Complete Verge

From Verge

0 Credits

Verge is Copyright © 2007, Adam Dray

Author:	Adam Dray
Additional Development:	Dave Cleaver, Sean DeArment, Jon Eisenstein, Fred Hicks, Ben Lehman, Tony Lower-Basch, Joshua A.C. Newman
Influences:	Dogs in the Vineyard, 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:	Numerous people (will list!)

1 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 interconnected ideas, organizations, and people on a big piece of paper. Then they take the role of a character in that setting and struggle for control of the setting elements to accomplish their goals. To control a setting element, they mark it with dice rolled from a pool. The result looks something like RISK but with dice on a relationship map instead of armies on a geographical map. This process tends to create stories about the smashing together of greed and other human frailties, ideology, and technology.

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.

The 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.

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 the main components of the setting. As the network develops, you will start to 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." The nodes should be evocative and sometimes mysterious. You don't have to know exactly how it's going to be used in play.

Nodes should 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.

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

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

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

Edges

Edges connect nodes together and give the network tension. As you develop the network, it starts to tell a story. Try to create edge relationships that create tension and conflict and tell a story. Sure, you can connect "The Demons, a street gang" to "Megasoft" with an edge like "hates." You'll have more fun with an edge like "employs" and explain 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 just a semantic 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 no power in game terms.

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."

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.

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

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.

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."

It's always more interesting when relationships are one-sided rather than two-sided. 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!). It's better to create a one-sided relationship and let other players develop the reverse relationship (or you can do it later). Even if Knight and Aliana love each other, it's better to 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.

Power and Value

Nodes and edges have little symbols after them: one or more !'s and maybe a couple ?'s, too. The !'s are good and the ?'s are bad. Think of a ! as a +1. Think of a ? as a -1. The modifiers are to a score called power. "Religion!!!" has power +3 but "Religion!!!??" would have power +1. Power represents a setting element's ability to change or control the rest of the setting.

There's only one other stat in the game, and that's value. Value is the number of !'s and ?'s combined without regard to their sign (+ or -). 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 or edge's value goes up, it becomes more costly to change it. 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 you alone control. Creating your character is the final step of setup and the character is just another node on the network. There really is very little you need to record about your character: his name, a couple !'s or ?'s that represent the "story power" you have, and the connections to other things in the setting. Everything else is just stuff you discuss with your friends at the table. You can take notes on a separate piece of paper if you want.

There is no separate character sheet. You don't need one. The character is just a node on the network that you alone control. You'll circle it to denote that special control you have. 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.

Game Play

At the highest level, the game has three main phases: compile, 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, then discuss the parameters of the game you want to play.

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 (the !'s and X's). 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 creating a character and something to do. You create a node for your character and connect it to the network. You invent goals for your character and create trouble for other characters. Four players can create their characters in about a half hour.

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.

You can create a setting and run it over and over if you want. The stories just keep piling up. You can repeat the load and run phases, creating new characters in your setting, 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.

2 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.

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. The smaller 12mm dice are better than the larger 16mm dice because you get more of them for the money and you can fit more on a node.

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.

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.

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. If you're not on the same page, then misunderstandings can make it harder to make your game rock. You want your game to rock, don't you?

Gather Friends

Find 3-5 friends. Verge rocks when you have a good group of people riffing ideas off one another. You can have a good game with just two other people but it'll lack and it's really tough to have any real game interaction with just one other person. More than six people total will slow play down but there's no real limit on how many players the game will support. 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.

Set Up the Play Space

The last 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.

Pick a Genre

Talk about the kind of game you want to play. You need to pick a genre or high level setting. It might be enough to agree on "near future cyberpunk" or "gritty 1980's 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, dial it back and 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.

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.

Discuss Themes

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

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.

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?

4 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 successfully 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.

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 (the number of !'s after the name). 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 declares her choice.
3. She bids a number of tokens towards the character.
4. The reserve, or minimum bid, is the power of that character. You cannot bid lower than this amount.
5. Going clockwise around the table, the next player may bid an amount of chips greater than the highest bid, or pass.
6. Bidding ends when everyone has passed.
7. The player with the highest bid pays his chips back to the bank and circles the character, who is her character now.
8. All the other players keep their chips, but lose the auction.

Repeat the process until everyone has a 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.

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 chips 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.

Taking turns, every player complicates the character for the player on her right and the player on her left. If Bea sits between Adam and Candace, then Bea gets to complicate Adam's character and Candace's character. They get revenge on Bea, though.

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.

5 Load

In the load phase, you build a world or at least the parts of it that you think are important. You and the other players will take turns adding bits to the world and casting votes on what you think is cool or bogus.

Four players can load up a network in about an hour's time. This is tremendous fun. World building seems to come naturally to 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. You want to end up with an amazing setting rife with tension and potential for conflict. Talk things over with your friends. When 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.

Bad Ideas

While there's a definite "brainstorming" flavor to the load phase, it 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.

Keep a finger on the pulse of the monster you're creating (the network). If it starts to mutate in a way that will make play not fun for you, speak up!

If you're ever short on ideas, refer to the List of Awesome.

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.

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 !'s on nodes and edges

Step 1 is pretty light. You'll just create nodes. 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 ! 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).

Adding Edges

Whenever you add an edge to the network, put a ! 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.

Power Bangs

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

A ! 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).

