Saved the best for last. This is Streets Tell Stories (1993), Underground’s Los Angeles campaign setting box set. Favorite thing: it has a full reproduction of a local newspaper inside. I frickin’ love it when they do that. There is a booklet of adventures, a big poster map of LA, sheets for The Notebook and a bunch of goofy and fairly useless one-sheet handouts (including two that include photos of ridiculously painful looking contortions for gang hand signs).

The best part is the Streets booklet, which gives you a neighborhood by neighborhood breakdown of the Greater Los Angeles area. This is a helicopter eye view – it gets across the character of the neighborhood, gives you an idea of how it fits with the rest of the city and then leaves you plenty of room to expand with your own ideas. This is super important, because the central idea of Underground is that your players live in, protect and generally look to improve a neighborhood of their choosing. So you want a little bit of detail to hook you, but lots of elbow room to allow the whole group to make the nabe their own.

I love this improvement system and honestly, I’d love for more games to steal it. Basically, every neighborhood has a set of stats called Parameters that define its current state of affairs: wealth, safety, government purity, quality of life, education, necessities and take home pay. These stats carry values between 1 and 20. To fix a problem in a neighborhood (or city, or state, or country – the system scales), you spend reward points earned during play to move those numbers to the goal set by the GM.

Two complications. One: because nothing happens in a vacuum, for every Parameter you raise, one other Parameter goes up and another goes down. Second: reward points are also what you use to improve your character. I like that tension, and I like how the Parameters give players clear, though abstract, goals that encourage in-game actions (we need to get that government purity number up, guys, time to root out some corrupt politicians!).