After the brain-scrambling joy of GenCon (and the 16 hour drive each way to and from) and then another 20 hours on the road to and from my sister-in-law's place, I've got a new game on the brain.

Originally, I was going to dedicate this month to an expansion and revision of AssassinX, my 24 hour RPG, to get it ready for publication in time for next year's GenCon. However, along the ride, I started musing about my other obsessions than murder, bloodshed and violence - drugs and hallucinations. I've been a William S Burroughs fan since the tender age of 16, and before that, a fan of the movie VideoDrome. And that is the territory where Junk Dreams seeks to travel now.

Unfortunately, like AssassinX, I can't see this ever being a commercial success. Whereas AssassinX involves bloody gore, Junk Dreams requires that the characters be junkies - heroin addicts seeking a mostly-safe place to take their next fix in order to return to the world they have left behind.

"Ever seen a bum, probably all messed up on drugs, stumbling about? Sometimes they awnder up to people as if they know them, and begin to speak jibberish at them excitedly, as if they were trying to communicate something incredibly vital, yet wholly untranslatable to our own frame of reference?"

Junk Dreams is about the world you can only interact with while 'on the nod', under the influence of heroin and its close cousins.While on the nod, you can see the world as others cannot, and you can interact with the strangers who live in that version of reality - the mugwumps and other strange Burroughs-esque creatures that exist exclusively in a state of drugged hallucinations. The 'wildlife' of this world is tragically apropos for the junkies who visit them - con-men, dealers, information brokers, traders in illicit vice, and other sullied affairs. The mugwumps (name to be changed) are universally paranoid, unpleasant, quiet creatures who look for opportunities in using those who visit them. The reality s that these creatures are a byproduct of the visitors to the world - the creations of paranoid and junk-sick minds who realize that the fix is only temporary, and they will have to find more as soon as they leave in order to return. Thus, there are other types of wildlife here too, based on other needs and desires of generations of junkies - from the dreams of ancient shamans, to the idols and loa of modern urban primitives. But the origin of these creatures, the wildlife of the junkscapes, is a secret of the game, not handed out to the players, but used in the design stages to develop the local wildlife.

But there is more to the wildlife of the junkscapes - truly sinister creatures who use this world to change the other world. Starting in the early 20th Century, goverment organizations started experimenting with drug use and altered states. The end result of these experiments are twofold. The Control Machines exist here now - playing humans like puppets, controling minds into a soporific and quiet existence of ignorance and bliss. The Control Machines are exactly what the government was hoping to be able to create through the drug programs, and thus it is exactly what they found there. The CIA maintains several teams of operatives that work within the junkscapes in order to supress those addicts who have seen the Control Machines and who now work against them. The rapid spread of HIV and HepC through injection drug use has little to do with the diseases themselves, but is a weapon used by the operatives in their work to control and suppress the junkie population.

Players will play characters who are junkies and who have discovered that there is much more to the world than what they can see when between fixes. In the drug-addled world, they have new found powers to change what is around them, or even to change themselves. Around them are armies of sleeping people who don't know the threats posed by the Control Machines, people who they cannot awaken while in their junk fixes, and who don't listen to them when they are not on the nod.

The 'normal' world in Junk Dreams is a darker, more despondent version of our own. In this world, the players have little ability to enact change or even to protect themselves. The mechanics of the game will make playing in the 'normal' world quite dangerous - honing the sense of the struggle required to score your next fix and find a safe place to take it in a world where everyone is out to get the junkies. People with connections and money, resources of any kind, find themselves unable to maintain them because they will estrange some through their own drug habits, and because the Control Machines use these resources to track down and eliminate those who oppose them. In time, the 'normal' characters will all be recluses, bums, homeless junkies and addicts eking out an existence to score their next fix. Game play in the 'normal' world will be painfully bleak, with the GM calling all the shots as in many traditional RPGs.

The 'junkscapes' are a place of potential and change. Events in the junkscape are much more mutable, with the characters having the ability to change elements of the environment as play progresses, making junkscape play significantly more narrativist in feeling, as the characters earn the ability to enact change - after all, if this space can only be seen through drug use, it will in time reflect the visions and peculiarities of your trip. Characters will earn tokens in play that can be used at the simplest level to enhance rolls or actions, or even to do 'the impossible' in some situations. Some characters will develop talents that allow them to change themselves or others directly, while others will see their junk selves as stronger, faster, or more acutely aware than their 'normal' selves. All of these abilities require the expenditure of these tokens, but more advanced expenditures are possible - actually changing the world around them, creating new story tangents, manipulating events through force of will, and so on. The ability to actually change the narration of the story is not explained to the players, but becomes available to the characters as they advance and learn about the world around them. Sooner or later, someone will wish for something, and instead of ignoring it, the GM asks for a number of tokens from the player, and changes the storyline as suits.

