First glance at the Vurt RPG

Vurt: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game is a new RPG by Ravendesk Games based on the "visionary and hallucinatory science fiction of author Jeff Noon (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award)". 

I've only come to know who Noon is because I saw this RPG for sale so I can't say much on that score. In fact what made me buy this, beyond the setting seeming like it would be cool, was the fact the game is the first licensed setting made to use the Cypher System. I'll have more to say about the rules at a later date, but right now I wanted to talk about my feelings regarding the setting as presented as an intro to some thoughts I had about tweaking it.

So the idea here is Earth is connected to a world that both influences us and is influenced by us - The Vurt, a world of our dreams. We use feathers - a technological product apparently - to connect to the Vurt and utilize this realm to escape the cyberpunk dystopia of our reality. Blue feathers are games/shows, Pink feathers are virtual porn, Black feathers are games where getting hurt there hurts here, Yellow is like black but there's no way to "jack out" save for winning the game..and sometimes using one of these to enter the Vurt means someone or something else comes through into our reality. There's also a variety of technomagic disciplines that can connect the Vurt and our world (what the games called the "real world".) As time passed Vurt beings like the King Naga came to the real world, sometimes on purpose and sometimes as an unintended swap due to the use of a Yellow Feather.

However our attempts to exploit the benefits of the Vurt lead to humanity being sterile, but we then solved this problem with a powerful fertility treatment which utilized some aspects of the Vurt's dream reality. This in turn lead to interbreeding possibilities opening up between humans, Shadow (undead), Vurt (dream beings), Dogs, and Robos (robots). So the mixing and matching of these "pure modes" lead to 31 modes of being.

I have to admit that it was the last part that really hit hard against my (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) suspension of disbelief even in a science-fanatasy setting, probably because of the Robos and Dogs being our cross breeding partners. Beyond that I personally don't like the whole "travel into your fictions" idea either here or in the Strange...even though both settings DO intrigue me as they raise interesting questions about the nature of reality and our relationship to our imaginations. Where they both lose a step for me personally is the assumption that our world is the real world that creates, sustains, or at least heavily influences the fictional realities. That said, I'd say the Vurt is a bit better (for me personally) than the Strange in this regard as the Vurt is acknowledged as a realm for our collective unconscious to take root in but also a world unto itself. OTOH, I do think the fictional bleed of the Strange has led to some interesting ideas like the Transhumanist Dystopia recursion. In general the fictional bleed concept can lead to some cool/intriguing locales, where one is not simply walking through one's favorite books but confronting something about the nature of humanity's hopes/fears/desires/etc.

The Vurt also has those feathers, which from an aesthetic standpoint just come off as rather cool even if the jargon used to make the claim they are technological artifacts doesn't quite jive with me. But then in a world that works on two intertwined metaphysical tracks - that of the mundane scientific and the psychic/magical - perhaps it would be fair to think of them as tech. I do find the idea of the lucid feathers rather interesting - you are doing things in the real world while playing through the setting the feather offers. One person online noted they used a "Baby Driver" feather to make a dashing car-based escape from the enemy which really showed me the potential of augmented reality feathers.

If I was going to run The Vurt I'd keep the rules, and even the modes of being with their robot-dog-human-etc hybrids but I'd want to confront in-setting my feeling regarding the oddness, even silliness I think Jeff Noon possibly included for allegorical/symbolic reasons...more on that in the next post...