Welcome to the Four Aces Chronicle!
These pages are devoted to my modern-horror role-playing game, which went on a planned hiatus after a memorable three years. Lately, though, we've been edging up on a new arc, so new material will be on the way as I give this site a thorough overhaul in winter, 2007.
If you are using Internet Explorer, you may have trouble seeing the buttons on the nav bar at left. This is a bug that I'm still tracking down in the code, but I hope to have it corrected soon. The nav bar should look fine if you're using Firefox or Safari. (I'm using a neat image-replacement trick to do rollovers without Javascript.)
Many of the pages are still very text-heavy, but I'm going to be making some changes in the next few weeks which, I hope, will make all that text work better for reading on a screen.
The Four Aces Chronicle is set in New York City, but important things have happened in Michigan and other places too. It's all sort of like Foucault's Pendulum meets "Angel," only with fewer vampires and a lot more guns and explosions.
The
Four Aces Chronicle draws a lot from history, so the players (the 'Aces') can't always be sure which details have been invented and which have not. The players are free to read any rulebook, article or website they want. It's what is
not written down--what's been
added to what's real--that their characters will have to worry about.
System-wise, we started with
Unknown Armies, but around episode six we switched to
Eden Studio's Unisystem (
Witchcraft, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Terra Primate, Armageddon) and we haven't looked back since. There are still a few ideas from
UA (and
Call of Cthulhu) in the chronicle, but the Unisystem gives all of us, players and gamemaster, more structure to work with. The Unisystem is an excellent rules system and setting for modern horror.
This website is a resource for the players, but I hope it's also interesting to anyone else who visits. The navigation bar on the left will take you to detailed "Recaps" of every game session; "Cast" biographies of player-characters and major non-player-characters; and short articles about magic, technology, and New York as they appear in the chronicle. There is also a page of "Links" that covers topics that have come up in the chronicle, and a "Quotes" page of some memorable player lines. "Introduction" will take you back here.
All the great sketches and illustrations are by commercial illustrator (and 'Ace') Storn Cook. If you want to see more of his work, you can find his website
here.
If you are a visitor, welcome! Please feel free to look around. I hope you find the page entertaining. Needless to say, this site is entirely fictional and should not be considered a reflection on any historical groups or people.
To give credit where credit is due: Alex Abel, Luther Miles, Eponymous, The New Inquisition, and the Sleepers are borrowed from the game
Unknown Armies. The names of Lady Margaret Jameson, Michel Borsavin, Martin Murray, Lesek Czernin, George Walker, and Klaus Hunderprest came from a very old
Call of Cthulhu scenario in "The Auction & Other Tales," but their personalities in the Four Aces Chronicle are very different from what they were in "The Auction."
In case you're wondering where to go next, I've made a chain of links that will take you through the other introductory pages, starting with the one below:
Next:
Meet the Aces
Back to Alcatia Home | Updated
4/9/07, by the Croupier
