Intro text
SOMEWHERE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY…
As any American could have told you, America was the greatest country on earth. Its streets were paved with gold, its power grid was fed by clean and cheap nuclear fission. Vaccinations were available for all, everyone had a college education, and music — rock, jazz, blues, country, Western — rolled across the nation like waves on the shore. America built rockets to the moon and invented LSD. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Friends, I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, Star Wars, Gunsmoke, Star Trek. Graceland and Disneyworld and Times Square. America had Elvis, the King of Rock, and Michael, the King of Pop, and America beat the Nazis and America had the Bomb and America held the Soviets at bay.
But now America is gone — sunk into the wine-dark sea, too good for this world. With it went peace, prosperity, and the Hollywood Dream. The Soviets spread across Europa and the Iron Curtain fell heavy from Ireland to Iberia, from Paris to Rome to Minsk. Africa and the Pacific Rim quail in terror: will they too be swallowed by the Collectivized behemoth, or will they stand fast. Whither the People’s Republic of China?
Both the Chinese and the Soviets hunt down the few remaining Americans. They say there used to be a big military base in Korea, and one near Saigon, but they’re gone, now. The tiny populations of Europan expats in Hong Kong and Manila might shelter a few disguised Americans; some may hide on the streets of Addis Ababa or Abuja. The bulk of the American population is missing, presumed drowned, but there are always stories.
So-and-so flew over a Sargasso of hundreds of American ships moored together in a vast floating city. Somebody saw a green New Las Vegas rising up from somewhere in Inner Mongolia, and somebody else said Australia was gone too and they were keeping it secret. The Americans built a Death Star and right now they’re in orbit around Venus, working out a way to blow up Communism without hurting any innocents. No proof, never any proof.
You are Americans. As far as you know, you are the last Americans. The USSR has an entire corps dedicated to hunting you down, and to evade them you’ve been traveling to one neutral country after another, pleading for asylum. No nation will admit you into its borders, and so you are forced to move from one International Airport to another, keeping one step ahead of the Soviets, trying to find a home.
* Take a chopper out of Saigon and ride a raft of milk cartons up the Nha Be river to hide in Cambodia!
* Try and fail to blend in with crowds of people who all have very similar hair colors, skin colors, and heights, none of which match yours!
* Flee from the Soviet officers tasked with tracking down the last of the Americans!
* Search out the hidden city of New America, floating somewhere on the Great American Ocean!
* Flail around trying ineffectually to communicate in very bad Japanese with people who speak very bad English!
SETTING: Each of the four sessions will take place in a different International Airport: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Delhi, and Tasmania, respectively. Player-characters may leave the airport, but only for short periods; the interiors of Japan, China, India, et cetera, are closed. All bets are off during the fourth and final session. Note that this restriction supercedes the normal Trollbabe rules which put travel destinations and locales squarely in the hands of the players. These International Airports are like small arcologies, with divers businesses and populations; q.v. D’Aubainne International Airport in Over the Edge
RULES: The game will use Ron Edwards’s game “Trollbabe” which the following modifications. Substitute “American” for “trollbabe.” Substitute “global magic and American magic” for “human magic and trollish magic.” Substitute “pop culture” and “American music” for the “found object” and “remembered spell” reroll opportunities.
CHARACTERS: Characters may be of any creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, or political party, but they must be from somewhere between August 9, 1945, and September 11, 2001, somewhere between Portland, Maine, and San Diego, California. Hawaiians, Canadians, and Confederates require special dispensation. Use standard Trollbabe rules for character creation. Please ensure your American has several goals, most or all of which could theoretically be achieved within an International Airport. NB that many things are possible within the spacious, well-traveled confines of an International Airport. NB also that while an American who speaks Japanese, Cantonese, Tongan, *and* Hindi runs counter to the spirit of the game, a bilingual world traveler is a happier world traveler. NB finally that weirdness and diversity are encouraged.
MAGIC: Fighting is fighting and talking is talking, but the magic systems require a little more explanation. Global magic involves contacting local small gods, spirits, elementals, et cetera. These spirits are omnipresent and each have a small, specific purview. They are organized in a hierarchy — I’m ripping off Exalted’s Celestial Bureaucracy here. Through prayer, sacrifice, and promises of favors and service, these spirits can be cajoled into performing services. Their powers revolve around physical manipulation of whatever facet of reality is in their purview, but within that framework they can be very potent.
