Complete Verge

From Verge

0 Credits

Verge is Copyright © 2005-2009, Adam Dray

Author:	Adam Dray
Vital Help:	Dave Cleaver, Jason Corley, Sean DeArment, Jon Eisenstein, Fred Hicks, Ben Lehman, Tony Lower-Basch, Joshua A.C. Newman
Influences:	Dogs in the Vineyard, In a Wicked Age, FATE, Sorcerer, Universalis, other games too numerous to mention
Editing:
Layout:
Cover Art:	Jake Richmond (concept by Adam Dray)
Interior Art:	Nathan Bolt, Lee Cerolis, Jake Richmond
Playtesting:	FiranCon 2005: Woody, Sam, Jessica Payne, Carrie Ann, Connie, and (I think) Jon Eisenstein; YukiCon 2005: Andy Kitkowski and friends; VergeMUSH: Lisa Christie, Sam, and Derek; MACE 2006: Andy Kitkowski, Matt Gandy; IKEA Con 2006: Tony Lower-Basch and Sean de Arment; FiranCon 2006: Jon Eisenstein; AdamCon 2006: Dave Cleaver, Brandon Rice, Jon Rubin, Jen Stein, Jon Eisenstein, and Dan Rubin; GenCon 2006: Ross Winn, Matt Gandy, Clyde Rhoer, Timothy Jensen, Piers Brown; JD Corley and friends; Dreamation 2007: Jon Eisenstein, Dave Cleaver, Ben Lehman, and Joshua A.C. Newman; AdamCon 2007: Jon Eisenstein, Jon Rubin, Fred Hicks, Anik Sood, and Janet Gramatges

1 Materials

Verge requires some special materials to play. This chapter explains what you need and how you can acquire them (or reasonable substitutes).

Paper

You'll be drawing a giant web of ideas, the network, on a shared piece of paper. That piece of paper should be as large as possible. Office supply stores sell pads of easel-sized paper. Most large grocery stores and general-purpose retailers sell poster board. You'll want white, or at least some very light color like yellow, so you can read what you write on it.

If large paper is not available to you, tape together four or six or nine regular sheets of blank paper (put the tape on the back so you don't have to look at it and write on it).

Pens

You will need to distinguish who wrote what. It's best if each player has a pen of a different color. Sharpies work great. Avoid similar color pairs (test on a separate piece of paper, if necessary): blue and black, orange and red, green and blue. These and other pairs of colors can look a lot alike on paper. You'll have to experiment to find distinguishable colors for everyone.

If you don't have colored pens or markers, regular pens or pencils will do. You'll have to initial everything you write down, though, and that is a pain in the ass.

Write a quick "key" in one corner of the paper: have everyone write her name in their color of choice, neatly along the outside edge of the paper near their seat.

Dice

Verge uses a lot of six-sided dice. Players can share dice. 20-30 dice should be sufficient for play. They don't have to match or anything like that, but see the note in Markers, below.

You can purchase attractive six-siders in "bricks" of 36 12mm dice for about $7 online and in fine hobby stores. I've seen bricks of 100 plain white, pipped six-siders on eBay for $8 (in 2009). The smaller 12mm dice are better than the larger 16mm dice because you get more of them for the money and they cover up less stuff on the network if you use them as markers.

Tokens

You'll need some kind of tokens. Color doesn't matter. Life is better if they stack. Really, poker chips are best because they stack and are easily countable. "Dollar" stores often sell small boxes of poker chips for... well, a buck. Sometimes they "bleed" their cheap ink on your hands though. Caveat emptor. That's Latin for, "Don't be a chump."

If you don't have poker chips, you can get by with cards, glass beads, or even pennies. Glass beads don't stack well but I guess they're pretty. Playing cards stack well but are hard to count at a glance. Pennies are hard to pick up and move around. See the Markers section, below, for ways to use your tokens as markers.

Markers

Each player needs a dozen or so small markers. Each player's markers should be distinguishable from every other player's markers. Glass beads work well enough.

Really, though, your dice can serve double-duty as markers if every player has a different color set of dice. If you have a different set of color poker chips, then your chips can server as markers.

Play Space

You'll need a suitably large table to fit your big-ass piece of paper.

Snacks

Verge is best played while enjoying the following:

• individually wrapped confectionary snacks (e.g., Twinkies, Ding-Dongs)
• microwaveable meat products (e.g., burritos, frozen pizzas)
• carbonated beverages with enhanced caffeine and sugar content (e.g., Jolt Cola, Red Bull, or the two mixed)
• inexpensive alcoholic beverages (e.g., Budweiser, bottom-shelf vodka)

2 Overview

Verge is a post-cyberpunk role-playing game with a conspiracy-story edge.

Players invent the setting during play by drawing a network of strangely interconnected technologies, philosophies, organizations, and people on a big piece of paper. Then they take the role of a sort of "free agent" character in that setting and struggle for control of the setting elements to accomplish their goals. This process tends to create stories about the smashing together of human frailties with ideology and technology.

This chapter discusses some of the core game elements. Make sure you understand these concepts before playing. Sometimes this chapter refers to rules that are explained in detail in later parts of the book. These rules will make more sense later.

Creating Setting through Play

Verge doesn't come with a setting but trusts that you are an ingenious and creative person who can come up with something more vibrant and exciting for you than anything I could supply. The rules do supply a list of ideas to bootstrap you if you need a little inspiration.

This text walks you through creating your world. The idea is that you only create the stuff you want to focus on. The rest can be added during play or glossed over. The setting creation step takes about an hour if you have four players.

You record the setting as a web of ideas and relationships on a big drawing called the network.

Cyberpunk

Ostensibly, Verge is a cyberpunk game. I treat post-cyberpunk and transhumanism as sub-genres. The term "cyberpunk" means different things to different people. Here's what I think.

Cyberpunk is a kind of science fiction, usually set in the near future. The genre grew out of the Eighties, when corporations and government were taking over the world, but at the same time there was this huge technology boom. Perhaps most importantly, personal computers were showing up in people's houses. So cyberpunk literature was dark -- in fact it was noir -- and its pessimism stared into the future and saw all kinds of huge organizations taking over the world, fracturing the vast government control we grew up in, and suppressing human rights. I suspect this paranoia was inherited from the influence of Philip K. Dick, largely considered to be the father of cyberpunk, though he died in 1982 and most of his writing didn't really become famous until they started turning his stories into movies.

Of course, cyberpunk authors also saw people fighting back. These rebels weren't well organized. In fact, they didn't like working with other people at all. These were free agents who were experts in narrow fields, often technological fields. These were independent-thinking anti-heroes like Case and Molly in Neuromancer and Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. in Snowcrash. These people fought The Man for their own selfish reasons but often they seemed to fight because no one else could.

Common Cyberpunk Themes

The genre seems to have collected a number of ideas, or tropes.

Some kind of virtual reality is one of the most common. Whether the setting's "otherworld" is a realistic place that you can step into (even masquerading as your real life, as in The Matrix) or just a huge construct of line graphics or data, cyberpunk stories usually have some kind of "world of information" that characters explore or travel to learn and hide.

Really, the idea of virtual reality grows out of the genre's deeper treatment of reality-as-illusion, in general. Look at movies like Bladerunner and The Matrix and you'll see themes about the sketchy and untrustworthy nature of reality. Pretty much any movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick story will play with this theme: Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Imposter, Next, A Scanner Darkly.

Hidden in a lot of cyberpunk stories is the idea of divine ascension, that man can rise to the level of godhood through technology. This theme borrows from transhumanist goals, which see mankind's potential as limitless. Within this theme are the subthemes of cybernetics (technological body modification), human-computer interfaces (often direct-to-brain), advanced mind- and body-enhancing pharmaceuticals, and vastly increased lifespans (near immortality).

On the flip side, cyberpunk also envisions computers becoming gods. Real artificial intelligence (AI) technology may be a long way off, but it appears frequently in the genre. These software beings often have goals that are alien and hard for people to understand. Sometimes, they just want to eradicate the world of human life (see Terminator). Some AIs are friendly and helpful, though.

One last trope worth exploring is corporate control. Cyberpunk seems to think that national governments are losing power to the corporations. These mega-companies span the globe, perhaps even star systems. They don't really answer to any government. If they do, the government is just an inconvenient obstacle. They have their own security, their own sovereign lands, and citizens. They often have "black ops" who do dirty work for them. They have become governments in their own right.

When you play Verge, keep these ideas in mind. Don't feel the need to incorporate all of them. Hell, if you have your own ideas, you're not required to use any of these.

The Network

The network is a drawing of the setting you make during play. It represents everything you think is important about the setting you're creating. The network is a web of things in the fictional world and the relationships that connect them.

Look, it's easier to show you than describe it in words. To the right is a sample network that a bunch of friends and I created at GenCon 2006.

A network consists of nodes (things) and edges (relationships). The edges are the lines between the nodes.

The nodes are the things (ideas, organizations, people, and items) in the setting, like Commercialism, Plasma Physics, Megasoft, or Edwin. The edges are the lines that connect the nodes. These are relationships between nodes, like the one labeled "Runs" on the arrow pointing from Edwin to Megasoft. Edges are always arrows so you know which way to read the relationship. Edwin runs Megasoft, not the other way around.

Nodes

Nodes are nouns. They can be qualified by adjectives and adjective phrases.

Nodes are the main components of the setting. As the network develops, you will get a picture of the world you are going to play in. It might have cyborgs, or artificial intelligence, or mind-raping viruses. Buddhism and Christianity could both be major components of the game world. The players can add concepts and ideas like "Hatred" to the map but they should also add specifically named people and organizations, too: "Megasoft," "The Demons, a street gang," "Knight Carson, hacker extraordinaire," "120 Park Street, NYC."