---

I've been pounding out the way the world works for the past three days in my head, and more will come in this design journal. I don't have the actual system for the game yet, as I dig through the various systems I've written over the years, as well as those I've played, and try to find what would suit this best. I've also got a bunch of other material I have to delve into once the system is decided... One of the major goals is very similar to the various storyteller games - to create an urban environment for adventure gaming, while reducing the number of major NPCs in the setting to keep it manageable to the GM - in Vamprie, all that matters is you and the other vampires; in Junk Dreams, the important people are the other junkies in town with their agendas, the 'native' mugwumps in the scene, and the Control Machines and agents.

"immersion levels" - indicating how much interaction you can have with the junkscapes based on the drugs you are taking - more powerful abilities to change the world around you are not available unless you are deeply immersed, but less immersion also means the wildlife of the junkscape will have less impact on you.

violence - big-time violence generally reduces your immersion level rapidly - nothing like getting shot at, shooting at someone, or killing someone messily to make you come down quickly. This reduces the tendency of players to resort to violence in game, as well as protecting the Control Machines from the simplest methods of eliminating them.

Mixing drugs - while heroin is the tool that gets you in, other drugs are also very useful - cocaine in order to increase your ability to concentrate once on the junk (trying to counter the other effects of the smack) which makes speedballs a popular and dangerous way of entering the junkscapes - LSD rapidly increases your immersion level, but lasts far longer than either heroin or cocaine, making frisco speedballs (Heroin, Cocaine & LSD) a strong tool for entry, but making it very difficult and dangerous to re-enter once the heroin has worn off... and more of course.

The Mugwumps - have to rename these of course, but these are the classic junk-creatures of Burroughs' stories that live in seedy bars and find interesting ways to con and use the users.

Other junk-dreams - modern urban loa and ancient totems from those who influence the junkscapes in their own ways - such as the modern primitives who enter and influence the junkscapes through endorphins released by body rituals; the shamans who used peyote or yage or toad-venom to enter their shamanic spaces; and so on.

I'm very interested in this project.  A lot of what you're describing is the way Trances work in Sweet  Dreams (teenagers usually enter Trances through Daydreaming, Drugs are downplayed in the first book, and dealt with in detail in the second book).  I love the shift from GM-driven reality to narrativist dream.  I may have to steal part of that for Sweet Dreams: New Skool .  I always struggled with including detailed drug use (that gives you superpowers) in a game about teenagers.  Thank you for having the courage to attempt a game about Burroughs' junkscapes.  Some thoughts and suggestions:

In Burroughs' stories, a major conflict is always between the junkie and the junk, addiction.  What mechanics will you use for addiction?  Can junkies work towards going clean? 

Junk use degrades the junky's physical and mental abilities, both short term during the trip, and long term.  But junk sickness (withdrawal) degrades them even more.  So characters should always be considered weaker than average people, and growing weaker all the time, on junk or off it.  Taking junk makes them temporarily more competant (as well as giving junkscape abilities), but never as competant as they used to be before junk. 

Junkies build up a tolerance, and have to move on to stronger, more dangerous cocktails to get the same effects they used to get off of small doses. 

Is there a specific question, issue, or aspect of the game you want to focus on in this thread?

Interesting. A game that Burroughs and Leary would gladly play.

Other games that tried to tackle a setting similar in some respects to what you are designing are Dreamwalker: Dicless Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams from Politcally Incorrect Games and The Fringe by Daniel Bayn (especially the latter one, where PCs are schizoprhenics fighting to protect the "sane" population from their delusions).

A question, if I may - how do the junkies interact with "the real world" during junkscape? Do they interact at all? To what extent those two worlds correlate?

I'm very interested in this project....Thank you for having the courage to attempt a game about Burroughs' junkscapes

In Burroughs' stories, a major conflict is always between the junkie and the junk, addiction.  What mechanics will you use for addiction?  Can junkies work towards going clean? 

Junk use degrades the junky's physical and mental abilities, both short term during the trip, and long term.  But junk sickness (withdrawal) degrades them even more.  So characters should always be considered weaker than average people, and growing weaker all the time, on junk or off it.  Taking junk makes them temporarily more competant (as well as giving junkscape abilities), but never as competant as they used to be before junk. 

