What Bogart Can Tell You About Page Turners

Page Turners, my game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, enables you to create stories resembling the character-driven narratives of films and literary fiction. Unlike the GUMSHOE One-2-One line of one player one GM games, it doesn’t focus on solving external problems. Instead it centers the protagonist’s journey from one emotional state to another as reflected in their relationships to the important people in their lives. It won’t replicate every sort of character-driven story, especially the more experimental ones, but will do most of them.

As gamers we tend to read books and watch movies about procedural characters. When you first try to think of a dramatic narrative your mind might instead go to procedural narratives set in the real naturalistic world, featuring characters without fantastical or nerdtroped elements. Many of these however still follow a procedural, albeit without monsters or rayguns.

To tell which of these two categories a source of story inspiration falls into, identify the main character’s goal.

In The Maltese Falcon, the Humphrey Bogart character, Sam Spade, wants to find out who murdered his partner. This mixes him up with a group of criminals in search of the titular historical artifact. If the fact that he’s searching for information and not an internal transformation or new relationships with others doesn’t tip you off, the presence of a McGuffin does. (A McGuffin, as per Alfred Hitchcock, is an object the characters pursue, propelling the story.) If the character wants a thing, or in this case, every other character wants a thing, you’re almost certainly looking at a story of external obstacles.

Similarly, in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, protagonist Philip Marlowe, later played by Bogie in the Howard Hawks film adaptation, takes on an external mission. Here wealthy eccentric General Sternwood hires him to smoke out a blackmailer plaguing one of his daughters. As in any detective story he follows a trail of clues to discover what’s really going on. To pay homage to that you once more need GUMSHOE One-2-One, not Page Turners.

However, as seen in Hamlet’s Hit Points, another Bogart film, Casablanca, concentrates on the restoration of lead character Rick Blaine’s altruism. Through a surprise reunion with ex-lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and interactions with the supportive, skeevy, and ambiguous people in his world as an expat club owner, he with fits and starts traces a redemptive arc back from sour self-pity. He confronts one external obstacle in the final scene but otherwise remains on this track.

A later Bogart classic likewise concentrates on the personal over the procedural. In a Lonely Place follows embittered, hair-trigger screenwriter and murder suspect Dix Steele as a new love with neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame.) The narrative concentrates on his relationship with her, and how it affects the internal struggle between his admirable and dark sides. We don’t see him actively sneaking around, conducting interrogations, and attempting to clear his name, as he would do in a procedural take on the same premise.

You could draw on either Casablanca or In a Lonely Place as models for a Page Turners scenario, one a personal story against a backdrop of wartime intrigue, the other a harrowing story of broken, vulnerable people in the backwash of Hollywood. In each case you could offer the player a choice of protagonists, letting them play either the male or female leads. A loose homage to either would play much differently from the woman’s point of view.

That’s all well and good, you might ask, but what about some examples from the current century? Well, if you insist, I’ll be back with some newer examples next time around.

Page Turners, the game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, enables you to create stories like your favorite character-driven novels and films. By Robin D. Laws, with scenarios by Ruth Tillman, Sarah “Sam” Saltiel, and Wade Rockett, it creates intense experiences of screwball comedy, robot civilization, vampire love, Austen-inspired wit and romance, and more. Coming soon from Pelgrane Press.