&D, noir usually has a sort of cynicism that's predicated on the idea that the protagonists, despite whatever heroic or redemptive turn they take, are either small cogs or worse agency-lacking outsiders to a much larger power game for which their actions don't really matter, other than the internalization of harsh life lessons. Casablanca rehabilitates Noir tropes for an inarguably heroic tale, but a better guide to Noir tropes in general would be IMHO The Third Man ... and there's only so many times your PCs will want to go atop your iteration of a ferris wheel to go over the cuckoo clock speech yet again (though the Ferris wheel and cuckoo clock speech just now made me realize how Eberron can make claims to Noir, never saw it or was skeptical of it to just now).
Also agree, that some of the larger write ups and thoughts you've put out here seem to lean more toward "heroic cyberpunk (steampunk)" than hard boiled noir (think Walter Jon Williams and maybe Neal Stephenson more than Gibson) ... I mean you wouldn't mind seeing your PCs actually win in a impactful way, right?
I see what you mean, the noir-ish stories I've read do usually don't have a big heroic finish. It's often down to one final gunshot, and more often it's bittersweet. I think, what I really was thinking about when I put noir on there, is that I really want my players to feel like it's all on them. There will be no helpful guide to lead them and give them the key. No adventurer to fill in the gaps. They have to find the clues and stop what's happening or it's all going to die. Especially the small stuff, I think the small choices should hurt just as much. If they choose to hide when some tough guys come into the shop they are in, and they don't step in when they ask where they are, someone's going to die.
Good guys in a bad world whose actions either intentionally or reluctantly "make a difference" is a fair noir trope, at least in what I'll call Neo-noir (basically stuff, mostly movies that came out turn of the 20th/21st century ... one may argue there are "clear wins" in these films because bleaker resolutions don't sell as many movie tickets, so to every larger budget example I point out there's a Cohen Brothers movie or The Usual Suspects). Take a look at L.A. Confidential for a dark take on it (set in 1930s? L.A. the "heroes" are LAPD, and the bad guy is the LAPD). Something slightly more light and comic (though there is a sinister backdrop) is The Nice Guys. The cyberpunk noir Strange Days can fits in the mix too, and actually has a largely mainstream tech world though there is technology on the fringes that borders on magical. 24, especially the first three seasons hits similar notes. I'd still say Watchmen though since everything I've identified is more solo or buddy rather than ensemble (Usual Suspects also gives a ensemble).
The movie Ronin, arguably takes some noir tropes by way of French New Wave and makes an action movie out of it. Also does a decent job of how "you all don't know each other but are brought together by someone who's hired you to X" trope in RPGs. It deals with keeping a weapon of mass destruction out of the hands of a black market (likely terrorists or what were called "rogue states" at the time), so there's quite a bit of action.
Michael Mann's Heat, while driven by the respective leaders of the "cops and robbers" sides could have been done as a more ensemble work (and actually DeNiro's "robbers" crew does get more fleshed out as characters than DeNiro's robbery homicide police squad). While the big action set piece is loosely based on two actual IRL shoot outs it's a fair illustration of how higher level characters would contend with opposition from stock NPCs (digresses way outside of this thread but there's an interesting "making of" clip where the way actors were trained in firearms handling for their roles was dependent on whether they were cast as police or bank robbers, give food for thoughts about characters going "all out" with their abilities in a public space, etc).
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'd second Watchmen (the original comic/graphic novel, and to a lesser extent the Zack Snyder movie) as a good reference point - though the ending might be a touch bleak for what you are going for; in my opinion one of the many things Watchmen does very well is point out the folly in relying on "heroes" by showing their attempts to solve the mystery to be completely futile. By the sounds of it, you still want a chance at somewhat heroic ending, even if it has to be paid for in blood & sweat.
It's also just occurred to me that Fallout: New Vegas, while not noir by any means, might also be some good reference material. The Courier is accidentally drawn into a scrabble over a macguffin which will control the fate of the 2270s Mojave region - they are in the wrong place at the wrong time and are left for dead when someone makes a play to steal said macguffin. In the game we don't actually see the Courier's backstory, but something like this might help escalate you from an intitial small-scale story to the bigger plot I think you'd like to end the campaign on.
If the above is the case, I'd also second what TimCurtin said about not really needing to rewrite the Arms of Creation - it would work to have them as the explicit villain as long as you've got other things going on that will give the characters hard choices to make and complicate matters.
If we want heroic Neo-noir flavored, I think we need to think about The Untouchables.
Let me pitch something like this: Your players are basically the FBI, in WW2 in New York. Your job is to catch criminals, but your country is at war. Is it more important to put all the criminals in jail, or do you maybe look the other way once in a while in return for their help fighting the strategically more important menace, The Arms of Creation? This has noir tropes for daaaayyyyyysssss, but, you can still end it with a bang!
So I asked this question earlier, but it was way too long-winded, so I'm asking again and paraphrasing. I'm going to start a campaign where the players will investigate the crimes of the terrorist organization, and the theme will be similar to those old noir detective movies. I'm looking for tips and suggestions to really make it something special.