Nodes must be unique. You can't add a node that's already on there in any similar form. It's bad cricket to add "Cyborgs" when "Cyborgs???" is already on the network. Also, you aren't fooling anyone by adding "Humanlike Robots" when "Cyborgs???" is already there.

Don't build a relationship into a single node. For example, don't write "Bob, husband of Janet." Instead, create a "Bob" node and a "Janet" node and connect them with an edge like "is married to" or "loves."

The nodes should be evocative and sometimes mysterious. You don't have to know exactly how it's going to be used in play.

Example Nodes:

• people: William Michael All (Megasoft VP Finance), Knight Carson (hacker extraordinaire), T55 the AI
• organizations: Megasoft, FBI, U.S. Government, Meridian Police Department, The Nanite Freemasons
• places: Meridian City, 1400 Elm Street, Cyberspace, Low Orbit Station, Washington DC, Bill's house
• ideologies: Christianity, Ludology, Hatred of Technology, Democracy, Privacy, Torture
• technologies: Brainframe, Nanite Construction, Holographic Reality, Mind Control Lasers
• things: Kunda 4500 Motorcycle, GZK v19 Advanced Processor Cyberdeck, Loaded Dice, Mobile Phone

Edges

Edges are verbs or verb phrases. Verbs are action words like "loves" and "taunts." Verb phrases are a string of words that do the work of a verb, like "vehemently opposes" or "is married to."

Edges connect nodes together and give the network tension. As you develop the network, it starts to tell a story. Create edge relationships that create tension and conflict and tell a story. Sure, you could connect "The Demons, a street gang" to "Megasoft" with an edge like "hates." However, you'll have more fun with an edge like "employs" and the explanation that Megasoft hired the gang for their tv commercials or something equally whacky.

The direction of the arrow that you draw for an edge is a device to help people understand which way the relationship points. For example, if "Knight Carson" is connected to "Aliana Light" via a "loves" relationship, the arrow points out who loves whom. The direction of the arrow has some power, in game terms, though. An outgoing relationship points away from a node. These are closely tied to the node, since they "belong to" it.

When writing the verb for an edge, you should make sure that it "reads" properly. That is, you should be able to create a sentence starting with the arrowless node as the subject, the edge as the verb, and the other node as the object. For example, "Knight Carson"(arrowless node) "loves"(edge) "Aliana Light"(arrowed node). See how you could replace the edge with "married" or "owns" or "does not speak with"? An edge like "friend of" doesn't work because "Knight Carson friend of Aliana Light" is lousy grammar. Sure, you can make the edge "is the friend of," but that's pretty strained. A stronger, simpler verb is "adores" or perhaps "protects." It might help you sometimes to ask how the verb applies. How is Knight the friend of Aliana? Maybe he saved her from a gang: "saved." Maybe they used to date: "dated."

Always create one-sided relationships. That is, you can't write an edge with an arrow that points both directions and write something like "loves" on it, to suggest that they love each other. One-sided relationships create tension. Two-sided relationships are boring. For example, if Knight and Aliana both love each other, that's less interesting than if Knight loves Aliana and she doesn't care about him (or hates him!). Create a one-sided relationship and let other players develop the reverse relationship (or you can do it later), or don't create the reverse relationship at all. Even if Knight and Aliana love each other, create two separate edges that can be separately manipulated.

You may not use forms of the verb "to control" for an edge. Control is a special concept within the game with a specific meaning, and muddling up play with two kinds of control just confuses other players.

Surges and Drains

Surges and drains are little punctuation marks after the names of nodes and edges. They tell you how powerful or valuable that thing is in the story.

The !'s are called surges. They give strength to a node or edge. Think of a ! as a +1.

The ?'s are called drains. They sap strength from a node or edge. Think of a ? as a -1.

Say you have a node named "Mind Transfer." If you want it to be a powerful influence in the setting, you'll add surges to it. If you want to weaken it in the setting, you will add drains to it. You might end up with a string of !s and ?s after the name, like this: Mind Transfer!!?!!! That's five surges and one drain. It's pretty powerful in the setting. You and your friends probably think it's pretty important to the story. In any case, it will be an important source of dice in the game, so it's likely to come up a lot in play.

Power and Value

Each node and edge has a score called power. Calculate power by adding the surges and subtracting the drains. "Religion!!!" has power +3 (3 surges minus 0 drains) but "Religion!!!??" would have power +1 (3 surges minus 2 drains). Power represents a setting element's ability to change or control the rest of the setting. The power of a node (and sometimes an edge) will earn you dice to help you win conflicts.

There's only one other stat in the game, and that's value. Value is the number of surges and drains combined without regard to their sign (+1 or -1). So "Religion!!!" has value 3 and "Religion!!!??!??" has value 8. Value represents how important a setting element is to the players and quantifies its staying power.

As a node's or edge's power goes up, it becomes harder to strengthen. As a node or edge's value goes up, it becomes harder to weaken.

Consider "Religion!!!??!??" (power 0, value 8). While it has been weakened in power to an ineffective state, it is obviously highly contested among the players. That increased attention on the Religion node belies how valuable the node is to the players.

Characters

You'll have a character that (most of the time) you alone control. You'll choose one of the characters that you or someone else created on the network and make it yours by circling it with a colored pen. (Every player needs a pen of a different color, so they can tell whose writing is whose.) That circle means that you control what happens inside (mostly) and reminds you that you can't control what happens outside (mostly).

You always get to make decisions for your character. People can do awful things to your character outside the circle -- kill your friends and allies, get you fired, destroy your ideology, and so on -- but they can't tell you how to think. They can make certain behaviors difficult or impossible, but they can't affect your character's will.

There is no separate character sheet. You don't need one. The character is just a node on the network. You'll definitely be making up all kinds of details about that character, but you won't write them down anywhere unless they're relationships to other nodes on the network.

Game Master

You'll choose one of the players to be the game master. She's usually the player who knows the rules the best.

The game master doesn't get to circle a character as "hers." Instead, she plays all the uncircled characters and represents the interests of the organizations and adversity in the setting. She'll roll dice against the players when the player's characters struggle in conflicts against the unclaimed parts of the setting (that is, any time that there isn't a player to represent a node's interests).

The game master also serves as a sort of cinematic director. She keeps the game's pace interesting. She modifies the network when things get crazy so that the setting makes better sense. She prods the story with interesting conflict when the players don't seem to have a direction of their own.

Being the game master is a lot like being a regular player, but she doesn't get to circle a character and so she doesn't take a personal interest in any specific outcome. Instead, the game master focuses on making the game more interesting for everyone by providing adversity and conflict with an author's or director's eye.

Ownership and Control

A lot of decisions in play will focus on who owns or controls a node.

The owner of a node or edge gets to make decisions about what that network element means and feels and thinks and does. At the start of the game, each player owns her own character and the game master owns everything else on the network. Ownership cannot be traded or given away.

Another important concept is control. The controller of a node or edge can change its power or value, link to it, or destroy it, provided she has enough tokens to pay for the action. If you do not control a node or edge, you cannot do anything to it, no matter how many tokens you have.

Every node and edge has a controller. Each player owns her own character node. The game master controls every other node and edge on the network. Other players can take temporary control over network elements.

Gaining Control

There are three different ways to gain control of a node or edge. See the Run chapter for more detailed rules. If you own a node, you have control until someone else takes control from you, or you give away control. You can borrow control from a friendly player, or you can steal control from an unwilling player. Both borrowing and stealing are temporary.

Ownership

If you own a node, you control it unless someone else takes control of it (see below).

Borrowing Control

You can "lend" control to another player. This is very limited, temporary control, and it can be revoked at any time. If you don't like how the other player is using your node or edge, you can revoke control retroactively. That is, another player can't borrow control from you with a promise of being nice, then do something nasty to that network element.

Players can borrow control to accomplish certain tasks. For example, I might lend you temporary control over my character node so you can add a relationship to it. If you suddenly decide to weaken my character node, I just retroactively revoke control before your weaken action can take place. Then I punch you in the mouth for being a dick.

Stealing Temporary Control

There is a sort of "hostile takeover" mechanism in the game, if you want to do something to a node or edge, and the controller will not allow that action. You must use the conflict resolution system (and dice) to overcome that network element, and then you earn control of the node until your scene ends. Because you have control, this gives you negotiating power to make the owner of the node do things.

For example, if you want to force the janitor at Megacorp to let you into the brainframe vault, you need the owner of the janitor node to role-play doing that. Even controlling the node won't let you make that decision for the janitor. However, controlling the janitor node will let you do all kinds of mean things to the node, like weakening it, ruining the janitor's relationships (like getting him fired, making his daughter hate him), and even killing him. You get to negotiate with the owner of the janitor (let's say it's the game master), and if you control the janitor node, you have a list of mean things you can do to it if the game master doesn't have the janitor do what you want. These agreements are binding.

Game Play

At the highest level, the game has four main phases: compile, load, link, and run. These are described briefly below and are explained in great detail in their own chapters.

The compile phase is about preparation. You call your friends together, ready a place to play, get a big piece of paper and some colored markers, set out a bunch of dice, heat up some burritos, and then discuss the parameters of the game you want to play. Hopefully, you can get through the compile phase in five or ten minutes.

The load phase is about building the setting. You follow a procedure designed to step you through the creation of a network. Players take turns adding setting elements (nodes) and relationships (edges) and their votes for things (with surges). You earn tokens for creating stuff that other people think is cool. It takes four players about an hour to build a network.

The link phase is about picking a character and customizing it a bit. You circle the character you want then add some new edges to make the character more interesting. Four players can choose their characters in about five or ten minutes.

