SLA INDUSTRIES
by Nightfall Games
SLA is copyright Nightfall Games.
I make no claim of ownership of any of their products, images, text, etc.
SLA Industries is somewhere between BladeRunner, Shadowrun (which is BladeRunner meets Lord of the Rings) and Clive Barker (Books Of Blood / Hellraiser) with quite a lot of Stephen King for good measure. But mostly it is the 80s consumer technology revolution (ie: fax machines) and late 70s / 80s subculture (ie: David Bowie on acid). There is also quite a lot of HR Giger in here once you scratch beyond a rain-sodden grime encrusted rusty bullet-hole bus-stop surface.
Surprisingly, this roleplaying game seriously opened up my heart and imagination. I live here in Mort City; I am from here. This one is more personal even than the World of Darkness. SLA is the World of Progress, which is to say; nothing ever changes except perhaps our psychelogical grip on the slippery constant downward slide toward ever-encroaching doom bringing us continuously a step closer to utter destruction. We don't expect to live that long because we are going to die trying to save what crappy existence we do have.
At time of writing, SLA is 25 years old this month! (March 2016). I have 1st ed rulebook from brand new as soon as it was available. It came to me by magick because magick objects find their rightful owners.
Before we go any further, the best way to begin exploring SLA is by copypasting some of my entries into the SLA official website which opened in 2011. The website admin / Nightfall team asked the question by opening a thread called:
YOUR World Of Progress
The personalization of SLA is a major feature, intentionally so, of this rpg.
Surprisingly, this roleplaying game seriously opened up my heart and imagination. I live here in Mort City; I am from here. This one is more personal even than the World of Darkness. SLA is the World of Progress, which is to say; nothing ever changes except perhaps our psychelogical grip on the slippery constant downward slide toward ever-encroaching doom bringing us continuously a step closer to utter destruction. We don't expect to live that long because we are going to die trying to save what crappy existence we do have.
At time of writing, SLA is 25 years old this month! (March 2016). I have 1st ed rulebook from brand new as soon as it was available. It came to me by magick because magick objects find their rightful owners.
Before we go any further, the best way to begin exploring SLA is by copypasting some of my entries into the SLA official website which opened in 2011. The website admin / Nightfall team asked the question by opening a thread called:
YOUR World Of Progress
The personalization of SLA is a major feature, intentionally so, of this rpg.
Copypastes from my 2011 crew's entries into the official SLA website:
Razhel
SCL 10
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2011 12:39 am
Posts: 229
Re: Your World of Progress
Cyberpunk influences flavour WoP, from Naked Lunch through Halo Jones to Manga; using the rulebook as a launchpad, a backdrop, innovating far beyond the reaches of publishable fiction.
Anti-grav hab-blocks filled with better-than-life holo-com zombies lined in rows like prison cells, worlds behind closed doors spoill over into public conduits until Shift hour calls a curfew and Jumpers dare to play between the grids. Tin can sanctuaries offer little protection from smuggled offworld psychedelicatessen cults spilling viral spore through lock-down zones on terrorist groups out to prove the worlds gone crazy and forge a name for endless forgettable logo's.
Eco-warrior guerilla-gardeners spraying gm greenspace night-forests amidst riot-gang berserkers. Old world artifacts peddled at high prices to colony bidders require diggers in the deadzones where tv crews dare not tread. Anyone wanna play our game?
Nah, they're all freaked out enough by Shadowrun already too much to dare our darkness.
We played alone in our bedrooms at night by candlelight with goth-metal nightclubs blasting through headphones, playing telepathic misadventrues with others like us elsewhere in imagination. All the nasties we could handle out-hardcored the local roleplay heroes with their safe little plastic models and lead headed ready meals delivered by skybikers in that cross-over zone between escapist fantasy and nihilistic reality where our elders shot up and sold our dreams to fund gangland routines that we couldn't see ourselves fitting into. All we had left was the rulebook that said 'chip in the head for a war-wage' and it clicked in our heads like a pack of rabid muties crashing the fence.
Then came along videogame and we forgot our teenage kicks, left school and took off to see what is left of this world by foot. Many years passed out before we came around again to tell of our tales, and not much has changed except this time, united by websites we find those alien others who programmed our minds and we wonder at what they would make if they only knew what they had started in us, dwelling in cracks between a soulless society and the promise of another repressive tomorrow that no-one can afford to live.
So we took to our guns and cut blazing through the night until childhood hopes were rusted and dusted, and whats left is left of center and still blazing, endless fire because they cannot cut us down, they cannot cut us down and still we dare to kill our makers. Its the look on your face as you shoot the bitch in the head well past its dead point, just to make sure. That's what the camera's call bite point and they cannot get enough. So we keep on coming, recycling the trash and building new layers to forget yesterdays failures.
That's what we call progress. You will too when you're ready. When you've been through too much and the rules that they forced you to obey are dissolved away, away, so much that the badder you are, the freer they make you, grant you the rights to be as twisted as girls because the anti-heroes keep the ratings soaring. The game had a sixteen rate but we took it to the X and we never came down.
_________________
To survive Mort the kids have to be brought up differently to how kids grow up on Earths consumerist monocult. Kids growing up on Mort are not lied to and protected from the harsh realities of Life. To do so would make them into victims. To survive on Mort, you either get very good at hiding and watching it all on omnipresent tv, or else you learn to kick back from an early age.
On Earth, kids know about guns before they know about sex, because there is a social taboo on earth that fucks peoples heads up. On Mort, this taboo does not exist. Only maybe with the ones whose heads are full of tv propaganda and I get the idea that on Mort, tv propaganda is less aimed at dumbing down a society and more aimed at telling them as it is - it's kill or be killed out there, outside this tin can there is a monster lurking, and sharpening its claws, and it wants your fleshy little meat for lunch, and its on its way here now buddy, the tv just mentioned that its right up your street...
