The Harping Monkey » vegas after midnight

VAM: A-MUSE-ING

Mick Bradley — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:00:49 +0000

I hereby officially declare that the new official opening credit-roll song for Vegas After Midnight is Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia”.

Thanks, carry on.

John Harper: The Four Cs of Character

Mick Bradley — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:00:18 +0000

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.

[VAM] Is the Joker TOO Wild?

Mick Bradley — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:10:49 +0000

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 …

The other day we were all in the van running errands before Leah left on her work trip (she’ll be back tonight) and I had the VAM soundtrack loaded in there, too. Leah has been extremely supportive of my vision for VAM all along, and she also tends to pay a lot of attention to what I’m doing with it although she rarely brings it up. So as Frank Sinatra’s warbling of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” came on, I said, “I have been looking for audio of Jerry Lewis singing this, but the best version I’ve found is Frank’s.”

And Leah asked, understandably, “Why would Jerry Lewis OR Frank Sinatra be singing that song in VAM?”

“Jerry Lewis is essentially the Red Joker,” I replied, “and in my mind this song is very appropriately ironic because basically he IS out there walking alone, lost, insane, and pining for a part of himself that he has forgotten about. But he walks on.”

Leah nodded, then pursed her lips. “Okay, you keep putting a lot of Jerry Lewis stuff into this, along with mixing in Frankenfurter and several other really campy things like that DJ guy you came up with last month. But the whole reason you said you switched from one game rules to another was that when you played VAM with the old system it came off as too campy and corny. Seems to me having Jerry Lewis and Frankenfurter and all that running around is going to come off as pretty campy no matter what.”

I thought about that for a minute, because she has a point. Basically my response was “Well, good point, but I think what I’m going for is that there still IS a campy veneer, but under that there is some pretty thick thematic meat, and that was not coming into play at all before. It’s like how I explained it on the Website – “Batman” can be Adam West and Caesar Romero running around like goofballs or it can be Christian Bale and Heath Ledger ripping each other’s souls to shreds with operatic intensity. Same basic characters, same veneer, but totally different feel. I want to play VAM like Dark Knight and not like the old TV show. Switching systems helps that happen.”

“I think you need to be prepared,” Leah said, “that people are going to look at things like Jerry Lewis and Elvis and the Rat Pack and they’re all so wild and outrageous that they’ll play it campy and corny no matter what you do.”

And then I said the thing that is probably the crux of this whole post: “I’m not really worried about other people playing it corny if that’s how they interpret it,if that’ fun for them. What I AM concerned about is building it on a system where I can give it the thematic punch I want when I’m playing it. It was much tougher to get the right feel with the FATE system, even for me. But yeah, you’re right. Most people will probably play up the campy stuff when I’m not around to run the game.”

What I realize now, looking back on that statement, is that I believe it’s mostly true for me – I’m making a game the way I’d want to play it, not the way most people will probably want to play it. And I AM good with that. But truthfully, I’m still concerned about writing the text and crafting the rules in a way that maximizes the game playing out with my essential vision intact. And that’s why I’m trying to pay attention to game design conversations and take things like the “three questions” seriously.

Wow, I’ve still got a lot of work to do. Yikes.

Joe McDonald: This Particular Darkness

Mick Bradley — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:13:35 +0000

He makes me wanna be a better game creator:

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.

[VAM] Picchiatello Jack’s Introduction

Mick Bradley — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:31:42 +0000

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 ripoff 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.”

Vegas After Midnight: The Rock Opera?

Mick Bradley — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:52:38 +0000

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.

So these days a lot of VAM-thinking occurs while I’m listening to this eclectic set of songs I’ve collected, and as a result music has become very intertwined within my VAM creative landscape. I mean, it really always has, as I mentioned above, but it has now become almost integral to my ability to invoke the setting and tinker with it.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to announce another major paradigm shift with VAM that would result in players having to listen to music in order to actually engage the game – although I’ll admit that the cool and elegant way that music is used in Ribbon Drive offers me some temptation in that regard. (Heh. We could call it Vegas After Midnight: the Rock Opera RPG.) But no, I’m just sharing how music has become the major driving force in my recent creative process with the game. I figured maybe a few of you might like to peek into what I’ve come to think of as the Vegas After Midnight soundtrack.

Actually, the full playlist is now up to 80 songs and continues to grow as I add old music that I want in the soundtrack but only just had the chance to purchase, and also as I discover new songs that seem perfect for the tone of the Madness. And although the vast majority of the music is rock (hard, classic, modern, grunge, emo, punk, neo-punk, indie) the list also includes some pop standards and other odd tidbits to spice the concoction with a classic Vegas vibe.