I went back and read your other, longer, post and it definitely is an interesting premise for a campaign. I'm not sure though that I would frame "The Arms of Creation" as the explicit villains though, and here's why:
To me one of hallmarks of the noir genre is the moral ambiguity inherent in characters scrabbling to survive in a broken or unjust society. That could be challenging to achieve if you have an explicit bad guy who has an obviously evil plot - in my opinion the tension required for a noir feel would immediately dissipate because there is a clear right and wrong.
What I think might work better is if all of the player characters were on the same side of the prison bars - have them come from different, maybe even conflicting backgrounds - an honest private investigator who crossed a corrupt cop, a common street thug, a rich person who has been benefiting from the current social order but was scapegoated for something, etc. Doing this would let you set up a political situation where both the existing government and this other organisation are both potential enemies and allies for the players - and let the players navigate a world where there are no good guys. I think this would capture that noir spirit pretty well, and could lead to some interesting character roleplay as people from different backgrounds might genuinely have different opinions on which group represents their interests best.
To begin the campaign, I'd use the attack on the prison to let them escape, and introduce the two central factions at the heart of the conflict - but then spend at least a couple of sessions doing small-scale stuff, looking at how the average person in this world lives and what their struggles are. Maybe something like helping a starving village ambush the trade caravan of a rich merchant - then flip the script and give them the opportunity to sell out the village for personal profit.
Last thought - the campaign description in your other post had a real small c cyberpunk feel to it - you could check out some modules/adventures from TTRPGS in that genre like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk Red (or Cyberpunk 2020)
I'll be honest: I know "noir" is one of those words that people use to distinguish Eberron from, say, the Forgotten Realms; but I'm not sure why. The books I've read might have a detective in them, but they seem pretty morally clear-cut. The only way I can give advice on "noir" is with references to the movies. As far as I can tell, the only really consistent element in film noir is a morally ambiguous female character who isn't the protagonist, but keeps the plot moving. If you want it to have a noir flavor, start with her and make sure no one is sure which side she's on. The rest of it has limited applicability to D&D. You can be Orson Welles describing a beautifully composed black&white shot full of Dutch angles, but your players will imagine it however they like. The flashbacks and experimentation with narrative structure you see in something like D.O.A. will never work in an ttrpg. Most tables already have a fairly flexible set of ethics and relatively few noir stories are about an ensemble of characters. Usually, there's one protagonist (the stereotypical voiceover narration doesn't work with multiple characters). The story spends a fair amount of time on their inner psychological life. Usually, the goals are substantially grubbier then in high fantasy: a life insurance policy; or the takings from a pawn shop robbery, rather than a dragon hoard.
If you're interested in tips, you might take a look at one of my favorite noirs: Kiss Me Deadly. It could very plausibly be tweaked for a group of investigators chasing terrorists. This Gun For Hire might also have some useful ideas for you. Also I know there's a podcast out there that has Keith Baker talking about noir elements in Eberron. He seems like he'd know what he was talking about.
Thank you so much for the detailed response, And here's my thoughts. I really like the idea of having all the characters behind bars, I'll probably use that. And I will have the government be a conflicting force in the matter as well, But the Arms of Creation, as noble as their goals may sound to themselves, their goal is to destroy the city of Sharn and it's people for what it represents. And so yes, there will be conflicting morals due to the injustice of the society, but it seems like the Arms of creation must be stopped. So should I change this, or change how I think about this?
I don't think you need to change too much - my only worry would be that if you describe the Arms of Creation as a "terrorist" group, that has the potential to immediately turn your players against them because of the connotations of that word in 2020. I think you might have more success if you made the group and their aims a bit more nuanced - yes, their goal is to destroy the city and it's current government but because they believe that it will lead to a better future for the common people of the city. I would instead maybe describe them as revolutionaries, who believe that the ends justify the means. For instance, have them commit attacks against the government but show that they don't particularly care if bystanders get hurt, because they think that what they are doing will hurt fewer people in the long run. I think the key would be to have it so that a character who came from the gutter (or was magically inclined) might support the Arms of Creation in principle, but a more upper class character would find them instinctively horrifying.
For a bit of historical inspiration, I'd recommend looking at the SR party in late Imperial Russia (wikipedia), or the Committee of Public Safety during the first French Revolution (wikipedia).
Adjacent to this, and to make room for "higher stakes" noir (as mentioned, the gumshoe type detective fiction a lot of people associate with Noir's origin are usually small potatoes conflicts), I'd argue all iterations of Watchmen are in fact noirish in tone. You also kind of have an ensemble, albeit a broken one.
I guess that's the big problem with truly doing noir in a game like D&D, noir usually has a sort of cynicism that's predicated on the idea that the protagonists, despite whatever heroic or redemptive turn they take, are either small cogs or worse agency-lacking outsiders to a much larger power game for which their actions don't really matter, other than the internalization of harsh life lessons. Casablanca rehabilitates Noir tropes for an inarguably heroic tale, but a better guide to Noir tropes in general would be IMHO The Third Man ... and there's only so many times your PCs will want to go atop your iteration of a ferris wheel to go over the cuckoo clock speech yet again (though the Ferris wheel and cuckoo clock speech just now made me realize how Eberron can make claims to Noir, never saw it or was skeptical of it to just now).
