Rippers RPG

I have only played miniature games for the past 3 years, but rpgs for over 25 years. Like most people I started with D&D but discovered Rippers by Pinnacle Entertainment some years ago. It is a Victorian Horror RPG where the players all belong to an organisation called Rippers who hunt monsters. As far as I know the game is based on Rippers - The Horror Wars and this is incidentally how I discovered Westwind's Gothic Horror range.

When my gaming group and I first attempted Rippers it did not go well. It was the first time I had attempted a horror rpg and I naively thought that the horror element would come naturally into the game. After around 6 gaming sessions I cancelled the game because I did not feel my players got the setting and were not that interested.

Recently we wrapped up our two-year running Deadlands campaign and I have decided to give Rippers a try again. This time I have removed a lot of things from the original setting and added elements from other Savage Worlds settings such as Realms of Cthulhu and the Horror Compendium to try and get the horror feeling into the game. There will be less focus on combat and more focus on investigation and deduction. A bit like the Call of Cthulhu rpg, but without the mythos and in the Victorian era.

Whenever we start a new setting I create the characters for my players, they are quite fine with this as I always give them something different than what they have just played. I also make sure that they have a role to fill in the group. For Rippers I have created the following:

Dr. Percy Trevelyan - Alienist
Sgt. Henry Baynes - Police Sergeant
Langdale Pike - Journalist
Father Phillip Green - Priest

The astute reader will notice that their names are all picked from Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Tomorrow - hopefully we will have our first session. Chances are that I will have to cancel since my wife has a permanent illness that most of the time prevents me from leaving the house. However I'm looking forward to it, and will post an account of the session on here. I will also go into a bit more detail about the things I have prepared for the game and background/stats for each of the characters.