HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
[imager]http://www.memento-mori.com/lacuna/lacuna_square.jpg[/imager]After reading through Lacuna Part 1: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City and my most recent love affair with John Wick's Discordia RPG (I'm sure I raved about it enough at GenCon that some of you were sick of it), and thinking about Junk Dreams again, I realize that my love affair is with STRANGE games.
I'll start with Lacuna. This is an RPG where you go into a surreal city that is a manifestation of the global REM state subconscious. You are agents for government agency that hunts down and eliminates the hostile organism that lives inside violent offenders. If you eliminate this horrendous creature, the person loses their violent tendencies and becomes a better person overall.
That basic concept is deeply disconcerting and WRONG. Which is part of why I love this game. Because you are not doing this in the real world, but in a messed up dream world where "Control" loses contact with you as you do your mission, and where every time you fail a roll, something else goes wrong around you. The setting is awesome - a dream city, grey, drab, always raining. And the people/residents come in and out of focus, except for the spidermen. The spidermen look like old commie internal security forces, except with spider's heads. They don't like the agents messing around in the subconscious. The mechanics of the game really support co-operative game play - one player CANNOT take the lead through the whole game because their heart rate will skyrocket and then they will likely die or have to eject from the city. I also appreciate that the character sheet is a scantron form.
Someone explained this game as a "Rorschach GM Test". Every GM who runs it will run it differently because the setting and rules are so loose. For example, of the examples of play out there, some have played it as a mystery game, others as an allegory of cold-war Europe, a horror game, a variation on the movie "the Cell", the Matrix from the perspective of the Agents, etc. I saw it immediately as being analogous to my own Junk Dreams setting.
- - -
[imagel]http://wicked-dead.com/discordia/discover.gif[/imagel]I'm sure those of you at GenCon got sick of me pulling this game out of my kilt pocket. Discordia is a discordian RPG. If you don't know about discordianism, it's basically a viral joke religion based around chaos, the trojan war, and the number 5. And Hot Dogs. But mostly the number 5. Well, mostly the hot dogs really.
Anyways.
The game mechanics in Discordia are a little more defined than in Lacuna, but at the same time are a little weaker. However the mechanics are secondary to the setting once again. This time you are playing members of one of the great global conspiracies (the UFO's, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Servants of Cthulhu, the Gnomes of Zurich, etc) who are actually double agents for the Discordians.
The basic premise of the conspiracies is that their Dogma is absolute and rules all. The basic premise of the discordians is that everything is true, even lies, and especially things that contradict each other. Just because (a) and (b) are mutually exclusive doesn't mean that both aren't right.
The game revolves around doing strange things, sabotaging the conspiracies, and spreading a bit of chaos. The adventures are designed using William S Burroughs' cut-ups method (applied to RPGs first by Robin Laws). Basically, put a bunch of cool words in a hat, and pull a few out and make a module out of it. Such as the one I was raving about at GenCon:
NASA is fake. There was no moon launch, no mars rover, no space shuttle. Everything we know about space and the other planets is basically true, but it isn't because of NASA. It's because we have the real Incan calendar, and we apply strange mathematics to it to open gateways to other planets (think Incan Stargate here for a second... "Sapa Huk* Locked and Holding... Sapa Iskay Locked and Holding... Sapa Kimsa Locked and Holding...") . We've sent men to the Moon, to Mars, and even to Venus. Actually, we're sending a team to Venus in a couple of days. And you have to be on that team. The Incans are going to Venus to find an artifact of some kind and bring it back. We don't know what it is, but if those Incan bastards want it, it can't be good.
So yeah. That's Discordia.
- - -
[imager]http://www.dreadgazebo.com/images/topics/dental-syringe.jpg[/imager]Finally, of course, my own dormant obsession is Junk Dreams, my RPG setting for people who take too many drugs.
This is an unexplored frontier of the real world. A place where “real” people don’t travel, where only the dregs of our society fit in, and a place we really don’t want to exist at all.
You see, the only way into the junkscapes is Heroin.
