It’s about that time again!
That time where Zyri gives backwards opinions on ROs with all the blind confidence of an absolute moron!
But enough about me - ya like jazz?
This time around, I read Jazz Age, by Nicola R. White, the very first entry in the Heart’s Choice catalogue - and this time, I actually bothered to look at the date before sticking my foot in my mouth: December 2, 2019. Heart’s Choice is five years old. Barely feels like it, huh?
In truth, I had actually read Dawnfall first, but I was left with such a sour taste in my mouth afterwards that I decided not to make a post about it - at least, not here. I might do a big ol’ Google Doc and then link it later for anybody who feels like reading it. I don’t believe I can talk about the ROs in Dawnfall without also discussing the problems with the rest of the story, and honestly, I found all the ROs to be absolutely insufferable anyhow.
Jazz Age takes place in the Roarin’ Twenties (the… 1920s, not the… not the current decade), the period where America was living it up, blissfully unaware of a Great Depression and two World Wars lurking just around the corner - that would be because we were distracted by a more immediate issue: Prohibition.
For anybody not familiar with American history, here’s the broad strokes: Starting from the 19th century, Pietistic Protestants attempted to ban trade in alcoholic drinks, in an effort to combat corruption and heal the damage that alcohol did to people’s bodies, minds and souls, as well as the damage that those people did to their families, friends and associates. The movement gained ground quickly, becoming a hotbed of debate, and it wasn’t long before progressive politicians (what was seen as “progressive” at the time, I mean), the grassroots Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Anti-Saloon League all made a hard push to get Washington, D.C. to make Prohibition official - which they did.
And there was much despairing.
This saw the rise of two things: mobsters and speakeasies. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the mafia was a thing long before Prohibition started, but many historians agree that the 19th century is when it officially emerged specifically in America. Fun(?) fact, my own home state of California is one of the stomping grounds of the Gambino Family, one of the big five mob families of America (aptly named The Five Families). They mainly hang out in Los Angeles… because, like, come on, it’s Los Angeles, of course there’s gonna be a mafia down there.
Speakeasies, on the other hand, were secret bars and clubs that were often disguised by otherwise upstanding business fronts (because who would expect Thomas the Toy Maker to have a gentleman’s club in the basement of his toy shop?), and typically needed a password to gain entry - and that password was carefully protected and only given out if you were trusted enough, or if whoever gave it to you figured you were a safe bet to gamble on, or if law enforcement collared one of the boys who had the password and forced them to surrender the code so that they could raid the joint. It goes without saying that the password changed frequently.
It was a pretty keen system they had worked out: The mobsters controlled the booze, the speakeasies sold that booze to customers who were desperate for a beer after a hard day at work, the owner of the speakeasy gave the mob their cut and invested whatever was left into keeping their business safe (likely with help from the mob, you know, that classic “protection racket” of theirs - “give us your money, and maybe we won’t sell you up the river to the feds or Molotov your bar and gun down your staff, how’s that for a deal?”) and greasing palms as need be to sweep the issue under the rug where Johnny Lawman couldn’t see it - after all, the FBI had become the top wardogs in the battle to keep America “dry and pure.”
Spoiler alert: They failed. Prohibition eventually got repealed, and now there’s a bar on every street corner, even in the most podunk locales. The mob is quieter these days, but is absolutely still up and kicking. GG, fellas, better luck next time.
Now, of course, this is all much, much more complicated than I’m making it out to be, but I’m really the wrong person to get into the deep, nitty-gritty details of that decade-and-some-change, and really, you only need to know the broad strokes in order to be prepared for this story. Hell, I didn’t even really need to tell you that bit about the mob, the most they get is vaguely referenced, and that’s only if you stumble across that conversation thread.
Speaking of which:
The story of Jazz Age centers on you, a farm kid from Greendale, Ohio, come to New York City to seek your fortunes as an actor (or actress!) on Broadway. You’ve no sooner stepped off the train, however, before you bump into Antoinette Vandenburg, a socialite/street rat/flapper (player’s choice) from a well-to-do family who got disowned by her parents for refusing to get with the program and is now parading the family name around to hopefully kill them with a heart attack when they hear news of their delinquent daughter schmoozing it up with people they would sooner hang than ever be caught associating with out in public.
Toni is quick to latch on to you as your new best friend, ostensibly to help show you the ropes so that New York City doesn’t eat you alive… and then she gets you wrapped up in working for a speakeasy. On purpose. With the excuse of, “what’s life without a bit of danger?” (An excuse she’s quick to fall back on for all her morally and legally dubious decisions throughout the story.)
That very same night, as you’re just starting your new job working in the speakeasy, the FBI launch a raid, and the agent heading the offensive hauls you in for questioning. One way or another, you get out of it, but he makes it very painfully clear that he’s going to be keeping an eye on you. To make matters worse, he and your boss have a sordid history with one another, so you have the tension of two opposing forces bearing down on you, demanding your loyalty.
And that’s before we get into the nightmare that is auditioning for Broadway!
