Mark Vallianatos

Corrosion

Monday, August 7th, 2006

Corrosion is a role-playing game of technological monstrosities. Machines stir from quiescence, propelled by evil. They stalk, terrorize and exterminate humans. Your characters are their human victims ? and whether they run, hide, or fight back, they will come to realize what the machines MEAN

Characters

Before creating your own character, talk to the other players about how all the characters will be connected. Why are they facing the same horror? Are they friends or family members? Do they live or work in the same building? Have they come together by chance (guests in a motel, strangers on a train)? Are they far-flung but linked by communication or shared interests? Once you agree on a context, each player can come up with a character concept, and flesh it out with a few biographical details: name, age, gender, job, etc. Players should also write down one thing that your character is especially afraid of and one common fear that doesn?t affect the character as much as it does most people.

Corrosion is set by default in the present, though you can play in any society that is being impacted by technological change. The moderator should pick specific locations that provide opportunities for interesting and scary scenes. As an example, for a two player game the players choose to be a young couple on their honeymoon in Hawaii. The wife will be particularly afraid of heights but about drowning since she is a strong swimmer. The husband will fearful of insects but fine with the dark.

Next, create a portrait of your character (either a head shot or a full length portrayal) by drawing a portrait on a piece of paper, cutting a picture out of a magazine, printing a image from the internet, or reproducing a picture from a book. If you have the materials, glue the picture to piece of cardboard or manila folder so that the pieces will be easier to handle.

Satanic Mills

Monday, August 7th, 2006

An inhuman power hums in the shuttles and valves of a 19th century English factory town. An alien power that lies congealed in the cloth and steel manufactured there. A hostile power that twists bone, robs children of their youth, and turns neighbors against neighbors. It is more terrifying than any unholy spirit, slithering lifeform or doomsday device because this horror is real, grounded in social relations. It is alienation and it is generated anew each shift as men, women, and children toil at the machines. Satanic Mills is a role playing game about the production of alienation and the destruction of human lives. It is based on Karl Marx’s theory of alienation as expressed in his Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844

Something Strange and Hostile

An inhuman power hums in the shuttles and valves of a 19th century English factory town. An alien power that lies congealed in the cloth and steel manufactured there. A hostile power that twists bone, robs children of their youth, and turns neighbors against neighbors. It is more terrifying than any unholy spirit, slithering lifeform or doomsday device because this horror is real, grounded in social relations. It is alienation and it is generated anew each shift as men, women, and children toil at the machines.

Satanic Mills is a game about the production of alienation and the destruction of human lives. It is based on Karl Marx’s theory of alienation as expressed in his Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Marx believed that workers in capitalist societies are stripped of or separated from what should be meaningful in their lives ? and that what is taken from us fuels our exploitation. He identified four linked types of alienation. People are alienated from their labor, since work is not done to fulfill the worker’s human needs and creativity but to meet the external agenda of the owner. Workers are also alienated from the products of their labor, which profit capitalists and emerge as commodities that the worker must buy. Workers are alienated from other people as the exchange of money and commodities warps social relationships. People are finally alienated from their species being, since the loss of meaningful productive activity removes one of the main capacities that makes us human.

Alienation, forged in Satanic Mills, will inexorably damage the lives of the game’s characters, with you serving as both victim and executioner.

Joy Division

Monday, August 7th, 2006

Joy Division is a near-future role playing game of technological horror. Characters are agents of the Joy Division, a small but well-funded transnational espionage agency concerned with advanced, destabilizing technologies. Its mission is to neutralize major threats that might arise from transformative technologies, including planetary-scale biocide, genocide and related crimes against humanity, nonconsensual alterations of the human genome, and, where necessary, consensual but radical transformations of human identity. Characters will use a range of quasi-legal and illegal means – targeted investments, blackmail, commercial espionage, misinformation campaigns, kidnappings — to neutralize or limit technological threats.

