Posts Tagged ‘vegas after midnight’

John Harper shares something that is so elegant and simple that it will likely become my new yardstick for measuring the characters I play, the situations I introduce as a GM, and the things upon which I focus during game/setting creation (including VAM and Scarlet Masque). In terms of my preferred style of play, I’d say that it doesn’t matter one little bit what sort of cool setting, premise, theme or concept that you come up with unless you’ve got these four items firmly intact:

What makes a fit character for (a roleplaying) game? The Four Cs.

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

via John Harper @ The Mighty Atom.

And of course I submit Lady Blackbird as an excellent example of this in practice.  I’d rather play a 12-page game that sets up the Four Cs perfectly than play a 300-page game that doesn’t.

First, a mini-catchup:

I am sitting here while Liam plays on the Playhouse Disney Website and there’s all kinds of stuff rolling around in my head. There are several things I want to write about. I literally have two partially-written posts in my drafts waiting to be finished and published – a political post about Bill Maher and a personal post about an epiphany I had during my recent trip to Cleveland. And this morning one of my newest Facebook friends, Tammy (who happens to be a significantly memorable high-school girlfriend and a fellow thespian) asked me to elaborate on something I mentioned in an earlier tweet about my “ALT experience”. “ALT” is insider shorthand for Amarillo Little Theatre, which is where I spent almost nine years in my 20s trodding the boards. So adding to my other posts-in-waiting I want to write about my years at ALT in more detail than I have ever done since I began to blog.

But what I will actually be doing in this post is writing about Vegas After Midnight again – because during lunch Liam and I were rocking out to my VAM playlist and it reminded me of a conversation I had with my lovely Leah a couple of days ago that I want to share.

So, the actual point of this post, as promised in the title, is … Read the rest of this entry »

The timing of Joe McDonald’s post about music and the questions it asks could not be more perfect for me. (And of course everything is all about me – hah!) Seriously, though – right when I’m in the midst of grappling with how various types of music invoke my creative expression, along comes this:

This Particular Darkness « Buried Without Ceremony.

You might think I tend to draw from the same few wells far too often when I share cool stuff that I’ve encountered, but if it moves me or makes me think or reaches down and grabs me by the scruff of the soul, then that’s what I wanna share and it kinda makes sense that a writer capable of doing that once will probably be able to repeat the feat every so often. These days, Joe McDonald is doing just that for me. He’s a reliable feat-repeater.

Not only does his post add some flavor into my recent thought about music in Vegas After Midnight, but it goes beyond that to make me think more about my music preferences in general.

I’m going to admit something that might slightly soil my self-advertised misfit cred. When I was a tween and teen back in Michigan in the 80s, my musical tastes were dominated by pop-radio rock (Prince, Duran Duran, Hall & Oates, Journey, etc.) and certain types of “classic” rock (The Beatles, Elvis, Queen, etc).  I used to shy away from punk and hard/metal rock. Too subversive, too much the music of the kids in my school who were stoners and rebels. True, I secretly wanted to BE a rebel, but in my school all the rebels were pot-smoking pill-popping drunkards who were nowhere near as cool and compelling as Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club or Robin Johnson’s character in Times Square.

So as it turned out, my teenage rebel phase didn’t actually emerge until I was in my late 20s and I started hearing the music of the misfit teens and art-class rebels who were regulars in the theatre groups I was part of and the teen residential-treatment home I worked at. They listened to lots of grunge, punk, neo-punk, proto-emo, etc. and when I heard it it clicked with me in ways that it never did when I was younger.

So now, I tend to listen to some pretty edgy stuff, some emo, angry, hard stuff, both modern and classic. And I’m much more appreciative of the subversive elements of the stuff I used to listen to but didn’t recognize as subversive.

So, when Joe poses his thoughts on the questions asked by punk genre, and he brings up the notion of raging against machines and fighting against oppressive institutions, and placing blame… I wonder.  Because I agree with him, but I’m not particularly involved in actually fighting or raging or rebelling any more than I used to be when I used to listen to processed pop music.

So my inner-rebel has always been sort of a wannabe. And I begin to realize that what I’m doing with VAM is to try to finally openly express – or at least grapple with – all the conflicting stuff I feel about the pros and cons of “fighting the status quo”. Because really, VAM is a game about waking up and doing something proactive in terms of raging against the dying of the light. It’s about not sleeping through the chaos in order to hide from it, but actually facing it down, shouting at it, and DOING something about it. I’ve always thought of VAM as my magnum opus, my statement. And it is. But I hafta admit, I’m not altogether sure, even at my age and “maturity”, whether the statement I’m claiming to espouse is entirely sincere, or if I just WISH I felt that way.

This bears more pondering. I’ll go listen to some Pink Floyd or Smashing Pumpkins and get back to you later.

I’m having fun sharing bits of VAM stuff these days, so I’ll continue the trend by posting what I’m currently thinking I’ll use as the opening text. This is something I jotted down over a year ago but after making a few changes over the past two days I’m pretty happy with it.  I suspect that some of you will notice it is a direct homage <cough>ripoff<cough> of one of my favorite speeches from Shakespeare.