Its like the Fremen of Arrakis, people don't have time for bullshit because bullshit = non-survival. It's a harsh and hardcore world that creates harsh and hardcore people. So as the extremity increases and becomes normality, what the fuck are people going to do for kicks when they get bored of the way things are?
Luckily its such a strange world, warped and twisted in ways beyond Earth (something like the universe in Immortel Ad Vitam gives an insight to it), that there is something for everybody. All you have to do is go down there and search for it. And try not to cross that line between 'operative' and 'renegade' while doing so. Well I guess, for the ones with imagination. The meat-heads just buy armour and bigger guns and sit in the bar remorselessly drinking over how many deadbeats they wasted this paycheck.
And the sci-fi element, totally controlled by SLA and Slayers agenda, whatever that is. WE know that the head honcho's have personal teleport beams and hardlight entertainment facilities and war-droids, and they don't actually need us, apart from the fact they are immortal and we are their popular entertainment channel for when they get bored and need some innovation. And that's us, and countless planets like us, upon which - so we are told - war rages.
Into dream go the Ebon, and being what they are, they bring back dreams of war. At least that's what the rulebooks say. But its short-hand you know it is, for so many countless things, Lovecraftian myths of horror lurking down below from the subconscious, safely packaged for consumer markets, its shorthand for all the other nasties that nobody sane dare write down, because planet Earth has orthodox Orwellian state mind control (and mind control technologies) and a war-on-terror budget that would psycheval probably most of us in here directly to the Bay.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
Razhel
SCL 10
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2011 12:39 am
Posts: 229
Re: Your World of Progress
Grimachu, I found your debrief about CS1 very helpful. I hate buying books if I don't already know whats in them which is why I don't buy many books any more, plus my bookshelf is full of shit I'm too nostalgic to part with. Your post has sold it to me. I read it and thought, yeah I can work with that. I know that place already somehow, its how Home must feel.
What Whitt says about how we had to develop our own WoP, and that there's a thread here about it too I don't know who started that, its awesome - it makes us feel like this IS our world, we are co-creating it. All the crazy Kultesque things we bring to it, its great that we have a chance here to show the development team what they did to us and what we have done with and to their changeling child.
So many RPGs go in for overkill and produce an endless amount of material that fills in the gaps necessary for creativity left by the limited space in the core rule book that there's hardly any room left to do anything but play pregenerated adventures the way they were intended by the copyright owners. If I wanted to do that I'd be on a videogame forum. I think thats the mistake that White Wolf made after Rein-Hagen left, the money option meant selling the fans short. They had some great ideas but when they revamped it, they created a history line that most of the WoD players I have encountered seem somehow bound by. And its nothing at all like what the original visionary setting seemed to offer promise that it was about.
RPG is the realm of imagination and one reason that Mort is so fun to explore is because so much of it is unexplored, there's stuff going on that even the rulers of the planet don't have a clue about, much less the game designers. It's a real place and you didn't make it up, you just saw a few snashots - enough to awaken and focus our minds on it so we could take a few more. Thats what role-play is, insights into a real place that we all share among us.
So I know there are more future publications planned, but please remember this - what worked so well in the original is that there were gaps in the logic, and to make coherent sense of it the reader had to go within themselves, to do a self search, and figure out a lot of it. In doing so, imagination was trained and innovation bloomed. This is not the same thing as creating shoddy books though!
Too many expansion modules for rpg are so sleek that the reader does not have to think for themselves. Its painting by numbers instead of inventing art movements, and the readers are still chasing that original buzz that got them hooked in the first place. And most of that buzz was because they were being teased into visualising the game universe for themselves and all the different versions of it that can be possible. If you heed these words, maybe just maybe the later publications will be able to hold onto this vibe, instead of cartoon repackaged crap like the recent White Wolf cash ins have been.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
ximr
SCL 10
Joined: Mon Feb 14, 2011 1:45 pm
Posts: 139
Re: Your World of Progress
I love the sci-fi gritty urban reinvention of the archetypal and classical mythology. Animal heads, the creatures in the illustrations - pictures tell a thousand words, I was inspired by these as much as the text. Minotaurs from the labyrinth below our feet. It is Lovecraftian, I found the nightmare cthulhonic powers sought by magi and cultists to be symbolised by the evolutionary cycles of aliens and entering the White space. It is R'lyeh dreamtime incarnate into scifi.
The first time I read the rulebook I came away with a different world to the intended one I discovered when I re-read it. I saw that:
By the writers and development team not having made it too 'exact' and 'defined' it is possible to interpret the same setting differently, so that layers of meaning are overlaid like layers of paint and grime on pot-holed tarmac streets and bullet-holed concrete infrastructure now doorless, windowless, inhabited by any who dare. Halloween Jack is not merely the pumpkin headed scythe wielding jester, a headless horseman of dark urban decay, he is the Bowie character who slides down a rope because the elevator is broke, from Diamond Dogs which weirdness when you first encounter it is awe inspiring, and that soundtrack, 1984, is caught up and woven into the mesh of SLA's morbid world.
Layers of meaning and layers of world like a philip K dick distopia, like BLADE RUNNER hints at when you feel its textures and watch the background detail promising that this is a full world, you already know it. Layers like raggedy clothes worn as masks over bodies forgotten so hard they are sexless and devoid of any personality but for that which is painted onto them by the observers interpretation and whatever, whoever you have to be on the day. Multiple levels of reality so that the world is made up of syncronicities between them, and we interpret them as we need, as we can, if we can, if it has not all already freaked us out to the point of irrational insanity. Syncronicities between layers and contradictions between layers. It is a classic writers trick used for emphasis and ambience; orange ball in a blue room, blue ball in a blue room. This taught me so much!