So, the premise of the story sounds pretty damn interesting, and I admit, I had high hopes for Jazz Age going in… which ultimately may have been a bit too high, for what ended up being the result: a lukewarm tale that really only barely scrapes the surface of the mess that was Prohibition Era America, and the romance element feels like it doesn’t have any place being there (A quote from late in the story: "Your head aches. You came to New York to become a star but you don’t have a role on Broadway, the actors’ union is on the ropes, and [the speakeasy] is on the verge of being shut down by the feds. On top of it all, your mother is about to lose the family farm and your love life is a mess. " I’m… sorry? That’s “on top of it all?” Why is my love life even included on this list? I feel like I’ve got some bigger priorities to be worrying about than who I am or am not taking to bed, right now).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but depending on your choices, you could end up at a pro-union protest, and a gang of union busters show up to put the protesters’ teeth to the curb… and you can resolve it without bloodshed in maybe one or two not even really difficult skill checks. And the “union busters” are just some two-bit thugs who got paid to scare people, they weren’t even the Pinkertons, proper. Keep in mind, the director who hired these thugs supposedly has the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts in his corner, so it’s not like he was hard up for cash.
But we’re not here to discuss how Jazz Age is or is not a letdown in terms of its setting and plot, according to me or anybody else. We’re here to discuss the ROs.
You get your choice of two ROs to pick from, one male, the other female; and because this is a story set in 1920s America, there’s no talk about being nonbinary, transgender, asexual, or anything like that. The LGBTQ spectrum may as well not exist. Hell, the fact that you can be a gay man, a lesbian woman, or in a bisexual polygamous union, is already extremely out there for Prohibition Era America. One of the ROs isn’t even white! We’re breaking all the rules!
Lila Johnson: Upon your arrival in New York, you quickly find that it’s an expensive town to live in - $10 might be a laughable sum to pay for rent these days, but back then, that was a person’s life savings. Well, Toni, being a pal of legally and morally dubious means, introduces you to Miss Lila Johnson, a hairdresser in Harlem, who offers to board you in the apartment above her salon for a mere $7 per month (she can even be talked down as far as $6!), with one small caveat: You have to work at her speakeasy out the back, Lila’s Place.
Thanks, Toni.
Whether you like it or not, you’re not gonna find a better deal anywhere in New York, so you accept what Lila puts on the table without much complaint. For my part, I was playing a character who was very much part of the problem - religiously opposed to alcohol consumption of any stripe, and thought unions were a bad idea that would screw up her chances on Broadway - so my MC was immediately not okay with her situation, a fact that should have put her at odds with Lila in a life-threatening way many times, but there would always be some excuse or another that prevented Lila from even threatening to throw the MC out. Which is funny, because there are several points where Lila can threaten to ruin you if you cross her (even funnier is that I avoided all of them by simply never talking to Lila in the first place), so the vibe I wound up getting was that she was just a toothless bag of hot air.
Anyhow, Lila claims to be one of the speakeasy owners who isn’t out trying to flout the law, she just thinks the laws, as they are, put too much restriction on the common man, who likewise isn’t out to break any laws and just wants to have a beer and unwind at the end of a work day. There’s a couple of immediate problems with this: for starters, her bar has gambling and prostitution, and at one point, Lila can vaguely suggest that she’s being hustled by the mob, which is why she refuses to cooperate with law enforcement (because nobody wants their knees broke, y’know?).
Another more serious issue is that when her bar gets raided, she immediately concocts a plan to get back at the FBI agent who led the raid by purposely feeding him fake intelligence so that he’ll lose all standing with the agency and be run out of town. Nevermind that this same agent tries for the entire story to avoid shutting down Lila’s Place in exchange for some juicier intel that he can use to get his bosses off Lila’s back, because the whole reason her bar is even being targeted is due to politicking behind closed doors rather than her doing anything horribly wrong, and he tells her so.
Oh yeah, and since you get arrested as part of that raid, this is the first possible instance of Lila threatening to ruin you if you try to stab her in the back - which, again, I was able to avoid by just not talking to her, and when the matter did get broached, it took one half-assed skill check to wave her off.
I assume you can tell where my thoughts lie on the matter, but I’ll just say it anyways, I found it very hard to have sympathy, or even be attracted, to Lila. Her overt attempts to flirt didn’t help, either - remember how I said the romance element of this romance game felt like it didn’t belong? Lila ended up being notorious for being livid with me for working with the FBI in one breath, and inviting me out for dinner in the next. And not even one of those “invitations you can’t refuse,” either, I turned her down and she just shrugged and went back to doing some bookkeeping paperwork and that was the end of it.
I’m sorry, Lila, did we get different scripts or something? You have valid reason to suspect my disloyalty… so you invite me to dinner? What, do you think picking up the tab will impress me enough to stop helping the FBI? I might be some farm kid from Greendale who got suckered into alcohol trafficking on my first day in the Big Apple, but I’m dumb, not shallow.
