Rear Window is a fascinating piece of cinema directed by one of the greatest talents of the medium, but it struck me as I was watching it the other day how much it relies on a setting that is as dead and gone as Caesar's Rome.
Sourced from Matt'sfilmblog
Shot in 1954 and based on a story written in 1942, the concept, setting and entire premise relies on two fundamental facts about New York in the mid-twentieth century.
First, there is no television. The glass teat does exist, and the basic technology's been around since the late 19th century. Yet it hasn't become a commodity, it isn't in every home. None of these people own a set, and if the protagonist, James Stewart's L.B. Jefferies, had one in his apartment this whole movie needn't have happened. It won't be long before televisions become commonplace; Sony sold over 4 million portable sets worldwide in 1960. It just hasn't happened quite yet.
Second, there is no air conditioning. Again, the technology exists, but it's so far out of reach for the ordinary consumer that the average New Yorker prefers to live with their windows open in the red-hot summer time. Some even sleep out on the fire escape, as the only way to get anything like a decent night's rest. I lived in New York for a short while years ago, and I can personally attest the city's just as hot in summer now as it would have been in the 1940s - but that doesn't matter any more.
From the Brooklyn Eagle in 1934, via the Gothamist:
15,000 persons spent last night on the beach at Coney Island and several thousand more sought relief from the heat in Brooklyn parks and playgrounds. Additional thousands slept on roof tops and fire escapes in the Brownsville, Williamsburg and other crowded sections of Brooklyn. In Manhattan, many slept on the grass in Central Park and on the open piers in the East River.
There's even a brief moment early in the film where you see someone delivering ice for the ice box, which isn't something you'd see nowadays. The ice box, if you don't know, is literally that: a box where you keep ice, so you can put butter and other perishables in cold storage. Once the ice brick you bought melts, you buy another one. Selling ice was a major line of business, in the days before refrigerators. It's something people have been doing since before the birth of Christ, and only came to an end relatively recently.
But here's the kicker: Rear Window can only exist because there is no television, and because there is no air conditioning. As a result, people live outdoors more, open their windows more - which lets Jefferies peer into their private lives, and provides the inciting incident that kicks the entire movie into gear.
New York still exists. If you looked hard enough you could probably find a neighborhood like the one Jefferies lives in. The film's shot on a Paramount stage built especially for the occasion, but it shouldn't be that difficult to find somewhere in Greenwich Village that looks like Rear Window. What you won't find are a lot of open windows. The landlord will have made sure they can't be opened, since the law changed in the 1970s so as to stop kids plummeting to their doom. You also won't find many people looking outdoors; either they're watching television, or their mobile devices, or both.
Rear Window's New York is as dead as dead can be, which is probably one of the reasons why the 1999 remake with Christopher Reeve didn't work.
When designing a setting, think about how people live and what they have to do in order to live well. Not just the big stuff, like which Camarilla faction holds political sway after dark, or whether ghosts are secretly controlling the police force. I mean the small stuff. What do people do for fun? How do they get their food? Do they have light when night falls, and if so how is that managed? What happens when it's hot? What happens in the rainy season? What happens when it snows? What happens to all the shit - literally, the shit - that your average city produces every day? Is someone hauling that off to the tanner's vats, or the farmer's fields? Are there public toilets, public baths? Do people just fling their waste into the streets?
Not that you, as GM, have to answer all those questions, but even answering one or two can lend a lot of atmosphere to your setting. Say that street lights are had by capturing souls and setting them on fire, which is something that happens to the souls of the poorest of the poor who can't afford proper burial. In Sword of the Serpentine's Eversink everyone tries to make statues for their dead, but there are always going to be people who can't manage that, or whose statues break. What if the alternative is an eternity roasting in hellfire so the wealthy can have decent street lighting? What kind of ghost catcher would the city have to employ to make that system work? How would the poor feel about that? Would there be riots, with people demanding that instead of using the poverty-stricken the city burns foreign souls instead? How do the characters feel about that?
Let's go from the general to the slightly more specific. What I want to talk about this time is the Building, as setting and as plot device.
