The rain hits the pavement as the shadows grow long. The streetlights, ever silent watchers, flicker to life. She walks under her umbrella, wrapped in his coat. It smells so much like him. Her hat brim hides her face and a fresh haircut feels like owl down. She feels the heartbeat of a city within her. The derringer in the coat pocket is heavy and she spots the party down the block, the Silver Spoon Club, its lights glowing unnaturally bright. Sees a man with his arm around a girl, soft faced and far too innocent to be around him.
She walks as she has been. Careful but relaxed. She knows what she’s here to do. It takes her two minutes to get next to him. She steadies the gun in the pocket, careful to not accidentally let it be seen in the exterior lights of the club. She puts the hidden derringer up to the man’s gut, his arm still wrapped around a woman she adores. He looks at her with expecting eyes, daring her, saying “try it in front of everyone.”
Her finger quivers on the trigger. What do you do?
This is the Noir TTRPG Jam. Or, as Em Hubbard put it, NOIR-vember.
Irving: I encourage you as a game designer to make a TTRPG with only a passing understanding of noir that you are familiar with. What is noir to you? What and whose ideas have you taken in? How do you chafe against them? Which do you keep stumbling into? What type of noir do you yearn for? There’s a lot of room for reinterpretation and reinvention in noir as a style-genre, so get weird with it!
Krakik: I encourage you as a game designer to get weird, mean, and strange with it. Make fucked up art. Noir is a genre-style laced with veiled eroticism, masochism, and artistic weirdness. We do not need to adhere to the Hayes code in the modern day; we can do things with our art that the Film Noir creatives of the past got blacklisted for. Go make the art that they fought for the right to make in their day, make the art that they had to bypass the censors for. Also, not all noir happens in cities.
Trad/Classic Noir and Neo Noir
Trad/Classic Noir is the image that first comes to mind when you hear Noir. Grayscale, rain-slicked streets, long shadows, bright lights, dangerous women and men stumbling their way into trouble. This type of Noir is notoriously hard to define, almost no detail is universally agreed on, but you’ll know it’s a classic Noir when you see it. Classic Noirs were wartime and postwar stories of moral decline, people digging their own graves, and falling for temptations. Not always about detectives and the women they fall for – some were about criminals on the run, men blamed for things they never did, loves gone wrong, list goes on. Noirs of this type include (but are not limited to) Double Indemnity (1944), I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Detour (1945), The Killers (1946), and Touch of Evil (1955).
Neo-noir is often a reinterpretation of a post-1959 noir era. Themes from trad noir can be the same or similar in Neo-noir while also grappling with the modern day aspects. Their contemporary settings and more familiar themes to the audience of today (such as tech, neon, and more) often reflect our own anxieties we face today. Such films (and video game) include Blue Velvet, Devil in a Blue Dress, Taxi Driver, Gatacca, Fallen, A History of Violence, Videodrome, Lust, Caution, The Parallax View, Drum, Ex Machina, The Handmaiden, Miss Bala, Rojo, Vikram Vedha, Abang Adik, Decision to Leave, Love Lies Bleeding, The Big Lebowski, Disco Elysium, and the Blade Runner Series to name a few. Things can be strange and a little out there with Neo-noir, but this is a space where that style of storytelling is allowed to run, bruise, and get back up again.
Irving: smoke hazed rooms, whispered secrets, the strange, the unusual, an unexpected place, an emotional moment cut short by fate, supernatural and dream logic noir.
Krakik: men soaked in rain and sweat, dangerous romances, unusual time periods, someone’s life going downhill fast, rock bottom, feverish delirium, bruises, and stories outside of America.
Irving: Noir was (and still is in my opinion) a very leftist genre. Noir took massive risks with storytelling during the Hayes Code era of Hollywood, especially in the years of The Red Scare. Some noir filmmakers would lose their careers due to hearings before the House of Un-American Activities Committee for suspicion of “communist sympathies”. Some people, like Dmytryk, would testify before the Committee and name people suspected of being a communist. One of these men who was named by Dmytryk, Arnold Manoff, who was also stated to have been a communist by his wife years after the hearing. He lost his career in 1951 and had to sell scripts under a pseudonym to survive. He would die at the age of 50 in 1965. Also, The Maltese Falcon is not noir, fight me.
Krakik: Noir, especially classic Noir, may be hard to define, but one thing that tends to run through most of the films people deem Film Noirs is commentary. Film Noir is an opinionated genre, style, and era, which clashed with the Hayes Code as Irving mentioned earlier. These films reflect societal fears, worries, and issues, in part because they originated in the 1940s; a very fraught and societally tense decade. War, political movements, wideswept changes in society, changes in economy, a certain sense that the world you knew is falling down around you. Sometimes classic Noirs have outdated ideas in them, notably related to gender and race, but sometimes, Noirs will surprise you with a more modern idea or by just how relevant their commentary is to today. The makers of these films were telling their disillusioned audiences that they get it, they see how the world is too; sometimes, they’ll tell this to you watching in the modern day.
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