Sunday 2 August 2015

The VURT RPG is something that exists

A Kickstarter campaign is currently underway for Vurt: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game. As the title implies, this is a roleplaying game based on Jeff Noon's seminal 1993 cyberpunk novel Vurt and its sequels.



Vurt (which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel in 1993) takes place in a dystopian future where people can escape into other realities ("vurts") by ingesting feathers. However, these other realities are not virtual (as first though) but alternate universes brought into being by the thoughts and dreams and nightmares of humans. Noon followed up Vurt with a sequel, Pollen (1995), and a prequel, Nympthomation (1997), as well as Automated Alice (1996), a semi-stand-alone novel that both lays the groundwork for the other books and links them to the works of Lewis Caroll. Short stories from the setting also appear in Pixel Juice (1998).

The Vurt RPG will be produced by Ravendesk Games, who have been working with Noon for four years on trying to bring the project to life. The plan is to produce a large core rulebook full of artwork (check out the Kickstarter page for more, most of it is cool) and, with additional stretch goals, a supporting line of adventures and sourcebooks. The game will use the Cypher System developed by Monte Cook for Numenera and The Strange.

As of this time of writing, the Kickstarter has already raised more than half of the initial requested goal, with almost a full month to go, so it looks likely that this will be a success.

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