Welcome

Lead and Chrome is a personal project for a 'home-brew' role-playing game which can be used to run campaigns in the Wild West, Film Noir/Gangster, Cyberpunk and Post-Apocalyptic genres, essentially from the late 18th century to the present, and on to end of the 21st century.

Lead and Chrome is a generic system, based largely on R. Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk series of games, with some elements borrowed from other games such as Games Designer's Workshops' Traveller, TSR's Boot Hill and Marvel Superheroes, and FASA Corporation's Shadowrun.

The purpose of this blog is to publicise Lead and Chrome, in the hope that role-players will play-test it and make suggestions to improve the game.

The following text is from the introduction to the game:

LEAD AND CHROME is a role-playing game system intended for games set in the modern period of history – specifically the late modern period which began with the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century – extending forward into the near future of Cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic speculative fiction. It is inspired by several genres of fiction – Western (especially Spaghetti and Revisionist Westerns), Crime, Film Noir, Cyberpunk and Post-Apocalyptic – which feature tragic or anti-heroic protagonists.
Mechanics-wise, the game is based around a task resolution system where the player tries to equal or exceed a difficulty number, by rolling a ten sided dice and adding their level in the relevant statistics and skills.
The rules are designed to be 'realistic', or at least believable and consistent, within the confines of a playable pen-and-paper tabletop RPG. In-game actions should have roughly the same consequences as in real life. Getting shot in this game doesn't cause abstract 'hit point' loss, it leads to serious injury or death, even for the strongest and toughest characters.
Being set in the real world (or a realistic fictional version of it), there are no supernatural powers or magic in Lead and Chrome, nor are there any mythical creatures science-fantasy or otherwise anachronistic technology. There are already plenty of other games available where you can play superheroes, dwarves and elves, wizards, psychics, vampires and werewolves or mad inventors in the industrial age.
Neither can players take in-game advantages and disadvantages for characters. In the author's experience, GMs of games with this feature have to work extra hard to make sure the disadvantages are role-played and that the advantages are not abused. The GM doesn't need any more headaches than they already have, what with running the game, writing and re-writing the plot and interpreting other rules.

I will post entries for other sections of the game when I have complete first drafts of them. All constructive comments are welcome.

Thanks for your time,

James Tweedie