What’s the rumpus? Gangbusters is the rumpus. I’ve admired the RPG Gangbusters ever since I was a teenager in 1983. Who doesn’t like cops and robbers. Gangbusters has it all — gangsters, FBI, Prohibition Agents, local police, reporters, hard-boiled detectives. I admit, though, I had no idea how to run it. Each class had independent goals and little reason to cooperate with one another. Conventional play assumptions of PC cooperation had poisoned my understanding of how to play. So, I never really got a game up and running. But, in recent years, and especially this year, a lot has been going on to point the way. But I, along with some of the finest players one can find, finally got in a game.

Now, I was over-ambitious. I wanted to include as much as possible from the material found in the original first edition Gangbusters game.

• All Six Classes
• Ethnic Conflict
• City Politics
• The Lakefront City map with its wards and ethnic groupings
• Campaign play with established factions.

So, I didn’t go with zero prep. I made the following factions

• Al Capone Gang (focused on his consigliere Tony “the scourge” Lombardo) and the Unione Siciliana.
  • Coming into town to bring the city’s gangs under Al Capone’s Thumb
• Irish O’Bannion Mob
  • with the Mayor and PD on his payroll
  • Risking losing control of the Longshoreman’s union and his alcohol supply
  • Also with a controversial wedding to plan
• Italian Casper Gang.
  • With a missing daughter
  • Al Capone breathing down his neck
  • A fiance of questionable loyalty
• Black ghetto Fire Kings gang
  • At a disadvantage being smaller and also with no political influence
  • With a missing son (yes, there is a Romeo and Juliette thing going on)
• FBI (Eliott Ness and his Untouchables)
  • New in town and not sure who he can trust
• Bureau of Prohibition
  • Eliott Ness newly assigned and trying to get a lay of the land.
• Lakefront City PD
  • Ostensibly in the pay of O’Bannion but also with the need to keep the public molified
• Pinkerton Detective Agency
  • dealers in information and thugs open to the highest bidder
• Times Crier (newspaper)
  • the underdog to the Hearst owned Lakefront Empire
• Lakefront Empire (newspaper)
  • the dominant city rag.

I didn’t get players for all of them, but I got most. All I missed was one newspaper and the Pinkertons. And yes, if O’Bannion and Casper sound familiar I did lift them and many of their men from my favorite gangster movie Miller’s Crossing — everyone should give it a watch.

The campaign rules for Gangbusters are pretty short. In their essence, each player writes down a week’s worth of orders for their character, then the judge adjudicates how it turns out — if characters meet then the combat rules are used to determine outcomes.

But one thing to know is a judge isn’t strictly required. One of the earliest things in describing the game says this explicitly.

The rules of Gangbusters are primarily focused on tactic skirmishes: gunfights, fistfights, car chases. One can imagine, even in a campaign game, that players write their week’s orders and then, without a judge, come up with the resulting scenarios for the tactical battles. This is much like the earlier Gunslinger RPG where the emphasis is on western gunfights with players taking turns to run the NPCs. But the judge does play a role.

I did item one, I designed the city using the Lakefront City map provided but I placed numerous locations associated with the factions — speakeasies, hideouts, mobster houses, hotels, banks, etc. This picture below shows the downtown core including the notoriously corrupt 6th Ward whose Republican/Democrat slip adds up to more than a hundred percent (a misprint I think but possibly ahead of its time).

I did play the NPCs, Including the NPCs working for the faction leads, at least I did to a degree. The chiefs could give them orders but whether and how they carried the orders out was left to me.

And, certainly my tastes did influence what I presented.

We played online through Discord. I created “Party Lines” so players could communicate privately. Plus, because the rules themselves are fairly sketchy as to how to carry out the weekly orders, I came up with a more detailed step-by-step procedure to work through the turns.

If I would change anything here, I think experience showed that such tight control of communication between players wasn’t strictly necessary. Generally, just assuming people had access to telephones and could communicate freely appeared both easier to manage and didn’t appear to change much of what was communicated. On the other hand, how would I know? Most communication was not with me, the judge, but with players to each other.

My hope was to get through a full week of orders. I had no idea how fast or slow it would go. I turned out to be about one hour per day. But the hours went fast — for me at least. For each day, I needed to assimilate each faction’s order, determine how it turned out and communicate that back, plus if players came into contact, direct them into communication. It was fascinating watching the “party lines” fill with players sharing information as I completed interpreting the results. Clearly, they were trying to influence one another, share info, gain resources. Then at he start of the next day, it was quite entertaining seeing the headlines ginned up by the player of the Times Crier.

Most of the game was carrying out investigations. People sending their men to spy on each other than report discovered actions to other players. In the end, things culminated on Thursday night when O’Bannion’s hit man attacked Johnny Caspar in the middle of the night. Caspar was not surprised however, and managed to take out the hit man despite the deaths of his guards and his house being torched. And, the same night, having been rebuffed by O’Bannion, Tony Lombardo dynamited the premier Shenandoah Club. Things were heating up, but we ran out of time.

Other things happened too. The missing daughter Cadenza Casper and the Eddie Collins Jr. were found shacked up at the dive Surf Hotel, and taken into police custody, but not before a scandalous tabloid photo was taken of Eddie trying to climb out the bathroom window. An apartment building was raided and an illegal still was thrown out a window. And, who did kill Eddie’s father Big Eddie Collins of the Fire Kings?

What surprised me?

• Casper didn’t resist joining Capone’s organization
• The players really engaged with the missing teenagers
• Nobody really focused on the corrupt Alderman who might totally change who held the power in town. But there were so many other things going on they might have yet gotten around to it.
• Much less violence than I figured.
• The public opinion game mechanism did result in changes to player actions which was cool.

My only real disappointment was I didn’t get through a full week. That would have been proof that Gangbusters can be played for a weekly 1:1 time session without resorting to downtime at all. Though the scenario was a complex one. With fewer single characters (as opposed to true factions), I am convinced a weekly turn could be completed on a weekly basis. In person, rather than typing so much, would go faster as well.

It was hard to keep track of everyone’s moves and track orders modified by new information coming to light. At times my head was spinning. In the end though, I had a blast and thank my players for being the best players around — and for their patience.

But I had a blast, and a new experience like never before. We should all thank Rick Krebs for such a understated, yet great game.