The JunkScapes the world you can only interact with while 'on the nod', under the influence of heroin and its close cousins. While on the nod, you can see the world as others cannot, and you can interact with the strangers who live in that version of reality - the mugwumps and other strange Burroughs-esque creatures that exist exclusively in a state of drugged hallucinations. The 'wildlife' of this world is tragically apropos for the junkies who visit them - con-men, dealers, information brokers, traders in illicit vice, and other sullied affairs. The mugwumps are universally paranoid, unpleasant, quiet creatures who look for opportunities in using those who visit them.
The reality is that these creatures are a byproduct of the visitors to the world - the creations of paranoid and junk-sick minds who realize that the fix is only temporary, and they will have to find more as soon as they leave in order to return. Thus, there are other types of wildlife here too, based on other needs and desires of generations of junkies - from the dreams of ancient shamans, to the idols and loa of modern urban primitives. But the origin of these creatures, the wildlife of the junkscapes, is a secret of the game, not handed out to the players, but used in the design stages to develop the local wildlife.
I can talk about this setting quite a bit. I did so even. But now I've Sblocked it because it makes the thread retardedly huge.
[sblock]The 'native fauna' of the junk world is generally the creation of the junky. A mugwump actually doesn't exist when there are no junkies around to interact with it. This serves two purposes - first, it reinforces the concept that the junk world is not a wholly seperate world, but exists purely as an extension of our own. Secondly, it gives the mugwumps a reason to cluster in areas where there are junkies - effectively, they like to stick near people who will interact with them in order to live. This gives us social groupings and areas of interest with populations of native life, and the rest of the place is generally abandonned - this makes social interaction more interesting in a limited population game such as Junk Dreams. This also makes the mugwumps desperate - a race of con artists, drug dealers, information brokers and fast talkers, eager to tell you or sell you exactly what you want... and odds are if you want it badly enough, they will just 'happen' to have it for you thanks to their own mutable nature - and of course they won't give it to you for free, because junkies know that everything has a price...
Origins of the JunkScape and the Control Machines.
When the CIA began testing drugs on soldiers and other Americans, the goal was to discover a means to control and contain them - to turn the drugs into part of the overall conditioning program used to keep us all in check, having the many doing what needs to be done in the eyes of the few. Of course, like most intense trips, they found what they were looking for. The underlying need to find a means to control became the impetus for the Control Machines. The very foundation of their existence is to control everything within the junkscapes. Born from a subconscious need for order, reinforced by government paranoia, and fed by the fears of the unwitting subjects of these very experiments, the Control Machines are not so much malicious as the personification of paranoia and the need to maintain order.
Soldiers are trained to dehumanize the opponents, to think of them as machines. The Control Machines, born of the junk dreams of these soldiers, seek to dehumanize the world, to see it on a holistic scale where societal groupings are what they deal with, not individuals. Individualism is chaotic, humanizing, personal. Everything the Control Machines see is patterns, smooth flows of data, quiet and unintrusive. If their world-view was so simplistic as this, perhaps they could be somehow beneficial to society as a whole. But beneath the logic and pattern-recognition is a deeply neurotic mind, one birthed of paranoia and fear. While big government was looking for control mechanisms, the guinea pigs in the experiments were isolated, thrown into incredibly deep trips into the junkscapes without proper preparation, nor the mind-set that could grasp what was occuring. The man was always there, always watching, waiting for a report, for the right report. The drugs changed from day to day, trip to trip. The settings were cold, sterile, hostile. The reports were written and fed into machines (electronic and bureaucratic, uncaring and daunting, consuming and consumptive) unrelentingly and with no perceivable result. The test subjects had to find out how to survive in this environment, and a hostile climate of cold paranoia was the best defence. But shields such as those are impossible to maintain in the face of massive dosages and deep immersion trips into the junkscapes. The facade had to crack, and the paranoia was tinted with fear, wonder and horror - and a need to escape the junkscapes, to return to the normal world beyond.
The Control Machines are the imperfect melding of these neurotic memes - the need to dehumanize and abstract, to control and maintain, to find and keep a status quo and the irrational fear of existance, a deep-rooted hatred and paranoia where everything is completely beyond the ability to control and a deep-seated need to be reminded of their own humanity in the face of an uncaring, devouring machine. Each Control Machine is its own worse enemy, except for the other Control Machines.
For there are many.