Junkies build up a tolerance, and have to move on to stronger, more dangerous cocktails to get the same effects they used to get off of small doses. 

Is there a specific question, issue, or aspect of the game you want to focus on in this thread?

Interesting. A game that Burroughs and Leary would gladly play.

Other games that tried to tackle a setting similar in some respects to what you are designing are Dreamwalker: Dicless Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams from Politcally Incorrect Games and The Fringe by Daniel Bayn (especially the latter one, where PCs are schizoprhenics fighting to protect the "sane" population from their delusions).

I've read Dreamwalker but not The Fringe. I'll have to go back and read them again, but now the question is whether I should before or after I do the primary design for this game.

and now, the million-dollar question

A question, if I may - how do the junkies interact with "the real world" during junkscape? Do they interact at all? To what extent those two worlds correlate?

I don't know.

This has been a point of discussion for the past 36 hours here. I *want* there to be correlation, that the junkies shuffle around in the real world while meeting people and such in the junkscapes. But this introduces a lot of additional work in maintaining suspension of disbelief... I was figuring that Mugwumps also manifest in the 'normal' world as very boring people, but that you can only really interact with them as mugwumps in the junkscapes. So in the 'normal' world, the junky walks up to this boring guy at the bar and starts to mumble something and the guy eyeballs him and ignores him. In the junkscape, the junky is talking fairly clearly to the mugwump and the mugwump is replying. The issue becomes one of dexterity and agility. It is hard to imagine a junky in his fix actually, well, doing anything remotely physical. So, I think that the junkscape image doesn't have to really follow the physical movements / actions of the real person too much, maybe only having to TRY to occupy the same space. So the safest way to go into a junkscape would be to be tied down to a stretcher first or some such... except of course the last member of the group who would not be able to tie himself up before shooting up.

But I don't want the junkscape to be 100% independent of the real world. I prefer if the junkies are prone to wandering about and muttering to themselves while in their fix. Making the junkscape fully independent of the 'normal' world would make it seem to be MUCH more of a dream scape and less... real. I don't want the junkies to be easily able to shrug off the machinations of the Control Machines as the stuff of their nightmares.

To answer the question above from Allan, this is probably what I really want - I need to think through the permutations of the three different options (full correlation, partial correlation, no correlation) and determine which suits the ideals of the game best, and to point out what I'm missing as I think it through. Just writing out the paragraph above has helped cement that I would PREFER a partial-to-full correlation to exist, but I'm sure there are elements I'll miss over. The first reason to avoid full correlation is that someone existing only in the 'normal' world could stop the junky from moving and this would stop the junky in both worlds... thus 'normal' security guards near the location of a Control Machine would be a perfect defence for it, able to stop the junky without the junky being able to see the security guard.

This is a truly intriguing concept. The first thing that came to mind was the junkies and slags in the Fallout game series shouting "More longer friend see that sky?" and "Whoa! Stop! Wait!...Ok, you can go now."

I'll come back with a more complete look at the concept, but what about random elements? The deeper you go in, the more power you are going to have, but the more likely you are going to get damaged (and the more resistance you build up), but also (this could be both positive and negative) more random elements are added when you don't necisarily want them to be.

Kirk

Hey there.

Great concept; I'm a big Burroughs fan (though I gotta say it's been a loooong time since I saw Videodrome...)

Out of the ideas that've been bandied about here, the things striking me are:

• The dichotomy between the realworld and the junkscape, specifically in the difference in control the players have over their characters and the environment.  Developed correctly, this could be a very cool way of capturing that Burroughsesque sense of hopelessness and implicit danger in everything surrounding the junky.
• The idea that violence is actually counter-productive.  This rocks!  What could be more agonizing (especially to someone feeling paranoid) than to be surrounded by danger and not be able to strike out.  There must be some mechanical way to capture the consequences...

I'm wondering if you might somehow be able to utilize Burroughs cut-up method of composing as an element in the game.  I've been reading John Wick's Discordia, which uses it quite effectively as a tool for creating scenarios.

You should also check out Jared Sorenson's game Lacuna, http://memento-mori.com/lacuna/, a junkscape if there ever was one.  I mean, c'mon, spider-headed Russians...  Also, in that game, your character sheet is essentially a vitals-monitoring readout as you travel through the dreamworld, tracking your pulse and heart-rate, etc.  It might give you some ideas for keeping track of the depth of the trip; are there transitional stages when you might have more/less control?

I look forward to reading more about this!