Picchiatello Jack is the name of my narrator, the guy whose voice the game text will be written in. He also happens to be the Tim Curry-esque DJ who broadcasts from atop the Needle. It all comes together.

Picchiatello speaks:

“If I could show you this story properly, I’d call down fire from the sky and conjure the scenes up right out on the Strip. The movers and shakers would play their own parts and the Aces would sit at attention and watch it all go down. Then we could kick it into high gear in one big orgasmic explosion of blood and madness and passion and pain that you could see with your own peepers.

But that’s not what you get tonight, Kiddoes. Tonight all you get is the words from my measly mouth and the truth from my meager soul, fumbling words cobbled together and shoved out through a ratty microphone along gossamer waves through the aether to try to paint you the epic spectacle of The Game.

It’s a fool’s errand, is what it is. But I’m just the fool to do it; I can ask your pardon and decry my skills all I want, but it needs be done.

So I’m asking you to let my words slip past your defenses to massage your imagination, because I can’t bring this story to life without it. I ask you to suppose that within the space between my speaking and your hearing exists a vast and arid waste of hardscrabble sand and jagged rock surrounding an isolated kingdom of steel, glass, and neon where life is hard & cheap and where death is easy & cheap. A place where Midnight has passed and Dawn never comes; where the many Sleepers slog through the streets like robot zombies and the few Awakened rise up to fight Madness with Madness in an all-out all-in Game of control, hope, chaos, and chance.

Help me bring it to life with your thoughts, Kiddoes. Because only your imaginations can put flesh on my words and breathe action into being. The clock is ticking and we’ve only got a short time, so please, let’s settle in and get going. I’ll be with you all the while to tell you what you need to know, so let me introduce myself: I am Picchiatello Jack, your humble voice calling out in the wilderness. I pray you’ll listen and understand. It’s time to wake up and get in The Game.”

Over the years, one of the most reliable ways I’ve gleaned inspiration for Vegas After Midnight has been through listening to music. I’ve made it fairly clear in the past that a lot of VAM’s inspiration comes from themes and concepts I’ve drawn from my favorite TV, movies, and fiction, but music has always been in the mix, too – especially in the past year or so. As a result I’ve collected a pretty broad playlist with songs that have come to represent broad-stroke thematic inspirations for the setting – or in a few cases become ideas ripped right from the songs and pasted into VAM’s patchwork.

In fact, lately the only times I seem to have the opportunity to devote much mindspace to VAM is when I’m listening to my VAM playlist, which in the past year or so has almost always occurred during certain times in my weekly routine – either driving around running errands, cleaning up the house, or mowing the yard. These are basically the only times I have these days to explore inside my head without having to simultaneously pay attention to kids or clients or other grownup responsibilities. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

My New Alter-Ego: Pocket the Fool

Hello, MisfitMonkey Nation.

If I’m still on your feed, thanks! I appreciate your desire to keep up with my harpings and I’ll make an effort to honor that by sharing my harpings more often. I’ve been … hibernating, so to speak, for the past little while. Now I’m awake, alert, and feeling good. Time to carpe diem!

Two things I want to highlight today. The first is that awhile ago I threw a tweet up on Twitter and Facebook inviting anyone in my sphere of influence who is attending GenCon to meet with me for an interview, chat, or shout-out on Canon Puncture. See, I wasn’t going to Indy this year, but circumstances have improved, and now I’m planning to come up after all on Friday evening (and stay til Sunday morning) to watch the Ennies and spend some time socializing with those of you that I hardly ever get to see – and to meet some new friends, too, of course. And I’ll be there with a media badge as the official GenCon 09 reporter for Canon Puncture.

So, if you missed my tweet about this, then hopefully you’ll catch this post – if you’re a publisher, designer, podcaster, rpg-player, booth monkey, or Canon Puncture listener and you’d like to talk to me on record about your game, product, creative endeavors – or, even better, just about your life and play experiences in our crazy hobby – then write to me at harpingmick@gmail.com or contact me in some way else, and I’ll start pulling together a list of people to connect with while I’m at the con.

Also, of course, I’m looking forward to just plain socializing and celebrating a chance to be with folks I enjoy hanging out with, so even if you don’t want to get your voice and thoughts on a podcast, then yeah, we can still get together and enjoy each other’s company!

The second thing – really more of a side-note – is that I am tempted to promise that I’ll be posting a series of VAM-related images, ideas, and concepts here on the Monkey in the next couple of weeks because I’m actually trying to pull together a playable alpha-test of the DRYH-version of VAM for possible play at GenCon and I’m trying to focus a lot of my newly-reignited creative energy on that, and I’d like to share it here while I’m doing it. And in terms of my intent, that’s all true. But I won’t actually make any such promise, because my reputation for promising such things and not delivering is already hefty enough.

But it might happen. So, stay tuned.