A story I don't know how to write

and an album recommendation

About a year ago I received my copy of Neurocity, a not-so-subtle Orwellian ttrpg about living in a highly censored surveillance state. I skimmed it, as I do most rpgs before committing to reading them, and despite being unsure of whether it suits me as a GM or not it has stuck with me. Or, more correctly, a single paragraph stuck with me and I haven’t been able to stop think about it:

‘As a general rule, characters start the game without Revelations; they are people who have never questioned the nature of reality.’

What a strong premise! Having played a lot back and forth with player buy-in and stories where the players aren’t strictly heroes, I became a little obsessed with this framing. Characters in Neurocity have the potential to rebel against the system, with the game providing no solution for what that might look like, but it doesn’t assume that players will. It says that living in the world of Neurocity is painful, stressful, and not even death can save you (with people killed being cloned back into life, a little less like themselves each time), but not what you should do about it. The game is very happy to let you play out your tragedy of a character that stays ignorant of the true source of their suffering until the very end. You start as censors, cops, propagandists and the like, and if it feels natural you can stay that way the entire story. But you don’t have to.

A lot of my work is very heavily inspired by music, something I hope to write about more in depth another time. A band in particular that inspires me a lot is prog-rock band ‘The Dear Hunter’, whom over the course of a decade released the ‘Dear Hunter’ saga, about the life of the eponymous character. Afterwards they released ‘The Indigo Child’ an EP setting the foundation for their next saga, of the same name, which was followed by the album I actually wanna talk about: ‘Antimai’. In many ways Antimai doesn’t really have a story, instead serving as a lore dump, each song describing a different part of the sci-fa world this new story will take place in, an oppressive city where even the higher classes feel the pressure of the thumb placed on top of them.

‘If my morals seem a bit mislaid, it might be easy to forget. If I ever tried to disobey, you’re probably gonna find me dead!’

Something I’ll definitely come back to again and again on this blog is my love stories told form the perspective of shitty people. Stories where you are following someone who is, at least initially, kind of a dick, or unaware of the oppressive society they uphold, or a total sleazebag. Whenever I listen to Antimai, I keep imagining what a ttrpg told from the stories of these higher up in the hierarchy would look like. I want to run a campaign once where the characters start out playing for the wrong team, where they’re blissfully unaware of the real harm they’re causing, before revealing to them what they’re part of and seeing how they react. Is it not these difficult choices we play ttrpgs to explore?

Now how do I do this? I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it? I have a handful of games and modules on hand that promise to do what I ask, and I will try to table those and come back to the design table when I feel more confident. My most recent idea is to use a pbta structure, but then I feel I should run more pbta before delving in. Though, there will always be more homework to be done, so what I should actually do is just jump in I think. Oh well.

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