Nicotine Girls--An Odd Proposal

[Eric J-D]

Hi Paul,

This is the first time I've posted in your forum I think, so forgive me if this is a strange first post (as well as a longish one).  Here's the thing: I've actually had in mind to get My Life With Master for a long time now, having heard the great reviews and read some of the wonderful actual play experiences folks have had with the game.  Unfortunately, I have no good excuse for why I haven't gotten off my bleedin' arse and ordered it.  I'm sure I will soon.

But that isn't why I'm posting.  I'm actually writing because I had an idea for Nicotine Girls that I wanted to float your way.  Brace yourself, though, since this might be a bit weird.

I've actually been thinking about what some sort of hybrid of Nicotine Girls and certain elements of Vincent's Kill Puppies for Satan--another game that I don't own but have some familiarity with through some of the AP posts--would be like.  The thing that got me started on this idea was thinking about a surface resemblance between the two: both games feature characters who are on the margins of society, so to speak.  The characters in Nicotine Girls are lower-income girls struggling with all kinds of shit that you might find in a somewhat lurid TV treatment (perhaps one of the more horribly voyeuristic "reality"-TV shows) of low-income girls, while Puppies' characters are pathetic satanic losers with even more pathetic loser friends.

Okay, so now for a brief bit of reminiscence (and I'll try to keep this brief).  When I was a teenager, my friends and I created a game that we played somewhat irregularly called "The Nimrod Game."  It's not a great title, admittedly, but we were kids.  Essentially, it was a very system-lite game in which we all created characters who were late-high school to early-college aged but who all were, to one degree or another, Zeroes, Schmendricks, Schlemiels, Schlimazels etc.  The expectation was always that these guys would get in terrible fucking trouble that would give them endless grief.

Sounds familiar, right?  The thing is--and this probably had something to do with some sort of barely-suppressed class rage many of us felt--in every case that I can recall, these guys were all fairly wealthy entitlement-brats from families that would make Nicky Silver's (he's a contemporary playwright with a really wicked sense of humor in case you're wondering) characters seem like models of psychological function.

So here's me thinking that some kind of horrible love-child produced from the mating of Nicotine Girls and Puppies but where the characters are all from families supposed to represent "success" in contempo-capitalist America might satisfy a certain itch out there.

Whadda ya think?  I would work on this and then turn it over to you and you could post-it or not on the Half Meme website along with Nicotine Girls.

Let me know what you think.

Eric

[Paul Czege]

Hey Eric,

Whadda ya think?  I would work on this and then turn it over to you and you could post-it or not on the Half Meme website along with Nicotine Girls.

I've always loved James V. West's The Pool Variations page. I would gladly put up a Nicotine Girls variations page on the Half Meme Press website, or actually, until there's more than one variation, a page just for yours.

Paul

[Eric J-D]

Cool.

I will get to work on it.  First step: get hold of Puppies so that I can see where or whether there might be some mechanical compatibility. <grin>


Oh, and I will get MLwM, of that you can be sure.

Eric