Verge Overview

From Verge

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.