A Master of Djinn 6: Gaming

RichardAbbott

Which aspects of the book would convert well to a game? Which parts of the story, world-building and/or characters would you include or reject?

Apocryphal

Probably the only thing I’d use is the setting of Cairo. I would definitely use Djinn, but I’d turn instead to the study of them that I read. I might crib some of the magic/spells from this book. I would not do any kind of hipster-magic-police-procedural thing, though, and I’m not really all that good at running diplomatic type scenarios.

clash_bowley

This would be an interesting source to use as a possible future for the Outremer setting. I would not use the magic. I love running police procedurals and am quite good at it, so that would not be off the table as a possibility.

NeilNjae

I liked the setting and could see it becoming a great setting for RPGs. It would be a refreshing change from the Western-Europe inspired standard urban fantasy settings. Urban Shadows, Liminal, any of the World of Darkness games.

I terms of stories, Cairo is a big city and has many stories. Blades in the Dark could fit: the Crew types of Smugglers and Cults could work well, alongside the standard thieves and heavies (40 Leopards is a great example of a crew of Scoundrels with a lot of assets on their Turf). A|State would be a good take, with a group of people struggling to make their corner of Cairo a better place to live, in the face of destitution.

I was thinking that a way to codify the magic would be to take a leaf from Mutant City Blues and have a map of powers and connections between them, showing how clusters of powers connect. If you've not seen it, imagine something like the London Tube map, but with abilities instead of stations. Someone's "power set" has a limited number of hops between "stations", so if you see one or two abilities, you can infer what other abilities they're likely to have.