morsels « The Harping Monkey

[VAM] Morsels – Cardology and High Rollers

By Mick Bradley, on August 3rd, 2009

Continuing my recent habit of dropping morsels (actually, this ends up being almost a meal) of new Vegas After Midnight stuff, here’s a one-two punch of infodump for you:

Cardology

Almost every aspect of The Game is infused with primal natures that correspond to the suits, colors and ranks found in a 54-card deck of playing cards. Awakened characters will have traits and relationships that are influenced by these primal natures. Also, most of the significant non-player characters written into the setting and many of the locations and artifacts will correspond to a specific card in the deck. The suit, color, and rank of a given card will say a lot about the nature of who or what it represents.

Read the full post.

[VAM] Morsels – Welcome to the Madness, Redux

By Mick Bradley, on August 1st, 2009

I enjoyed sharing some morsels from my current work on Vegas After Midnight yesterday, so I’m going to share some more today, and probably every so often over the next couple of weeks.

Before I do, though, I want to point out that none of this stuff should be taken as an example of the finished text – either how it’ll be written or how it’ll be organized. These morsels are practically a stream-of consciousness info-dump without much linear continuity or instructive process. They’re morsels that will eventually weave into concepts that build upon one another sensibly, but I make no such promises at this point. If you’re still interested, read on.

The Game

Vegas After Midnight is a setting and alternate rules supplement meant to be played with the Don’t Rest Your Head rpg from Evil Hat Productions. In that meta-sense, it’s a game – or at least a supplement/alternate means of playing a game. But within the conceit of VAM itself is also a concept called “The Game”. We only recently started calling it that. You’d think it would be obvious, but actually the thought of bringing in the conceit of a giant metaphysical game of chance as an actual in-world concept, rather than just the metastructure of the design, only came up a few months ago. David Moore, my co-developer on the VAM project, gets credit for the breakthrough. He wrote me a question: “What causes people to wake up and get in The Game?” And I ran with it. Now, along with our old standby “Welcome to the Madness, Baby!”, “Wake up and get in The Game!” is now VAM’s tagline/slogan.