The multiple versions of a world built on the useless trash of yesterday because progress demands it, and yet for most, the vast majority shaping the hive mind, we cannot afford to live in that fresh new glossy consumer production line market that calls us failures if we are less than glossy consumer market production line people fresh out of our packaging. For the most of us we are scum and decay, making good of what we have which is to assemble broken dolls for our play, Sebastians Game, and these are frankenstien dolls with a mind of their own and no feelings to prevent them eating yours alive.
So the majority hide in their illusion, locked in behind closed doors and fearful that the world they are watching on television is the world they will find if they leave the comfort of their tv phone in mail order lifestyle. Because monsters climb and monsters crawl and they come through the walls. The brave few explore armed with guns they get the only way they can - sign on and join the corporation. For those who don't, they stew in the juices of their own madness, trapped in their boxes going stir crazy. You can feel it when you enter peoples houses, your head pops with the pressure of the mad paradigm maintained to protect their fragile egos from seeing through the veils of a confident voice on television and have to see the world as it truly is; chemical stained dirt and grime with no future at all and no past worth remembering.
This theme seems to spread like dry rot through all of the parallel versions of real until we are forced to face the reality that it is the reality, that everything else is built of yesterdays soggy hardboard,even the moods we thought represented us. So in this fugue of feeling alive and wanting to make a change, we surround ourselves with warriors and feel comradeship and pills, anything to change the rules, to shift the bleak human condition we are faced with.
I saw that the city is layers and layers and layers of rotting infrastructure with the new stuff on top and the old decaying down there beneath us full of mutants and hybrids, aliens and experiments, a place where lurking psychosis has gone to find others of its kind or as near as possible to it.
Everything is going on down there, everything. Because each area of another persons madness that bends the walls and causes us to live within its hue while we step into its bubble, is hard to describe upon arising and so we stereotype in shorthand for the sake of appearing to be keeping it all together.
I'm reading it again and its different this time also.
And my head is popping again.
_________________
All of the electrical technology is sealed into a flexible translucent rubber wrapper to make it waterproof. Plastic outer clothes are essential and far more stylish than the rain macs found on earth.
Because soap fumes are pumped into the atmosphere by industrial machines in the hearts of the cities, the rain often tastes of detergant and everything is clean.
There are awnings everywhere, and dry air blowers in shop doorways and in phone booths. Posh houses have them too, and tumble-dryers in the hall. Wellington boots are the most popular footwear.
_________________
grew up watching monsters on tv, but the mirror says the monster is in me
mirror crackles shards as sharp as teeth, childhood hides screaming scars beneath
“Dad! Channel 66 says you’re dead! It showed your picture”
“I told you son, tv always lies”
Razhel
SCL 10
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2011 12:39 am
Posts: 229
Re: Your World of Progress
Cyberpunk influences flavour WoP, from Naked Lunch through Halo Jones to Manga; using the rulebook as a launchpad, a backdrop, innovating far beyond the reaches of publishable fiction.
Anti-grav hab-blocks filled with better-than-life holo-com zombies lined in rows like prison cells, worlds behind closed doors spoill over into public conduits until Shift hour calls a curfew and Jumpers dare to play between the grids. Tin can sanctuaries offer little protection from smuggled offworld psychedelicatessen cults spilling viral spore through lock-down zones on terrorist groups out to prove the worlds gone crazy and forge a name for endless forgettable logo's.
Eco-warrior guerilla-gardeners spraying gm greenspace night-forests amidst riot-gang berserkers. Old world artifacts peddled at high prices to colony bidders require diggers in the deadzones where tv crews dare not tread. Anyone wanna play our game?
Nah, they're all freaked out enough by Shadowrun already too much to dare our darkness.
We played alone in our bedrooms at night by candlelight with goth-metal nightclubs blasting through headphones, playing telepathic misadventrues with others like us elsewhere in imagination. All the nasties we could handle out-hardcored the local roleplay heroes with their safe little plastic models and lead headed ready meals delivered by skybikers in that cross-over zone between escapist fantasy and nihilistic reality where our elders shot up and sold our dreams to fund gangland routines that we couldn't see ourselves fitting into. All we had left was the rulebook that said 'chip in the head for a war-wage' and it clicked in our heads like a pack of rabid muties crashing the fence.
Then came along videogame and we forgot our teenage kicks, left school and took off to see what is left of this world by foot. Many years passed out before we came around again to tell of our tales, and not much has changed except this time, united by websites we find those alien others who programmed our minds and we wonder at what they would make if they only knew what they had started in us, dwelling in cracks between a soulless society and the promise of another repressive tomorrow that no-one can afford to live.
So we took to our guns and cut blazing through the night until childhood hopes were rusted and dusted, and whats left is left of center and still blazing, endless fire because they cannot cut us down, they cannot cut us down and still we dare to kill our makers. Its the look on your face as you shoot the bitch in the head well past its dead point, just to make sure. That's what the camera's call bite point and they cannot get enough. So we keep on coming, recycling the trash and building new layers to forget yesterdays failures.
That's what we call progress. You will too when you're ready. When you've been through too much and the rules that they forced you to obey are dissolved away, away, so much that the badder you are, the freer they make you, grant you the rights to be as twisted as girls because the anti-heroes keep the ratings soaring. The game had a sixteen rate but we took it to the X and we never came down.
_________________
To survive Mort the kids have to be brought up differently to how kids grow up on Earths consumerist monocult. Kids growing up on Mort are not lied to and protected from the harsh realities of Life. To do so would make them into victims. To survive on Mort, you either get very good at hiding and watching it all on omnipresent tv, or else you learn to kick back from an early age.
On Earth, kids know about guns before they know about sex, because there is a social taboo on earth that fucks peoples heads up. On Mort, this taboo does not exist. Only maybe with the ones whose heads are full of tv propaganda and I get the idea that on Mort, tv propaganda is less aimed at dumbing down a society and more aimed at telling them as it is - it's kill or be killed out there, outside this tin can there is a monster lurking, and sharpening its claws, and it wants your fleshy little meat for lunch, and its on its way here now buddy, the tv just mentioned that its right up your street...
