Pyramid Review
Haven: City of Violence -- A Role-Playing Game of Modern Violence
Published by Louis Porter, Jr. Design Inc.
Written by Louis Porter, Jr. with Brent Dragoo, Steven S. Long, Angus McNicholl and Simon Rocquette
Illustrated by Rowan Dodds and Jason Walton
208-page b&w softcover; $30.00
Playing Cops 'n' Robbers is one of the two analogies most often used when explaining the basic ideas behind roleplaying, the other of course, being Cowboys 'n' Indians, so it is no surprise that there have been roleplaying games for both genres. What is surprising is that there have been so few, with FGU's Gangster! and TSR's Gangbusters leading the way, both focusing upon the genre's classic period of the 1930s. Other games looked at either cops or robbers, with the Dallas RPG from SPI combining soap opera and the criminal actions of Texas oil barons, and Task Force Games' Crime Fighter exploring the TV cop show. All of these titles are long out of print and the trend for most games is to explore their setting's criminal underbelly through dedicated supplements such as White Wolf's World of Darkness: Mafia, though more recent titles such as Guardian of Order's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai RPG, the scathing Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed from Hogshead Publishing, and GURPS Cops have all bucked this trend.
In the wake of such films as Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs,, television series like The Sopranos, and computer games such as GTA: Vice City, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 10, 2003
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