Sometimes, in Bedlam, the only people who talk are the ones you wish would just shut up. And the people you want to talk are locked up tight with no signs of budging. That’s when you have to bust out the tools and get to work. Time to interrogate.

You have two options when it comes to persuasive extraction: break the subject’s spirit or break his body. With the former, it’s about getting into his head, weakening him emotionally, and finding out what strings you need to snip to get him to sing. With the latter, it’s about pain. Deep-down and to the bone. The kind of pain that scars your soul. A good interrogator knows which is a subject’s weakness and goes right for it. Others have to dig around a while or try them both.

While Streets of Bedlam introduces some new systems to Savage Worlds, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel if I didn’t have to. I knew I wanted to spotlight investigation and interrogation in the rules so I looked for systems already in Savage Worlds that might handle those. In a film, when some guy is strapped to a chair, duct tape over his eyes, sweating under a bare-bulb lamp while some heavy hovers over a car battery with a sadistic grin on his face, that’s a pretty dramatic moment. So to replicate those types of moments in Streets of Bedlam, I decided to use a system Savage Worlds already had: Dramatic Tasks. But I wanted to tailor it a bit, so instead of needing five successes in five rounds, the interrogator needs a number of successes equal to or greater than the subject’s Spirit (if the interrogator is playing mind games) or his Vigor (if the interrogator is going the physical route). If successful, information comes out. If he’s very successful, it may even be the right information.

Thing is, the subject is dealt in as well so while the interrogator is looking for weaknesses, the subject’s probably planning something of his own. What matters here is not who succeeds best but who succeeds first.

(Please note that the rules above are currently in playtest and subject to change. Full, final rules will appear in the Streets of Bedlam corebook, due out April 2012.)