Category: Commentary

From the BBC, Why do men go missing?

“They are not missing to themselves. It is only the people who are left behind who see them as missing”, he says.

“There is a small group of people who go missing for a week or two and then reappear not being able to remember what happened. That’s often because of work stress.”
…
The US medical encyclopaedia, the Merck Manual, describes dissociative fugue as “a disorder in which one or more episodes of sudden, unexpected, and purposeful travel from home (fugue) occur, during which a person cannot remember some or all of his past life”.

Continuing my current trend of grabbing news headlines and turning them into story backgrounds, I consider fugue to be compelling.

In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Thoughout the evolution of humanity, there have been men and women of great stature. They became our leaders, survivors and martyrs. Most of the time they are normal members of society, living out their lives in quiet anonymity. It is only in these times of adversity, when others look for someone to lead, to save them, to die for them – that they step to the fore. Afterwards, they cannot explain their activities, as if they were acting under the control of a higher power.

This is the Fugue.

While gripped by the Fugue, a person’s perceptions are altered. Often they are able to see things with astounding clarity and sense the right thing to do. They may be gifted with extraordinary abilities by the Fugue and feel drawn to dealing with the event which caused it.

If they are unable to resolve the cause of the Fugue Event, either through inaction or failure, then it is possible they may never recover from the Fugue and may continue to live apart, still not cognisant of their real name, the identities of their family or their calling in life. Sometimes, after years, the fugue may subside and they may find themselves separated months or even years from their previous life, as if plucked through time to the future.

Fugue can be played in two ways.

1. One-off: you are handed pre-generated normal people who will imminently be involved in a Fugue Event. Once handed their Event cards, they will be told which way to act, what abilities they know about and if the GM is feeling nice, the resolution clause for the Fugue Event. The Resolution Clause may be omitted to give a more “Quantum Leap” feel.
2. Campaign: we take a step back and adopt a more “Nephilim” or “Quantum Leap” look at things where there is an outside force, played by the players, which makes the individual act out of the ordinary. The outside force as well as the normal people must be generated. The player, however, looks after the outside force as a heroic archetype. At the start of every session the player will be given his current normal person to play and must wait until the appropriate time before he can access his heroic archetype. A GM could be cruel and demand that there are preconditions for activation: situations, sights, triggered memories, keywords

This kind of reminds me of Miracleman, the absolutely fabulous superhero serial by Alan Moore. If you haven’t read it, stop right now and go and read it.

It would be possible to run Fugue with the same normals every time but there would have to be reasons why anyone would be in these situations day after day.

Suggested abilities:

Senses – enhanced senses or extrasensory perception
Strength – capable of lifting five, ten maybe fifty times normal…
Speed – maybe someone can move at double, triple or much faster than expected.
Healing – can heal a horrific injury, cure a disease..

Use of abilities:

These abilities should not be “always on” but should be summoned.To simulate this in the game, allocate the players a number of Fugue points with their Fugue Event card. Each point can be used to summon the Fugue ability for a scene (think no more than 3 panels in a comic).

System:
Oh it really doesn’t matter. I’d use either ERIS or SNCC for this. SNCC would seem to fit better because it doesn’t have Strength statistics and so it’s much easier to fluff it.

What do you think?

A few months ago I came across a great article on the IntarWeb about the origin, trafficking and “business” of Heroin which went into great detail about how it was the main product of the East India Trading Company and how the British exported heroin in vast quantities to China and not the other way round. I’ve since lost track of it but had an idea for a game. Anyone knows which article I’m talking about? Pop it in the comments. Ta.

gives an example of the interesting history of the drug.

Heroin, however, was not brought into existence until 1874.

Heroin was first synthesized by a dude named C.R. Alder Wright, who in addition to having lots of given names, was an English chemist employed at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London.

Another chemist, this one German, employed at Bayer, and named Felix Hoffmann, independently re-synthesized diacetylmorphine in a failed attempt to make codeine from morphine. After testing it out in some lucky humans, Bayer decided to rename the compound heroin, reportedly because it made test subjects feel, among other things, heroic.

Again with the ideas.

I envisage a game called “Heroics” set in the pulp era with a very edgy, gritty feel. The heroes are, of course, heroin addicts and it is the drug which gives them their powers. The eventual collapse of their bodies is part of the whole story.

Subplots

• Getting heroin is not hard but it starting to become outlawed in some regions and in others it is socially unacceptable or available only with prescription
• It causes chronic constipation
• it’s up to the GM on whether the heroic feeling is any more than just a feeling

When you’re lying awake in the night and dreaming new dreams about far off places and alien races, in science fiction and fantasy, and you think it might be easy to invent something new.

No.

A few years ago, some of us tried to write a science fiction background which included some elements from sci-fi we liked. It was, I suppose, meant to be a slightly more mature outlook on Star Trek, a series most of us watched and a game we generally liked playing (though convincing one ham actor that he couldn’t always be the captain was troublesome).

We only wanted 3-4 alien races to deal with but we wanted them to be very very alien. Some of the concepts were facinating. I loved the Swarm, the Snakes and the “human aliens” (colonies). I had some trouble with the molluscs but I blamed that more on myself. As a biologist I had a good grasp of the weird things out there on Earth and wanted to invent things that were really alien. Others without that background weren’t looking for the same criteria though they were instrumental in tightening the physics because that was their background!

But as an example, look at these beasties, the Water Bears.

Freeze them, boil them, dry them, expose them to open space & radiation – after 200 years they’ll still be alive!

How weird are they? Yet, blow them up a hundred times and instead of a millimetre-long creepie crawly you have a 10 centimetre freaky pet thing. Make it a metre long and, who knows, you’ve got the start of a primitive alien race. Give them money and digital watches and you’ve just invented Croydon.

If inventing new aliens, get a biologist on team. They’ll be able to tell you if the thing you’ve just invented is original or if you’ve just extrapolated the Moss Piglet from first principles (in a similar way to the way I once designed a nasty beastie for SLA Industries and discovered I’d invented spiders without referring to the copious documentation I had, book lungs and all!)

Just remember, if something is humanoid, there’d better be a good reason for it (like, for example, they’re humans and they’re from Earth) and that can open up an entire kettle of fish.

As for the game itself, it was shelved. The fun was in the creation.