To Lila’s credit, if you get her relationship level down low enough, she’ll be decidedly less interested in trying to win your affections, and if you attempt to profess your love for her, she’ll come back with, “Uh… how about we take it slow and see where it ends up?” Which is still giving you more of a chance than you deserve if you’ve been pissing her off the whole game, but again, this was the first HC story, so a lot of the nuances present in more recent entries weren’t really a thing yet. You can safely abuse Lila’s trust from chapter one to chapter ten, and she’ll still (hesitantly) agree to a relationship with you if you choose to engage in one.
I did not. This, therefore, shut off two romance paths (the polygamy route requires you to be on good terms with both ROs, shockingly enough) and left me with one other option:
Agent John Curtis: You bump into John right away in chapter one, but you don’t realize it’s him until he reappears in chapter two… whereupon he launches a raid of Lila’s Place and has you arrested with several of the other employees. You can try and fight him on it, which is a bad idea and only serves to piss him off, but even when you’re full-on cooperating with him, it can seem like he’s being a hardass for no good reason. To be clear: He absolutely is a hardass. But as it happens, John is much more reasonable than first appearances suggest - by his own words, he’s not interested in hammering down on someone having a beer after work, and honestly would just as soon leave Lila’s Place be if it were up to him, because he’s far more interested in targeting the actual problems, unlike other Prohibition enforcers who mainly do it for the thrill. Sadly, his name is John Curtis, not John Edgar Hoover, so he has to follow his superior’s orders, and that means Lila’s Place is on the chopping block.
Furthermore, his reasons for being so zealous about his work are… honestly not terrible: Alcohol tore his family apart when his father, an otherwise good and caring man, got so drunk that he became angry and violent, and took it out on his wife and son, until Mrs. Curtis finally had enough and left. For a while, John was angry at his father, but eventually came to realize that his father was a good man, but a weak man, and when in the presence of alcohol, there was simply no helping him. So, in an effort to prevent that same nastiness from tearing another family apart, John puts his all into his work, becoming the Eliot Ness of New York (minus the spiraling descent into infamy, alcohol addiction and financial ruin, and rather than assembling a team of incorruptible super cops, John just kinda runs solo).
Oh yeah, and if you play your cards right, John can show up to that protest I mentioned earlier, either with nothing but his own sheer badassery, or with a team of gun-toting agents of the take-no-shit variety. It makes breaking the impending riot up much easier, and makes much more sense than you just… magically talking it down on your own.
Fun fact: I have a distant cousin who works in law enforcement, and on a lark, I called her up and pitched John’s character bio to her. And I quote:
Cousin: “This sounds like the kind of character my DM would bitch at me for bringing to the table.”
(She also has a DnD group she hangs with on her days off. She constantly makes Paladins and Fighters who are, as I previously said, super cops, to the point where even the actual law enforcers of the setting are all, “bro, can you chill?” I understand that it’s become an in-joke with them at this point.)
The romance feeling out of place rears its ugly head again with John, who, if you have a good enough relationship with him at any point in the story, will try multiple times, at multiple bad times, to express his feelings to you. I had one incident happen when the MC’s horrible moron kid sister Fern is gallivanting around New York on her own and the MC is frantically trying to figure out where she’s gone where my MC calls John up to beg for his help, and he chooses that exact moment to try and confess his feelings to me.
BOY, CAN IT WAIT?! WE’VE GOT A DELINQUENT IDIOT ON THE LOOSE IN THE CITY, AND THIS TIME IT’S NOT ME!
Honestly though, between John and Lila, I have much less to criticize about John. I actually like his character, to begin with - he values loyalty and guts, doesn’t really appreciate the kind of person who’s willing to sell someone up the river to save their own skin, hates the fact that the job he’s trying to do for legitimate good cause is so bound up in politics and bullshit, and if you get into his romance, he turns out to be a very gentle-hearted individual… who also knows just about every sex position in the book and is more than willing to try them out if you’ve got time to spare. (As usual, I refused to have anything to do with the sex elements, but I saw that part in the code and it seared itself into my brain like a branding iron of awfulness, so now I can’t forget it.) And because I made sure to burn the bridge and then salt the remains with Lila, John was really my only option anyhow. I got a bit of a kick out of the fact that Lila still pouted when I inevitably chose John over her, even though it should have been clear beyond a shadow of doubt that she never had a snowball’s chance in hell with me.
So there you go. That’s the ROs. It feels strange to only have two people to talk about, this time around, which is probably why I wasted so much time talking about other stuff.
Like I said, for me, Jazz Age was a miss. I went in hoping for far more than what I ended up getting. John’s character was a bright spot, but as good as I found him to be, he wasn’t enough to salvage the rest of the story. At several points, it looked like the narrative was threatening to delve deeper into the Big Ol’ Oopsie that was Prohibition, but then it would wheel itself back around and go back to just grazing the surface instead. I wish somebody would take up the reins and try it again, because I truly believe there’s an untapped wealth of inspiration to be found if the right author digs into it, and I can’t say that I hate Jazz Age for putting the genre on the table… I just wish it was more than it ended up being.