Aaron

But I don't want the junkscape to be 100% independent of the real world. I prefer if the junkies are prone to wandering about and muttering to themselves while in their fix. Making the junkscape fully independent of the 'normal' world would make it seem to be MUCH more of a dream scape and less... real. I don't want the junkies to be easily able to shrug off the machinations of the Control Machines as the stuff of their nightmares.

Tonight's design session:

First, Denise reminded me of something vital throughout the conversation - this game / project is commercial suicide. The target market for a game where you take the most villified drug in the world as the primary protagonistic device - a game about being fucked out of your gourd, as you will - is about 2 dozen people.

Secondly, she had just read AssassinX for the first time. She tore apart the layout, and commented on the typos and spelling errors. She also pointed out that when AssassinX is redone and released, and Junk Dreams is launched, that we'll have Drugs and Violence covered, leaving only Sex for our next game. I thought that drugs was commercial suicide... I can't imagine a game about sex that *I* might write being any more feasable. But it would certainly involve a lot of pretty latex and bondage gear.

We hammered away at our concepts, what we each felt Junk Dreams was about. Denise had a much nicer view of the world than I do, more idealistic. She wrote an excellent manifesto for the junk world as a place that was wonderful and has slowly been tainted by paranoia and fear, but where only those with special acquity can manifest now... these are the pharmonauts that the players portray. It is an excellent meme, the thought that some junkies think that the junk world is something that junkies discovered instead of created, that the junk world can be a beautiful place as long as good people are there. Of course, in my opinion, it is totally wrong. :) But it brought us to talking about Memetic Warfare, and how to apply it in-game, which in turn brought us to talking about the Control Machines themselves.

The 'native fauna' of the junk world is generally the creation of the junky. A mugwump actually doesn't exist when there are no junkies around to interact with it. This serves two purposes - first, it reinforces the concept that the junk world is not a wholly seperate world, but exists purely as an extension of our own. Secondly, it gives the mugwumps a reason to cluster in areas where there are junkies - effectively, they like to stick near people who will interact with them in order to live. This gives us social groupings and areas of interest with populations of native life, and the rest of the place is generally abandonned - this makes social interaction more interesting in a limited population game such as Junk Dreams. This also makes the mugwumps desperate - a race of con artists, drug dealers, information brokers and fast talkers, eager to tell you or sell you exactly what you want... and odds are if you want it badly enough, they will just 'happen' to have it for you thanks to their own mutable nature - and of course they won't give it to you for free, because junkies know that everything has a price...

The exception to this 'co-exist to exist' rule is the Control Machines. The Control Machines have managed to exist independently of the junkies now, although they were born of their paranoia and fear. While junkies went into the junk world afraid of the junk, full of self-loathing and paranoia about the 'man', the man went in also, looking for something to control people, a tool to be used to keep the world in line, predictable and placid. They both found what they were looking for, of course, and these became the Control Machines. The Control Machines want the status quo. They want people to sit still, not revolt, and watch a little more TV, thank you. They don't want drug addicts, they don't want crime, they just want the world to keep on spinning nice and quiet-like. The Control Machines seem to present a unified front, but in fact there are many of them, each with somewhat different goals and opinions, based on their conception. In southeast Asia, the Control Machine first appeared in the Opium Dens. This Control Machine wanted peace, quiet, and changelessness. However, with the Vietnam War, many American GIs discovered heroin and joined into the junk world there. These men were seeking to forget the horrors of war, they were looking to go home, back to America, to be anywhere but here. The Control Machine became fairly psychotic after this, a meld of Asian and American influences - wanting to go home, wanting to stop the commies, but also wanting everything to be quiet and unchanging. It remains a very strange and confused machine to this day. Control Machines in other areas show other influences, but most of the ones are in Europe and America, and are insistent that each one must control the world.

But a new meme is travelling among them. Somewhere, a communist Control Machine has started thinking that they ALL should control the world, and those Control Machines that accept this meme become part of this hive-mind, while the others fight it. So even the Control Machines are fighting one another with memes and more direct methods through junkies, and in the real world.

Junkies also have their own memes. Various junkies have different ideas about what they are experiencing when they get their fix. The most common meme is actually the truth, but there are others - people who believe that they are seeing the aliens who run the world (think "They Live"), others think of the junk fauna as Angels or Demons or both. Some even see the junk world as the next step in human evolution - pharmolution, enhancing the race through pharmeceutical change.