Its like the Fremen of Arrakis, people don't have time for bullshit because bullshit = non-survival. It's a harsh and hardcore world that creates harsh and hardcore people. So as the extremity increases and becomes normality, what the fuck are people going to do for kicks when they get bored of the way things are?
Luckily its such a strange world, warped and twisted in ways beyond Earth (something like the universe in Immortel Ad Vitam gives an insight to it), that there is something for everybody. All you have to do is go down there and search for it. And try not to cross that line between 'operative' and 'renegade' while doing so. Well I guess, for the ones with imagination. The meat-heads just buy armour and bigger guns and sit in the bar remorselessly drinking over how many deadbeats they wasted this paycheck.
And the sci-fi element, totally controlled by SLA and Slayers agenda, whatever that is. WE know that the head honcho's have personal teleport beams and hardlight entertainment facilities and war-droids, and they don't actually need us, apart from the fact they are immortal and we are their popular entertainment channel for when they get bored and need some innovation. And that's us, and countless planets like us, upon which - so we are told - war rages.
Into dream go the Ebon, and being what they are, they bring back dreams of war. At least that's what the rulebooks say. But its short-hand you know it is, for so many countless things, Lovecraftian myths of horror lurking down below from the subconscious, safely packaged for consumer markets, its shorthand for all the other nasties that nobody sane dare write down, because planet Earth has orthodox Orwellian state mind control (and mind control technologies) and a war-on-terror budget that would psycheval probably most of us in here directly to the Bay.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
Razhel
SCL 10
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2011 12:39 am
Posts: 229
Re: Your World of Progress
Grimachu, I found your debrief about CS1 very helpful. I hate buying books if I don't already know whats in them which is why I don't buy many books any more, plus my bookshelf is full of shit I'm too nostalgic to part with. Your post has sold it to me. I read it and thought, yeah I can work with that. I know that place already somehow, its how Home must feel.
What Whitt says about how we had to develop our own WoP, and that there's a thread here about it too I don't know who started that, its awesome - it makes us feel like this IS our world, we are co-creating it. All the crazy Kultesque things we bring to it, its great that we have a chance here to show the development team what they did to us and what we have done with and to their changeling child.
So many RPGs go in for overkill and produce an endless amount of material that fills in the gaps necessary for creativity left by the limited space in the core rule book that there's hardly any room left to do anything but play pregenerated adventures the way they were intended by the copyright owners. If I wanted to do that I'd be on a videogame forum. I think thats the mistake that White Wolf made after Rein-Hagen left, the money option meant selling the fans short. They had some great ideas but when they revamped it, they created a history line that most of the WoD players I have encountered seem somehow bound by. And its nothing at all like what the original visionary setting seemed to offer promise that it was about.
RPG is the realm of imagination and one reason that Mort is so fun to explore is because so much of it is unexplored, there's stuff going on that even the rulers of the planet don't have a clue about, much less the game designers. It's a real place and you didn't make it up, you just saw a few snashots - enough to awaken and focus our minds on it so we could take a few more. Thats what role-play is, insights into a real place that we all share among us.
So I know there are more future publications planned, but please remember this - what worked so well in the original is that there were gaps in the logic, and to make coherent sense of it the reader had to go within themselves, to do a self search, and figure out a lot of it. In doing so, imagination was trained and innovation bloomed. This is not the same thing as creating shoddy books though!
Too many expansion modules for rpg are so sleek that the reader does not have to think for themselves. Its painting by numbers instead of inventing art movements, and the readers are still chasing that original buzz that got them hooked in the first place. And most of that buzz was because they were being teased into visualising the game universe for themselves and all the different versions of it that can be possible. If you heed these words, maybe just maybe the later publications will be able to hold onto this vibe, instead of cartoon repackaged crap like the recent White Wolf cash ins have been.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
ximr
SCL 10
Joined: Mon Feb 14, 2011 1:45 pm
Posts: 139
Re: Your World of Progress
I love the sci-fi gritty urban reinvention of the archetypal and classical mythology. Animal heads, the creatures in the illustrations - pictures tell a thousand words, I was inspired by these as much as the text. Minotaurs from the labyrinth below our feet. It is Lovecraftian, I found the nightmare cthulhonic powers sought by magi and cultists to be symbolised by the evolutionary cycles of aliens and entering the White space. It is R'lyeh dreamtime incarnate into scifi.
The first time I read the rulebook I came away with a different world to the intended one I discovered when I re-read it. I saw that:
By the writers and development team not having made it too 'exact' and 'defined' it is possible to interpret the same setting differently, so that layers of meaning are overlaid like layers of paint and grime on pot-holed tarmac streets and bullet-holed concrete infrastructure now doorless, windowless, inhabited by any who dare. Halloween Jack is not merely the pumpkin headed scythe wielding jester, a headless horseman of dark urban decay, he is the Bowie character who slides down a rope because the elevator is broke, from Diamond Dogs which weirdness when you first encounter it is awe inspiring, and that soundtrack, 1984, is caught up and woven into the mesh of SLA's morbid world.
Layers of meaning and layers of world like a philip K dick distopia, like BLADE RUNNER hints at when you feel its textures and watch the background detail promising that this is a full world, you already know it. Layers like raggedy clothes worn as masks over bodies forgotten so hard they are sexless and devoid of any personality but for that which is painted onto them by the observers interpretation and whatever, whoever you have to be on the day. Multiple levels of reality so that the world is made up of syncronicities between them, and we interpret them as we need, as we can, if we can, if it has not all already freaked us out to the point of irrational insanity. Syncronicities between layers and contradictions between layers. It is a classic writers trick used for emphasis and ambience; orange ball in a blue room, blue ball in a blue room. This taught me so much!
