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Vurt (The First Book in The Series, As Opposed To The Full Series of Interwoven Stories) Was The

The document discusses a Kickstarter campaign to create a tabletop roleplaying game based on the trippy novel Vurt, which involves sharing hallucinatory realities through colored feathers. It provides details on the novel's surreal setting and drug use, as well as the developers' choice to use the Cypher System ruleset. It encourages supporting the Kickstarter to help unlock additional stretch goals for the project.

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darkoutcast
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58 views1 page

Vurt (The First Book in The Series, As Opposed To The Full Series of Interwoven Stories) Was The

The document discusses a Kickstarter campaign to create a tabletop roleplaying game based on the trippy novel Vurt, which involves sharing hallucinatory realities through colored feathers. It provides details on the novel's surreal setting and drug use, as well as the developers' choice to use the Cypher System ruleset. It encourages supporting the Kickstarter to help unlock additional stretch goals for the project.

Uploaded by

darkoutcast
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as ODT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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High Noon: Feathers, Dice, and a Curious Yellow Kickstarter

As far as drugs go, storytelling is one of my favorites. Weaving a story for anyone listening,
carving out a space for shared experience that is as deep as we care to make it. Layer by layer, off and
falling down the rabbit hole, we all come to a vaguely consensus based reality. It should be no surprise
then, that when I heard that Ravendesk Games had launched a Kickstarter to turn British author Jeff
Noon's trippy Vurt series into a tabletop RPG, I wondered what color feather I'd idly had in mouth.

Vurt (the first book in the series, as opposed to the full series of interwoven stories) was the
bonkers story of drug addict Scribble. The drug of choice is Vurt; color-coded feathers that whisk you
into shared “vurtual” reality. Things get complicated when Scribble and his sister/lover Desdemona
share a trip to English Voodoo, and Scribble comes back with an amorphous blob one of his gang
members calls “The Thing From Outer Space”, instead. The whole affair has a very Orpheus into the
Underworld feel to it, filtered through the lens of Neuromancer. Or possibly The Matrix, if The Matrix
had been equal parts Jodorowsky and Aronofsky, with more jumping through realities and less nutrient
gruel. Noon's Manchester is bizarre and surreal, a world where incest, bestiality, animal hybrids, and all
sorts of other abnormalities are commonplace. Being a plain old human is boring and looked down
upon. This is the world that still isn't enough for the addicts, and so they turn to their reality hopping
Vurt.

Now, coming back to the beginning... Ravendesk Games has actually gone off the rails enough
to put together a tabletop experience for Vurt. It apparently took a four year effort to convince Jeff
Noon, but their persistence won out. Furthermore, they're going to be using the Cypher System
currently found in Monte Cook's Numenera. The Cypher system is the wild, unkempt cousin of d20, in
many ways. Monte Cook reinvented a great deal of RPG terminology in the current write-ups for
Cypher, but you still roll a d20, still have levels, still have classes. The actual math for difficulty is
based on multiples of three across ten steps of difficulty, which sounds odd but functions cleverly.
Added bits like “Focuses” which function almost like a subclass are pretty interesting. On the negative,
Cypher also dabbles with systems like “GM Intrusion” which (on top of being horribly named) forces a
FATE-style “spend x or be subjected to badness” but gambles players' XP. I'm eager to see what the
Ravendesk team does to tailor Cypher to Vurt.

What? You're still here? Go! Go on! Go read about Curious Yellow feathers, and shadowgirls;
about mathemagick and cybernetics. While Ravendesk Games made their first goal and Vurt: The
Roleplaying Game WILL be coming, there's no reason not to support them further as the stretch goals
include pregen adventures, a sourcebook, and five language support for the core rulebook. In parting, I
leave you with one my favorite lines from Vurt; “Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel
pain. Knowledge is torture.”

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