Also agree, that some of the larger write ups and thoughts you've put out here seem to lean more toward "heroic cyberpunk (steampunk)" than hard boiled noir (think Walter Jon Williams and maybe Neal Stephenson more than Gibson) ... I mean you wouldn't mind seeing your PCs actually win in a impactful way, right?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Okay, let's tie all this together. Destroying a city is a pretty maximalist goal for a noir villain, but instead of rewriting the Arms of Creation, let's add another villain or two, with their own motivations. And then your players can be the ones with the moral clarity to stay on task, like Philip Marlowe. Say there's a representative of law, an inspector breathing down the party's necks. Also, a representative of some other enemy of the Arms, or even a potential defector from the Arms with valuable information. One of these characters should be the femme fatale I mentioned.
These will be the people your party bangs up against while they're trying to chase down the Arms of Creation. At some point, the character on the law and order side will sell them out, at some point the character representing naughtiness will betray them. Each of them has a secret that compromises them and which your players can learn about. One of them talks like a jerk, but is actually a good friend, one of them is friendly and helpful, but is scheming against the party. That kind of thing. Over the course of the campaign, you can try to turn one or both into a true (enough) ally for the final confrontation with the Arms, or something like that.
I see what you mean, the noir-ish stories I've read do usually don't have a big heroic finish. It's often down to one final gunshot, and more often it's bittersweet. I think, what I really was thinking about when I put noir on there, is that I really want my players to feel like it's all on them. There will be no helpful guide to lead them and give them the key. No adventurer to fill in the gaps. They have to find the clues and stop what's happening or it's all going to die. Especially the small stuff, I think the small choices should hurt just as much. If they choose to hide when some tough guys come into the shop they are in, and they don't step in when they ask where they are, someone's going to die.
Good guys in a bad world whose actions either intentionally or reluctantly "make a difference" is a fair noir trope, at least in what I'll call Neo-noir (basically stuff, mostly movies that came out turn of the 20th/21st century ... one may argue there are "clear wins" in these films because bleaker resolutions don't sell as many movie tickets, so to every larger budget example I point out there's a Cohen Brothers movie or The Usual Suspects). Take a look at L.A. Confidential for a dark take on it (set in 1930s? L.A. the "heroes" are LAPD, and the bad guy is the LAPD). Something slightly more light and comic (though there is a sinister backdrop) is The Nice Guys. The cyberpunk noir Strange Days can fits in the mix too, and actually has a largely mainstream tech world though there is technology on the fringes that borders on magical. 24, especially the first three seasons hits similar notes. I'd still say Watchmen though since everything I've identified is more solo or buddy rather than ensemble (Usual Suspects also gives a ensemble).
The movie Ronin, arguably takes some noir tropes by way of French New Wave and makes an action movie out of it. Also does a decent job of how "you all don't know each other but are brought together by someone who's hired you to X" trope in RPGs. It deals with keeping a weapon of mass destruction out of the hands of a black market (likely terrorists or what were called "rogue states" at the time), so there's quite a bit of action.
Michael Mann's Heat, while driven by the respective leaders of the "cops and robbers" sides could have been done as a more ensemble work (and actually DeNiro's "robbers" crew does get more fleshed out as characters than DeNiro's robbery homicide police squad). While the big action set piece is loosely based on two actual IRL shoot outs it's a fair illustration of how higher level characters would contend with opposition from stock NPCs (digresses way outside of this thread but there's an interesting "making of" clip where the way actors were trained in firearms handling for their roles was dependent on whether they were cast as police or bank robbers, give food for thoughts about characters going "all out" with their abilities in a public space, etc).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'd second Watchmen (the original comic/graphic novel, and to a lesser extent the Zack Snyder movie) as a good reference point - though the ending might be a touch bleak for what you are going for; in my opinion one of the many things Watchmen does very well is point out the folly in relying on "heroes" by showing their attempts to solve the mystery to be completely futile. By the sounds of it, you still want a chance at somewhat heroic ending, even if it has to be paid for in blood & sweat.
It's also just occurred to me that Fallout: New Vegas, while not noir by any means, might also be some good reference material. The Courier is accidentally drawn into a scrabble over a macguffin which will control the fate of the 2270s Mojave region - they are in the wrong place at the wrong time and are left for dead when someone makes a play to steal said macguffin. In the game we don't actually see the Courier's backstory, but something like this might help escalate you from an intitial small-scale story to the bigger plot I think you'd like to end the campaign on.
If the above is the case, I'd also second what TimCurtin said about not really needing to rewrite the Arms of Creation - it would work to have them as the explicit villain as long as you've got other things going on that will give the characters hard choices to make and complicate matters.
If we want heroic Neo-noir flavored, I think we need to think about The Untouchables.
Let me pitch something like this: Your players are basically the FBI, in WW2 in New York. Your job is to catch criminals, but your country is at war. Is it more important to put all the criminals in jail, or do you maybe look the other way once in a while in return for their help fighting the strategically more important menace, The Arms of Creation? This has noir tropes for daaaayyyyyysssss, but, you can still end it with a bang!