The multiple versions of a world built on the useless trash of yesterday because progress demands it, and yet for most, the vast majority shaping the hive mind, we cannot afford to live in that fresh new glossy consumer production line market that calls us failures if we are less than glossy consumer market production line people fresh out of our packaging. For the most of us we are scum and decay, making good of what we have which is to assemble broken dolls for our play, Sebastians Game, and these are frankenstien dolls with a mind of their own and no feelings to prevent them eating yours alive.
So the majority hide in their illusion, locked in behind closed doors and fearful that the world they are watching on television is the world they will find if they leave the comfort of their tv phone in mail order lifestyle. Because monsters climb and monsters crawl and they come through the walls. The brave few explore armed with guns they get the only way they can - sign on and join the corporation. For those who don't, they stew in the juices of their own madness, trapped in their boxes going stir crazy. You can feel it when you enter peoples houses, your head pops with the pressure of the mad paradigm maintained to protect their fragile egos from seeing through the veils of a confident voice on television and have to see the world as it truly is; chemical stained dirt and grime with no future at all and no past worth remembering.
This theme seems to spread like dry rot through all of the parallel versions of real until we are forced to face the reality that it is the reality, that everything else is built of yesterdays soggy hardboard,even the moods we thought represented us. So in this fugue of feeling alive and wanting to make a change, we surround ourselves with warriors and feel comradeship and pills, anything to change the rules, to shift the bleak human condition we are faced with.
I saw that the city is layers and layers and layers of rotting infrastructure with the new stuff on top and the old decaying down there beneath us full of mutants and hybrids, aliens and experiments, a place where lurking psychosis has gone to find others of its kind or as near as possible to it.
Everything is going on down there, everything. Because each area of another persons madness that bends the walls and causes us to live within its hue while we step into its bubble, is hard to describe upon arising and so we stereotype in shorthand for the sake of appearing to be keeping it all together.
I'm reading it again and its different this time also.
And my head is popping again.
_________________
All of the electrical technology is sealed into a flexible translucent rubber wrapper to make it waterproof. Plastic outer clothes are essential and far more stylish than the rain macs found on earth.
Because soap fumes are pumped into the atmosphere by industrial machines in the hearts of the cities, the rain often tastes of detergant and everything is clean.
There are awnings everywhere, and dry air blowers in shop doorways and in phone booths. Posh houses have them too, and tumble-dryers in the hall. Wellington boots are the most popular footwear.
_________________
grew up watching monsters on tv, but the mirror says the monster is in me
mirror crackles shards as sharp as teeth, childhood hides screaming scars beneath
“Dad! Channel 66 says you’re dead! It showed your picture”
“I told you son, tv always lies”
What Nightfall say about SLA:
"SLA Industries itself is a fictional corporation run by a mysterious and seemingly immortal creature called "Mr. Slayer", whose upper management team includes two other creatures like himself, "Intruder" and "Senti". The corporation is headquartered in "Mort City", a densely populated city-sprawl larger than Eurasia and surrounded by the urban ruins of the "Cannibal Sectors". It is all located on a vast planet (also called "Mort") that had been stripped of its natural resources to the point that the ecology had been utterly destroyed. SLA Industries controlled an undefined but vast number of planets, collectively referred to as the World of Progress, and governed them in accordance with Mr. Slayer's Big Picture. The setting is bleak and surreal, with much left deliberately ill-defined in the source material.”
“Players take the role of freelance employees of SLA Industries, called Operatives, living in Mort City and taking care of odd jobs assigned to them by the corporation. These jobs usually involve keeping the peace—chasing serial killers, hunting monsters in the sewers, quashing riots, foiling terrorist plots, and silencing dissidents are common themes. Appearance, style and branding are emphasized in the game world as much as combat ability, due to the omnipresence of television; for ambitious Operatives public persona and TV ratings are often as important as professional abilities. A supplement, the Contract Directory, also provides the option for players to play as celebrity gladiators called Contract Killers. As a role-playing experience, the game tends to be predisposed towards splatterpunk horror, noir, dark satire, and/or gunbunny high action. However, the complexity and Byzantine politics of the setting allow for slower-paced campaigns based around subversion, inter-departmental rivalry, and cut-throat power struggles within the company.”
"Along with humans, playable races include the drug-addicted mutant humans called "Frothers", the stealthy feline "Wraith Raiders", the formidably violent saurian "Shaktar", and the two 'Ebb' / pseudo-magic using races: the emotionally sensitive and charismatic Ebon, and their more sadistic and violent evolution, the "Brain Wasters". There are also a variety of biogenetic vat-grown warrior races called Stormers, produced by SLA to fight in their endless wars.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLA_Industries
EXTRAPOLATION:
"The setting is bleak and surreal, with much left deliberately deliberately ill defined in the source material”
Subsequently it is necessarily left to the GM and Players to fill in the gaps by reinventing SLA to their own particular flavour. But you cannot tell anyone about it or Nightfall will sue you. The atmosphere of complete total repressionist pervades, and actually adds to the Cult Status of the whole thing.
"chasing serial killers, hunting monsters in the sewers, quashing riots, foiling terrorist plots, and silencing dissidents "
That’s your basic 5 plot lines right here in a nutshell, that is.
All of this leads to:
SLA SOUTH WALES STYLE
First off: the streets are dangerous, the kids are kept indoors, until the age they become latch-key kids because parents, single parent mother usually, is by now bored of them and prefers the mind-zomb drugs and tv, and whatever current boyfriends cock she is sitting on this week. It is chav-culture as mainstream (not the same thing as scav-culture). Everybody is on the dole unless you are an Operative.
The underground use re-creational street drugs, re-creating you; instead of tv which is omnipresent anyway. Paying the license fee enables the extra channels of sameness and costs the same as the street drugs. But you need to traverse the streets to find a dealer, unless you are lucky enough to have door-to-door one or prefer the corporate drugs which means prescriptions from the doctors.