Rear Window wouldn't work if all Jefferies did was stare at the murderer all day. He has an entire world at his disposal, from Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyhearts to the sculptor, the newlyweds, the old married couple, the composer, and dozens of others who appear and disappear like mayflies. They all exist within an artificial concept which I'm going to call The Building, even though the concept extends outside the walls of the structure to the coffee shops and railway stations of the film's 'outside world'. In the film's conceit the Building is literally that, and Jefferies is tied to that spot because he has a broken leg. The audience hardly ever sees anything from any perspective other than Jefferies' room.
Loadingreadyrun recently finished a short series directed by Jacob Burgess called Not A Drop To Drink, a Vampire chronicle set in Vancouver Island. I recommend it to anyone thinking about getting into tabletop but isn't sure how best to do it. However I bring it up now because of something Jacob said in the Q&A.
In answer to the question, was there anything you changed about the campaign due to decisions taken during session 0 (about 1.09.54 in), Jacob replies:
I had nothing planned going in ... I made a city, I wrote a city and all of the people in it ... and then you drop four [players] into it. I really didn't plan anything ahead of time and I used the elements people gave me, what they wanted, what they said some of the characters' desires were because those are sometimes different things and sometimes they even conflict ... to then feed in and fold everything in, so we all created the space we got to play in.
Jacob created a city and all of the people in it. Many settings do the same; Swords of the Serpentine again is a classic example of this, where the GM has an entire city at her disposal ready to be populated.
I'm going to suggest to you now, as GM to GM, that this conceit is the Building. It is the structure in which the action happens, and in which people meet the players, creating plot. It can be as large or small as you need it to be. Some games need entire planets. Some stories can play out within a single structure.
Most of Rear Window happens within one apartment; Jefferies can see other apartments, other people, but he's as locked in as any prisoner in Sing Sing. If he wants to talk to other people, they either have to be in the room with him or he needs to call them on the phone. Half the tension in the final act is precisely because the audience is locked in there with Jefferies; they can't move any more or any further than he can.
The Building is that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. It is player interaction, not NPC action, that makes plot.
For example, in a Cyberpunk session that I'm creating for some friends of mine, I've created:
Zhirafa Alley: For whatever reason the Zhirafa police drones have a bug in their programming about this crossroads. There used to be a CHOOH2 station here, run by some of the Aldecaldos. That went up in the third strafe. Nobody knows what happened to piss the drones off, but they regularly zap moving targets and complaints to Precinct #2 are ignored. Shooting back does not help; it only summons more Zhirafas.
I haven't written any more than that. I shouldn't need to. There's enough here to paint a scene and give the players something to interact with. Whether or not they go any further than that is up to them. They might never encounter Zhirafa Alley. I certainly haven't splattered stats all over the page, any more than (I suspect) Jacob gave each and every one of the dozens of NPCs in Not a Drop full stats. What would be the point?
Of course, if the players start paying close attention to Zhirafa Alley, that's a different story. That's the point at which I start thinking about stats, and motives, and other player-engagement things. Just as (I suspect) Jacob at least partially statted out the more important Not a Drop NPCs, like the Sherriff, as soon as he realized that NPC could become plot-critical.
Moving from the slightly more specific to the very specific, consider this potential Cyberpunk answer to the question, where do the characters live?
If you've existed on the internet for longer than five minutes you've probably seen at least one story or video about Hong Kong's coffin homes:
Sourced from Channel NewsAsia via Mythopolis Pictures
Lest we get too sanctimonious, it's worth reminding ourselves that coffins are for the rich just as much as they are the poor:
Sourced from CNN
Sourced from Here be Barr
With the obvious caveat that the rich can buy much nicer coffins than the one in the Hong Kong video.
This is nothing new. We tend to think that the ideal middle class environment is the detached suburban house with garage, back yard, decent schools nearby for the 2.5 kids we intend to have and so on. We forget that suburbs are a very recent creation - late 19th century, with England's Metroland - and only came about because the train, and later the car, extended our reach. Before them, we could only ever go within walking distance of work and food. People lived in tiny houses or stuffed whole families into single rooms in big cities because there was no other affordable space.
Public transport was an incredible boon that allowed places like London to burst their boundaries, with buses, trains and highways creating new suburban opportunities. Trouble being, nobody's invented anything better since then, and the boomer generation's greying suburbs means installing more highways or better rail networks is almost impossible because grandpa doesn't want that in his backyard. That creates more pressure on the existing habitable space, which in turn creates demand for even the smallest of city habitats.
