Monday, July 12, 2010

PASIV Aggressive

I love Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs.

As much as I enjoy tabletop gaming I rarely, if ever, have the time to actually participate in one. Like so many of the first generation to grow up with RPGs, I find myself grabbing my gaming when I can between the demands of work and having a family. Being able to take a little time in the evening to tackle a few puzzles and catch up on a developing storyline is the perfect venue for getting my fix.

That's one of the reasons I liked this story from "Wired" involving a viral marketing/ARG project tied into the upcoming Christopher Nolan film "Inception". The other is the impressive craftsmanship that went into creating the PASIV device "Dream Share Manual" that arrived on the author's doorstep.





The article includes high-resolution scans of all the interior pages, which consist mostly of hand-drawn illustrations and redacted text. That makes it easy for fans to reproduce the manual, but it's also handy for anyone interested in re-purposing the material for a modern take on the Dreamlands. Even if you don't embrace the "Delta Green" approach to the Mythos the canon establishes two facts that would make something like this useful- people and creatures can move back and forth between our world and the Dreamlands, and the US government, or at least some elements within it, is officially aware of the Mythos. A Spec Ops team traveling beyond the veil to recruit ghoul intelligence operatives for the war on terror might be a little over the top, but there are a lot of other creative ways to adapt the material.

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