Here we diverge: SLA 80s and SLA 2020 are two different arena’s entirely. SLA80s has telephones and fax machines. SLA2020 has touchscreen tablets and VR goggles with internet integrated. SLA80s is noir. SLA2020 is neo-noir.
“Cyberware was a passing phase in the World of Progress. Its time came and went many years ago. A fashion statement with batteries, the age of the ‘Chrome Warrior’ is gone.” http://www.dnotice.de/SLA/essay/inspiration.htm
Operatives keep society safe generation after generation of the sameness. Operatives protect people from the constant onslaught of Sewer Things, Psycho’s and Terrorism; the three main threats to Your Important Life (YIL) which comes hand in hand with Your Important Life Style (YILSTYL) of being either a corporate consumer in either of three guises of the Wage-Slave (WAGSLAV) culture; SLA Operative (best tv viewing) Military Cop (worst tv viewing) or Chav/Dole/Normal/Mainstream (CDNM) (90% the mainstream).
Obviously the incentive to Change Things (Only Nothing Stays The Same ONSTS, a terrorist slogan) means involving yourself in Underground Terrorism Groups (The UTG), or going Psycho as a lone gunman.
In our version of SLA we have a Sanity rating measuring between 10 (NOBODY has 10) through Zero into Minus Figures. It is our major game stat.
Everybody begins at 5.
Dole = +/- 0
Military Cop = +/- 0
Operative = -1
Terrorist Group = -2
Lone Psycho = -3
It is possible to belong to multiple of these categories.
Events which occur during gameplay (losing your cool, holding your cool, facing the monsters) make a big difference, based on Stress Factors. Every stress factor means you have to do a dice-roll to test your Sanity rate and if you fail, you lose a point AND temporarily go a bit nuts, usually from a breakdown as Fear takes control, occasionally in an anti-human way. The Humanitarian rating accompanies it, and is based on species and occupation. The tv zombies are desensitised to the Fear - at least until it actually comes climbing and crashing through the wall of their porta-hab stack.
Q: How do you improve your Sanity rate?
A1: You don’t.
A2: Corporate drugs. Their psyche review based paperwork is entirely bogus and useful only to get you back into active duty. It has nothing to do with your actual sanity.
A3: regular sex of a type you enjoy to balance you holistically. There is no other way. Of course finding an appropriate partner is near-impossible until you enter the domain of disposable-sluts (street slang; ’sluttable’) from contacts-net (NETCON).
In SLA2020 we have various degrees of sexdroids to augment the prostitutes and slags available through cyber and the streets. Our SLA is mature and deals with the nasty side of sex. Underground subcultures. Fucking a slut can regain your Sanity and Humanity by 1 point so long as he or she is not Doing Your Head In (DYHI) which reduces it by 1. Remember; if you think you are getting on with her, she is a femme fatale, or soon will be thanks to SLA Industries knowing everything about everyone and controlling everything by interfering with your life.
“The men were here … they want me to inform on you.”
“Did they leave a card?"
"Cloak Division. I might have known.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing I can do. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Do you trust me?”
“In this world i don’t trust anybody baby. But you come close.”
PsySex is a nightclub scene with franchises into your living room. SLA try to control it by selling stuff for it. The business rivals sell more ingenious dodgy quality stuff and have a darker scene less clean. Obviously the types of creeps wo hang out there are the type of creeps you want to meet in the dark.
1920s style Deco Coffee and Jazz Club. Private membership only. The social elite. It costs a lot to be a member, by introductions only, and for the privilege card you get to meet other people who can open doors for you. It is a chain branch bordering on cabaret but preferably discrete. Vibes of a gangster run speakeasy during prohibition era blend with views over the city tops.
We did not have The Writers Bible because as empathic Ebons we discovered early that it is full of shit, the games designers not knowing what they are doing pretending to know what they are doing and generally distracting and irrelevant, based on internal conflict of unresolvable issues. Neither did we have any other source material and as such we developed Our mort in our own direction. It does 100% keep inline with the original source book and the original intent. If anything we made it more story based, since our understanding of the rules and mechanics of Film Noir heavily influenced the progression of our adventure campaign. Obviously it takes a long time to create a new character, the excitement and buzz of doing so makes it unnecessarily cruel to kill everyone off quickly. The death of a friend is a tragic event and a part of the crews ongoing scenarios. What we loved most was visual description. I heard the news over ports-com sheltering from the rain below cast-metal import girders from some nameless world holding the plasti-hab complex aloft, running in my shift-gap between a double-time over-time mission to afford to pay my daughters medical fee. Later after my characters own untimely death by Sewer Slime during a dredge-drudge mission training some grunts I would get to play my daughter as a Psycho character but for now I had to cross-town by foot impossibly fast to make the team on time, and already the shlurkers were trailing ahead of me sizing me up for a morsel. Someone would have to do something about the zero-tribes soon, they were encroaching into civvi-town, getting too brave for comfort to be spooking even me with my suspensor-born Op-cam sweeping the zone to the tv livestream and the 'Hoop' (HOAPV - Head Office Armoured Personnel Van) alike. Fuckers could at least have given me a lift.
We had one copy of the first print of SLA Industires and had made much sense of it because we too are fans of Bowies Diamond Dogs album growing up in a military recruitment town.
Splatterpunk was only a minor part of our games albeit a major part of the characters lives. Most of our excitement happened in the development of plot rather than the adrenaline thrill shoot-out. Despite what the pay forms say, an Op is never off-duty.
We discovered that we needed to simplify the whole system. We were also into a lot of other games, from Cthulhu and Vampire: theMasquerade (Hence Sanity and Humanity stats).
