I was in a GURPS Fantasy game where our group of mercenary PCs spent about two years of real world game sessions being one of the criminal gangs in a fantasy-roman city. It made for some fun game play.

I'm going to be running sometime in the next year or so a Shadowrun gang campaign, with a heavy influence from the criminal side of The Wire.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035761It's funny how many elements from gangster movies can end up appearing in a Wild West campaign.

All of them except those that depend on technologies that weren't invented yet, I'd guess?

Quote from: AsenRG;1035868All of them except those that depend on technologies that weren't invented yet, I'd guess?

Pretty much, though it's not what you usually see in the western movies.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1036065Pretty much, though it's not what you usually see in the western movies.

I'm probably weird in that when I think about the Wild West, I don't think about movies. Spaghetti or not, Westerns are a genre, but not how things really were, IMO.
Instead, I'm thinking how Pinkerton, railroad workers, Indians getting pushed away, and outlaws with bounties on their heads would mix;).

Quote from: RPGPundit;1033629I don't necessarily mean 1920s gangsters or modern day drug lords (though it could be those), but have you ever run a campaign where your PCs were part of (or the ringleaders of) a gang, either de jure or de facto?

It must have been around 2002. The players were Hobbits in a street gang in a mostly-human (above the ground, anyway) city in a Dwarf kingdom. They were doing a bit of mugging, some extortion and so forth. The campaign ended when most of them were killed or imprisoned but the gang still exists in the same city in my current campaign but it's all NPCS.

My Nine Pearls campaign runs intermittently since last fall. It involves a ninja clan but they actually serve the local Daimyo, doing things his Samurai wouldn't do. So gang is a stretch.

Quote from: AsenRG;1036123I'm probably weird in that when I think about the Wild West, I don't think about movies. Spaghetti or not, Westerns are a genre, but not how things really were, IMO.
Instead, I'm thinking how Pinkerton, railroad workers, Indians getting pushed away, and outlaws with bounties on their heads would mix;).

Well yes, actual wild-west history was strongly about 'gangs'.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037019Well yes, actual wild-west history was strongly about 'gangs'.

Called "posses"?

Had the first session for my Patriarca Family campaign (session two is tomorrow). Pretty much all the NPCs with a handful of exceptions were real people (or at least my fabricated idea of people based on their image on a company website or something). The downside to this is session online recaps haven't been easy, since we are using local dentists and community leaders. I also had all the players roll on tables to determine the details of blood relatives and people they know from growing up in the area. The session started out with them going to a strip club to take over the place from someone who owed the family money, and ended with them in a horrible car wreck on the highway after being chased by someone they were following (it turned out the guy had a lot more protection and skilled people detailing his security than they at first thought). Healing is pretty slow, and characters are squishy, so the PC driving the car ended up nearly dead and had to be taken away in an ambulance at the end of the session.

I did modern criminals with GURPS once. We were young and immature. It got ugly.

I also did "noble knights" in Westeros. We were mature then... but in some aspects the end was even uglier.

Also, western (after watching "Young Guns", although I liked the first movie better).

As I player, I had an evil necromecner and a modern mafisoso.

Also, FWIW I once argued that the "gang" is essentially what most PCs are in almost ANY D&D game...

http://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com.br/search?q=gangs

"I also watched Vikings for a while. I eventually got bored, but I watched enough to realize the Vikings are exactly like the Sons of Anarchy (a 1%er biker gang) with better plot armor.

Think about it: they are both gangs of bigoted (or downright racist), arrogant armed thugs that have to fight other gangs and external threats to survive, get rich, pursue happiness etc. They are often very loyal to one another and respect their own peculiar codes, but despise higher laws and authorities. Most of their problems are solved with violence, deception, bribery, etc. But they also have to ally themselves with other gangs, even "enemy" gangs, because if they fight against everyone else at once they will be massacred (by other gangs or by the higher authority/external threat).

It doesn't matter if they are illiterate, violent or lazy; they are the heroes, because there are worse people out there, and at least they are brave and protect their own.

In short, they are the player characters."

I ran a GURPS Tredroy campaign some years back. The PCs didn't start out as members of any particular gang but they became entangled in the machinations of several gangs that operated in the city. They got involved in the war between the Irish gang and the Russian mob with some additional interactions with the Sahudese faction and Hashashin from Al Haz. It was a fun campaign of bluffing, diplomacy, double crossing and all out gang warfare. It was kind of like the fantasy version of Miller's Crossing.

Quote from: AsenRG;1037671Called "posses"?

Well, the Posses were sometimes the people who went after the gangs. Though lawman corruption was also pretty endemic, so that's not always true.

BTW, I just found my actual plays for a campaign that was almost completely gang-based:).

http://aflashingbladeandpanache.blogspot.bg/search/label/Actual%20Play%20report+FWTD

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037883Well, the Posses were sometimes the people who went after the gangs. Though lawman corruption was also pretty endemic, so that's not always true.

From an RPG standpoint, I prefer to think of them as "a gang with law backing chasing another gang".

It struck my players pretty strongly how surprisingly blurry the line was between Outlaw and Lawman. Some of the biggest historical figures of the Wild West went back and forth between those two designations with surprising ease.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1039099It struck my players pretty strongly how surprisingly blurry the line was between Outlaw and Lawman. Some of the biggest historical figures of the Wild West went back and forth between those two designations with surprising ease.

Wyatt Earp and Roy Bean come to mind.

A good example of this is Peaky Blinders as well. Sam Neil's character is every bit the gangster as Cillian Murphy's. Only he works for the government, the biggest and baddest gang of all.