thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-07, Christopher Kubasik wrote:
Hi Vincent.I vote, "Not Moronic!"
Your essay reminded me of a time I played Over the Edge with some friends. I had screened Nake Lunch. The reaction was, "That was cool. But you want roleplay THAT?"
I said, "Yeah, but we get to make up our own weirdness!"
But being where my thinking was at that time, it didn't occur to me to toss the setting material. Still, I knew there'd be a problem with particular crew trying to get things "right"—so I made up my own set of Whimsey Card. I mean, Whimsey Cards times 10. So Whimsical that you could realign the reality of Al Amarja by tossing one of these babies on the table.
It was a disaster. It was wild and crazy shit for about half an hour. But it was kind of like reality unspooling in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
Which I see now is kind of what I was trying to do. I created the Hyper-Whimsey cards to BREAK Al Amarja.
If I'd been armed with your essay, however, I would have set up my tenents as you described your friend did, and joined those with the elements out of character creation we would have ended up with something wonderfully weird—but, as you say, it would have been our Weirdness. Which was why I wanted to play the damned game in the first place—to escape all the cliches of fantasy and SF environments bogging down most RPGs and find out what our fantastical world, born of our specific imaginations, would have been.
You're fifteen years too late, you bastard. But good work anyway.
Christopher