We also wanted to take SLA off world. Part of its atmosphere was that we knew we would never get offworld. Word was that in other cities, civvies were being lifted by carriers and loaded to colonies which had less monsters. Word was out that the colonies were infected by mutagenic virus and were less secure than Mort. We never saw any of that. As Ops we weren’t leaving anyway having signed our lives away, and besides none of that shit was happening in our city anyway, we were last on the planetary relocation list. Most people thought the list was a myth. Turns out that we had to accept it as wishful thinking anyway, exactly as our psyche training instructed us - Mort is Humanities last, final stand and we are that effort.
"Fuck man, we’re fucked.”
Pretty much every Combat Op ever / popular graffiti slogan.
In 2011 we discovered that Nightfall were suing their fans for creating fan fiction. Fuck that shit. The decision NOT to release a bunch of home-made campaigns onto the internet for people to enjoy for free because we don’t want to get sued for playing role-play games which were invented for people to play, was made. We can only make blogs about it and advertise them for free if we accompany the blogs by a disclaimer that NO INTENTION TO INFRINGE COPYRIGHT and SLA INDUSTRIES IS COPYRIGHT NIGHTFALL GAMES.
But we still love it because despite what Nightfall think about it, Mort is REAL and it’s where we are from. Seriously.
And so, we cannot post pictures from Nightfall here but we can post a whole load of stuff relating to our vision of it. And we can quote accredited non-profit quotes.
"SLA Industries is a dark horror game filled with treachery and deception – most of this coming from the company itself. It is the job of the Gamemaster to bring this to the attention of the players at every possible point. This should make the players feel that they are not just part of the deception but are helping to create it, without making them feel like the sheep that they are. In this setting, SLA Industries is the biggest power there is, and they own everything and everyone (including the players). There is nothing that can stop the company from doing whatever it pleases (although some try) in any way they see fit, including sending them on missions without telling them the truth or the whole story.”
Copyright © 1995 by Nightfall Design Team written by David “Jimbo” Boylan, James “Freddy” Lennon, Morton T. Smith, Jared Earle
taken from the booklet of old and the currently out-of-print GM Screen http://www.dnotice.de/SLA/essay/inspiration.htm
Face Value v The Con
Schedule 3
“The best strategy for fucking up an enemy is misinformation."
military digital communications and surveillance training
Schedule 2
“We train our soldiers by putting them through living examples to hardwire the understanding into their perception, it becomes cognitive and neural adaptation, it becomes a default outlook. At this stage they can no longer fit into ‘civilian communities’.”
Schedule 3
“Actually boss, using civilian communities is a necessary factor in our training project. Some of the world related scenarios occurring in civilian communities outstrip anything we can come up with. Deep-throat in a female jail is the basic training for all our psy-ops."
SLA SOUTH WALES STYLE
First off: the streets are dangerous, the kids are kept indoors, until the age they become latch-key kids because parents, single parent mother usually, is by now bored of them and prefers the mind-zomb drugs and tv, and whatever current boyfriends cock she is sitting on this week. It is chav-culture as mainstream (not the same thing as scav-culture). Everybody is on the dole unless you are an Operative.
The underground use re-creational street drugs, re-creating you; instead of tv which is omnipresent anyway. Paying the license fee enables the extra channels of sameness and costs the same as the street drugs. But you need to traverse the streets to find a dealer, unless you are lucky enough to have door-to-door one or prefer the corporate drugs which means prescriptions from the doctors.
Here we diverge: SLA 80s and SLA 2020 are two different arena’s entirely. SLA80s has telephones and fax machines. SLA2020 has touchscreen tablets and VR goggles with internet integrated. SLA80s is noir. SLA2020 is neo-noir.
“Cyberware was a passing phase in the World of Progress. Its time came and went many years ago. A fashion statement with batteries, the age of the ‘Chrome Warrior’ is gone.” http://www.dnotice.de/SLA/essay/inspiration.htm
Operatives keep society safe generation after generation of the sameness. Operatives protect people from the constant onslaught of Sewer Things, Psycho’s and Terrorism; the three main threats to Your Important Life (YIL) which comes hand in hand with Your Important Life Style (YILSTYL) of being either a corporate consumer in either of three guises of the Wage-Slave (WAGSLAV) culture; SLA Operative (best tv viewing) Military Cop (worst tv viewing) or Chav/Dole/Normal/Mainstream (CDNM) (90% the mainstream).
Obviously the incentive to Change Things (Only Nothing Stays The Same ONSTS, a terrorist slogan) means involving yourself in Underground Terrorism Groups (The UTG), or going Psycho as a lone gunman.
In our version of SLA we have a Sanity rating measuring between 10 (NOBODY has 10) through Zero into Minus Figures. It is our major game stat.
Everybody begins at 5.
Dole = +/- 0
Military Cop = +/- 0
Operative = -1
Terrorist Group = -2
Lone Psycho = -3
It is possible to belong to multiple of these categories.
Events which occur during gameplay (losing your cool, holding your cool, facing the monsters) make a big difference, based on Stress Factors. Every stress factor means you have to do a dice-roll to test your Sanity rate and if you fail, you lose a point AND temporarily go a bit nuts, usually from a breakdown as Fear takes control, occasionally in an anti-human way. The Humanitarian rating accompanies it, and is based on species and occupation. The tv zombies are desensitised to the Fear - at least until it actually comes climbing and crashing through the wall of their porta-hab stack.
Q: How do you improve your Sanity rate?
A1: You don’t.
A2: Corporate drugs. Their psyche review based paperwork is entirely bogus and useful only to get you back into active duty. It has nothing to do with your actual sanity.
A3: regular sex of a type you enjoy to balance you holistically. There is no other way. Of course finding an appropriate partner is near-impossible until you enter the domain of disposable-sluts (street slang; ’sluttable’) from contacts-net (NETCON).
