High Noon: Feathers, Dice, and a Curious Yellow Kickstarter

(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.”