(This is an archival writing sample from the now defunct YourNerdIsShowing.com)
As far as drugs go, storytelling is one
of my favorites. Weaving a story for anyone listening, carving out a
space for shared experience that is as deep as we care to make it.
Layer by layer, off and falling down the rabbit hole, we all come to
a vaguely consensus based reality. It should be no surprise then,
that when I heard that Ravendesk Games had launched a Kickstarter to
turn British author Jeff Noon's trippy Vurt
series into a tabletop RPG, I wondered what color feather I'd idly
had in mouth.
Vurt
(the first book in the series, as opposed to the full series of
interwoven stories) was the bonkers story of drug addict Scribble.
The drug of choice is Vurt; color-coded feathers that whisk you into
shared “vurtual” reality. Things get complicated when Scribble
and his sister/lover Desdemona share a trip to English Voodoo, and
Scribble comes back with an amorphous blob one of his gang members
calls “The Thing From Outer Space”, instead. The whole affair has
a very Orpheus into the Underworld feel to it, filtered through the
lens of Neuromancer.
Or possibly The Matrix,
if The Matrix had been
equal parts Jodorowsky and Aronofsky, with more jumping through
realities and less nutrient gruel. Noon's Manchester is bizarre and
surreal, a world where incest, bestiality, animal hybrids, and all
sorts of other abnormalities are commonplace. Being a plain old human
is boring and looked down upon. This is the world that still isn't
enough for the addicts, and so they turn to their reality hopping
Vurt.
Now,
coming back to the beginning... Ravendesk Games has actually gone off
the rails enough to put together a tabletop experience for Vurt. It
apparently took a four year effort to convince Jeff Noon, but their
persistence won out. Furthermore, they're going to be using the
Cypher System currently found in Monte Cook's Numenera. The
Cypher system is the wild, unkempt cousin of d20, in many ways. Monte
Cook reinvented a great deal of RPG terminology in the current
write-ups for Cypher, but you still roll a d20, still have levels,
still have classes. The actual math for difficulty is based on
multiples of three across ten steps of difficulty, which sounds odd
but functions cleverly. Added bits like “Focuses” which function
almost like a subclass are pretty interesting. On the negative,
Cypher also dabbles with systems like “GM Intrusion” which (on
top of being horribly named) forces a FATE-style “spend x or be
subjected to badness” but gambles players' XP. I'm eager to see
what the Ravendesk team does to tailor Cypher to Vurt.
What?
You're still here? Go! Go on! Go read about Curious Yellow feathers,
and shadowgirls; about mathemagick and cybernetics. While Ravendesk
Games made their first goal and Vurt: The Roleplaying Game WILL be
coming, there's no reason not to support them further as the stretch
goals include pregen adventures, a sourcebook, and five language
support for the core rulebook. In parting, I leave you with one my
favorite lines from Vurt;
“Expect
to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge
is torture.”