The experiments that created the Control Machines were not universal, nor linked. Around the globe, Control Machines came into existence despite themselves, each a paranoid entity confined to the junkscapes and seeking to control everything, and to escape the limits of the junkscape. Each bears remarkably similar neuroses, tinted by the scenario that birthed it. Each sees the others as a horrible abomination, something that seeks to repress and control it, that wants to reduce it to a pattern, something to be controlled and monitored. Each fights to be an individual in the face of the Control Machines.
The Control Machines have managed to exist independently of the junkies now, although they were born of their paranoia and fear. While junkies went into the junk world afraid of the junk, full of self-loathing and paranoia about the 'man', the man went in also, looking for something to control people, a tool to be used to keep the world in line, predictable and placid. They both found what they were looking for, of course, and these became the Control Machines. The Control Machines want the status quo. They want people to sit still, not revolt, and watch a little more TV, thank you. They don't want drug addicts, they don't want crime, they just want the world to keep on spinning nice and quiet-like. The Control Machines seem to present a unified front, but in fact there are many of them, each with somewhat different goals and opinions, based on their conception. In southeast Asia, the Control Machine first appeared in the Opium Dens. This Control Machine wanted peace, quiet, and changelessness. However, with the Vietnam War, many American GIs discovered heroin and joined into the junk world there. These men were seeking to forget the horrors of war, they were looking to go home, back to America, to be anywhere but here. The Control Machine became fairly psychotic after this, a meld of Asian and American influences - wanting to go home, wanting to stop the commies, but also wanting everything to be quiet and unchanging. It remains a very strange and confused machine to this day. Control Machines in other areas show other influences, but most of the ones are in Europe and America, and are insistent that each one must control the world.
But a new meme is travelling among them. Somewhere, a communist Control Machine has started thinking that they ALL should control the world, and those Control Machines that accept this meme become part of this hive-mind, while the others fight it. So even the Control Machines are fighting one another with memes and more direct methods through junkies, and in the real world.
While the Control Machines are playing humans like puppets, controlling minds into a soporific and quiet existence of ignorance and bliss, the CIA maintains several teams of operatives that work within the junkscapes in order to suppress those addicts who have seen the Control Machines and who now work against them. The rapid spread of HIV and HepC through injection drug use has little to do with the diseases themselves, but is a weapon used by the operatives in their work to control and suppress the junkie population.
Playing in the JunkScapes
Cut word lines
Cut music lines
Smash the Control Images
Smash the Control Machines
A character discovering the junkscapes by default are those who are taking heroin and other similar narcotics. Within their hallucinations, they have discovered that there is much more to the world than what they can see when between fixes. In the drug-addled world, they have new found powers to change what is around them, or even to change themselves. Around them are armies of sleeping people who don't know the threats posed by the Control Machines, people who they cannot awaken while in their junk fixes, and who don't listen to them when they are not on the nod.
The 'normal' world in Junk Dreams is our own – this setting meshes nicely with most modern RPG settings, especially conspiracy and horror-oriented settings. In this world, the players have little ability to enact change or even to protect themselves.
Because of the Control Machines, junkies with connections and money, resources of any kind, find themselves unable to maintain them because they will estrange some through their own drug habits, and because the Control Machines use these resources to track down and eliminate those who oppose them. In time, the 'normal' characters will all be recluses, bums, homeless junkies and addicts eking out an existence to score their next fix. With extended play in the junkscapes, game play in the 'normal' world will transition into something painfully bleak, with the GM calling all the shots as in many traditional RPGs.
The 'junkscapes' are a place of potential and change. Events in the junkscape are much more mutable, with the characters having the ability to change elements of the environment as play progresses, making junkscape play significantly more narrativist in feeling, as the characters earn the ability to enact change - after all, if this space can only be seen through drug use, it will in time reflect the visions and peculiarities of your trip. Characters will earn tokens in play that can be used at the simplest level to enhance rolls or actions, or even to do 'the impossible' in some situations. Some characters will develop talents that allow them to change themselves or others directly, while others will see their junk selves as stronger, faster, or more acutely aware than their 'normal' selves. All of these abilities require the expenditure of these tokens, but more advanced expenditures are possible - actually changing the world around them, creating new story tangents, manipulating events through force of will, and so on. The ability to actually change the narration of the story is not explained to the players, but becomes available to the characters as they advance and learn about the world around them. Sooner or later, someone will wish for something, and instead of ignoring it, the GM asks for a number of tokens from the player, and changes the storyline as suits.
