Verge Compile
From Verge
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?
