After the brain-scrambling joy of GenCon (and the 16 hour drive each way to and from) and then another 20 hours on the road to and from my sister-in-law's place, I've got a new game on the brain.

Originally, I was going to dedicate this month to an expansion and revision of AssassinX, my 24 hour RPG, to get it ready for publication in time for next year's GenCon. However, along the ride, I started musing about my other obsessions than murder, bloodshed and violence - drugs and hallucinations. I've been a William S Burroughs fan since the tender age of 16, and before that, a fan of the movie VideoDrome. And that is the territory where Junk Dreams seeks to travel now.

Unfortunately, like AssassinX, I can't see this ever being a commercial success. Whereas AssassinX involves bloody gore, Junk Dreams requires that the characters be junkies - heroin addicts seeking a mostly-safe place to take their next fix in order to return to the world they have left behind.

"Ever seen a bum, probably all messed up on drugs, stumbling about? Sometimes they awnder up to people as if they know them, and begin to speak jibberish at them excitedly, as if they were trying to communicate something incredibly vital, yet wholly untranslatable to our own frame of reference?"

Junk Dreams is about the world you can only interact with while 'on the nod', under the influence of heroin and its close cousins.While on the nod, you can see the world as others cannot, and you can interact with the strangers who live in that version of reality - the mugwumps and other strange Burroughs-esque creatures that exist exclusively in a state of drugged hallucinations. The 'wildlife' of this world is tragically apropos for the junkies who visit them - con-men, dealers, information brokers, traders in illicit vice, and other sullied affairs. The mugwumps (name to be changed) are universally paranoid, unpleasant, quiet creatures who look for opportunities in using those who visit them. The reality s that these creatures are a byproduct of the visitors to the world - the creations of paranoid and junk-sick minds who realize that the fix is only temporary, and they will have to find more as soon as they leave in order to return. Thus, there are other types of wildlife here too, based on other needs and desires of generations of junkies - from the dreams of ancient shamans, to the idols and loa of modern urban primitives. But the origin of these creatures, the wildlife of the junkscapes, is a secret of the game, not handed out to the players, but used in the design stages to develop the local wildlife.

But there is more to the wildlife of the junkscapes - truly sinister creatures who use this world to change the other world. Starting in the early 20th Century, goverment organizations started experimenting with drug use and altered states. The end result of these experiments are twofold. The Control Machines exist here now - playing humans like puppets, controling minds into a soporific and quiet existence of ignorance and bliss. The Control Machines are exactly what the government was hoping to be able to create through the drug programs, and thus it is exactly what they found there. The CIA maintains several teams of operatives that work within the junkscapes in order to supress those addicts who have seen the Control Machines and who now work against them. The rapid spread of HIV and HepC through injection drug use has little to do with the diseases themselves, but is a weapon used by the operatives in their work to control and suppress the junkie population.

Players will play characters who are junkies and who have discovered that there is much more to the world than what they can see when between fixes. In the drug-addled world, they have new found powers to change what is around them, or even to change themselves. Around them are armies of sleeping people who don't know the threats posed by the Control Machines, people who they cannot awaken while in their junk fixes, and who don't listen to them when they are not on the nod.

The 'normal' world in Junk Dreams is a darker, more despondent version of our own. In this world, the players have little ability to enact change or even to protect themselves. The mechanics of the game will make playing in the 'normal' world quite dangerous - honing the sense of the struggle required to score your next fix and find a safe place to take it in a world where everyone is out to get the junkies. People with connections and money, resources of any kind, find themselves unable to maintain them because they will estrange some through their own drug habits, and because the Control Machines use these resources to track down and eliminate those who oppose them. In time, the 'normal' characters will all be recluses, bums, homeless junkies and addicts eking out an existence to score their next fix. Game play in the 'normal' world will be painfully bleak, with the GM calling all the shots as in many traditional RPGs.

The 'junkscapes' are a place of potential and change. Events in the junkscape are much more mutable, with the characters having the ability to change elements of the environment as play progresses, making junkscape play significantly more narrativist in feeling, as the characters earn the ability to enact change - after all, if this space can only be seen through drug use, it will in time reflect the visions and peculiarities of your trip. Characters will earn tokens in play that can be used at the simplest level to enhance rolls or actions, or even to do 'the impossible' in some situations. Some characters will develop talents that allow them to change themselves or others directly, while others will see their junk selves as stronger, faster, or more acutely aware than their 'normal' selves. All of these abilities require the expenditure of these tokens, but more advanced expenditures are possible - actually changing the world around them, creating new story tangents, manipulating events through force of will, and so on. The ability to actually change the narration of the story is not explained to the players, but becomes available to the characters as they advance and learn about the world around them. Sooner or later, someone will wish for something, and instead of ignoring it, the GM asks for a number of tokens from the player, and changes the storyline as suits.

---

I've been pounding out the way the world works for the past three days in my head, and more will come in this design journal. I don't have the actual system for the game yet, as I dig through the various systems I've written over the years, as well as those I've played, and try to find what would suit this best. I've also got a bunch of other material I have to delve into once the system is decided... One of the major goals is very similar to the various storyteller games - to create an urban environment for adventure gaming, while reducing the number of major NPCs in the setting to keep it manageable to the GM - in Vamprie, all that matters is you and the other vampires; in Junk Dreams, the important people are the other junkies in town with their agendas, the 'native' mugwumps in the scene, and the Control Machines and agents.

"immersion levels" - indicating how much interaction you can have with the junkscapes based on the drugs you are taking - more powerful abilities to change the world around you are not available unless you are deeply immersed, but less immersion also means the wildlife of the junkscape will have less impact on you.

violence - big-time violence generally reduces your immersion level rapidly - nothing like getting shot at, shooting at someone, or killing someone messily to make you come down quickly. This reduces the tendency of players to resort to violence in game, as well as protecting the Control Machines from the simplest methods of eliminating them.

Mixing drugs - while heroin is the tool that gets you in, other drugs are also very useful - cocaine in order to increase your ability to concentrate once on the junk (trying to counter the other effects of the smack) which makes speedballs a popular and dangerous way of entering the junkscapes - LSD rapidly increases your immersion level, but lasts far longer than either heroin or cocaine, making frisco speedballs (Heroin, Cocaine & LSD) a strong tool for entry, but making it very difficult and dangerous to re-enter once the heroin has worn off... and more of course.

The Mugwumps - have to rename these of course, but these are the classic junk-creatures of Burroughs' stories that live in seedy bars and find interesting ways to con and use the users.

Other junk-dreams - modern urban loa and ancient totems from those who influence the junkscapes in their own ways - such as the modern primitives who enter and influence the junkscapes through endorphins released by body rituals; the shamans who used peyote or yage or toad-venom to enter their shamanic spaces; and so on.