The run phase is about role-playing in the setting you made. You interact with the other players, describing what your character is doing and explaining how you want to change the fictional world. When you describe something that requires a change to the network to make sense, you spend tokens to pay for those changes. Some important rules about control limit what you can change. Whenever you try to control a node or make a change that another player contests, you activate the conflict rules. Those rules use dice to determine who wins.

The game is replayable. You can create a setting and run it over and over if you want. The stories just keep piling up. You can keep your network but repeat the link and run phases, choosing new characters and telling new stories from their perspectives. You can create a new setting every time, if you want, repeating the last three phases or even all four phases.

3 Compile

In the compile phase, you gather everyone and everything you need to play, then discuss your goals so that you're all on the same page. When everyone understands and agrees on the goals for play, you avoid misunderstandings and build up a kind of role-playing synergy that makes your game positively rock.

Gather Friends

Find three or four friends. It's best if you really know and like these people — that is, you hang out with them outside gaming, too. You trust them and care about them. That makes for the best gaming.

Verge rocks when you have a good group of people riffing ideas off one another. There's a "sweet spot" when you have enough people to create an interesting, but not overcomplicated, network.

You can have an all right game with just two other people but it'll feel a bit empty. One of you will be the game master, and that leaves two regular players. Good stories have at least three strong characters. A game with just one player and one game master won't work.

More than five people (one game master plus four players) will slow down play. The network will be overcrowded and too complicated for most players to remember what is going on. That means players will spend more time staring at the network to figure it out and less time actually role-playing. A lot of the game's fun comes from the interaction among characters, too. If you have too many players, each player will be able to interact with only a subset of the other players, and that's less fun. Last, as you add players, you increase your wait between scenes for your character.

Set Up the Play Space

The Materials chapter talks about the materials you'll need to play. Gather those.

You'll want a table large enough for the paper you're drawing on, but not so large that you have to reach too far to write on it.

When I play, I like the table free of unnecessary crap. But, you know, reality dictates that people will want a place for their beer and their burritos.

Oh yeah, food. The right food to eat while playing Verge is the worst kind of synthetic, processed shit you can find: high-caffeine cola, marshmallow pies, and individually-packaged microwaveable burritos. Skip the health food. If you can buy it in a vending machine, it'll do fine. Indulge in a bite of heaven. Skip the "top shelf" alcohol and opt for the cheap stuff. A case of cheap, American beer or a bottle of Mad Dog. Being a little drunk probably won't hurt your game. Being a lot drunk will, but you won't care.

Pick a Genre

Talk about the kind of game you want to play. You need to pick a genre (high level setting). Just a "high concept." It might be enough to agree on "near future cyberpunk" or "gritty Mars vice squad," or you might prefer to nail down some more details, like "transhumanism to the Nth degree in 2800 AD when mankind has built a Dyson sphere and every person is connected to a symbiotic AI." Less is more.

If you can't agree on the genre, nail down the parts you can agree on and leave the rest for the Load step. And even if you nail down some things, you can "un-nail" them later using the network rules.

If there's a really big rift in the group about the genre, offer a compromise. You can dare another player to be the game master for his genre idea, or you can bribe the other player with an offer to be game master if he accepts your genre ideas.

Discuss Tone

Determine the tone you want the game to have. Is it serious or funny? Scary or light? Action-packed or focused on romance or politics? Again, less is more and don't argue about it. If you can't decide, leave it for later. Really, spend no more than like two minutes on these things. Get to the fun part quickly. Arguing with your friends isn't fun, unless you're a lawyer, and it's still not fun for your friends.

Discuss Themes

Are there any themes you want to explore? If a theme surfaces naturally, great! Don't force it.

Perhaps you want the game to be about something, like how technology is replacing religion, or how big corporations are necessarily corrupt, or about privacy rights in a digital age. If you don't have anything like this in mind, don't sweat it, but when a group of players all hammer on a theme, a story will really come together.

Determine Limits

Discuss any kind of limits and special needs for the players. Many people are sensitive about role-playing certain kinds of sexuality or violence. Talk about what is too far? What lines should you never cross? When should you "draw the veil" or "fade to black" and not role-play the details? If someone doesn't like the way play is going, how should they communicate that to the other players in the least embarrassing way? Get this stuff out of the way now, before you stumble into someone's pain.

The game is meant to be fun, not psychotherapy.

Even once you've discussed all this, expect more to come up in play. How were you to know that the game would start exploring those very scary clowns? Just speak up if something makes you uncomfortable. These are your friends you're playing with, right?

4 Load

In the load phase, you build a world or at least the parts of it that will be central to the story you're going to tell. You and the other players will take turns adding bits to the world and casting votes for what you think is cool and vetoing what you think is bogus. As you load up the network, you may have some story ideas in mind, but don't worry about that. The story will flow naturally out of the completed network.

Four players can load up a network in about an hour's time. This is tremendous fun. World building comes naturally to people, especially role-players.

Your world will take shape on the network as you and your friends add things to it and connect them with relationships. These rules present a formal procedure that guarantees your best chances at creating something both fun and cyberpunk.

How to Use These Rules

Before you start, make sure you're very familiar with the concepts laid out in the Overview chapter. You'll need to have a firm grasp on what nodes and edges are and understand the right way to word them.

It's best to take a holistic approach to network creation. That is, look at the big picture of what the network is becoming and don't get too focused on specific elements. As you build the network, make sure you end up with an amazing setting full of tension and potential for conflict. Talk things over with your friends.

Before you write something down, explain what you're thinking so everyone else gets it. If you can't figure out the right way to word something, explain your thought process and get some help. Make sure each thing you write down is awesome. Really, talk shit out before you touch the damned permanent marker.

It's tempting to just grab your pen and write. Do that if discussion is getting annoying. But don't write until you talk about your idea, because it might suck. And then people aren't gonna vote it up, you aren't gonna earn tokens, and you will start the game at a disadvantage. Worse, your sucky idea might make the whole game suck a little, and then you'll have eaten those burritos for nothing.

Discussing your idea before you record it gives other players a chance to make it more awesome. It lets you refine the phrasing so that everyone understands it. It prevents you from creating something that you thought made sense, but actually doesn't. It helps ensure that the world you're creating is dynamic and rife with possibility, and not static and motionless as a wino on a park bench.

GM's Role

The game master has a different role than the other players. Yes, she will help create the setting like everyone else, but she also facilitates and guides play. The game master should keep the other players moving but at the same time, stop them from moving too quickly. If players are writing without talking, slow them down and get them to discuss their ideas. Make sure everyone understands what things mean. Ensure players write clearly. If people get stuck, help them out.

During the load phase, the game master creates nodes and edges, adds surges, and has a veto just like other players. However, while the players tend to to go a little gonzo-crazy while they create the setting, the game master's role is to rein it back by making sure things stick together.

Edges are the game master's main tool for making the setting coherent. Use edges to connect nodes that need conflict. If the network seems a little too static, shake it up with a surprising edge connector. Don't ruin the setting but make it a better setting for play.

The nodes the game master creates often make existing nodes more usable. Add people to flesh out organizations, especially.

The game master places surges (!s) the way other players do, too. Use these to tell everyone what you think is awesome, the same way they're doing.

Finally, the game master can help vote down an idea, as any other player can.

Bad Ideas

While there's a definite "brainstorming" flavor to the load phase, the game doesn't inherit the typical "there is no such thing as a bad idea" philosophy common to brainstorming.

There are bad ideas, at least as far as you're concerned, and you should use your voice and your strikes to let people know when something doesn't seem fun to you. As you discuss ideas with your friends, be ready to express when you think something wouldn't be fun to play, or when you think something else might be a lot better. In the end, though, it's up to each player to write down what they think is fun for them.

How do you recognize a bad idea? That can be hard. If in the compile phase, you said your game would be serious in tone, then any ideas that seem silly or comical probably don't belong on the network. Really, any idea that violates any of your group's rules for setting, tone, or limits should be vetoed unless the creator can justify an exception.

Every player can voice hard opposition to an idea before or after it gets written down on the network. This is a veto. If any idea or node or edge gets a veto from two different players, it is stricken from the game. If it's already written on the network, draw an X through it. If it's a node and has edges, X out the node and its edges. It doesn't exist, so things can't have relationships to it.

Remember what I said about talking out ideas before writing? Right.

Steps, in General

Complete each step below and the task within it in the order listed. Read all the steps to the players first, though, so they can plan what they want to do.

The steps are gonna guide you through creation of some named people, some ideologies and technologies, some organizations, and lots more people. In this Load phase, these characters are communal property. In the Link phase afterward, you'll get to make one of those people your character.

All of the steps have a common tempo, a series of tasks that you'll repeat with slight variations. In general, each step asks each player to:

• create a new node on the network (with a ! after it)
• connect it to another node
• create another connection between any two nodes
• place three surges on nodes and edges

Step 1 is pretty light. You'll just create nodes (names of people, with a ! after each of them). You don't connect those nodes or place additional surges. Starting in step 2, though, you'll perform all four of these tasks every time.

Adding New Nodes

Whenever you add a node to the network, put a surge (!) after its name so that it starts with 1 power and 1 value.

Except in step 1, when you create a new node, you must also connect it to another node in the network with an edge (relationship).

When you create nodes, get specific! Instead of writing down "Los Angeles," write "LAPD" or "L.A. City Hall." The more specific you are, the better the other players will understand what you're doing, and the more likely they will add surges to your creation (and that earns you tokens when you Cash Out).

Adding Edges

Whenever you add an edge to the network, put a surge (!) after its label so that it starts with 1 power and 1 value.

Edges always connect two nodes. There's no such thing as an edge that has one or two unconnected ends. Edges always have an arrow, but never two arrows.

Surges

In every step after step 1, players place three surges (!s) on nodes and edges of their choosing. This is a way of distributing power to the elements of the setting you want to make central to your story.