In the world of CP RED space is at a premium. After the nuke dropped, refugees ran away from the hot zone and set up temporary-but-permanent tent housing in what was the former Beavertown of Rancho Coronado. Many people don't have the luxury of four walls and a roof. As for public transport ...
Surprise, surprise. Contrary to expectations, the Dark Future has not yielded any staggering new developments in transportation. Years of economic strife and civil unrest have discouraged research into new ways to travel—in fact, the very act of travel has become very restricted. Don't expect the inner-city world of the Time of the Red to be much like the 20th century—a network of crowded freeways, packed trains, and swarming airports. Instead, think of it as a patchwork of badly up-kept roads, abandoned airports, and trains plagued by gangs and intermittent service. (Main Book, Everyday Life p 322).
So if you want any kind of work at all you need to live close to where you work. Odds are unless you have a lot of cash in your pocket you can't afford whatever travel networks exist, and that assumes those networks are safe(ish) to use - which they almost certainly aren't. When Rancho Coronado was a Corporate-controlled Beavertown with actual transport options this wasn't a problem. Nowadays, though, when you can't even reliably drive anywhere and Rancho Coronado is basically a tangled slum, we have:
Crystal Rock
Nobody remembers how Crystal Rock got its name, but it probably wasn't a compliment. When refugees first started flooding into Rancho Coronado many of them were temporarily housed in this old sports stadium. Over time, as Rancho Coronado devolved and it became clear there were few options for the forcibly evacuated, enterprising businessmen started adding portable Cubes, as a kind of an upgrade to tent housing and uncovered sleeping pallets. After all, it's not like the Rancho Raiders were ever going to play here again. Cubes piled on top of Cubes, and a couple of Cargo Containers were added to the mix for those who could afford luxury accommodation.
Cubes: You live in a single windowless room with a nice strong lock where you can touch both walls if you spread your arms. Flatpack furniture folds out of the walls, converting your cell from a chair with a desk to a bed with a small television. [Notice how even this is better than the Hong Kong coffin; there's space to sit, and a desk. You could work from home in this environment. It wouldn't be pleasant, but it would be doable.]
Cargo Containers: You'll have plenty of places to store your things, a bed to sleep comfortably, a desk, electricity, a refrigerator, microwave, and sink, protected by the security of a strong lock.
None of this was designed by any kind of qualified architect. It just grew like Topsy, built on top of what was intended to be temporary tent housing inside a sports stadium. Think of it like a ring fort, with the outer ring being the old stadium (now basically a kind of glorified strip mall catering mainly to residents), the next ring being open air tents and sleeping pallets, the next ring being Cubes, and the innermost ring being Cargo Containers. The final two rings are piled on top of each other, on foundations of building rubble and old abandoned Cubes. Sometimes there's a shift underneath that shakes the whole structure. It probably doesn't mean anything. You get from low to tall by means of escalators, which don't always work. Climbing all the way up to Container level when the escalators don't work is a real five-storey-brownstone pain in the ass. Luckily some enterprising folks have set up little mobile kibble wagons at each level, some even with seating, so climbers can take a break when they need to.
Many of the people who live here are in construction and entertainment. Company transport wagons bus them over to Pacifica Playground to the West, where there are plenty of jobs. The ones who don't work in Pacifica either work in one of the nearby construction or factory zones, or they have a hard time getting by.
Utilities (power and water) are handled on-site by filtration plants and solar generators. The Cubes and Containers aren't plumbed-in (though some of the more expensive Containers do have micro-shower cubicles). Instead there are public lavatories and showers inside the Stadium, accessed by private keys issued to tenants. The company that manages the utilities, toilets and showers, River Bend Management, is every tenant's love-to-hate company. Brownouts are common in the hot months, when everyone tries to run a fan or some kind of air conditioning.
Wireless Nodes nearby are run by three different service providers, of which the most popular is Feebus, with its cartoon winged man logo. Feebus isn't more reliable than the others, but it's cheaper.
Gang activity was a big problem in Crystal Rock's early days, but it's less of a problem now thanks in part to BozoByeBye, a loosely organized neighborhood watch. Originally set up by a Solo who's since moved out of Crystal Rock, BozoByeBye was created to deal with a persistent Bozo infestation in the Stadium. Nearly every permanent resident has the BBB app installed in their Agent, and it's generally assumed that when an alert pings someone in the group will deal with the problem. Eventually.