The Control Machines can create puppets from junkies that they overwhelm in the junk world. A junky who is fully immersed in the junk world faces such a fate if they are 'killed' by a Control Machine. Most junkies never get that deep into the junk world, maintaining lower doses for a variety of reasons, often of finances or self-preservation. However, a truly hard-core junky will skirt the edge of overdose with every trip - some do it to get as far away from the world as possible without actually commiting suicide directly, others because they need to be immersed that deeply in order to use their abilities to change the junk world... the most powerful abilities require very deep immersion, and open you up to fates far worse than death.

(In our conversations, banging junk gives the average junky an Immersion Level of 5. Lower forms of drugs produce lower immersion levels, and are often used by tools of the Control Machines that require the ability to function normally in the 'normal' world, such as various real and synthetic opiates. Getting deeper than level 5 requires interesting cocktails and speedballs, or newer and scarier designer drugs. The latest such drug is Burroughs' fabled di-oxy-heroin, which can get to level 5 by smoking or ingesting, and can be banged as deep as level 10.)

At level 6+, a person overcome by the Control Machines becomes a puppet of the Machines. Even more frightening is that someone at level 10 becomes a gateway for the machine into the 'normal' world. Fortunately, the Control Machines agree that they are not ready to impose themsleves physically on the 'normal' world yet...but obviously another Control Machine disagrees, because di-oxy-heroin is still making it out into the population occasionally, and the Control Machines don't understand how to neutralize a threat whithout killing it, sometimes accidentally opening the door that they never wanted to open.

My mental image of the Control Machines at this point is something biomechanical, like those biomech tattoos people were getting in the 90's. Machines covered in pulsing cables and conduits, strangely organic but nearly entirely synthetic.

---

We discussed more (the China White overdoses in the late 90's; politics in heroin production vs usage (something I don't think I want to get into, its bad enough writing a game about heroin, it would be double suicide to get into politics at the same time); more about memetic warfare; working on the concept of handling the correlation between normal and junk worlds; other junky memes; comparisons with the Matrix - how people who are not aware of the junk are 'sleepers' and how you can't wake most of them up (turn them on) because they would run away screaming, or worse, call for the Control Machines, so you have to be careful when introducing new users to junk, and so on...)

But I have to work on getting employment, otherwise I won't be able to afford to ever finish this game.

M wrote:
The target market for a game where you take the most villified drug in the world as the primary protagonistic device - a game about being fucked out of your gourd, as you will - is about 2 dozen people.

As one of them, thanks for keeping up with it anyway. 

The mugwump ecology is great.

(In our conversations, banging junk gives the average junky an Immersion Level of 5. ... At level 6+, a person overcome by the Control Machines becomes a puppet of the Machines.

Loving it all so far.  What if the junky gains 1 Tolerence for each game session (or each trip)?  It would gradually and simply increase how much they had to take, making takeover by the Control Machines more dangerous to older, harder addicts.  There could be a chance to resist gaining Tolerence too.

But I have to work on getting employment, otherwise I won't be able to afford to ever finish this game.

Kesher wrote: Great concept; I'm a big Burroughs fan (though I gotta say it's been a loooong time since I saw Videodrome...)

• The dichotomy between the realworld and the junkscape, specifically in the difference in control the players have over their characters and the environment.  Developed correctly, this could be a very cool way of capturing that Burroughsesque sense of hopelessness and implicit danger in everything surrounding the junky.
• The idea that violence is actually counter-productive.  This rocks!  What could be more agonizing (especially to someone feeling paranoid) than to be surrounded by danger and not be able to strike out.  There must be some mechanical way to capture the consequences...

I'm wondering if you might somehow be able to utilize Burroughs cut-up method of composing as an element in the game.  I've been reading John Wick's Discordia, which uses it quite effectively as a tool for creating scenarios.

are there transitional stages when you might have more/less control?

I'm not if this will hel pyou very much, but I had a similar rough sketch of an idea, that I outlined here. As you say, the cut-ups aren't really your thing, but feel free to steal anything you like from Diceman (real life is eating up far too much of my time to work on anything right now.)

Warren

Thanks, Warren, I'm digging through it now.

M wrote:
Tonight's design session:

First, Denise reminded me of something vital throughout the conversation - this game / project is commercial suicide. The target market for a game where you take the most villified drug in the world as the primary protagonistic device - a game about being fucked out of your gourd, as you will - is about 2 dozen people.

Jared - in my experience, 40 copies in PDF is commercial suicide, but then again, our best-selling PDF product has sold 1,741 copies to date, not counting the print run.

That said, I expect this will be able to sell at least a 100-copy print run in its lifespan, and more importantly, regardless of commercial success or failure, it will be released - commercial success has nothing to do with whether or not it is worth writing. It just means I'll have to be somewhat frugal with art & production expenses.