You cannot put power bangs on nodes or edges that you created.

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: Technologies

In step 1, you each write down a technological concept that puts the "cyber" into your cyberpunk. These should be world-sized ideas: grand concepts whose effects reverberate through society.

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.

In regular turn order, each player does the following:

• Create a node that represents a technology. Explain to the other players what you mean and why you think it's cool.

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, put a ! after it. This starts it with 1 point of power and value.

Don't connect any of these with edges. You'll connect them to other things later.

Step 2: Ideologies

In step 2, you highlight important ideologies that will influence play. Cyberpunk stories often have a message about religion or government or philosophy.

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.

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 (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 !'s on nodes and edges.

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 LA." 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 !'s on nodes and edges.

Step 4: People

In step 4, you create some of the movers and shakers of the setting. This will be the pool of characters in the setting for the game master and players to play. If you're a player, you will end up choosing one of these characters to play. If you're the game master, you will play the rest of them.

These people should have specific names. Avoid writing down nodes that are just a title like "The President." Give the President a name. 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.

Relationships between people should be strong, emotional links. If Bartleby Deathover is the CEO of Megasoft and Mandy Ulsted is his secretary, link both Mandy 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."

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.

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.

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.

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 !'s 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. People are what bring the world to life.

Step 5: Tie-Ins

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. You can if you want, though, but it won't be tied very well into your setting and it will likely get short thrift during the game. You will have squandered your opportunity to fine-tune your setting before play.

In normal turn order, each player does four things:

• Create a node of any kind (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 !'s 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.

Look around the network at all the things (nodes and edges) you personally wrote on the network. For each ! after those nodes, gain a token.

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 continues 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 GM, 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 GM should hurry people along when they're slow.

Get Paid

At the beginning of your turn, you earn three tokens.

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.

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.

You'll probably want to use "camera" loosely, too. 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.

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.

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'll state your scene goal in terms of the setting, not the network and the rules. The GM will translate that to effects to the network. If the GM cannot figure out how it affects the network, then your scene goal is too small. Make it bigger. 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 likes that: "Now that's a great goal!" Killing the Puppet Master requires that you weaken his node to 0 power. That's a network change.

Scene goals break down to one or more of the following effects:

• You want to gain control of a node.
• You want to strengthen a node or edge that you control.
• You want to weaken a node or edge that you control.
• You want to create a new node and connect it to a node you control.
• You want to create a new connection between two existing nodes that you control.
• You want to destroy a node that is at zero power.

You can accomplish any number of those scene goals in a scene. The difficulty rises according to how many of those things you attempt all at once. It might be easier to do one piece at a time. It is entirely up to the GM to decide what pieces can be done. She may rule that you have to do one piece at a time, or that these three things have to be done together, or whatever. The rules in the Resolution section explain how you determine the difficulty of a goal.

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.

You buy dice and rerolls, roll dice, move dice from node to node, or make approved changes to the network with your pen. Role-play a little for each thing you do so everyone understands what that little use of game system represents. For example, when you move two dice from your character up to a node you're trying to control, but it's not enough to gain control yet, role-play through trying and failing -- you might still win later, maybe even on this turn.

Finally, the dice will have spoken and you will know if you succeed or fail. Play out enough of the scene to see how it resolves.

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

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 as a Player

You get to roll giant handfuls of dice. How many dice? It depends on your character's power plus the help you get.

First of all, you get a number of dice equal to your character's power. That's the number of !'s minus the number of ?'s.

Second, you can try to get an ally to help or you can use a tool. Your character is connected to all kinds of other people and things on the network. These are potentially allies or tools. You can use a person as a tool; they don't get a choice in the matter, but they won't like it.

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.

If you use a person node, and that person is a willing ally, you get a number of dice equal to the power of the node plus the power of the relationship to the node. If you use a non-person node, or you use an unwilling person node, you get a number of dice equal to the node's power. To use a node as a tool or ally, you must control the node or have permission of the node's controller. Controlled nodes are marked with tokens. "Uncontrolled" nodes are not marked with tokens, and the game master is their controller.

Earning Dice as a GM

The game master earns dice in a different way. She determines how the elements of the setting react to the character's actions and any elements (nodes and links) that are involved in a change contribute their power (sometimes their value) to the GM's dice pool. That is, anything that the player wants to change gives the GM dice and that makes it harder to succeed.

Player Action	GM Dice
They want to gain control of a node
They want to strengthen a node or edge that you control.
They want to weaken a node or edge that you control.
They want to create a new node and connect it to a node you control.
They want to create a new connection between two existing nodes that you control.
They want to destroy a node that is at zero power.

Success and Failure

7 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.

cash out 

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

character 

A person in the game world controlled by a player.

compile phase 

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

dice (singular

die): "Normal" six-sided dice.

dice pool 

A group of dice that haven't been rolled yet.

edge 

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

fade to black 

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

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 and link a character.

network 

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

node 

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

organization 

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

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.

points 

A way of counting the !'s and X's you get to add to the network during the link phase. A ! costs 1 point and an X costs 2 points. You get 4 points per step during the link phase, except in step 1.

power 

The story power of a node or edge, measured by the number of !'s after it minus the number of X's after it.

vote 

A ! or X on the network during the link phase.

run phase 

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

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 the total number of !'s and X's after it.

8 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