Junkies also have their own memes. Various junkies have different ideas about what they are experiencing when they get their fix. The most common meme is actually the truth, but there are others - people who believe that they are seeing the aliens who run the world (think "They Live"), others think of the junk fauna as Angels or Demons or both. Some even see the junk world as the next step in human evolution - pharmolution, enhancing the race through pharmeceutical change.
The Control Machines can create puppets from junkies that they overwhelm in the junk world. A junky who is fully immersed in the junk world faces such a fate if they are 'killed' by a Control Machine. Most junkies never get that deep into the junk world, maintaining lower doses for a variety of reasons, often of finances or self-preservation. However, a truly hard-core junky will skirt the edge of overdose with every trip - some do it to get as far away from the world as possible without actually commiting suicide directly, others because they need to be immersed that deeply in order to use their abilities to change the junk world... the most powerful abilities require very deep immersion, and open you up to fates far worse than death.[/sblock]
- - -
[imagel]http://www.leisuregames.com/acatalog/over_the_edge_rpg.jpg[/imagel]Postscript: My introduction to bizarre RPGs was in the form of Over the Edge, an RPG by Robin Laws and published by Atlas Games. This is far more traditional of an RPG than the ones I've posted above, but definitely bears mentioning because it was the first time I played in an RPG that involved lots of drug use, strange surreal environments and material liberally stolen from the movies Brazil and Naked Lunch.
We dealt with giant centipedes as business contacts, dealt drugs on the mean streets of the setting's main city, and got involved in some odd paranormal sequences. Just writing this all down makes me realize I should really own a copy of this game - it was a game that I played in and never ran nor read. The system wasn't my cup of tea, and it doesn't jive with the first three RPGs presented above in that the setting is actually pretty detailed instead of completely fluid.
- - -
Anyone have any more bizarrities that I should be reading before I actually dive into the deep end and finish off Junk Dreams? Experiences with these (or other) strange RPGs?
* Yes, I actually looked up the Incan language of Quechua for that... Basically means Unique One, Unique Two, Unique Three.
I'll start with Lacuna. This is an RPG where you go into a surreal city that is a manifestation of the global REM state subconscious. You are agents for government agency that hunts down and eliminates the hostile organism that lives inside violent offenders. If you eliminate this horrendous creature, the person loses their violent tendencies and becomes a better person overall.
That basic concept is deeply disconcerting and WRONG. Which is part of why I love this game. Because you are not doing this in the real world, but in a messed up dream world where "Control" loses contact with you as you do your mission, and where every time you fail a roll, something else goes wrong around you. The setting is awesome - a dream city, grey, drab, always raining. And the people/residents come in and out of focus, except for the spidermen. The spidermen look like old commie internal security forces, except with spider's heads. They don't like the agents messing around in the subconscious. The mechanics of the game really support co-operative game play - one player CANNOT take the lead through the whole game because their heart rate will skyrocket and then they will likely die or have to eject from the city. I also appreciate that the character sheet is a scantron form.
Someone explained this game as a "Rorschach GM Test". Every GM who runs it will run it differently because the setting and rules are so loose. For example, of the examples of play out there, some have played it as a mystery game, others as an allegory of cold-war Europe, a horror game, a variation on the movie "the Cell", the Matrix from the perspective of the Agents, etc. I saw it immediately as being analogous to my own Junk Dreams setting.
- - -
[imagel]http://wicked-dead.com/discordia/discover.gif[/imagel]I'm sure those of you at GenCon got sick of me pulling this game out of my kilt pocket. Discordia is a discordian RPG. If you don't know about discordianism, it's basically a viral joke religion based around chaos, the trojan war, and the number 5. And Hot Dogs. But mostly the number 5. Well, mostly the hot dogs really.
Anyways.
The game mechanics in Discordia are a little more defined than in Lacuna, but at the same time are a little weaker. However the mechanics are secondary to the setting once again. This time you are playing members of one of the great global conspiracies (the UFO's, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Servants of Cthulhu, the Gnomes of Zurich, etc) who are actually double agents for the Discordians.