A surge is also a vote of confidence. It tells your friends that you think this idea is cool. It flags the node so that when the other players are what to create next and how to connect things, they are more likely to connect to the thing that everyone thinks is cool (the thing with a lot of !s).

In the load phase, once you've created a node or edge (always starting with a single surge), you cannot put additional surges on anything you've created. You need to convince other people to do that, and you'll be rewarded with tokens for all of the surges your creations earn.

Turn Order

In step 1, decide who goes first. If someone has a cool idea, let them go. If multiple people want to go first, roll a die (highest wins, reroll ties) to see who goes.

Play proceeds clockwise.

In each subsequent step, the last player to go in the last step gets to go first this time.

Example: Adam, Bobbi, Carla, and Dave are seated in that order clockwise around the table. Adam and Carla present some cool ideas. They roll d6 and Adam's 5 beats Carla's 2. Adam goes first in step 1. Then Bobbie, then Carla, then Dave. In step 2, since Dave just went last, he gets to go first. Then Adam, then Bobbie, then Carla. In step 3, Carla goes first. In step 4, Bobbie goes first.

Step 1: People

In step 1, you write down names of people. Who are these people? No one knows -- yet. You'll figure that out later. This just gets some nonplayer characters on the board pronto so you can start connecting them to the cool stuff later.

This is easy if you can make up names on the fly. It's hard if you can't. Get one of those books of names, or a phone book. This should be easy.

All you're doing is writing down names. No roles or titles. Write "Bali Watanabe," not "Bali Watanabe, CEO of Megasoft." Since a "person" in your game might be a robot, AI, or space alien, these names might be pretty strange, and that's okay.

Oh, and try not to write down a half dozen old-white-guy names, okay? Cyberpunk characters in books and movies are male and female and other-gendered; Japanese, Indonesian, Russian, and ancient-Sumerian; adolescent, elderly, and unborn. Before you write down another English dude's name, like William or Bob, stop and think.

In later steps, you'll start connecting these people to ideas and each other. That's when they'll start to take form and be more than a name. You can get creative with the definition of a person, too. Any intelligent, sentient agent counts. That means you can have AI programs, robots and androids, sentient dolphins, aliens, or divinities if you want. I've personally played in games where "God" or "Reincarnated Elvis" got written down as people. Keep these things in mind when you make up names.

After Load, in the Link phase, you'll bid to make one of the characters on the network your own. For now, no one owns them.

In regular turn order, each player does the following:

• Create a node representing a person with a name, and don't worry at all about who they are (no titles or roles).

That's it. It doesn't really matter where on the network you write this, though there are some social strategies about node placement (see Network Layout, later).

Whenever you add a new node (including these names), put a ! after it. This starts it with 1 point of power and value.

Step 2: -ologies

In step 2, you each write down a concept that is either technological or ideological.

The technologies put the "cyber" into your cyberpunk. These should be world-sized ideas: grand concepts whose effects reverberate through society. You'll probably have to explain to the group what your shorthand words mean. You might write down "Brainframes" and explain that they're large networks of disembodied minds and repurposed for computation. You might be tempted to say that they're extracted from the skulls of prisoners, and that they run the virtual reality "matrix," and that the humans who use the matrix sometimes experience awful dreams from the prisoners residual minds... but don't. It's okay to talk about those things, but focus each node pretty tightly. Whenever you start talking about how your node relates to other things in the world, that's when you stop and get other people to create those other things as nodes of their own. If they think it's as cool as you think it is, they'll add them. Or you can add them on your next turn.

Consider the precognition in Minority Report, the mental viruses in Snowcrash, and the independent artificial intelligence in Neuromancer. Each of those things served as a vehicle for those stories. Those stories also contained smaller technologies like electric cars, virtual reality, and neurotoxins, but the stories could have substituted other things for them without much loss. You want the former kind of technologies, not the latter.

Ideologies are belief systems shared by lots of people. These can create movements, inspire cults, and reign in governments. Cyberpunk stories are riddled with ideological messages about religion or government or philosophy. That's because good writing is about people and their beliefs. Good games are about these things, too. You'll want to include things that you and the other players think are important and cool.

The movie The Matrix has all kinds of stuff about Gnosticism, quantum mechanics, and Buddhism bolted into it. David Brin's Earth has a strong current of naturalism and conservation. Choose things that are interesting or important to you. You don't have to agree with these ideas, but you should think they'll be interesting to explore in your game.

You'll get to create either a technology or an ideology. If the two players before you created a technology, you must create an ideology, and vice versa. You don't want all of one kind on the network.

In normal turn order, each player during his turn should do all of the following (in any order, more or less):

• Create a node that represents an ideology or technology (with a ! after it).
• Connect that node to another node via a new edge. Label the edge (with a ! after it).
• Create another edge connecting any two nodes and label it (with a ! after it).
• Place three surges on nodes and edges.

Remember, talk things out before you write them down. Figure out how to word the node properly before writing, too. It's fine to connect characters to one another at this stage, and this will start defining them.

Once every player has had a turn at -ologies, your network should be populated with some core ideas and the start of some strange characters.

Step 3: Organizations

In step 3, you establish the large organizational structures of the setting. One of the perennial elements of cyberpunk literature is its simultaneous glorification and demonization of large corporations, cults, organized religion, and government agencies.

Any group of people counts as an organization, even if they're not centrally organized. A city or place can be a code word for an organization, too. For example, "Los Angeles" really means "all the people in L.A." Be clear what you mean when you add nodes like that. Don't use places as places, though. Location is "color" that you can add freely during the game.

Consider the movie Blade Runner. It creates a handful of cool organizations: Replicants (androids), Blade Runners (special ops police, basically), and Tyrell Corporation (the obligatory evil corp). The Running Man has the Hunters (elite killers), The Network (tv company), the Government, and the Police.

In normal turn order, each player does four things:

• Create a node that names an organization or group of people (with a ! after it).
• Connect that node to another node via a new edge. Label the edge (with a ! after it).
• Create another edge connecting any two nodes and label it (with a ! after it).
• Place three surges on nodes and edges.

Step 4: More People

In step 1, you created a bunch of named characters. In steps 2 and 3, they started getting connected to the network. Those characters probably also earned some surges and since they're well-connected, they will have lots of plot power (even if they're not seemingly powerful people in the setting). They'll generate more dice that will help win conflicts.

In step 4, you create some more characters.

Instead of writing down just a name, also decide who these people are and what they do. These characters will be weaker and less connected than the step-1 flock, but they also have the potential to cause trouble and shake up the establishment. Don't think that these are bit parts. These are likely going to provide useful connections between strange nodes on the map, and they'll be more easily controlled by the players' characters.

Like the people in Step 1, these people should have specific names. Avoid writing down nodes that are just a title like "The President." Give the President a name. Here, though, it's okay to add the title after the name (e.g., "Cleopatra Cambridge, the President").

These should be people with strong ties to the other elements of the setting. Their relationships (edges) should be strong in the context of the setting. Don't create some software developer who barely matters in the world. Instead, make the programmer the girl who invented NetWorld, or a disgruntled employee of Megasoft bent on the company's destruction.

These people can be good guys, bad guys, or something in between. They can even have that special quality that screams "protagonist!" to the budding author in you. In general, these people should be "grabby" enough to make you (the player) like them, hate them, fear them, or otherwise care what they do.

Neuromancer had some memorable characters. Case (the protagonist) and Molly (his mercenary femme fatale) are the first that come to mind. Armitage (a sort of paramilitary / broker-middleman who drives the story) makes a great mover and shaker in the setting. The book has two or more artificial intelligences (AIs), too. The Dixie Flatline is a computer program that mimics the personality of Case's dead mentor. And, of course, don't forget Wintermute, the AI scheming for freedom from the Turing Law Code.

Also note that the name "Case" is a pun on the CASE statement in some programming languages. The street name of the main character in Snowcrash is "Hiro Protagonist."

Relationships between people should be strong, emotional links. If Bartleby Deathover is the CEO of Megasoft and Mandinka Ulsted is his secretary, link both Mandinka and Bartleby to the Megasoft organization node (with an edge named "works for" or "employs") and consider a juicier relationship between the two people. What's juicier? How about "hates" or "sleeps with" or "blackmails."

In normal turn order, each player does four things:

• Create a node that names an intelligent individual (with a ! after it).
• Connect that node to another node via a new edge. Label the edge (with a ! after it).
• Create another edge connecting any two nodes and label it (with a ! after it).
• Place three surges on nodes and edges.

Then, repeat the People step. Each player should create two characters, perhaps more. Consider a third loop around the table if there's room on the paper for more people and the network isn't getting too busy (it probably is). People are what bring the world to life.

Step 5: Continuity Check

In step 5, you tie things up. You can add any kind of node but your aim should be to make the network make more sense. Certainly as you wrote things down in the first four steps, you had all these ideas about how they related, but maybe you didn't get to see that stuff through to fruition. Now is your chance to cement things.

Now is not the time to introduce some crazy, brand new idea. If you could, it wouldn't be tied very well into the setting and it likely would get short thrift during the game. You would have squandered your opportunity to fine-tune your setting before play. So you aren't allowed to do that.

In normal turn order, each player does four things:

• Create a node of any kind (with a ! after it). This node should enhance or clarify the network. No new ideas.
• Connect that node to another node via a new edge. Label the edge (with a ! after it).
• Create another edge connecting any two nodes and label it (with a ! after it).
• Place three surges on nodes and edges.

Load Check

At the end of the load phase, you should all agree that the setting rocks, that the ideas kick ass, and you should all be excited to see what happens next.

You should be pretty convinced that if you set the world in motion, stuff would happen. The organizations would tear each other apart. The people would get into trouble. The ideologies would forever change the way society thinks. If you don't feel that way, consider scrapping what you did and making a new network.