In SLA2020 we have various degrees of sexdroids to augment the prostitutes and slags available through cyber and the streets. Our SLA is mature and deals with the nasty side of sex. Underground subcultures. Fucking a slut can regain your Sanity and Humanity by 1 point so long as he or she is not Doing Your Head In (DYHI) which reduces it by 1. Remember; if you think you are getting on with her, she is a femme fatale, or soon will be thanks to SLA Industries knowing everything about everyone and controlling everything by interfering with your life.
“The men were here … they want me to inform on you.”
“Did they leave a card?"
"Cloak Division. I might have known.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing I can do. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Do you trust me?”
“In this world i don’t trust anybody baby. But you come close.”
PsySex is a nightclub scene with franchises into your living room. SLA try to control it by selling stuff for it. The business rivals sell more ingenious dodgy quality stuff and have a darker scene less clean. Obviously the types of creeps wo hang out there are the type of creeps you want to meet in the dark.
1920s style Deco Coffee and Jazz Club. Private membership only. The social elite. It costs a lot to be a member, by introductions only, and for the privilege card you get to meet other people who can open doors for you. It is a chain branch bordering on cabaret but preferably discrete. Vibes of a gangster run speakeasy during prohibition era blend with views over the city tops.
We did not have The Writers Bible because as empathic Ebons we discovered early that it is full of shit, the games designers not knowing what they are doing pretending to know what they are doing and generally distracting and irrelevant, based on internal conflict of unresolvable issues. Neither did we have any other source material and as such we developed Our mort in our own direction. It does 100% keep inline with the original source book and the original intent. If anything we made it more story based, since our understanding of the rules and mechanics of Film Noir heavily influenced the progression of our adventure campaign. Obviously it takes a long time to create a new character, the excitement and buzz of doing so makes it unnecessarily cruel to kill everyone off quickly. The death of a friend is a tragic event and a part of the crews ongoing scenarios. What we loved most was visual description. I heard the news over ports-com sheltering from the rain below cast-metal import girders from some nameless world holding the plasti-hab complex aloft, running in my shift-gap between a double-time over-time mission to afford to pay my daughters medical fee. Later after my characters own untimely death by Sewer Slime during a dredge-drudge mission training some grunts I would get to play my daughter as a Psycho character but for now I had to cross-town by foot impossibly fast to make the team on time, and already the shlurkers were trailing ahead of me sizing me up for a morsel. Someone would have to do something about the zero-tribes soon, they were encroaching into civvi-town, getting too brave for comfort to be spooking even me with my suspensor-born Op-cam sweeping the zone to the tv livestream and the 'Hoop' (HOAPV - Head Office Armoured Personnel Van) alike. Fuckers could at least have given me a lift.
We had one copy of the first print of SLA Industires and had made much sense of it because we too are fans of Bowies Diamond Dogs album growing up in a military recruitment town.
Splatterpunk was only a minor part of our games albeit a major part of the characters lives. Most of our excitement happened in the development of plot rather than the adrenaline thrill shoot-out. Despite what the pay forms say, an Op is never off-duty.
We discovered that we needed to simplify the whole system. We were also into a lot of other games, from Cthulhu and Vampire: theMasquerade (Hence Sanity and Humanity stats).
We also wanted to take SLA off world. Part of its atmosphere was that we knew we would never get offworld. Word was that in other cities, civvies were being lifted by carriers and loaded to colonies which had less monsters. Word was out that the colonies were infected by mutagenic virus and were less secure than Mort. We never saw any of that. As Ops we weren’t leaving anyway having signed our lives away, and besides none of that shit was happening in our city anyway, we were last on the planetary relocation list. Most people thought the list was a myth. Turns out that we had to accept it as wishful thinking anyway, exactly as our psyche training instructed us - Mort is Humanities last, final stand and we are that effort.
"Fuck man, we’re fucked.”
Pretty much every Combat Op ever / popular graffiti slogan.
In 2011 we discovered that Nightfall were suing their fans for creating fan fiction. Fuck that shit. The decision NOT to release a bunch of home-made campaigns onto the internet for people to enjoy for free because we don’t want to get sued for playing role-play games which were invented for people to play, was made. We can only make blogs about it and advertise them for free if we accompany the blogs by a disclaimer that NO INTENTION TO INFRINGE COPYRIGHT and SLA INDUSTRIES IS COPYRIGHT NIGHTFALL GAMES.
But we still love it because despite what Nightfall think about it, Mort is REAL and it’s where we are from. Seriously.
And so, we cannot post pictures from Nightfall here but we can post a whole load of stuff relating to our vision of it. And we can quote accredited non-profit quotes.
"SLA Industries is a dark horror game filled with treachery and deception – most of this coming from the company itself. It is the job of the Gamemaster to bring this to the attention of the players at every possible point. This should make the players feel that they are not just part of the deception but are helping to create it, without making them feel like the sheep that they are. In this setting, SLA Industries is the biggest power there is, and they own everything and everyone (including the players). There is nothing that can stop the company from doing whatever it pleases (although some try) in any way they see fit, including sending them on missions without telling them the truth or the whole story.”
Copyright © 1995 by Nightfall Design Team written by David “Jimbo” Boylan, James “Freddy” Lennon, Morton T. Smith, Jared Earle
taken from the booklet of old and the currently out-of-print GM Screen http://www.dnotice.de/SLA/essay/inspiration.htm
Face Value v The Con
Schedule 3
“The best strategy for fucking up an enemy is misinformation."
military digital communications and surveillance training
Schedule 2
“We train our soldiers by putting them through living examples to hardwire the understanding into their perception, it becomes cognitive and neural adaptation, it becomes a default outlook. At this stage they can no longer fit into ‘civilian communities’.”
Schedule 3
“Actually boss, using civilian communities is a necessary factor in our training project. Some of the world related scenarios occurring in civilian communities outstrip anything we can come up with. Deep-throat in a female jail is the basic training for all our psy-ops."
