Fiasco purchases

Jamie and I went up to Leeds at the weekend to attend the Fiasco show. We try to get up there each year and it's become a tradition to visit the nearby Pizza Express at lunchtime.

In the past I've been to Fiasco and bought nothing at all, other times I've splurged heavily. This time I was relatively restrained. I bought some Dark Earth paint and self-adhesive steel paper from Magnetic Displays, some dead Mexican gunfighters and dead horses from Great Escape Games' Dead Man's Hand range and, perhaps most significantly, this:

As a fan of the Marcus Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis, I really ought to have tried this earlier. I like the idea of translating the characters in the books into the games terms and sourcing suitable 28mm figures. In particular I'd love to find suitable figures for Lenia the laundress and Smaractus, Aventine gangster and Falco's landlord.

At first glance the rules look interesting. They are very clearly based on the assumption that the players will each be running a street gang trying to gain control of an area either for their own nefarious purposes or to promote the interests of some high-ranking citizen with designs on a senate seat.

Gangs of maybe three or four figures are controlled by the two players but there will also be a number of "mob bases" in the playing area. These represent the uninvolved population of the city and they move at least partly under the control of one player or another but only for short periods of time and on a random basis.

An interesting idea is that in some circumstances characters can disappear into the Mob, their figure being removed from the table only to reappear where least expected.

Another interesting aspect of the game is the activation system. This is initially driven by drawing counters from a bag. When one of your counters comes up, you choose a figure to activate and place one to four counters (marked I, II, III and IV) on the board stating what the character will attempt to do.

So you might say, I'm going to move to here (placing the "I" counter at the location your gang member will move to), climb down to ground level to here (placing counter "II"), move again to here (counter "III") and then blend into the this Mob (counter "IV").

The player then rolls a number of six-sided dice equal to the character's Agility stat (this seems typically to be in the range 5 to 7). Each success (4+) sees one of the selected actions completed, obviously taking them in chronological order. Any action that isn't made puts stress on the gang member and has them rolling fewer dice next time. You can only remove this stress by achieving everything you attempt to do (you must attempt a minimum of one action) so a stressed character will probably take it easy when next activated.

The game is clearly designed with a view to urban adventures in the Eternal City but I could see myself adapting it to cover the encounters of a certain Imperial agent and his allies in the countryside around the Bay of Naples or perhaps even in the wilds of Germania Libera.

Finally, as always, I'm giving some thought to whether these rules might have a Gloranthan application. Gangs of Pavis? Gangs of Glamour?