It's best to have a strong foundation for your play and not start out all wobbly. Load doesn't take that long so it should be pretty easy to make something better. If you start over, talk about the things that made you want to start over so you don't repeat them. Then grab a new sheet of paper and reload!

Cash Out

Once you and your friends have given your blessing to the network and setting you've created, you all get tokens for all the cool stuff you created.

Each player gains 1 token for each point of power among all the nodes and edges that she created. How? Look around the network at all the things (nodes and edges) you personally wrote on the network (in your pen's color, right?). For each ! after those nodes, gain a token.

Yes, the game master gets tokens, too!

5 Link

In the link phase, you bid tokens to select a character as your own. Then the other players make your character's life more interesting.

The linking step is repeatable. Between stories, you can change characters by bidding tokens to control a new, uncontrolled character. If you succeed, you give up control of your current character and take over the new one. If a character dies or becomes unplayable, or if you just want a new character, relink and start fresh in the same setting. Relinking is described in the Tuning chapter.

You can change characters during play (and not wait for the story to end) with the group's permission. Perhaps during play, someone creates a new character that you like better than your current one. Switch!

Link is composed of two tasks:

• Auction characters
• Complicate characters

These tasks are explained below. You must complete the tasks in the order given, but you need to be thinking about all of the tasks the whole time. In fact, for best play, be thinking about these things early on when you're building your network in the Link phase.

Auction Characters

You earned tokens in the Load phase. Now you get to spend them on a character auction. Obviously, the player who best gauged what was fun or enthralling to the other players will have the most tokens. This gives that player the most power to "buy" a character.

Not every character is created equal. The most popular characters will have a very high power (surges minus drains). These characters cost more.

Here's how the auction works:

1. Players who already have a character are excluded from this process. They sit out.
2. The player with the most chips chooses a character and bids a number of tokens towards the character.
3. The reserve, or minimum bid, is the power of that character. You cannot bid lower than this amount.
4. Going clockwise around the table, the next player may bid an amount of chips greater than the highest bid, or pass.
5. Bidding ends when everyone has passed.
6. The player with the highest bid pays his chips back to the bank and circles the character, who is her character now.
7. All the other players keep their chips, but lose the auction.

Draw a (small!) circle around your character so people know it's yours. The circle just means "this character is taken" and the pen color tells everyone who owns it.

Repeat the process until everyone has one character. This implies that the last person to take a character gets it for the cost of the character's power, since no one can raise the bid. If a player cannot afford any character on the network, she pays all her tokens and takes the character with the lowest power. If more than one player cannot afford any character on the network, the player with the most tokens select a character first, then the player with the next highest number of tokens, and so on.

Note that players will tend to select the most powerful characters, who are also the characters that the players liked the most. This is a design feature, not a flaw.

Leftover tokens will be useful during play. Save some for later!

Complicate Characters

Now everyone has a character to call her own. Great! Now we make sure they are fit for play.

First, each player adds a new node near their character node and connects them with a new relationship. The new node should be a new character or something tangible, not an ideology or technology or anything surprising and potentially setting-changing. Use this to add a little color to your character. The new node cannot be a quality or a skill or something like that (for example, these are unacceptable nodes: Great Strength, Botany, I am cool, Angry).

Personalize! This is a good place to add your hacker's cyberdeck, her young daughter, or a friend. Most likely these things will end up as useful tools during conflicts, or they'll end up as targets for attacks on you. Either way, they'll make the game more fun! Make sure you tell everyone what you're writing down, as usual.

Then, taking turns, every player complicates the character for the player on her right. If Bea sits between Adam and Candace, then Bea gets to complicate Adam's character. When everyone has done that, then every player complicates the character for the player on her left.

To complicate a character, give the character a new relationship. Make it something that causes trouble. The best complications connect characters to other characters (run by players or the game master). Make them juicy! The arrow should point toward the character node. If you want to create a node that points in the other direction, you need the player's permission. The spirit of this rule is to prevent players from complicating characters by changing who they are or attributing them emotions.

Complications should make the player like the character more, not less. That doesn't mean you can't be cruel to the character. Just don't be cruel to the player. Put the character in a bad situation but don't try to change the character concept to mess with your friend's head.

6 Run

In the Run phase, you get to pull the trigger and see the bullet of your character blast into the network, wreaking havoc with the world. You've built the world, populated it with fascinating people and ideas, and created characters you all care about. Now you get to make stuff happen.

Turns

Play proceeds in circles around the table, starting with the player who drew the last relationship in the Link phase. Each player gets one structured scene during his turn. That scene involves role-playing, focusing the camera, figuring out what the player wants and what is in the way, earning and spending tokens, rolling dice and moving dice around, and adding and changing nodes and edges.

When it is your turn, you are called the focus player. The spotlight is on your character. Other players might have characters who are involved in the scene, or they might be asked to play characters for the game master, but the action focuses on your character's story. Your turn is a "scene," like in a movie. You might cut away to another character's scene before resolving this one, or you might play it out to its conclusion. When to end a scene is up to the game master.

Turns are usually quick! A few minutes should be enough to role-play a bit, figure out what the scene is about, roll dice, and change the network. Everyone should keep play moving quickly and the game master should hurry people along when they're slow.

Each player's turn goes something like this:

1. The player Gets Paid (see below).
2. The player and game master, perhaps with input from other players, discuss where the character's scene will be.
3. The player and game master set the stage for the scene, using "camera" techniques to introduce sensory detail.
4. The player role-plays his character. The game master role-plays all the other characters in the setting, but might hand some off to other helper players.
5. If the scene leads to a conflict, the game master and player resolve the conflict with dice and tokens, then negotiate a resolution. The resolution is recorded on the network.
6. The game master ends the scene and moves on to the next player.

Get Paid

At the beginning of each player's turn, that player and the game master earn three tokens each. These tokens represent story power. They will buy dice and rerolls, and they will purchase consequences for nodes or edges that you control.

Set the Stage

The focus player and GM start by discussing where in the setting to stage the scene. You might say, "I'm going to go to the dojo and confront my sensei about his affair." That establishes a bit about what you want your character to do and where you want the action to occur (a dojo). The dojo is like a sound stage for a movie production.

Be creative when choosing a stage. Evoke the right mood for the scene. Think like a director here. Have your character encounter his nemesis in a dark, dirty alley. Have her learn that thugs are after her when three black sedans try to run her motorcycle off the road on the highway bypass that runs through the city.

The Camera

Do not get so focused on the dice and tokens that you forget the fiction and the role-playing. The game contains a simple gimmick to remind you: the camera. The camera is a metaphor for sensory detail in the fiction. Much of this detail will be visual or sound effects (stuff a real video camera would record), but it can really be anything: how your food tastes, the smell of the burning wires in the brainframe vault, or the soundtrack you imagine playing for your scene. Don't take the camera metaphor too literally.

At the start of every scene, the focus player and the GM need to establish where the character is and what he's doing. Imagine that you're shooting a movie and you're the director. What does the set look like? Where is the camera relative to the action?

Through play, use the techniques you've seen on tv and at the theater. When you want to draw attention to your character's reaction to something his enemy just said, say, "Close-up of my face" and glare at the GM or add, "I am glaring menacingly." Use camera angle, blocking direction, fades and cuts, zoom, and anything else you can think of to make your game more visual.

Getting visual means calling attention to details. More importantly, it forces you to get into the setting. If you are talking about what happens in the game but no one can picture it, you're probably just pushing dice and tokens around and not role-playing. That's like going to a movie where the director tells you about the movie he made, but you don't get to see it. Show me the film already.

Remember that the camera is more than just sight and sound. Be creative. You can talk about the sound effects, tastes or smells, the air temperature, the chill that crawls up a character's spine, and so on. You can get into character's heads and hear their thoughts. You can cut back and forth between two or more different "sets" or characters. Use anything you have at your disposal to describe what is going on in a way that excites you and your friends. You might want to describe the framing of a scene using descriptions of how it'd look in a graphic novel, for example.

Role-Play

This word is a catch-all for the real meat of play. This is why you're here: to get into the fiction, explore a cyberpunk setting and get into your character, and tell a story with some friends. Always role-play before reaching for the dice and before engaging the resolution mechanics.

The Fiction Always Wins

There is a guiding rule for all of play: The fiction always wins.

"The fiction" is short-hand for the story you're telling and all the details you've discussed. It includes the setting and the characters, and everything in the setting. It includes the events that have unfolded during play (and play includes the compile, load, link, and run phases). If, during the compile phase, you agreed that this would be a gritty, serious far-future world set on a starship, then that's part of the fiction.

This means that the elements of the fiction have to make sense. Verge has all these rules for rolling dice, changing the network, and negotiating outcomes, but all of that stuff must make sense in the fiction. It doesn't matter if you have enough tokens to destroy the Megasoft node if you can't explain how your character did it. Further, it has to make sense to everyone else, not just you.

Everything you do must have a corresponding part in the fiction. If you earn dice, explain how that happens in the fiction. When you roll dice, describe what your character is doing. When you earn a reroll by burning a friend, explain how this pisses them off. Even if you just want to give five of your tokens to another player, play out a short scene where you show how you're helping her character.

Further, everything you do has to consider the fiction you have created so far. Most of what you'll do when playing Verge won't be recorded on paper anywhere! You'll be adding all this colorful detail about people and places and it'll only be in your heads. That doesn't mean it isn't important. In fact, it's more important than the network. Yes, you want to reconcile the fiction and the network as much as possible, but when in doubt, the fiction wins.

Norms for Role-Playing

Role-playing doesn't necessarily mean character acting or talking in funny voices. Each play group should figure out what they expect, but it's generally something everyone can work out during play.

