Topic: A Conspiracy of Clippings (with Apologies to William S. Burroughs)
Started by: earwig
Started on: 12/31/2007
Board: First Thoughts
On 12/31/2007 at 7:15pm, earwig wrote:
A Conspiracy of Clippings (with Apologies to William S. Burroughs)
I was reading something about William S. Burroughs the other day, and it was talking about how he would sometime just cut up stips of paper containing words or phrases, toss them arround, and then pick them up in a random fashion and then type them onto the page as they appeared. That got me thinking...
What about a conspiracy game designed around the same principle. Players would each pick up a newspaper en route to the session. Then everyone would cut up a few random pages until they had a nice big bowl full of words, phrases, and names. To make a character each player pulls a number of these clippings from the bowl and interprets them as to attributes. The actual attribute would vary based on the players interpretation of the word pulled. So if the player pulls "TRAIN" for instance, that could mean strong, fast, consistant, etc. So on the sheet it would be listed something like "TRAIN (Strong)" If the player pulls a word that is truly unable to be interperated (such as "the", "and", etc.) then the player pulls another word, combining the two.
The GM (if there even is one) would then pull several words to put together the conspiracy for the evening. There would be a list such as:
1. Involved People:
2. Target:
3. Obsticles:
etc.
Clippings would be pulled from the bowl and assigned IN ORDER to the list.
Furthermore, the players will have the ability to spend "points" during the mission to pull from the clippings and narrate how this clipping works into play.
Granted this could make for some insane adventures, but it might be kind of fun as a one-shot.
Just kind of looking for general feedback or ideas. I was thinking this game might work GM-less, but I personally have never played a GM-less game, and aren't sure exactly how well they work. I was kind of leaning towards a game with a GM, but still giving quite a bit of narrative control to the players.
On 1/1/2008 at 2:20pm, GregStolze wrote:
Re: A Conspiracy of Clippings (with Apologies to William S. Burroughs)
On 1/2/2008 at 12:00am, earwig wrote:
RE: Re: A Conspiracy of Clippings (with Apologies to William S. Burroughs)
I forgot about the Cut-Ups. If I remember correctly they actually altered reality itself through putting phrases into a machine, correct? Heh. Well, maybe subconciously this was the root of my idea...Oh well. $12.95 will save me a whole lot of time instead of coming up with a system. :)