When I was first getting started in playing tabletop roleplaying games, a good friend of mine (one of the ones responsible for getting me to stick with the hobby in the first place) had a bit of an addiction: an addiction to starting new campaigns. I had my own campaign I wanted to run, but he would constantly jump all over any opportunity to start yet another one of his own, and it bugged me to no end. Unfortunately, this compulsion turned out to be contagious: currently I’m running three tabletop campaigns and playing in one, with another three on the back burner and three in the works. There are, however, even more games that have eluded me, and one of them in particular seems to be an especially challenging thought experiment: the world of “Dishonored.”
“Dishonored” is a 2012 video game made by Bethesda Softworks, featuring adventures in a steampunk city, guards with swords and Victorian helmets riding steam-powered boats and two-legged mechanical walkers. The setting is wonderfully fleshed out, a perfect and artistically unique representation of a world in which both magic and technology are feared but commonplace, forbidden but powerful. This already makes the game a great candidate for a tabletop conversion, since – as Eberron, Numenera, Pathfinder’s Iron Gods adventure path, and countless other tabletop settings indicate – the melding of magic and technology in an aesthetically unique world is a gold mine for the imagination. The game’s setting, however, isn’t all that compels me to convert it to a tabletop format: the game’s mechanics do, too.
Video game mechanics are oftentimes not looked upon kindly in the tabletop industry – after all, video games tend to be limited in freedom of choice for programming reasons, and mathematically complex to take advantage of computing power. “Dishonored,” however, excels at the feel and aesthetics of the gameplay itself, the main character being a magical, knife-wielding assassin that can Blink forward, pull an enemy into an alley while silencing him, mind-controlling the guard’s hapless comrade and using him to stab the ultimate target in the back. The controls are smooth and interactive, the ways of using the powers and abilities only as limited as the imagination, and any conversion of the game would have to be similarly fluid to capture the essence of the game.
The idea of running a game inspired by or even set in the universe of “Dishonored,” combined with the fluid and lethal (or challengingly non-lethal!) combat and mobility of the game, is absolutely intoxicating. Think of the societal predisposition towards antiheroes, or misunderstood people with great power, or people trying to come to terms with their own abilities and nature, and imagine it happening in a steampunk universe of corruption and disease – teams of player characters arcing over walls, slipping into windows, one distracting a guard and enchanting him with a simple whistle or whisper while the others isolate and silently take down targets of opportunity and necessity before disappearing into the night as mechanical walkers scream and hiss on the hunt for the killers.
The problem is that finding or running such a tabletop campaign would require a system capable of supporting such gameplay. Freeform games like Fate, for instance, would be able to represent the smooth and accessible powers, but would fall flat in terms of providing highly lethal, methodical combat; the Kickstarter game Blades in the Dark is a hack of the Apocalypse World system that aims to replicate some of the atmosphere of the universe, though this is tied to the more narrative and freeform combat of the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. Games like GURPS and Legend of the Five Rings manage to capture the specific, skill-demanding and dangerous feel of combat in “Dishonored,” but fail to provide the more powerful and smooth elements of the “Dishonored” magic system without substantially tweaking the games. It may be possible to use more cinematic rules, especially with GURPS – perhaps using the one-hit minions rule to kill guards and other simple enemies in one hit, just requiring more effort for stronger and more important enemies. One-roll combat resolution could also work in numerous systems – one-roll combat often involves the use of a single (or at most a few) rolls to resolve combat, even provided as a written-in options in GURPS and the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPGs.
Speaking of Fantasy Flight, it might also be possible to convert other systems to fit the purposes of a “Dishonored” campaign. Some users of the FFG forums have already made fantasy conversions for the Star Wars RPG system, and more could undoubtedly be made, especially since crossbows and guns alike are found in “Dishonored,” meaning ranged weapons wouldn’t be out of place or without variety. Games like Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, which relies heavily on combat and maneuvering, could work with a “re-fluffing” towards the idea of more modern, magic-and-gunpowder technology, as could somewhat more popular games like Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and 5th Edition, Pathfinder, or Numenera, all of which could potentially work to represent a nice balance between power and lethality best applied to a “Dishonored” game.
One last complication of converting “Dishonored” to a tabletop game is the fact that the abilities and situation of the main character are intended to be exceptional, a sort of “one man versus the world” kind of situation. The setting already has other people with similar or even identical powers, like the spellsword-esque teleporting villains seen early in the game, and the upcoming “Dishonored 2” will feature another such character, but the game master in a “Dishonored” game would have to be rather careful to control the scale and scope of the players’ power; after all, one man in “Dishonored” can topple entire schemes and kill hundreds along the way, so a group of three or four or six or seven of them would inevitably just run out of bad guys to kill. Keeping things challenging would be a constant challenge in and of itself for the aspiring game master.
Ultimately, the video game world of “Dishonored” would be a challenge to convert to a thematically and aesthetically faithful tabletop campaign, requiring work on the part of the game master to either tweak the rules or shift the atmosphere of the game world. That said, “Dishonored” represents prime and fertile ground for tabletop roleplaying, combining a tight and well-crafted atmosphere with fluid and engaging gameplay opportunities, making a Dishonored-themed campaign one of the RPG loves I so often pine for.
D.T.S.
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