Some people like to get deep into their characters and do the my-character-says-what-I-say thing ("I talk to the drug dealer down the street. [In a nasal voice] 'Hola. My name is Knight. What can you tell me about that one?' I point to the girl in the nylon skirt.").

Some talk about their characters in the first person but describe what they're doing and saying without exactly acting it ("I talk to the drug dealer down the street, explaining how I need information on the girl in the nylon skirt.").

Other players prefer to treat characters like an author might, talking about them in the third person ("Knight goes to the drug dealer and gets him to tell her about the girl in the nylon skirt.").

As long as everyone is having fun, it shouldn't matter how each player role-plays, but some groups might want to set standards on how they approach role-playing.

Help for the Game Master

The game master should ask players (especially those who are not already involved in the scene) to play some of the extra characters in scenes. They get a lot of leeway about how to role-play these parts, but the game master should give them guidance -- and has the authority to restrict how the player plays the setting character, which is owned by the game master, after all. (The game master should never tell a player how to play her own character, though.)

Sometimes the game master might make up an "extra" that isn't even on the network. A bank teller or security guard or something. This character, while unimportant to the overall story, will make the scene flow better. The game master can dole out these roles to other players.

Declare a Scene Goal

During the role-playing on your turn, you will get to a point where you have a clear idea about how what you're role-playing affects the world. This is your scene goal. You don't have to declare your scene goal before you start your scene. You can, if you want, but it often evolves from your role-play.

You state your scene goal in terms of the setting, not the network and the rules. The GM translates that to changes to the network. If the GM cannot figure out how it affects the network, then your scene goal is too small or too big. For example, you might say, "Mara wants to run over the goon with her motorbike." The GM looks at the network and can't tell how that changes the network, so she asks you to make the goal bigger. "What do you really want?" she asks. You think. Really, you want to escape from the goons. "Bigger," the GM says. You think more. The goons are just a tool that the Puppet Master is using to capture you. You want to kill the Puppet Master. The game master shakes her head, "Too big right now." Hrm. "I want to hurt the goons so bad that they fear me." The game master likes that: "Now that's a great goal!" That sounds like weakening the Goons node.

The GM should keep an eye on game pace and watch the role-playing for signs of a scene goal. Once it becomes obvious that the role-play is about to step over something that needs to be resolved by the game system, the GM should suggest a scene goal (e.g., "Are you trying to weaken the Megasoft node then?" or "You'll need control over the Megasoft node to make them lose this public relations battle with your pirate VR news team"). Once the focus player and GM agree on the goal, role-play can proceed for a little longer, to establish how the player wants to achieve the scene goal. But the GM gets control over pacing here. The GM can say, "Okay, bring in some dice and let's see what happens" or whatever and force the system into play.

Scene goals break down to one or more of the network changes in the next section (Changing the Network). If you control all the nodes and edges that you want to change, then you can pay the price in tokens and role-play how you do it. If the controller of a node or edge that you want to change lends you permission, then you can do it, too: pay and role-play.

As soon as you want to change the network and you don't have permission or control to do it, it's a conflict and the dice get involved. If you win the conflict, then you steal temporary control over a single node or edge and then you can spend tokens to change it.

You can accomplish any number of those scene goals in a scene, if you have permission. You can make only one forced network change when you win. That is, in a single scene, you can steal control of only one node or edge and force only one consequence on that network element.

You activate nodes to get dice, buy dice, roll the dice, buy more dice, buy rerolls, and take turns narrating what is going on in the story. Role-play a little for each thing you do so everyone understands what that little use of game system represents. For example, when you spend a token to activate your character's souped-up cyberdeck, talk about how you use it to hack into your enemy's systems.

Finally, the dice will have spoken and you will know if you succeed or fail. The winners will force network changes on the losers, or negotiate alternative consequences. Play out enough of the scene to see how it resolves.

Changing the Network

Note: Need a detailed section that talks about translating the fiction to network changes with many examples.

The network consists of nodes and edges between them, plus control markers. Some nodes are controlled by you, some controlled by other sympathetic players, and some controlled by other antagonistic players. Note that the GM can be a sympathetic or antagonistic player, depending on what you're doing. Maybe she's on your character's side because it's a cool story. Maybe the story is cooler if she marshals her forces to oppose you.

There are only a few ways you can change the network in play.

Create a new node and link it with a new edge. The new node comes into play controlled by the game master. The power of the node and edge are both 1 (put a ! after the name of each). To link your new node to an existing node, you need permission from the existing node's controller. If you control it, hey, you're good to go. When you create a new node, this can mean different things. In the simplest case, it means that the thing you added was always there, but now it is important to the story. You can also play that someone created or invented it, too, if that makes sense. It's up to the node's creator. Cost: 2 tokens.

Add a new edge between two existing nodes. Draw and name a new edge. The edge has power 1. You need permission from the controllers of both nodes you are connecting. A new edge can imply a relationship that was just created, or the new revelation of a relationship that has existed for some time. This is up to the edge's creator. Cost: 1 token.

Strengthen a node or edge by X. You need permission for the node's or edge's controller. Add a number of surges to it equal to X. When a network elements gets stronger, this means that the element has grown stronger in the fiction, too. Explain how. This may be as a result of something your character did, or something that just happened. Cost: 1 token per point of power in the node or edge plus X tokens.

Example: You want to strengthen the node "Megasoft!!!?!" (power 3) by 2. That costs 5 tokens (power 3 + 2 surges). You change it to "Megasoft!!!?!!!" (power 5).

Weaken a node or edge by X. You need permission for the node's or edge's controller. Add a number of drains to it equal to X. This decreases its power and increases its value. Note that the cost makes it harder and harder to weaken nodes over time. Explain how the node or edge got weaker in the fiction. Cost: 1 token per point of value in the node or edge + X tokens.

Example: You want to weaken the node "Megasoft!!!?!" (value 5) by 2. That costs 7 tokens (value 5 + 2 drains). You change it to "Megasoft!!!?!??" (power 1).

Destroy a node. This is the ultimate punishment. Draw an X through the entire node and each of its outgoing relationships. They are "dead." Interpret this however you like, but the node has become an ineffective agent in the story. It doesn't erase it from the fiction like the veto did in the load phase; whatever the node represents is still in the story, but it changes in the story so that it can no longer affect the rest of the world. For example, if you destroy the node representing Megasoft, that doesn't erase Megasoft from the history of the world, but perhaps the company goes bankrupt and closes down. Cost: The value of the node plus the power of all of its edges.

Example: You want to destroy the node "Megasoft!!!?!" (value 5) that has two edges: "builds!!" (Megasoft builds Brainframes) and "leads!?!" (Suri Branst leads Megasoft). That costs 8 tokens (value 5 + power 2 + power 1). You cross out Megasoft with an X.

You cannot destroy a relationship, only weaken it to 0. Someone can still strengthen it after that.

Note that once you win a conflict, you gain temporary and limited control over a node you don't normally control. This lets you spend tokens to affect that node and its edges as described in the Effects section.

Resolution

This section covers the rules for using dice to resolve scene goals. This is the most complicated part of the rules and you might need to read it a few times and even play it a bit before it all sinks in.

Signal and Noise, Strength and Frequency (Dice)

The essence of the resolution rules are rolling giant handfuls of dice and looking for a number with the most matches. The more matches, the better. If you roll eight dice and get 11222346, you have three 2's, so that's the only part of your roll you care about. The part you care about (222) is called the signal. The part you don't care about (11346) is called the noise.

The number of dice in the signal is called the strength. Remember, higher signal strength means a better chance to succeed at scene goals. The face value of the matching dice in the signal is called the frequency. Frequency is used to determine who gets to describe what happens after a roll. If you rolled 11222346, then the signal has strength 3 and frequency 2.

Confused by all these weird terms? Think about having six radio transmitters. If you can get them all on the same frequency, the signal will be really strong.

You don't always have to choose the highest strength frequency for your signal. You might opt to choose a higher frequency with a lower strength so that you get to say what happens, even if it means you fail at your goal. In this case, you want the power to narrate how you fail.

Earning Dice

You get to roll giant handfuls of dice. How many dice?

Players and the game master earn dice by "activating" nodes. Each node activated by a player contributes its power in dice. Each node activated by the GM contributes its value in dice. That which does not kill a GM-controlled node only makes it stronger. Beware.

For free, each player gets to activate his character node. The GM designates a defender node that makes sense in the story as a defender against the player's action. It must be a node that is opposing the character's actions.

Activating additional nodes costs tokens. The first helper node costs 1 token. The second costs 2 more. The third, 3 more, and so on. A player or the game master can activate only nodes that are adjacent (connected) to the nodes they've already activated, or nodes over which they have control (and are marked as such). This goes in "turn order" starting with the current scene's player. Once a node is activated, no one else can activate it.

A "friendly" node is more useful than a "hostile" node. Activating a friendly node earns additional dice equal to the power of the edge between them, if there is one. A friendly edge is one that describes a relationship that benefits the node gaining the dice (the player's character node or the game master's defender node). So if your ex-wife hates you and has a relationship that says so, then you can't get her edge dice. If she still loves you, or if her edge implies she would help you out, then you do get edge dice for her, equal to the edge's power. You can generally tell how another person feels about your character by reading the relationship. If it's "hates" or "blackmails," they obviously won't be a willing ally. You'll have to force them somehow. If it's "loves" or "protects," they'll probably help you even if it means a great risk to themselves.

Every time you activate a node that isn't friendly, add a drain (?) to its edge that connects it to you (if there is one). This means it's getting even more unfriendly.

Additionally, the game master can gain dice by activating "attacker" nodes adjacent (connected) to a player's activated helper nodes, if those attacker nodes have unfriendly relationships to the activated node. For example, since you were such a dick to your ex-wife, she hates you. And now the GM gets dice for her edge to you (equal to the edge's power).