The Change

In 1924 the writer Virginia Woolf noted that “on or about December 191 human character changed.” ** She was at least a century premature. With apologies to Ms. Woolf, who chose that date due to a provocative modernist art exhibit and expansion of the suffrage, you haven”t experienced change in character until your only daughter has her brain pulped and her personality embedded in an AI platform. Your values aren”t tested until you and your kind are viewed as expendable animals by a hypercaste of fantastically enhanced and ferociously careless hybrid machine-humans. And you can”t fully appreciate post-impressionist painting until you see the blue of the eastern horizon ripped to a congealing mass of doughy gray by invisible chains of poorly-programmed nanobots feasting on atmospheric gases, perforating the sky like termites crossbred with neutron bombs. I can”t tell you exactly when this change will come ? February 229 or June 238 or thereabouts ? because when it does there will be no one left to care, at least nothing that will concern itself with calendars or human character… Which is why we have to stop it.

By the late 2th century a number of futurists projected that accelerating technological developments would converge in the not too distant future in a Singularity ? an exponential, explosive transformation of machines, society, and human nature. *** Some celebrated the possibility that artificial intelligences and related transhumanist innovations would free mankind from the limits of human biology. Others doubted that these predictions were anything more than wishful thinking or science fiction ? techno-optimism run amok. Meanwhile a subset of the world”s business, scientific, and political elites grew concerned. They noted trends in robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology and related fields, that, while intriguing and potentially profitable in the short term, were socially problematic when extrapolated along a curve of accelerating innovation.

Doubting that nation states or intergovernmental organizations were willing or able to track and regulate the coming singularity/transhumanist revolution, in 211 a group of the concerned convened a session on “Transformative Technologies” on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Participants drafted a declaration calling for a balance between innovation and regulation. They chartered a new organization, the Coalition on the Responsible use of Transformative Technologies (CRTT), to carry out public education, research and advocacy. Behind the scenes, conference organizers consulted with several highly-placed sympathizers who were unable or unwilling to sign the declaration. This inner circle provided funding for an Immediate Response Division (IRD). The IRD was designed as the clandestine arm of the CRTT. IRD agents would intervene surreptitiously but aggressively to stop or delay the launch of problematic technologies. And that”s what the IRD did. Although no one inside or out of the CRTT-IRD, except possibly the most unflinching bureaucrat, used that designation… They all called it the Joy Division.

Capital of the Eternal Century

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

The Capital of the Eternal Century is a game of urban psychogeography. It celebrates the city as a puzzle of emotional zones. Themes drawn from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project provide the pieces. Think of it as a barely-recognizable 19th Century Paris experienced by a fl?neur (stroller) voraciously absorbing the dense details of streets life and urban transformations while walking through the metropolis.

Capital of the Eternal Century is a game of urban psychogeography. It celebrates the city as a puzzle of emotional zones. Themes drawn from Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project provide the pieces.

Think of it as a barely-recognizable 19th Century Paris experienced by a fl ?neur (stroller) voraciously absorbing the dense details of streets life and urban transformations while walking through the metropolis.

The game follows a single character out on a long, meandering stroll: ten hours from a day in their life. You will play the game as ten one-hour sessions. The fi rst session fi nds the character eating a meal in preparation for the long walk in front of them. During this fi rst hour you will begin to build the character by establishing some of his or her emotional and intellectual facilities. You will fi ll in part of a phrenological map of the character?s mind and personality, leaving blank spaces that will inscribed over the course of the remaining sessions.

You have the choice of whether the initiating meal is breakfast, lunch or supper, which determines what hours of the day the character will be out strolling. Since the mood of a city changes throughout the day, the time you set will shift the emotional resonance of the nine city districts the character experiences.

Sessions two through ten each take place in a different zone of the city. These zones are physical settings with varying mixes of inhabitants, architecture, street activity and businesses. More importantly, every zone is infused with its own unique mood, which will influence the game as much as much as the city?s physical layout.