But it occurs to me that sharing the whole playlist would not only be overkill, it would also possibly give a couple of things away that are a bit premature to release into the aether. So I’m going to paste in the first 25 songs of the playlist and just whet your appetite. Here is the beginning of the VAM soundtrack:

#	Title	Artist	Album
1	Lunatic Fringe	Red Rider	As Far As Siam
2	Neon Bible	Arcade Fire	Neon Bible
3	Make a Move	Lostprophets	Start Something
4	Welcome To The Black Parade	My Chemical Romance	The Black Parade
5	All Along the Watchtower**	U2	Rattle and Hum
6	Ain’t That A Kick In The Head	Dean Martin	Dino: The Essential Dean Martin
7	A Little Less Conversation	Elvis Presley	Ocean’s Eleven
8	Feeling Good*	My Brightest Diamond	Dark Was the Night
9	Brave and Crazy	Tom Cochrane	Mad Mad World
10	Sound Of Madness	Shinedown	The Sound Of Madness
11	Funhouse	P!nk	Funhouse
12	Diamonds Are Forever	Shirley Bassey	Greatest Hits – Shirley Bassey
13	Peacemaker	Green Day	21st Century Breakdown
14	Bullet With Butterfly Wings	The Smashing Pumpkins	Rotten Apples
15	The Show Must Go On	Queen	Innuendo
16	Ave Mary A	P!nk	Funhouse
17	Stand And Deliver	Adam Ant	Antics In The Forbidden Zone
18	Dirty Vegas	INXS	Rockstars
19	Luck Be A Lady	Frank Sinatra & Chrissie Hynde	Duets II
20	My Delirium	Ladyhawke	Ladyhawke
21	Burning Love	Robert Johnson	Close Personal Friend
22	Wild Boys	Duran Duran	Decade
23	Heroes	David Bowie	Heroes
24	Who Wants to Live Forever	Queen	Queen – Greatest Hits
25	Is This The End?	Creed	Creed

* – There are also great versions of this song by Muse, Sammy Davis, Jr., and of course the classic from Nina Simone sets the standard – but this new version from MBD has the sultry lounge singer feel that VAM needs. The idea is to imagine this song being sung in a smoky Vegas lounge by Lady Luck while a big change to the setting’s status quo takes place simultaneously.

** – Mad props to the Bob Dylan original and the Jimi Hendrix version, but I choose this one for Bono’s addition of the line “All I’ve got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth. All I’ve got is a red guitar, the rest is up to you.”

[VAM] Morsels – Welcome to the Madness, Redux

Mick Bradley — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:33:04 +0000

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.

The idea of “The Game” is this – In the world of VAM, life itself can be seen as an ongoing contest to win security, power, resources, and sanity. The ‘gods’ are playing poker with the universe, and the characters are the cards. Something terribly bizarre has occurred at some point in the past, and the world has become a strange nightmare realm dominated by Madness and Pain, where the gaudy facade of all the tropes and archetypes of Las Vegas have become the reality, where only the buzzing and glittering glow of neon and halogen illuminate the ever-present darkness. Many of the denizens of the setting are not aware that their world has gone mad. They are mere cogs in a nightmare machine that has overwritten all former realities. They go through life, they do what they’re told, they toil for awhile upon the stage, never realizing that all around them the world is one big table and the fate of Everything is playing out on its tattered felt surface.

But the player characters in VAM, along with many of the movers and shakers they’ll be interacting with, have become awakened to at least some of the Truth. They have been drawn into The Game. This is not to say that awakened folk know everything – I don’t think even the High Rollers know everything – but they’re at least aware that the world is infested with a preternatural spirit of Madness, and if that Madness isn’t stopped – or brought under control – then everything will eventually just devolve into one big entropic mess of utter chaos. How the players/characters end up dealing with this becomes the throughline of play in VAM. Various approaches and temperaments will fall under the influence of the four suits and two colors of a deck of playing cards. Different suits and colors will govern certain natures and temperaments (kind of like horoscopes, tarot, or cartomancy). And the Aces of each suit, along with the two Jokers, will represent a pantheon of primary archetypal beings known as the High Rollers. These High Rollers are the ones who are running The Game – or at least they think they are. They’re the ones going around awakening certain people (including the player characters) and drawing them into The Game. Each High Roller becomes the patron of the people they awaken. A player character’s relationship to her patron High Roller and its corresponding suit/color becomes the foundation upon which the character launches into play.