There is no security per se. River Bend keeps a remote eye on its installation and occasionally a Precinct #2 Zhirafa flies over, but there are no armed guards on patrol.
OK, so that's the Building. More than enough information there to keep the players entertained. What about the people?
Let's stick to three per area to keep things as simple as possible. So what are the areas? Broadly: the Stadium, the Tents, the Cubes, the Containers.
Stadium: Khan a cheerful little man in his early thirties (Aikido 6) who owns and operates PatchIt, a clothing repair store, bullet holes a specialty. He's dry cleaner, leatherworker and tailor to all of Crystal Rock. When this was still a sports stadium his store was a souvenir shop, and he hasn't changed the layout much. He also runs a self-defense class for Crystal Rock tenants.
Mulligan a broad-faced woman in her early forties, techie, River Bend's main maintenance operative. Big fan of BBB, will abandon a job in progress to go hunting with her shotgun.
Hooman an acne-scarred Fixer in his mid-twenties, the unofficial pharmacist for Crystal Rock. Limited medical skills, nothing like a ripperdoc or even a competent medtech but he can at least fill you full of narcotics, slap your ass and send you on your way.
Tents: Alice, formerly a dancer with minor exotic body mods (cat), lost her main gig after a bout with cyberpsychosis. Scrapes a living refilling noodle Vendits in the Stadium, dreams of getting back into Pacifica. Local strip joint TropicalMotion keeps offering her work and she keeps turning it down.
El Nagar, a Solo lying low after a really bad gig. Light tattoos indicate Triad affiliations. Enhanced Antibodies, Skin Weave, Vampyres. Keeps a machete and an SMG on him at all times. Likes to play chess.
Sudo, a gambling fanatic who sometimes has a Cube but more often than not is out in the tents again. His main game is poker. His prize possession is his Netrunning deck (500eb), the only thing he's never sold or pawned.
Cubes: Dirty Dirty, affiliated with the Aldecaldos, is Crystal Rock's Shylock. Mid-forties, broad and brawny. If you want a loan and have something to pawn, he's your guy. He doesn't really live in his Cube; it's more of a storage space for the stuff people give him. The lock's much better than average, and you won't get the combination from Dirty Dirty even at gunpoint. Day in, day out, you'll find him sat outside his Cube waiting for business.
Mikey, construction worker (borgware Sigma, heavy lifter), eternally cheerful, to such an extent people wonder if he's permanently stoned. He does a lot of work in dangerous zones; people joke his footprints glow.
Cleo, kibble vendor who runs a stall out on the Cube's rooftops. Korean theme, has a popular sideline in medicinal foods or boyangshik. Always on the lookout for her deadbeat former girlfriend Seo-yun, who's often strung out on Hooman's latest batch.
Containers: Hibiscus, rocker/entertainer at a Pacifica nightclub, Redemption. Age impossible to guess, apparent age twenty-one. They specialize in pre-Bomb classics, more feel-good than high-intensity. One of Khan's dedicated students, and often runs the class if he's not available (Aikido 6).
Wally, corporate shark (literally - shark aquaform), works human resources for a construction firm, Premier General. He's one of the few people in Crystal Rock who was actually born in Rancho Coronado, pre-Bomb. He remembers coming to watch the Rancho Raiders with his dad when this was still a stadium.
Bobbi J, media, street scribe with a local music scene focus, a regular vidcast, Spread the Word, known in Rancho but not elsewhere. Popularly thought to have links with Network 54 talent scouts. Almost pro-level dancer, technicolor hair.
That's it. That's the Building. That's all you need.
Insert players, watch plot develop. Will they help Cleo save Seo-yun? Go Bozo hunting with Mulligan? What's the deal with El Nagar, and will some heavy hitters come looking for the Solo down on his luck? Is Dirty Dirty going to have to break Sudo's leg before Sudo coughs up the cash? Is Mikey borderline cyberpsycho or is his permanent happiness actually the real deal? Jesus, what is up with Feebus today - reception's patchy as hell. Will River Bend ever fix the fracking toilets - and what is causing that stink anyway? (My money's on a dead Bozo Mulligan chased down an HVAC vent, but you never know ...)
Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment