T H E T A B L E T O P R O L E P L A Y I N G G A M E
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CREDITS
Artists
Guillerme Asthma, Graham Chaffee, Filip Dudek, Amit Dutta, Josh Finney, Piotr Gajda Rhys Griffiths, Naim Horwood, Alexander Lepera, Rebecca Michalak, Micah Pil
Diogo Rodriguez, Igor Sapotchkin, Cody Vrosh, Worasak Suwannarach Playtesting provided by
David Carroll, Sam Leith, Alexis Long, Charlotte Irrgang, David Culp, David Gish Jonathan Long, Logan Goolsby, Mike Dempsey, Paul Chailloux, Robb Irrgang, Zach Bertram
Gabrielle Meester, Jakob Schmidt, Katie White Based on the Vurt novels by Jeff Noon Rules adapted by Alexander Lepera and Lee Pruitt from the Cypher System Rulebook by Monte Cook
Including excerpts by Monte Cook.
Writing: Alexander Lepera, Lee Pruitt Additonal Writing: Pete Sauber
Editing / Proofreading Logan Decker, Susan Jonaitis, Ian O'Reilly Graphic Design: Alfredo Jimenez, Diogo Rodriguez
Cover Artist: Rhys Griffiths Art Direction: Lee Pruitt Project Management: Lee Pruitt
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
GETTING STARTED
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 4
CHAPTER 2: WELCOME TO MANCHESTER 5
CHAPTER 3: HOW TO PLAY VURT 8
PART 1: CHARACTER CREATION CHAPTER 4: CREATING YOUR CHARACTER 14
CHAPTER 5: MODE DESCRIPTOR 20
CHAPTER 6: CHARACTER TYPE 44
CHAPTER 7: CHARACTER FOCUS 66
PART 2: EQUIPPING YOUR CHARACTER CHAPTER 8: EQUIPMENT 98
CHAPTER 9: BLURBFLIES 110
CHAPTER 10: VEHICLES 118
PART 3: PLAYING THE GAME CHAPTER 11: RULES OF THE GAME 130
CHAPTER 12: OPTIONAL RULES 158
CHAPTER 13: VURT FEATHERS 166
PART 4: THE SETTING CHAPTER 14: THE REAL WORLD 174
CHAPTER 15: THE VURT WORLD 242
CHAPTER 16: FEATHER TRIPS 250
PART 5: GAMEMASTER SECTION CHAPTER 17: BEING THE GAMEMASTER 284
CHAPTER 18: CREATURES & NPCS - THE VURT WORLD 296
CHAPTER 19: CREATURES & NPCS - THE REAL WORLD 326
CHAPTER 20: CYPHERS 359
CHAPTER 21: ADVENTURES 376
PART 6: BACK MATTER INDEX 401
CHARACTER CREATION WALKTHROUGH 404
RESOURCES 405
KICKSTARTER BACKERS 424
2
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Many years ago I dreamed of feathers.
Welcome to the Univurt.
A place where fantasies can come true, as long as you’re willing to pay the price.
A place where borders are made of mist.
A place where doors lead to the interior of the skull
A place where swarms of blurbflies hover, spreading messages of hope and despair.
A place where the vurt gangs, the cops and the corporations fight for control of the people’s desires.
A place where the Game Cat holds the key to the code to the map to the treasure.
A place where the barriers of the skin are broken down, where all modes of being
INTRODUCTION
C H A P T E R 1 Sample file
W E L C O M E T O M A N C H E S T E R
5
WELCOME
TO MANCHESTER
EXTRACTED FROM THE LOOKING GLASS WARS BY R.B. TSHIMOSA
There is now little doubt that one of the most important discoveries of the last century was the ability to record dreams onto a replayable medium, a bio-magnetic tape coated with Phantasm liquid. This liberation of the psyche, in its most advanced form, became known as Vurt. Through the gates of Vurt the people could re-visit their own dreams, or, more dangerously, visit another person’s dream, a stranger’s dream.
It is generally accepted that this ‘doorway between reality and dream’ was first opened by the amorphologist ‘Miss Hobart,’ but the actual origins of the Vurt and the method by which human beings travelled there (via ‘dream- feathers’ which were placed into the mouth) will always be shrouded in mystery.
Much of this frustrating lack of knowledge stems from the nature of the Vurt itself, because the ‘world of dreams’
very quickly achieved a life of its own. The early people of Earth were, in the main, ignorant of this aspect of the invention. It was this ‘self-dreaming’ attribute of the Vurt world that eventually led to that series of battles we now call the Looking Glass Wars. This book will attempt a dispassionate overview of the terrible wars between the dream and reality, a conflict in which both parties would suffer terrible losses before an eventual victor was declared.
All the great theories of warfare can be reduced to a manifestation of greed. Thus it was that the creatures of the dream, as they grew more powerful, started to despise and look down upon the original dreamers, whom they called the mere ‘storytellers’ of planet Earth. Indeed, the creatures of the dream now saw their fantastic realm as a separate world, Planet Vurt. The ‘Vurtuals’ longed for independence.