Sometimes an adjacent (connected) node has both a friendly edge and a hostile edge! Perhaps more than two edges with different qualities. In these cases, you can choose which edge want to use, as long as you can explain it in the fiction.

Roll the Dice!

Okay, everyone involved has dice. Make sure everyone has all the dice they deserve, then make a final call. This is the last chance to add dice, except by spending tokens. Then ask for a roll. Roll the handful of dice and determine your signal strength.

Compare your signal strength to the game master's. The highest strength (best match) is winning the conflict (in the story, too). Whoever has the highest frequency gets to narrate what is happening so far. Sometimes you care more about narrating than winning! That's fine.

When you narrate, you can't violate the rules of the world you've created. You can't describe things that don't make sense. You can, however, freely make up bit characters and situations and convenient buildings and other "color" to fill in the world for your scene. Of course, you can't narrate that you're winning if you're not, or vice versa. You have to obey the dice.

Amplification (Reroll)

By "burning" a relationship, a player can pick up all of his noise dice and reroll them. This process is called amplification, because it increases the strength of your signal. Amplification lets you add all the dice that match your signal's frequency to the signal, strengthening it.

Burning a relationship requires that you say how you're using and abusing one of your friends and add a drain to the relationship connecting your character and that node. The friend must actually be a friendly node, as described above. You can't burn people who already hate you. The game master cannot burn relationships for rerolls, but may buy a reroll for 1 token.

The story about how you use the relationship for the reroll has to explain how you abuse the nature of that relationship. It's never a friendly thing. It always weakens that relationship. You're burning them to get ahead.

For example, say you originally rolled ten dice and got 6544433221. Looks like your signal is 444 (strength 3, frequency 4) and your noise is (6533221). You pick one of your friendly relationships -- say, your ex-husband, who has a "loves!" relationship to you -- and add a surge to it (it becomes "loves!?"). You explain how you're threatening his child visitation rights to get you a security card for the Megasoft office. Then you pick up the noise and reroll (you keep the 444 signal dice to the side). Let's say your new roll is 6554442. That's three more 4's for your signal, which is now 444444 (strength 6, frequency 4) and your noise dice are 6552. You could burn another relationship (but not the ex-husband again, because he's no longer friendly), explain how that node helps, and reroll those four noise dice again and see if they help.

Take turns amplifying. Don't do it twice in a row if someone else wants to do it. Give everyone else involved a chance to amplify before you do it again. This can lead to a dramatic back-and-forth trading of the winning position. However, there's no limit other than your tokens to how many times you can amplify your signal. If you have the tokens, go ahead and burn or spend, explain, and reroll.

Effects

When no one wants to amplify any more, the game master can call the dice rolling to a close. Then the players determine effects.

First, get the noise dice out of play. They'll just confuse things.

Second, who won the conflict? Whoever has the signal with the greatest strength wins. This person has a lot of control over what happens next. Often there are only two people (a player and the game master) involved in a conflict, but occasionally more than one player gets involved. In this case, they apply effects in order of signal strength (highest to lowest). Break ties using the signal's frequency. Break further ties with a die roll.

When it's your turn to negotiate effects, pick a target. That target must be owned by a player or game master with a lower signal strength than you.

Also, that target must make sense as something you attacked during your turn and something that could change in the story, based on what you just role-played. You can't team up with Joe's character, act all friendly, win the conflict with the best dice, then surprise Joe with a nasty effect. It doesn't work that way. Of course, if you role-play your obvious deception during the conflict (but before there is a clear winner), then you're free to treat Joe's character node or his helper nodes as your target.

The target node is under the winner's control until the turn ends. This is a limited kind of control and there are only a few effects the winner can inflict. You still have to pay the token cost for these effects. If the effect destroys a node or weakens a node or edge, the tokens get paid to the loser, not back to the bank. Intentionally losing conflicts is a great way to earn tokens for later scenes! Choose only one of the following:

• The winner can weaken the node with one drain for free. The node's owner earns a token from the bank, in this case.
• The winner can add connections to the node as if she controls it.
• The winner can further weaken or strengthen the node as if she controls it.
• The winner can weaken or strengthen the node's outbound edges (those with the arrow pointing away from the node) as if she controls them.
• The winner can destroy the node as if she controls it.

Often, the winner doesn't do any of those things. Instead, the winner can bargain with the loser. This is a player-to-player (or player-to-game-master) bargain about the story, not a character-to-character negotiation. It should be quick and snappy, and if the loser balks, the winner can always apply one of the mechanical punishments listed above. For example, the winner might say, "Okay, how about you agree that the Black Ops Team is so afraid of me that they stop attacking me, for the rest of the game; otherwise, I'm going to weaken the Black Ops Team node by 5, and I have the tokens to do it." The GM accepts the deal.

Bargains can include exchange of tokens as bribes, too. If you don't have enough tokens to buy one of the effects, you have very little negotiating power, but you can always choose the 'weaken with one surge for free' option (the first effect in the list, above).

Once the winner has negotiated effects, the next highest signal strength goes. They can target anyone with a lower signal strength than theirs, even if that player has already had a node targeted. Continue till everyone involved in the conflict takes a turn. Of course, the participant with the lowest strength won't get to control anyone.

At the very end, whoever has the highest frequency narrates all the outcomes of the scene.

7 Tune

This chapter offers some general advice plus some advanced techniques you can use to improve your game.

Game Mastering

There are some basic strategies that any game master can use to make play better. This section talks about some in detail.

Causing Trouble

The game master's main role is Chief Troublemaker.

A game master starts planning trouble in the load phase. Use the load phase to create a setting that breeds conflict! Conflict is what creates fun play. Figure out what seems to be important to the players (and their fictional characters) and start planning ways to make them hurt.

This means creating bad guys. Cyberpunk stories are full of amazing bad guys. They don't have to be twirly-moustache-evil, though. They can be unfathomable, strange, and alien. Cyberpunk villains are often shades of gray, not black-and-white. For instance, Neuromancer has an AI that causes all kinds of problems for Case and Molly but it is a super-intelligent computer and its motives are difficult to call evil. Bladerunner's replicants cause trouble for Deckard, but they are mostly just trying to survive. As the players load up the network, use your voice and your pen to create memorable bad guys.

During the run phase, use those bad guys to cause more trouble. Spend your tokens to create new bad guys to fill in holes and spend more tokens to pump up their strengths. The players may weaken them, but that just increases their value, and that nets you more dice in conflicts when you use them to defend.

If you can brew a conflict between characters, all the better. These are conflicts that sap player tokens without you spending anything yourself. Use your game master turn to sow discontent. Make deals with characters that pit them against other characters. Create relationship edges that encourage players to fight over important resources (nodes they'll want to activate). Make sure that, in the fiction, these nodes are not friendly to everyone. They can ally with one character but hate another character.

Don't be afraid to let the players win. That means you earn tokens that you can use to cause trouble later. Save up for a couple scenes, then bring out a heavy wallop. Make them fight for that scene.

Pacing

Keep a finger on the pulse of the game. If it feels too fast, slow it down. If it's lagging, spur some action. It's okay to let the pace oscillate a bit, fast for a few scenes then slow for a few then fast again. Use your favorite movies as a guide for how fast you want the story to unfold.

Whose Story?

The story is owned by everyone. As a game master, don't come into the game with a story to tell. You might have ideas, and these can fuel your trouble-making, but be prepared for them to fall apart when the players do something unexpected. This isn't your show. You get a say, but the players need to be the fuel for the fire. You just bring the matches and occasionally throw in some napalm.

Token Economy

The game has a flow of tokens between players. It may be easier to understand the game if you know how the currency flows. It looks sort of like this:

1. Players initially earn tokens in the load phase by creating nodes and edges that other players put their surges on. These come from the bank.
2. Each player earns 3 tokens at the start of his turn. The game master gets 3 tokens on each player's turn, too. These come from the bank.
3. During the run phase, players spend tokens to change nodes and edges they control. These go back to the bank.
4. They also spend tokens to activate nodes in conflicts, and to inflict effects on a target node when they win conflicts. If these weaken or destroy the node or the node's edges, these tokens go to the "loser" (the owner of the target node); otherwise, they go to the bank.
5. There's a special effect, which is a sort of free "default" action, that weakens a target node by 1 drain, and the target's owner earns a token from the bank.

Network Grammar

The network has a grammar to it. Nodes are nouns and edges are verbs. Here are some lessons culled from grammar textbooks to help you write more interesting edges. This section was written by an army of nerds armed with dictionaries. If your eyes start to glaze over, just skip it.

Stative Verbs

The best kind of edge uses a type of verb called a stative verb. Stative verbs represent the current state between two things: either a relation or a mental perception. For example, "employs" is a stative verb that identifies a relation between two things. "Fears" is a stative verb that identifies one thing's (probably a person's) perception of another thing.

Here are some sample stative verbs:

• emotional state: likes, loves, adores, appreciates, hates, loathes, fears, trusts
• desire: wants, needs, desires, prefers, eschews
• ownership: has, owns, employs
• belief: thinks, believes, doubts
• recognition: recognizes, affirms, forgets, ignores
• components: consists of, contains
• perception: perceives, sees, hears, smells

If you're not sure if something is a stative verb, try dropping the -s, add an -ing to the end, and add the verb "is" in front of it. Does it still make sense? If not, it's a stative verb.

Say you have "Knight loves Aliana." Is "loves" a stative verb? Replace "loves" with "is loving": "Knight is loving Aliana" doesn't make a lot of sense (it certainly doesn't have the same meaning as "Knight loves Aliana") so it's a stative verb. What about "manufactures"? Say you have "Megasoft" "manufactures" "Brainframe 2000." Replace "manufactures" with "is manufacturing." "Megasoft is manufacturing Brainframe 2000." That seems to make sense and have the same general meaning as the earlier sentence, so it's a dynamic verb, not a static verb.