The basic premise of the conspiracies is that their Dogma is absolute and rules all. The basic premise of the discordians is that everything is true, even lies, and especially things that contradict each other. Just because (a) and (b) are mutually exclusive doesn't mean that both aren't right.
The game revolves around doing strange things, sabotaging the conspiracies, and spreading a bit of chaos. The adventures are designed using William S Burroughs' cut-ups method (applied to RPGs first by Robin Laws). Basically, put a bunch of cool words in a hat, and pull a few out and make a module out of it. Such as the one I was raving about at GenCon:
NASA is fake. There was no moon launch, no mars rover, no space shuttle. Everything we know about space and the other planets is basically true, but it isn't because of NASA. It's because we have the real Incan calendar, and we apply strange mathematics to it to open gateways to other planets (think Incan Stargate here for a second... "Sapa Huk* Locked and Holding... Sapa Iskay Locked and Holding... Sapa Kimsa Locked and Holding...") . We've sent men to the Moon, to Mars, and even to Venus. Actually, we're sending a team to Venus in a couple of days. And you have to be on that team. The Incans are going to Venus to find an artifact of some kind and bring it back. We don't know what it is, but if those Incan bastards want it, it can't be good.
So yeah. That's Discordia.
- - -
[imager]http://www.dreadgazebo.com/images/topics/dental-syringe.jpg[/imager]Finally, of course, my own dormant obsession is Junk Dreams, my RPG setting for people who take too many drugs.
This is an unexplored frontier of the real world. A place where “real” people don’t travel, where only the dregs of our society fit in, and a place we really don’t want to exist at all.
You see, the only way into the junkscapes is Heroin.
The JunkScapes the world you can only interact with while 'on the nod', under the influence of heroin and its close cousins. While on the nod, you can see the world as others cannot, and you can interact with the strangers who live in that version of reality - the mugwumps and other strange Burroughs-esque creatures that exist exclusively in a state of drugged hallucinations. The 'wildlife' of this world is tragically apropos for the junkies who visit them - con-men, dealers, information brokers, traders in illicit vice, and other sullied affairs. The mugwumps are universally paranoid, unpleasant, quiet creatures who look for opportunities in using those who visit them.
The reality is that these creatures are a byproduct of the visitors to the world - the creations of paranoid and junk-sick minds who realize that the fix is only temporary, and they will have to find more as soon as they leave in order to return. Thus, there are other types of wildlife here too, based on other needs and desires of generations of junkies - from the dreams of ancient shamans, to the idols and loa of modern urban primitives. But the origin of these creatures, the wildlife of the junkscapes, is a secret of the game, not handed out to the players, but used in the design stages to develop the local wildlife.
I can talk about this setting quite a bit. I did so even. But now I've Sblocked it because it makes the thread retardedly huge.
[sblock]The 'native fauna' of the junk world is generally the creation of the junky. A mugwump actually doesn't exist when there are no junkies around to interact with it. This serves two purposes - first, it reinforces the concept that the junk world is not a wholly seperate world, but exists purely as an extension of our own. Secondly, it gives the mugwumps a reason to cluster in areas where there are junkies - effectively, they like to stick near people who will interact with them in order to live. This gives us social groupings and areas of interest with populations of native life, and the rest of the place is generally abandonned - this makes social interaction more interesting in a limited population game such as Junk Dreams. This also makes the mugwumps desperate - a race of con artists, drug dealers, information brokers and fast talkers, eager to tell you or sell you exactly what you want... and odds are if you want it badly enough, they will just 'happen' to have it for you thanks to their own mutable nature - and of course they won't give it to you for free, because junkies know that everything has a price...
Origins of the JunkScape and the Control Machines.
When the CIA began testing drugs on soldiers and other Americans, the goal was to discover a means to control and contain them - to turn the drugs into part of the overall conditioning program used to keep us all in check, having the many doing what needs to be done in the eyes of the few. Of course, like most intense trips, they found what they were looking for. The underlying need to find a means to control became the impetus for the Control Machines. The very foundation of their existence is to control everything within the junkscapes. Born from a subconscious need for order, reinforced by government paranoia, and fed by the fears of the unwitting subjects of these very experiments, the Control Machines are not so much malicious as the personification of paranoia and the need to maintain order.