The fl ?neur character spends exactly one hour walking though each zone. He or she may pause, step inside a shopping arcade, chat with a friend, be drawn intoa temporary escapade, but by the end of the hour the character will have moved on the next district.

Players open each of the strolling sessions with approximately fi ve or ten minutes of description to establish the setting and color of the zone their character is passing through. For the remainder of the hour, players introduce confl icts linked to the zone?s mood and to themes of 19th century urban modernity. Confl icts in the game unfold in three varieties. The fl ?neur can be confronted directly? perhaps by a petty criminal, gendarme, scam artist, lost child, street preacher or the like ? choose to intervene in a tense situation, or create the tension by intervening. The character can also observe confl ict as an emotional voyeur by fi xing on the disputes and passions of people encountered along the way. Finally, confl ict can play out internally among competing mental drives as the character reacts to the cityscape and the issues inscribed in its boulevards.

The outcomes of these conflicts add new details to the character?s mental topography. Over the course of play, the phrenological map that defi nes the character blends with the other ?map layers? of the game. Movements tracked along city streets. Psychogeography?s validation of the emotional resonance of place. Benjamin?s schema of cultural trends and material artifacts that made Paris the capital of the 19th century.

Capital of the Eternal Century was written for the 26 Game Chef competition. It incorporates the time limitation of ten one-hour sessions, with character creation taking place during the initial session and each remaining session exploring a different city zone. The game also uses three ingredients: glass, ancient, and emotion. Glass gives the game the glass roofs of the arcades that signify the rise of modern consumer culture. Ancient provides the buried city of the river, the sewers, and the metropolises deep history. Emotion inspired the psychogeographic division of the city into emotional zones and the emotion-description based conflict resolution system.

Escape from Prince Charming

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

Escape from Prince Charming is based on the traditional fairy tale. The players take on the roles of fair princesses, seeking to escape their fate and risking their lives and the lives of others to escape it. But like the fairy tale, the endings have already been written, it’s only a matter of finding which one you get. It is also the appetizer in the Full Course of Love and Death.

This RPG is the first in the Full Course of Love and Death. As an appetizer it prepares the players for the main courses to come. As such it need not be played with any special constraints for enjoyment of the full course. Instead just pick characters and begin playing. When you are done, any character, human or otherwise who died can be played in Someone to Love, the first of the main courses. Like all games in this Full Course, Escape from Prince Charming is intended for five players.

As a game designed for Iron Game Chef 26, it is necessary to discuss the allotments made for that contest. Indeed, for the theme of time, Escape from Prince Charming fulfills the three sessions of 3 hours each requirement. And it uses the following contest terms: Glass, Committee, and Ancient.

Cage of Reason

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

Cage of Reason is an age of enlightenment game of pile-driving philosophes and eye-gouging Essayists. Characters are intellectuals and reformers struggling to bring the light of reason to societies weighed down by despotism, superstition, and stultifying custom. The Characters’ struggles against censors, priests, and reactionary aristocratic twits are played out as professional wrestling matches.

Cage of Reason is an age of enlightenment game of pile-driving philosophes and eye-gouging Essayists. Characters are intellectuals and reformers struggling to bring the light of reason to societies weighed down by despotism, superstition, and stultifying custom. The characters. struggles against censors, priests, and reactionary

aristocratic twits are played out as professional wrestling matches. Cage of Reason was written an entry in the 26 Game Chef competition. It is organized to be played over four game sessions of two hours each. During the first session, players create characters and plan out the upcoming wrestling events. The last three sessions are main event wrestling extravaganzas, with interviews and other rituals leading up to matches between characters and villains that represent the clash of ideas in the age of enlightenment.

The game also incorporates three .ingredients. from the Game Chef competition: law, team, and steel. Law becomes the enlightenment era ideological struggles over the laws of nature and laws of men and nations. Team and Steel are present in the wrestling rules that allow tag team action throughout and require the final session matches to be fought in a steel cage with elevated brutality.