American magic is entirely different, and involves Culture, that ineffable quality which binds humanity together into a coherent whole within the noosphere. It exists wholly in the numinous realm of ideas, and while it cannot affect base matter, it can have tremendous effects on the mental plane: thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and drives are all within its power. The only physical changes American magic can work are upon the caster, and even then it’s more limited than using global magic to wear a loa. American magic is also more ephemeral; while the raisins conjured through global magic will continue to exist until they’re eaten or composted, personality changes wrought by American magic last only a few hours or days. The more drastic the effect, the more brief its duration.
Note that global and American magic do not often overlap. A shaman calling on the Coca-Cola loa could rot an enemy’s teeth and soften their bones, or bury them under a mound of shaved ice, while an American magus could use a Coke jingle to instill in them an all-consuming thirst only Diet Cherry Coke can sate, or create an illusory Santa Claus to distract. Or, to put it in D&D terms, global magic is conjuration and transmutation, American magic is enchantment and illusion.
Spirits are alien to the American magic schema. While a global shaman might summon forth Heaven-Under-Glass, the God of the Peepshow, and converse with it to learn what had happened in the airport strip bar the night before, the American magus would be forced to use more indirect methods, such as finding an eyewitness and plucking the secrets out from their mind. An American magus can create the illusion of conversing with spirits — pulling images of Lucille Ball and Top Cat and Ted Koppel from the ether — these imagos are empty and without intelligence; they echo lines from old television shows and a conversation with one is at best like an ELIZA transcript.
However, one way global and American magic synergize is by using the former to call forth a god and then, rather than sacrificing to it in the normal manner, using American magic to trick it into performing some service.
The main downside to American magic is that everyone using it eventually goes crazy. However, as everybody knows, Americans are crazy already. The only other group with anywhere near the mastery of American magic possessed by Americans are those involved in the Bollywood film industry.
EXAMPLES:
Global magic:
Conjure and abjure the god of chocolate-covered almonds to smite your Skittles-eating infidel enemy.
Pray to the local spirit overseeing a cart of janitorial supplies to provide you with a shave, haircut, iron your suit, et cetera.
Beg the Newsprint Elemental to give you the details of some relevant news item concealed within the huge variety of newspapers and magazines (many in languages unfamiliar to you) for sale at a newsstand.
Trade a hot meal from a god of soups and sandwiches for the sacrifice of a token sum of money.
American magic:
Kick your foe in the soul, knocking loose his sense of self-preservation and stowing it inside a handy action movie, thus inducing in him acts of suicidal recklessness.
Compel everyone around you to participate in a song-and-dance musical comedy number (and create the appropriate musical accompaniment).
Change the perceptions of those around you such that you appear to be a few bars of a Buddy Holly song hummed by someone nearby (making you effectively invisible).
Pour into your target the personality of Homer Simpson or Archie Bunker, stirring constantly such while the target overflows and gets personality all over the floor, what remains inside the target is a mixture of the original personality and your contaminant.
FAQ:
Q. What year is it?
A. It’s sometime between 1945 and 2001. There are many anachronisms; there is little to no Internet, but every episode of the Flintstones is available on DVD and reruns of Friends and I Love Lucy are on all the time.
Q. How long ago did America sink, or disappear, or whatever?
A. Not long, between six months and a year. Where the PCs were when they learned it happened, and how they reacted, and why they weren’t on America at the time are all up to them.
Q. How long have we the PCs known one another?
A. If you want to be childhood chums, that’s fine, or you could have just met. Regardless, as the last Americans, your stories are now inescapably intertwined.
Q. Do we have money?
A. Though Wall Street is long gone, VISA and AmEx and Mastercard are all still accepted by every ATM and most vendors.
Q. What happened to the US Armed Forces stationed outside the Americas?
A. They’re gone, man. Maybe where they went will come up in play, maybe not.
Q. What about Canada and Nicaragua and Brazil and Cuba and Mexico and Paraguay?
A. They’re gone, too. People don’t worry so much about them, though.
Q. Why hasn’t someone invaded Japan or Australia, since the US isn’t around to protect them from China et cetera any more? Same question, but for Israel. How did the USSR expand into “Europa” so far and so fast, and why Europe? Why not the Middle East? Why hunt down Americans?
A. Look! Behind you!
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles. (War/Culture/Ritual)
Six-String Samurai. (Only one man could kill this many Russians)
Over the Edge, by Jonathan Tweet. (D’Aubainne International Airport)
Unknown Armies Second Edition, by Greg Stolze et al. (Postmodern Magic)
Trollbabe, by Ron Edwards. (Rules)
octaNe, by Jared Sorenson. (Psychotronic feel)
Hitherby Dragons, by R. Sean Borgstrom. (Killer McDonalds Ninja-Cashiers)
Something by Grant Morrision, I’m Not Sure What Yet. Possibly the Invisibles, Which Would be Kind of Ironic.