[RPG] Dogs in the 'Verse

Warning – this post is extremely RPG-geeky and pretty much for my own reference.

I had another cool experience with Dogs in the Vineyard last night. I'll write that up later on, but in the meantime a lot of people have been figuring out how to convert Dogs to run a game set in the Firefly universe. Things start here with Dogs in the Black, especially Vincent’s message from here:

... the Firefly folks are all the time landing in a little town and pronouncing judgement upon its sins. The Train Job, Heart of Gold, Jaynestown, Safe, Shindig... right?

Ditch the Faith, that's easy. Instead of Dogs the PCs are space outlaws, no problem. For initiatory conflicts you can do conflicts about how they became part of the crew.

Then just do what they did on the show: everywhere they go, a) there's something there they need to accomplish; b) they know somebody; c) people want things from them; d) the things they want are all contradictory and problematic. You can easily use the game's town creation rules for that.

Dial the supernatural down to nothing, except for River, but still use the demonic influence, sorcery and possession rules. Like I say, demons and sorcerers are just bad luck and bastards. Every Western needs those

I predict that it'd be grimmer, tenser, and less flip than the show - on account of the game's pacing and escalation dynamics - but fundamentally similar.

That led to a sequel thread, Firefly in the Vineyard with some thoughts on character creation. Kitbashing & The Faith talks more about town creation,

With a comment from Vincent here about who the characters need to be

And Sydney’s follow-up thought about the same topic, in a different thread