Chicago Citybook

Bullets & Bootleggers Supplement by Ghost Ape Games

A Ghost Ape System Sourcebook for Noir Chicago, 1929–1931

Chicago isn’t a backdrop — it’s a character with a switchblade grin.

Bullets & Bootleggers: Chicago Citybook is your full guide to Prohibition-era Chicago for use with the Ghost Ape System (GAS). It’s part sandbox, part history book, part DM toolkit, and part love letter to a city where every alley has a story and every handshake hides a deal.

Inside you’ll find:

• 250+ Pages of District-by-District Chicago

Every neighborhood written in full noir prose — Uptown’s neon marquees, Wicker Park’s basement card dens, Lakeview’s beer gardens, Bridgeport’s political back rooms, South Side speakeasies, industrial hellscapes, lakefront coves, immigrant enclaves, and gangland borders where Capone and Moran collide.

Each district includes:

• Points of Interest with built-in hooks
• Speakeasies & Vice
• Bootlegging Supply Chains
• Police Presence & bribability
• Magical Awareness for games with the occult dialed up
• HEAT system for tracking what the neighborhood thinks of your crew
• Encounter Tables (d20) tuned to local flavor and faction politics

• The Machinery of Crime

This book lays out how 1929 Chicago actually works:

• smuggling routes
• beer chains
• cold storage operations
• counterfeit networks
• political machines
• streetcar runs
• and all the small-time rackets tying the whole city together

Everything is rooted in real period history and built for immediate table use.

• Optional Supernatural Noir

Chicago’s shadows hide more than bootleggers.
Thin places, strange echoes, occult musicians, ghost runners, entropic artifacts, and grim favors lurk behind the city’s polite façade — all written with grounded, believable rules that never drift into “weird for weird’s sake.”

The supernatural is modular: run it as gritty realism or occult noir.

• GAS Mechanics & Tools for Chicago Play

You get:

• HEAT rules
• supply chain interaction
• convoy hijacking mechanics
• gambling tables
• smuggling fallout
• supernatural bleed zones
• faction influence & political pressure
• neighborhood consequences that actually matter

Plus guidance for running sandbox-style gangster campaigns where the players — not the plot — drive the story.

• Ready for Any Game Style

Run Chicago as:

• a gangster sandbox
• a speakeasy & smuggling campaign
• a noir investigator story
• an occult thriller
• or a companion to Lich Too, Bullets & Bootleggers, or the upcoming campaign arcs

• A Complete GM Resource

No filler. No fluff.
Just a fully functional city you can drop players into tonight.

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If you want your game to smell like spilled whiskey, cordite, and lake wind, this is the book.

Detailed. Gritty. Playable.
Welcome to Chicago.

Chicago Citybook is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.

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