Well, that’s enough for now. Next up, I’ll share a bit about the natures symbolized by the card suits and also let you peek at the High Rollers.

Hey, I Wanna Talk to You on Canon Puncture!

Mick Bradley — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:50:32 +0000

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.

MERP Friday: April 17th

Mick Bradley — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:30:14 +0000

Making:

I’m coding a nifty image doodad for the Monkey so I can use Flickr’s JSON feed capability to pull in a prettier and more custom-styled slideshow to replace the Picasa show that’s up now on the HM home page.

For Vegas After Midnight, I’m writing flavor text drafts for the characters representing the 16 face-cards, the 4 aces, and the Joker. It feels good to be focused on this again. I like how it is coming together under the Don’t Rest Your Head umbrella.

For Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, I’m sketching some very loose notes of custom bits to mix into the setting, so that once I find a group to play, we can put our own stamp on it. Basically, my scheme is to commandeer one of the minor Barathi houses, House Lupini, and flesh them out by blending in some cultural and societal bits I wrote up about the Raehalan (from Canon Puncture’s Sojourn 66 PTA series). I’ve made up a basic house sigil (see pic at left) that I’ll be sharing on the S7S wiki, and writing down some basic ideas as well. I don’t want to go too far with it until I can sit down with a whole play group and do some collaborative setting brainstorming. But it’s a fun exercise, and it’s actually helping unscrew my brain to let the VAM creativity flow. And the blogging ideas, too, for that matter.

Enjoying:

Not much of note going on in the TV-watching arena, except that I must say I am liking Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire quite a bit more than I expected to. Yes, it is juvenile, campy, and has moments where the humor falls flat. But it has provided me with as many moments of laugh-out loud entertainment as 30 Rock and The Office do, and I actually think the underlying storyline has a pretty sincere mythic feel to it. I don’t know this for sure, but the show feels to me like it is written and guided by people who actually understand fantasy and geekery, and I even suspect some of them are familiar with roleplaying games. The humor seems to be an homage rather than a satire. If the writers and actors are given a chance to get a feel for characters, I think the consistency will improve and this will emerge as a consistently enjoyable show. Although it probably helps to have a little Skyy (or your mild mood-enhancer of choice) in your system.

Reading:

Comics – I’m catching up on the last few issues of Northlanders, Green Arrow/Black Canary, and the first issue of Warren Ellis’ new steampunker, Ignition City. Northlanders rocks as always. GA/BC is nothing spectacular, but hey, they’re a couple of my favorite characters and their current exploits have me in a decent state of enjoyment.

Novels – I’m still marking time with the mildly palatable The Pirate Queen by Alan Gold until my name comes to the top of the library waiting lists for either Morgan’s The Steel Remains or Butcher’s Turn Coat. Or maybe I ought to go sell off some of my old books at Half-Price Books and maybe scratch up enough flow to buy my own copy of one of the titles I want.

Playing:

Not a darn thing lately. But I have to believe that’s about to change. Otherwise I’ll go crazy.

[Waypoints] Cultures of Play – Setting and the Unknown

Mick Bradley — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:04:48 +0000

Cultures of Play – Setting and the Unknown…

…wherin Rob Donoghue, with some very useful input from Josh Roby and several other folks, sparks a discussion about knowability/unknowability in relation to settings for rpgs.

I find this a fascinating discussion in the general sense, but it also serves to help reignite my passion for working on Vegas After Midnight, which is something I really fell away from in the past few months. I’ve been struggling under the self-created burden of my own overreaction to a blog post from Jonathan Walton [Why Most Supplements Suck] about supplements, settings, and how much material should or should not be established in the text (as opposed to at the table).

Basically, as a guy who feels pretty strongly about the fun and awesomeness of collaborating on a roleplaying scenario and helping establish situations and settings with the play group, after reading Jonathan’s blog post I was led to wonder why in the hell I’ve been trying to finish and publish Vegas After Midnight, which is almost entirely pre-established setting and in many ways fits the description of exactly the kind of thing that Jonathan was suggesting as suckish.

Or maybe it was another excuse not to work on my creation and take the safe and easy way out. Who knows?

Well, the thread I’ve linked above has me thinking about it again, but at least this time I can say that apparently my self-doubt is enough in check that thinking about these issues is actually inspiring me rather than mucking with me. So the time has come to work on VAM, eh?

For that matter, I think the time has also come to let myself enjoy playing in a pre-established setting again. I’m particularly enamored with Shaintar lately. And I( miss playing in the Firefly campaign that I used to play with the Rolemonkeys. And I wanna try Hellas sometime, too.

To be continued …