One particularly weak point in the barrier between dream and reality existed in the psychic air that surrounded Manchester, a rain-drenched city to the north-west of Singland (which was known in those primitive days by the name
‘England’). It was in this fabled city that the incident now called the Pollination took place. This is generally believed to be one of the earliest skirmishes in the Looking Glass Wars…
-Pollen, Jeff Noon
C H A P T E R 2
5
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Y
ou look confused. I don’t blame you, kittling, Manchester takes some getting used to. I ar- rived here as a young man, back in the early days. They laughed at the way I dressed, at how I spoke. They still do, but I perfected my Mancunian accent and I’ve lived here so long at this point that I may as well be a native. I was here before the City Wall was complete—before Manchester seceded and declared itself a city-state.If you’ve just arrived you won’t recall the bizarre days of the Fecundity-10 disaster, when humans, dogs, robots, and even the dead began to produce offspring in all the glorious colors of the rainbow. You might only have heard about Takshaka’s reign of terror as Chief of Police, or the deadly Pollen outbreak that dug so many graves and then blanketed them in flowers.
Then, there is the Vurt. We’re all oh so addicted to it. With Vurt feathers in our mouths we plunge into the wilderness of our dreams and seldom awaken.
We’ve got feathers in our pockets, in our cars, in our beds. Used up, they cover the carpeting and litter the filthy, crowded streets. We’re mad for them, and get- ting madder all the time.
I tasted some of the earliest Vurt feathers, the origi- nals—Blue Lullaby, Honey Suckers, Godhead, Thermo Fish—anything I could get my grimy hands on. I was a featherhead and damn proud of it. My friends and I wanted to follow in the steps of the great Game Cat, our patron saint of Vurt feathers. We read every issue of his magazine, scoured the city for illegal, bootleg dreams, avoiding the MPD like the plague.
Now I understand that those baby-blue, mainstream dreams are for sheep, baby. I don’t bother with them.
I go for darker more nutritious dreams, where real knowledge is waiting to be devoured.
The Vurt world is a real place, and the deeper you go the more of yourself you are exposing to danger.
There are black feathers that can kill you, leaving your rotting body back in the real world. There are Yellow feathers so deep that you might just disappear in them, or lock your mind in an endless loop with no hope of return to the real world.
You look scared. You should be, kittling.
You may or may not have a deep love for Vurt feathers like I do. Sure, everyone but Dodos do feath- ers. I don’t mean recreational use. I mean deep love, pushing you to leave the real world entirely and spend eternity in the Vurt world, exploring the ever expand- ing land of dreams and nightmares. That’s how I feel.
Every day is spent escaping without ever leaving my couch. Pardon me, my settee. I find no joy in anything
our very existence. It allowed us to create the first feathers that would lead us into the group-dreaming experience we all take for granted now.
Kittling? Oh, that’s something the Game Cat always says, and we featherheads love our Game Cat parlance. His reviews are still released weekly, and I haven’t missed an issue in over 30 years. The Game Cat is a guru. Although no one has seen him in decades, his wisdom has saved countless lives of travellers navigating the Vurt world. If you haven’t read Game Cat before, I highly recommend it.
We all do Vurt feathers because it’s an escape. Let’s be honest, kittling. Life is a shit-show—the overcrowd- ing is only getting worse, everyone is feeling cagey and genetics have divided us even farther. 31 modes of being fighting it out, 31 flavors of mixed genetics.
Everyone fighting. Robomanshads against vurtdogs against pure humans. Everyone is divided, the streets have never been more dangerous. Manchester, the most populated place on earth, is a bloody tinderbox.
Manchester is the largest megacity on the planet.
No one saw that coming, believe me. This is now the center of the real world’s economy, the dominant culture, and the origin of everything that has come to define this first half of the 21st century. Construction hasn’t stopped in 30 years. The higher our skyscrapers reach, the less we see those rare patches of Mancu- nian sunlight.
It still rains as much as ever, and a downpour is about the only thing that momentarily clears the skies of those damned blurbflies and their invasive, incessant advertising jingles. There are parts of the Manchester City highway system where the cars are stopped for- ever, hopelessly locked in a cold jam of metal that will soon be paved over. They’re compensated, of course.
Tourists from all over pack our restaurants and hotels, and still the locals complain.
There are simply too many people in Manchester.
Mancunians are rats in a cage, frogs in a slow-boil pot. There’s no space anymore! It’s no wonder we’re reverting to tribalism in many ways. These days there are countless anti-dogman, anti-robovurt, anti-shad- owvurtdog groups. Whatever you are, there’s a group out there on the streets of Manchester that hates you for it. Some have it much worse than others, and that fuels the flames. Everyone hates almost everyone else.
Angry addicts smoke Haze, snort Choke, and slam Fetish. Teeth grind up mouthfuls of Cortex Jammers, veins are filled with Cherry Stoner. The undernour- ished and overweight chew through mountains of Whoompy’s burgers, kill Ultra-Garlic infused curries
