Vegas After Midnight is about nine years old now, going back to its original incarnation. In that time, I’ve had about six or seven different ideas attempting to explain just exactly what the historical and metaphysical truth is behind what caused Midnight and what is now going on “behind the curtain” in the setting. Six or seven ideas.
Some of them were pretty cool. Some were pretty lame. Oddly, though, none of them changed the essential nature of the central themes of VAM. Any one of them – well, any one of the decent ones – could stand as the explanation of “the truth” and not significantly alter the way the game might be approached or played.
Maybe it’s like in Keith Senkowski’s cool indie rpg, Conspiracy of Shadows, where the game is about struggling against some dark conspiracy, but the conspiracy itself is left up to the play group to define. Maybe I should do the same thing with VAM. Or, regardless, I COULD do it, and it would still work.
This is something to ponder. Hmmm….
Should I let YOU decide what Midnight is, and what is really going on? Should each group get to tailor their own truth to suit their own tastes and style? Or is that just me being creatively lazy, passing too much of the work on to the play group?
I’ve got to think about this.
