Romani / Tabletop Games

• Arcanum takes place in the prehistoric Earth after the fall of Atlantis. The Lexicon supplement says that Roms from the nation of Oggia are a wandering tribe of gypsy nomads. They are a dark-skinned, dark-haired people who are fond of brightly colored clothes and jewelry. They travel throughout Mediterranea in painted wagons. They sometimes enter the borders of the Black Forest in search of magical herbs.
• Battlelords of the 23rd Century supplement No Man's Land: Planetary Atlas: The Moig Da are called "Space Gypsies". They wear extravagant, brightly colored clothing, have close-knit and clannish family relationships among themselves, and have a public reputation for being dishonest. The reputation is justified, as they are consummate professional thieves. They tend to stand out in a crowd, as they adorn themselves with face paint, tattoos, unusual hairstyles and lots of jewelry.
• Blue Rose: The Roamers are Gypsies of the "brightly colored caravans and fortune tellers" kind. Their name is a pun on Romani as well as being descriptive of their lifestyle.
• Buck Rogers In The Twenty Fifth Century: The Desert Dancers of Mercury are based on the Gypsy stereotype. They are freedom-loving nomads who travel across the surface of Mercury in large mobile buildings (like Gypsy wagons), wear loose Arabian-style clothing, are armed with knives and are known for their skills in the performing arts, such as playing music and singing.
• Call of Cthulhu:
  • Dark Designs, adventure "Eyes for the Blind". The people who run Ferencz' Fair are gypsies who follow the standard stereotype. The text notes that they are also called "Romanies".
  • The Fungi from Yuggoth campaign, section "Castle Dark". The PCs can encounter a Gypsy Fortune Teller and her son. The woman attempts a reading using Tarot cards but it foretells only death and disaster for the Player Characters.
• Champions supplement C.L.O.W.N.: Lisa, aka the supervillainess Random, joined a circus and befriended a Gypsy Fortune Teller who worked there. When the fortune teller died, she bequeathed Lisa a book that gave the location of a pair of magical dice.
• Cyberpunk supplement NeoTribes: The Nomads are those who took to the open road after the Collapse (of U.S. society). Over time they took on a number of stereotypical Romani traits because of their situation. They are hated, feared, distrusted and misunderstood by "statics" (those who don't travel around), they're divided up into clans, and two ways they make money are criminal acts (including con games and theft) and entertaining the "statics" with carnivals. The Romani themselves are one of the major components of Nomad culture, and the other Nomads have adopted many of their ways.
• Cyberspace: Gypsies are nomadic homeless people who live in clans. Some of them act like the Gypsies of Europe: providing entertainment, news, and rumors to locals. They also trade services, handicrafts, and favors for fuel, supplies and technology.
• Dangerous Journeys: The main rules have a sample entry for Gypsies in the world of Aerth (an Alternate Universe Earth). They are wanderers who tell fortunes, entertain the yokels and steal from unsuspecting audience members in the crowd. They travel using wagons and horses. Their members are often members of the Vocations (classes) of Fortune Teller, Mountebank (con men) and Thief.
• DC Heroes adventure When a Stranger Calls: While in Romania, the PCs will meet an old Gypsy Fortune Teller named Madame Sosostris who will offer to read their fortunes. If they agree, she will give them information about the object of their search and clues about an upcoming encounter.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Ravenloft: The Vistani avoid negative stereotypes about the Roma — they're mysterious and mystical and apt to throw curses, but they aren't inherently better or worse than any other person. Too bad the other citizens of Ravenloft haven't gotten the memo — much like real Roma, they get a lot of bad press (which isn't to say some don't deserve it, but the vast majority of them don't). This depiction might be less offensive than in other media since nearly everyone in the D&D world has access to mystic powers and has magic users living among them. Third edition's Expedition to Castle Ravenloft transforms the Vistani from an ethnic group into simply a communal subculture by including halfling as well as human Vistani. The Vistani do seem to have some inborn magical talents that few humans in Ravenloft do, but that probably seemed more startling before 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons introduced the Sorcerer class.
  • Greyhawk: The Rhenee are basically Romani living on barges. The 1983 Greyhawk boxed set says that when they deal with non-Rhenee, they will steal, lie, cheat, and kill freely. They also kidnap children and raise them as Rhenee.
  • Spelljammer: The Aperusa are usually in roles of harmless entertainers, salvage scavengers, petty thieves or scammers, or at most not-too-brave Lovable Rogue. They even travel on unarmed (and patchwork) ships. On the exotic side, they're slightly magic-resistant and immune to mind-reading, but can't have Psychic Powers. They also have an extremely misogynistic culture; men are the brains and the brawns while women do all the work and make babies, men get first pick at the loot, a widower can remarry but a widow must stay chaste, etc, and the menfolk in particular love to take advantage of non-Aperusa women who are foolish enough to fall for stories of the romanticism of the Aperusa lifestyle.
  • Forgotten Realms: The Valantra are a nomadic folk which also gave name to "spellsingers" — very powerful (not bound by Vancian rules) but non-combat (slow) spellcasting tradition introduced in Wizards and Rogues of the Realms. Just to remove possible doubts, the artwork shows a fine dark-haired lady clad in wind-friendly clothes and lots of bracers, dancing with a tambourine.
  • Pathfinder: The Varisian culture can be found nearly everywhere, have the usual negative stereotypes by the rest of the humans on Golarion. They've also settled in Varisia and Ustalav, the latter of which is Überwald to a T, and read Harrow cards.
  • When 3E went out of its way to "de-Tolkienize" the halfling race, making them less insular and more adventurous, their default culture took on a few Romani-like characteristics.