Soldiers are trained to dehumanize the opponents, to think of them as machines. The Control Machines, born of the junk dreams of these soldiers, seek to dehumanize the world, to see it on a holistic scale where societal groupings are what they deal with, not individuals. Individualism is chaotic, humanizing, personal. Everything the Control Machines see is patterns, smooth flows of data, quiet and unintrusive. If their world-view was so simplistic as this, perhaps they could be somehow beneficial to society as a whole. But beneath the logic and pattern-recognition is a deeply neurotic mind, one birthed of paranoia and fear. While big government was looking for control mechanisms, the guinea pigs in the experiments were isolated, thrown into incredibly deep trips into the junkscapes without proper preparation, nor the mind-set that could grasp what was occuring. The man was always there, always watching, waiting for a report, for the right report. The drugs changed from day to day, trip to trip. The settings were cold, sterile, hostile. The reports were written and fed into machines (electronic and bureaucratic, uncaring and daunting, consuming and consumptive) unrelentingly and with no perceivable result. The test subjects had to find out how to survive in this environment, and a hostile climate of cold paranoia was the best defence. But shields such as those are impossible to maintain in the face of massive dosages and deep immersion trips into the junkscapes. The facade had to crack, and the paranoia was tinted with fear, wonder and horror - and a need to escape the junkscapes, to return to the normal world beyond.
The Control Machines are the imperfect melding of these neurotic memes - the need to dehumanize and abstract, to control and maintain, to find and keep a status quo and the irrational fear of existance, a deep-rooted hatred and paranoia where everything is completely beyond the ability to control and a deep-seated need to be reminded of their own humanity in the face of an uncaring, devouring machine. Each Control Machine is its own worse enemy, except for the other Control Machines.
For there are many.
The experiments that created the Control Machines were not universal, nor linked. Around the globe, Control Machines came into existence despite themselves, each a paranoid entity confined to the junkscapes and seeking to control everything, and to escape the limits of the junkscape. Each bears remarkably similar neuroses, tinted by the scenario that birthed it. Each sees the others as a horrible abomination, something that seeks to repress and control it, that wants to reduce it to a pattern, something to be controlled and monitored. Each fights to be an individual in the face of the Control Machines.
The Control Machines have managed to exist independently of the junkies now, although they were born of their paranoia and fear. While junkies went into the junk world afraid of the junk, full of self-loathing and paranoia about the 'man', the man went in also, looking for something to control people, a tool to be used to keep the world in line, predictable and placid. They both found what they were looking for, of course, and these became the Control Machines. The Control Machines want the status quo. They want people to sit still, not revolt, and watch a little more TV, thank you. They don't want drug addicts, they don't want crime, they just want the world to keep on spinning nice and quiet-like. The Control Machines seem to present a unified front, but in fact there are many of them, each with somewhat different goals and opinions, based on their conception. In southeast Asia, the Control Machine first appeared in the Opium Dens. This Control Machine wanted peace, quiet, and changelessness. However, with the Vietnam War, many American GIs discovered heroin and joined into the junk world there. These men were seeking to forget the horrors of war, they were looking to go home, back to America, to be anywhere but here. The Control Machine became fairly psychotic after this, a meld of Asian and American influences - wanting to go home, wanting to stop the commies, but also wanting everything to be quiet and unchanging. It remains a very strange and confused machine to this day. Control Machines in other areas show other influences, but most of the ones are in Europe and America, and are insistent that each one must control the world.
But a new meme is travelling among them. Somewhere, a communist Control Machine has started thinking that they ALL should control the world, and those Control Machines that accept this meme become part of this hive-mind, while the others fight it. So even the Control Machines are fighting one another with memes and more direct methods through junkies, and in the real world.
While the Control Machines are playing humans like puppets, controlling minds into a soporific and quiet existence of ignorance and bliss, the CIA maintains several teams of operatives that work within the junkscapes in order to suppress those addicts who have seen the Control Machines and who now work against them. The rapid spread of HIV and HepC through injection drug use has little to do with the diseases themselves, but is a weapon used by the operatives in their work to control and suppress the junkie population.
