The bathrooms are purely modern (stand in accessible showers), doors wider than normal, and so on. You end up with the feeling you're expected to spend your entire life in your apartment or condo or home. There are no maps of it to be found, and the newspaper are full of strange classified ads that read out like messages to secret agents or demented love letters. EX: "SRM seeks NDG for rendezvous at the high point. Poodle only. Safe word: None."
There are fnords. And they are everywhere.
If there is a way out of the city, no one seems to know. Most people don't even seem to care. There are hints that horrible things happen to those who try and escape, but no one knows any specifics. There are the police, but there are hints that anyone could be a member of the secret police, who prevent crime from happening at all. (Those caught are often killed, to prevent them from THINKING of committing another crime -- or so the rumors claim.)
The City is clean, and neat, and terribly tidy - as if a neat freak, about to kill themselves, had tidied everything up before hand to leave a last, sparkling impression. There are more city workers who clean things up than there may be citizens, and most dust mites probably starve to death. They clean up crew are all white, blond haired and blue eyed - Hitler's Aryan wet dream, scrubbing out the toilets and cleaning up the homes. They never speak.
There are panhandlers, but they are all neat, clean, and impeccably polite, decorating the Blue Light districts of the City, asking for credit, and possibly all spying on you. Or everyone else, too, but mostly you. Some of them might even know you by name, but there are always people who look like "a Joe" aren't there? No need to be worried. There is never any need to be worried.
Sources
This is pretty much sourced in The Prisoner, 1984, Brave New World, Paranoia (the rpg) with dashes of Kult, Transmetropolitan and Serial Experiments Lain. As well as generous helpings of conspiracy theories, the importance of truth, the nature of identity and lots of fun spy and thriller novels. It might help to think of James Bond on LSD, at least some of the time. (Most of the rest of the time, he is probably on soma, the same as everyone else.)
Character Creation
As explained by Robert Sloan: Join a dystopia RPG where you don't know what system you're playing, don't know what your stats are and the GM laughs malevolently while fondling the DVD of "The Prisoner."
To whit, the players are told they have 4 statistics. Each represents Body (Strength, Dex etc.), Mind (Intellect), Soul (willpower, force of personality, etc.) and Luck. You divide them in orders of importance (A - D) and then divide 100 points between them. Points divided don't necessarily have to correlate to importance) You then pick skills your PC should know, up to 5 per stat, in order of importance. You then decide what thing you are really, really good at. This can be a skill, it can be a Unique Trick. It doesn't matter. This is the little thing that makes your character a PC.
Genre: Spy/Conspiracy pretty much.
Background: Anything you want, barring in mind the game is set in the real world. But, in the real world, you have a Secret. This is Important, and it's valuable enough that someone put you here to, somehow, extract it. Or perhaps they already have, or never needed to at all. We're all being used, after all. We're all pawns, and there is always someone out there pulling our strings: whether we accept this with resignation or fight to be ourselves is up to us ....
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
- Huxley, Brave New World
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