  • Dragon magazine #93 adventure "The Gypsy Train" thoroughly describes a band of Gypsies, including complete character descriptions and stats. The Gypsies are stated to be "light-fingered", including stealing things from Player Characters.
  • The AD&D 2nd Edition supplement The Complete Bard's Handbook has the Gypsy-Bard kit, which can be used with bard characters. Gypsies are members of a clan, are considered to be thieves by non Gypsies (because they will steal anything that's not on someone else's person), travel using horse-drawn carts and wagons, entertain non-Gypsies with song and dance, have a gift for dealing with animals, can be Fortune Tellers and sometimes call themselves a king or queen.
• Eclipse Phase: The Scumborn can be described (in the loosest of terms) as gypsies Recycled In Space or at least as cultural analogs. Subverted in that the Scum are very difficult to define in general terms since the only things you need to claim the name are a nomadic lifestyle on the edges of the solar system, and a "fuck propriety" attitude. Also, Scum actually is what they call themselves — they adopted the name everyone else was already using to describe them as a way of flipping everyone else the metaphorical bird.
• Everway supplement Spherewalker Sourcebook: The Basahn are clearly Everway's version of the Roma. They have light olive skin and dark hair, travel as families (often in caravans), speak their own language (called Basahni), have a reputation as cheats and liars, and face fear, hatred, and distrust wherever they go.
• GURPS Space Atlas 4. The Space Gypsies travel throughout the Phoenix Nebula in brightly painted starships. They tell people's fortunes, sell trinkets and are secretive about themselves. The Patrol and local police officers consider them to be thieves, Con Artists and smugglers, with some justification. Their skills include dancing, playing the fiddle, scrounging and fast-talking.
• Ironclaw: Bats have overtones of being a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to the Romani — frequently nomadic, subject to racism, supposed ties to vampires (they have a reputation for being vampires, in this case), etc.
• Monsters and Other Childish Things supplement Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor: The Romani are the brightly colored, nomadic, musical type. Given the intentionally vague faux-30s time frame of the game, this may be a bit more forgivable. Notably, they're actually much more honest than the norm for the setting — although they have the same intentionally ill-defined "Dreadful Secrets" as anyone else and an air of mystery, both the local Romani colony in general and the two characters specifically provided are generally likable, although one's a bitter and hot-headed youth and the other's mysterious. Also notably, they're specifically mentioned to speak perfect English, unless faking bad English serves them better for hiding some of their secrets — we didn't say they were totally honest, just better than the usual level of corruption and nastiness that most of the other characters and groups show.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • There was a book written for the line that had Romani who embodied the 19th-century stereotypes — mysterious, sneaky — living in the 21st century. Oh, and it had a statistic that represented "Blood Purity." Players, and indeed, writers tried to forget about that one. It even got a Discontinuity Nod in a later edition, which omitted the Gypsy book and mentioned that inaccurate information about Gypsies can be found in RPGs. Worse, they also had early rules for creating Hunter characters who focused on particular kinds of supernatural beings. Since the Gypsy book classed them as a supernatural type, you could create a character who hunted and killed Gypsies. Er.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: The origins of the Ravnos were tied to India and the Roma, their unique Discipline gave them the power to craft illusions... and their clan flaw made it so they had to roll to resist engaging in the criminal activity of their choice. Yeah... Rumor has it the ham-fisted portrayal of Romani culture is why most of the clan was killed off by the time of Revised (their Antediluvian rose first, got put down, and drove most of the clan to madness and death during the intervening period), which would explain why the ones who survived were given more of a "twisted Hindu mythology" focus when the Revised Ravnos Clanbook came out.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Silent Striders are Egyptian necromancers/travelers with ties to the Roma. It would seem the writers missed the memo that "Gypsies" aren't really Egyptian. The Revised tribebook corrected those errors, specifically mentioning the Striders ended up mixing with the Romani a fair bit due to their nomadic nature, but aren't that closely intertwined with the culture (the laws on marhime - what's clean and unclean - tend to clash with a tribe that regularly interacts with the restless dead). It also says that if a young werewolf meets a Gypsy-style Romani all dressed up, playing the violin and offering to read their palm, it's probably a ragabash playing a joke on them.
• Sufficiently Advanced: The Roamers are the Romani Recycled In Space, albeit with full access to the (well) sufficiently advanced technology of the setting.
• Traveller The New Era supplement Vampire Fleets: The "Gypsies" of the planet Promise are feared, hated and persecuted by the Virus controlled human population. Controlled humans consider them to be outcasts and abominations and tell their children that the Gypsies will steal them. The Gypsies are forbidden to enter the Subject Lands and mostly travel in small bands through the Outback. Many of them have psionic abilities, which would appear to be magic to those unfamiliar with psionics.
• Warhammer:
  • The rarely mentioned Strigany are best known for being henchmen to vampires. In Ancient Blood, told from the perspective of the Strigany, is about them trying to escape from a bigoted Elector Count who is trying to wipe them out. They are described as 'Eaters of Death', as when the people of a village die of the plague the Strigany enter the village to bury the dead and take any valuables. Those elders that do know of the vampires tend to avoid them though. One wished that vampires could be forgotten.
  • The Doomstones campaign had regular gypsies, pretty much fitting the trope.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Blood Ravens Space Marine chapter are essentially Space Gypsies. Their defining characteristics are a higher than average level of Psychic Powers, a tendency toward Kleptomaniac Hero-ism and having no fixed address, their HQ is located in the flagship of their battlefleet. Worse yet, they're all but confirmed to be a loyalist offshoot of the Egyptian-themed Thousand Sons Chaos Legion.

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