What is Malandros?

Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 19th century: a city of slums and palaces, street gangs and tycoons, magic charms and outlawed martial arts. Cunning, bohemian and streetwise, the malandro walks its streets without fear - because there's always a way out.

Malandros is a tabletop roleplaying game based on the award-winning DramaSystem rules engine. It's a game of personal struggles and interpersonal dramas.

You play characters in a tight-knit community caught up in tumultuous times: gang leaders, captains of industry, fishermen, martial artists, swindlers and more. You all know each other - you're family, friends, rivals or enemies, all living in the same part of town. You all want something from each other. Maybe it's respect, maybe it's love. Maybe it's fear, or something else.

Will you get what you want? That's what we're here to find out.

 

 

 

The Game
Malandros uses the DramaSystem rules, created by Robin D. Laws and first published in his game Hillfolk, which won both the Diana Jones Award for Gaming Excellence and the Indie Game Awards' "Indie Game of the Year" in 2014.

Here's how Robin described the system's design goals in his introduction to DramaSystem:
"DramaSystem sets out to create a substantially unguided experience, creating a very simple framework for extended dramatic storytelling. It doesn’t take you in a specific direction. Rather, it fosters a group dynamic allowing the participants to explore a surprising emotional narrative. The resulting story acquires a definite shape, but that comes from its use of dramatic storytelling techniques rather than a push in any particular direction, either by the rules system or the GM."

 

Malandros retains the elegant drama token system for resolving dramatic scenes that you'll already know if you've read Hillfolk or the free DramaSystem basic rules. It then takes a new approach to resolving "procedural" scenes - that is, scenes where characters use their abilities to achieve practical goals.

Where Hillfolk is designed to emulate the pacing and outcomes of ensemble TV dramas, Malandros uses character abilities and the scene economy to create dramas that resemble the twists and turns of 19th century novels and modern telenovelas. 

 

 

In procedural scenes, characters undertake practical tasks with a tangible, external goal. Resolving these challenges uses the roll of a single D6, to which you may add your rating in a relevant ability - but once you've done so, you need to refresh that ability before you can use it again.

You refresh abilities by calling an appropriate dramatic scene. The interlocking ability and scene economies mean that the story ebbs and flows between the dramatic and the procedural. The system emulates a more novelistic form than the "HBO drama" style of Hillfolk by reducing the need for teamwork in procedural scenes without losing the incentives for emotional interaction in their aftermath.

 

Character creation is done as a group. Individual players define their characters' desires, personality and characteristics, but the relationships between them are a two-way street. For each PC yours has a relationship with, you say "what I want from him/her" -- and they explain why you can't have it, at least not yet.

Malandros also builds on DramaSystem by providing frameworks for character creation and procedural resolution that guide the game into a bohemian Carioca milieu.The result is a game in which laid-back scenes, where characters sip caipirinhas and watch the world go, by are punctuated with moments of high drama or intense action.