Playing in the JunkScapes
Cut word lines
Cut music lines
Smash the Control Images
Smash the Control Machines
A character discovering the junkscapes by default are those who are taking heroin and other similar narcotics. Within their hallucinations, they have discovered that there is much more to the world than what they can see when between fixes. In the drug-addled world, they have new found powers to change what is around them, or even to change themselves. Around them are armies of sleeping people who don't know the threats posed by the Control Machines, people who they cannot awaken while in their junk fixes, and who don't listen to them when they are not on the nod.
The 'normal' world in Junk Dreams is our own – this setting meshes nicely with most modern RPG settings, especially conspiracy and horror-oriented settings. In this world, the players have little ability to enact change or even to protect themselves.
Because of the Control Machines, junkies with connections and money, resources of any kind, find themselves unable to maintain them because they will estrange some through their own drug habits, and because the Control Machines use these resources to track down and eliminate those who oppose them. In time, the 'normal' characters will all be recluses, bums, homeless junkies and addicts eking out an existence to score their next fix. With extended play in the junkscapes, game play in the 'normal' world will transition into something painfully bleak, with the GM calling all the shots as in many traditional RPGs.
The 'junkscapes' are a place of potential and change. Events in the junkscape are much more mutable, with the characters having the ability to change elements of the environment as play progresses, making junkscape play significantly more narrativist in feeling, as the characters earn the ability to enact change - after all, if this space can only be seen through drug use, it will in time reflect the visions and peculiarities of your trip. Characters will earn tokens in play that can be used at the simplest level to enhance rolls or actions, or even to do 'the impossible' in some situations. Some characters will develop talents that allow them to change themselves or others directly, while others will see their junk selves as stronger, faster, or more acutely aware than their 'normal' selves. All of these abilities require the expenditure of these tokens, but more advanced expenditures are possible - actually changing the world around them, creating new story tangents, manipulating events through force of will, and so on. The ability to actually change the narration of the story is not explained to the players, but becomes available to the characters as they advance and learn about the world around them. Sooner or later, someone will wish for something, and instead of ignoring it, the GM asks for a number of tokens from the player, and changes the storyline as suits.
Junkies also have their own memes. Various junkies have different ideas about what they are experiencing when they get their fix. The most common meme is actually the truth, but there are others - people who believe that they are seeing the aliens who run the world (think "They Live"), others think of the junk fauna as Angels or Demons or both. Some even see the junk world as the next step in human evolution - pharmolution, enhancing the race through pharmeceutical change.
The Control Machines can create puppets from junkies that they overwhelm in the junk world. A junky who is fully immersed in the junk world faces such a fate if they are 'killed' by a Control Machine. Most junkies never get that deep into the junk world, maintaining lower doses for a variety of reasons, often of finances or self-preservation. However, a truly hard-core junky will skirt the edge of overdose with every trip - some do it to get as far away from the world as possible without actually commiting suicide directly, others because they need to be immersed that deeply in order to use their abilities to change the junk world... the most powerful abilities require very deep immersion, and open you up to fates far worse than death.[/sblock]
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[imagel]http://www.leisuregames.com/acatalog/over_the_edge_rpg.jpg[/imagel]Postscript: My introduction to bizarre RPGs was in the form of Over the Edge, an RPG by Robin Laws and published by Atlas Games. This is far more traditional of an RPG than the ones I've posted above, but definitely bears mentioning because it was the first time I played in an RPG that involved lots of drug use, strange surreal environments and material liberally stolen from the movies Brazil and Naked Lunch.
We dealt with giant centipedes as business contacts, dealt drugs on the mean streets of the setting's main city, and got involved in some odd paranormal sequences. Just writing this all down makes me realize I should really own a copy of this game - it was a game that I played in and never ran nor read. The system wasn't my cup of tea, and it doesn't jive with the first three RPGs presented above in that the setting is actually pretty detailed instead of completely fluid.
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Anyone have any more bizarrities that I should be reading before I actually dive into the deep end and finish off Junk Dreams? Experiences with these (or other) strange RPGs?
* Yes, I actually looked up the Incan language of Quechua for that... Basically means Unique One, Unique Two, Unique Three.
A lot of "the serial numebrs filed off" stuff going on here, but still fun
