Verge Link

From Verge

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.