Dynamic Verbs

You don't have to use stative verbs. Dynamic verbs describe actions that have a start and an end. You can use dynamic verbs like "writes" or "manufactures." These can give the network a little punch, especially if the verb represents some ongoing process or activity.

Here are some sample dynamic verbs that might be fun to use on a network:

• destroys, kills
• designs, invents, creates
• operates, leads, manages
• uses, exploits

Verb Tense

Note that all the sample verbs are in the present tense. Present tense verbs are actions that are happening right now -- not in the past or the future. You can use other tenses, but be careful.

Use care with the past tenses including the perfect and past perfect tenses (e.g. "loved," "has loved," "had loved") because they represent facts that are not theoretically changeable. Edges using stative verbs make for a much more interesting game, because they represent the state of things that can be changed in the world. You can change the fact that "Aliana loves Knight," but you cannot change the fact that "Bob killed Janet." A past tense edge is something that happened in the past and continues to affect the relationship of those two nodes. If Bob killed Janet, you can exploit that past event for present needs.

Avoid the future tense (e.g., "will kill") and future perfect (e.g., "will have killed") unless you're trying to create some kind of strange prophecy; the node will be difficult to understand and use.

Custom Load Phase

You can customize the steps in your load phase to get different kinds of games! This is more of an art than a science, but here are some ideas. You'll have to test them and fiddle with them until they reliably give you the setting you want.

First of all, don't add too much. Mind how many nodes and edges your custom loader generates. It's easy to go overboard, and then your network will be too busy, too crowded, and too hard to understand. Also, the "cash out" step at the end of the load phase generates starting tokens for players. The more stuff that goes on the network, the more tokens each player will have.

On the flip side, don't restrict the network too much either. You need a good number of nodes and edges to spur creativity and give players something to do. How big a network is the right size? The author thinks the existing rules are about right, so you probably can't go wrong by cloning the load phase as written, and changing a couple things.

Focus the types of nodes and edges players create to elicit the setting you want. Verge elicits a sort of Philip K. Dick cyberpunk feel by asking players to connect organizations, technologies, and ideas in strange ways. If you wanted to create a Tudor court political drama, you might ask the players to connect noble people, human rights, and court positions. Two or three types of nodes is about right. You don't have to limit edges at all, but you might set down some rules about what kind of verbs you can write.

The first "names" step in the load phase is there for a reason. It gets actual people onto the network early so that they are well-connected by the end of the load phase. Beware of removing this step or moving it to a later position in the load phase.

Relinking

If you let your character die, or if you want a new character for whatever reason, you can "relink." This means initializing a new character and jumping back into play.

First, pick a new character. Pay its power in tokens. If you are voluntarily picking a new character (i.e., there's nothing wrong with your current one; you just don't like it), then you must be able to afford the cost of the new one. If you can't afford it, you can't switch. If you are involuntarily picking a new character (i.e., your last character is no longer available for play), then you get a bye if you can't afford the power cost (pay all of your tokens to the bank though).

Second, circle your character. It's yours.

Third, give up your old character. Gently scribble out the circle around the node. It's not yours any more. The game master owns it now.

Fourth, complicate your character, as stated in the Link chapter. That is, add a new node and connect it to your character, then let the players to your left and right each add a new relationship to your character.

You are ready to jump back into play.

If more than one player wants to relink at the same time, and more than one player wants a character, it goes on auction, as explained in the Link chapter. Whoever offers more tokens for the character gets to have it at that price.

8 Glossary

Verge uses a number of special terms throughout the rules. Refer to the glossary if you can't remember what a specific term means.

AI 

An artificial intelligence, typically a software program that has free will and sentience.

amplification 

Rerolling noise dice to increase the signal strength.

auction 

Bidding payout tokens on a character node so you can play that character.

awesome 

An overused word. The List of Awesome is a compilation of ideas for when you can't think of something to add during the Load phase.

bribe 

An offer of tokens as a bargaining chip in the final part of resolution.

cash out 

To collect tokens for the cool stuff you created during the link phase.

camera 

A technique used to remind people to focus on the physical details of a scene.

character 

A person node controlled by a player, not by the game master.

compile phase 

The first phase of the game, in which you assemble friends and prepare to play.

conflict 

Everything involving an unwanted change to part of the network.

controller 

The player or game master who has the authority to change something during the Run phase.

create 

Add a new node or edge to the network.

destroy 

Remove something from the game so that it no longer has any affect. How you kill something in the game.

dice (singular

die): "Normal" six-sided dice.

dice pool 

A handful of dice of a certain category (like the "signal" pool)

drain 

A question mark (?) written after the name of an edge or node to signify a decrease to its power.

edge 

A relationship (verb) between things in the game world, represented by an arrow (line) on the network.

effects 

Changes to the network made after winning a conflict.

fade to black 

To gloss over some part of the story, typically when it would make some players uncomfortable.

frequency 

The face value of a die. See also: Strength.

game master (GM) 

A special player who controls pacing and mood and the adversarial elements that normal players don't control.

genre 

A set of conventions that define the type of game you want. For example, "cyberpunk" is a high-level genre.

ideology 

A type of node representing some big philosophy, religion, form of government, or other body of thought.

link phase 

The second phase of the game, in which you build the network.

load phase 

The third phase of the game, in which you create a character and link it to the network.

network 

A diagram that represents everything important in the game world. The diagram is a web of nodes connected by edges.

noise 

The dice that you toss out or reroll after a roll. See also: Signal.

node 

A thing (noun) in the game world and the main component of a network.

-ologies 

Technologies and ideologies.

organization 

A type of node representing a group of people, centrally organized or otherwise.

payout 

Earning tokens for the power of the nodes and edges you created during the Load phase.

person 

A type of node representing an intelligent and sentient being, such as a human being, an AI, a robot or android, a sentient animal, or even an alien.

player 

Your or one of your friends, while playing Verge. Often but not always distinguished from the game master.

power 

The story power of a node or edge, measured by its surges minus its drains. See also: Value.

resolution 

The rules and process for figuring out who wins a conflict that changes part of the network when the controller of that part wants to prevent the change.

role-playing 

Talking about what happens in the game and coming to agreement about it.

run phase 

The fourth phase of the game, in which you role-play the character you created in the world you created.

signal 

The dice (all showing the same value) that you keep after a roll. See also: Noise.

stage 

The fictional place where a scene happens.

strength 

The number of dice in the signal. See also: Frequency.

strengthen 

Add one or more surges to a node or edge.

surge 

An exclamation point (!), written after the name of an edge or node to signify an increase to its power.

technology 

A type of node representing some big scientific or technological idea.

theme 

A unifying idea or message in a story.

token 

Some kind of item that represents a unit of game currency. Tokens are often represented by poker chips.

tone 

Parameters for the kind of mood you want your game to have (e.g., funny, serious, philosophical, light).

value 

How important a node or edge is to the play group, measured by its total number of surges and drains. See also: Power.

veto 

A drain added to a node or edge during the setting creation steps in the Load phase. The drain represents a vote of no-confidence in the idea added to the network.

vote 

A surge added to a node or edge during the setting creation steps in the Load phase. The surge represents a vote of enthusiasm in the idea added to the network.

weaken 

Add one or more drains to a node or edge.

9 Ideas

This page is a list of things to use as nodes when constructing your setting network. You're certainly not limited to this list, but use these for inspiration when creating your own game world. Eventually, I want this list to be a thousand or more items!

Please add your own ideas to this page! You'll receive credit (make sure you are registered on the site with the name you want credited, or drop me a note via email or your personal User: page).

Ideas borrowed from:

• Warning Signs for Tomorrow, by Anders Sandberg

Cool Terms We Just Made Up

Zombie Brainframe, a giant computer composed of interconnected, (usually) human brains in a vat of fluid. (Adam Dray)

Sony PrayStation, a portable electronic device used by the on-the-go faithful to reach their preacher or deity. (Matt Gandy)

Ideas for Elements

Technologies

Nanotechnology

Plasma Physics

Biofuels

Virtual Reality

Holographic Hyperreality

Cybernetic Organ Replacement

Disposable Bodies

Genegeneering

Subliminal Behaviour Modification Advertising

Androids

RIFD

Antimatter

Chaotic Systems

Self-replicating Devices

Universal Internet Connectivity

Self-Improving Software

Ideologies

Commerc ialism

Religion

Christianity

Buddhism

Muslim

22nd Century Atheists

Government

Imperialism

Democracy

Communism

Monarchy

Oligarchy

Utililitarianism

Ludditism

Digital Animism

Privacy

Ubiquitous Surveillance

Free Speech

Freedom of Religion

Freedom of the Press

Right to Bear Arms

Organizations

Secret Societies

Neo-Nanite Freemasons

Government

CIA

FBI

Corporations

Megasoft

Advanced Biotechnica, Corp (ABC)

Channel 999

Recreation

International Chess Grandmasters

Situations

Addiction

Apocalypse

Nonstandard Spacetime

Places

Space Station

Near-Earth Orbit

Meridian City

Vatican VR Cathedral

Mainframe 221

Qualities

Bulging Muscles

Hyperintelligence

Charisma

Eidetic Memory

Hive Mind

Lightning Reflexes

Bullshit Detector

Pediatric Cybersurgeon

Ideas for Edges

Stative Verbs

has a

is a

feels

likes

loves

hates

thinks he wants

believes

is trying to _____ (with transitive verb)

wants to _____ (with transitive verb)

knows

owns

controls

contains

recognizes

prefers

Dynamic Verbs

leads / is leading

chases / is chasing

seeks / is seeking

Past Tense Verbs

created / designed / invented / founded

begat / gave birth to

married

retired from

quit

killed

resigned

joined