Nuadha's Tale

Ignorance can be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. -Thomas Jefferson

Friday, July 26, 2002

Gaming
A long time ago I read an article on GMing that suggested starting out and ending each game with a piece of music or something that becomes a ritual that tells the players that "the game has begun." I tried it out for the first time with the Vurt/Cyberpunk/Masterbook game I ran. I started each game out by either playing or quoting the first track from Billy Idol's album, Cyberpunk which I will now quote to the best of my memory.

The future has imploded in to the present with no nuclear war. The new battlefields are people's minds and souls. The Corporations are the new government. Computer-generated worlds are the new frontier. Although we say all information should be free, it is not. Information is power and currency in the virtual world that we inhabit. Welcome to the future....cyberpunk.

I would end each Vurt adventure with a snippet of a radio program that exists in the Vurt books, the Game Cat. The Game Cat reviews the newest Vurts to hit the streets and warns vurt-heads about the dangers of the vurt. In some of the early games I just read Game Cat passages out of the Jeff Noon novels but later I had the Game Cat talk about things that directly realted to the game. When one character faced off of against his father in the vurt, the Game Cat ended that adventure warning his listeners not to try to work out all of their psychological issues with vurt. The vurt can guide you deeper into psyche and give form to your greatest fears but there are some things you have to work out in the real world.

This framing technique worked really well in Vurt and I have used it in several campaigns since. In some games I used music at the beginning of each session. In my first Changeling game I started some of the sessions with a poem. (I didn't have a fitting poem each game but luckilly C has quite a collection of poetry books for me to draw from.) In the last Changeling game I tried the teasers.

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