[UA] We love Dick!

[Stuart Anderson]

Joe Iglesias wrote:

> >Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 11:27:27 -0700
> >From: Stuart Anderson <stuartanderson at qwest.net>
>
> >Have you read _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_ by Philip K Dick? It's not exactly what you're talking about, but it reminds me of it. Martian colonists endure unbearable living conditions by taking drugs which send them into a delusion state where they take the place of little dolls in playlets they've bought. Whenever I see elaborate miniature battles, it makes me think of
> >it. Anyhow, whenever you think of layers of reality and lies being shuffled and confused, you need Dick. Well . . .you know what I mean.
> >--Stu
>
> Three Stigmata's quite good, yeah.  Probably the most UA-ian PKD I've read (and my favorite work of his) is Valis, as it balances out the wacked-out cosmological stuff with ordinary, messed-up people trying to find some meaning in life.  It's great stuff and very funny.
>
> A Scanner Darkly is also appropriate for its black-humored portrayal of the druggie lifestyle, but it doesn't have any peculiar cosmologies in it.

    A Scanner Darkly is probably my favorite, or maybe Confessions of a Crap Artist. I think Dick does have a cosmology all his own, though. It's not easily nailed down. But even in Co/aCA and his other "non-sci-fi" work, he puts across this extremely convincing cosmology. It's worth mentioning that the title A Scanner Darkly's a rip on my favorite Bible quote. <What's that? Yeah--I've
read it> It's *all* about ordinary, messed-up people trying to find meaning in life. That's the definition of cosmology, isn't it? He just points that out to us in a particularly raw form. His characters look at the world through a kaleidoscope. There's just a few things they're sure of, and those things keep moving around. And they line up with each other in crazy shifting patterns
until you're just wigged out and exhausted trying to figure out what's real. That's Cosmology 101, I think. He doesn't care if it's God or aliens or subjective modal restructuring or whatever.
    The reason that's UAble for me is because I continuously overlay the UA cosmology over the other more established cosmologies and let the points the players are sure of writhe and twist and fall together into different bizarre shapes until the players go cross-eyed. I play very street campaigns, with the cosmology in the distant background, so it doesn't get overwhelmingly
frustrating or feel like a bait 'n switch. It also lets me incorporate famous bits of other campaigns we've run into our current story. My players are currently investigating an event that occurred as a result of many of the same players' actions in another GM's Delta Green campaign, which had some bearing on another event in one of my older In Nomine campaigns. So we've got three
competing cosmologies in there. Five, if you count voodoo and Jehovah's Witnesses, which slip somehow into most of the games I run. It's never central to the action, but the players put some pretty sophisticated thought into resolving these issues. It's fun to watch. They're a lot better at that kind of thing than I am. One of these days I'm going to run a short campaign where there's
another IC running another reality. I'm going to pattern it on Man in the High Castle.
--Stu


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