[UA] Soundtracks (Long)

[Dylan Craig]

Hey all,

When my 'Book of Lies' game ran last year, I made up a 'significant soundtrack'
designed specifically for the game and the characters, and burned a copy for
each player. After the game folded up, I let them try and guess what each song's
relevance was, and wrote the following report-back for them. all in all much
appreciated by the group; especially having the CD as a souvenir of the game.

Campaign log, to make sense of it all, is at
http://www.eyeballkid.co.za/clog.html .

>>>>

Hi all

A while ago Vera asked about the concealed significance of the tracks on the BoL
soundtrack; well, I have some free time this morning and I thought I'd write it
down for you. Hopefully it will spice up a boring day!

1. Pepper (Butthole Surfers)
Nothing special, except for the litany of violent deaths, shady characters, and
oblique references to the Holy Grail! "Mikey had a facial scar and Bobby was a
rapist/They were all in love with dying, they were doing it in Texas/Tommy
played piano like a kid out in the rain but then he lost his leg in Dallas, he
was dancing with a train....", "Some will die in hot pursuit in fiery auto
crashes/Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes/Some will
fall in love with life and drink it like a fountain that is pouring like an
avalanche coming down a mountain", and critically, passages dealing with the
subjectivity of life and right: "You never know just how you look through other
people's eyes". That last one was going to tie into an adventure where a
magickal ward swapped your personalities around... so Vera might be playing
Crane, Dave playing Nikolai, etc... until the end of the session. Ideally this
would have led to some horrible caricatures being enacted, with everyone leaving
going 'Shit, is THAT what they think my character is all about?'

2. Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing (Chris Isaak)
This was Kirsten's song. Gary Chandler, the horror writer, simply chose the
wrong woman's heart to break - she was a Pornomancer packing a major charge, and
seeing as Pornomancer spells deal with desire, she used it to switch the
terrible, unfulfilled longing she carried, from her to him... so that he would
literally crave her affection and presence for the rest of his life. And she
wasn't in a coma... she'd switched bodies with a hitcher coming back during a
magickal car wreck (and adventure you never got to) in which the fabric of
reality parted, duplicating some people and setting the duplicates loose to roam
around reality - 'A Bill in Three Persons' from the main rulebook, if you ever
got a chance to read it.

3. The Passenger (Michael Hutchence)
Just atmosphere, really... keeping the car/urban/grit motif going. "I am the
passenger... I ride and I ride... I ride through your city tonight... I see the
stars come out of the sky... yeah, the bright and hollow sky... you know it
looks so good tonight". If you'd ever met Le Comte de Saint-Germaine, the sort
of cosmic janitor of the UAverse, he usually manifested as a hitch-hiker. Mark's
character, if
he'd ever played, would have met him once.

4. $10 (Cop Shoot Cop)
This was Wendy Rutherford's song... she was this 14-year old money-mage behind
the Rutherford foundation, which financed Five Points. "Ten dollar bill in my
pocket... ten dollar bill... what you gonna buy with that greenback? What kind
of thrill? Ten dollar bill in my pocket... ten dollar bill... tell me, where'd
you get that money? Who'd you have to KILL?". Vegas was also full of ritually
defaced $10 bills, which some occultists used to ward off the influence of this
whacked-out bunch of dead Plutomancers who'd tied themselves occultically to the
US currency (and immortality) by committing suicide inside the national mint.
They could cast spells on you through money - unless you were carrying one of
these notes.

5. 15 Minutes of Fame (Sheep on Drugs)
Atmosphere again. "Suffer little children in your skyscraper hell of crack
cocaine... while rock stars drive fast cars and drink champagne". This was
basically my 'Vegas duality' song.

6. Subbaculcha (The Pixies)
This was the Vegas Occult Underground song. People 'all dressed in black'
poncing about and doing the clubs. Vegas was real dabbler's territory, but one
of the threads was a New York hitter called Sammy Styx deciding to move into
Vegas and turn it into his turf. Johnny Atlantis, as pretty much one of the most
high-profile mages in town, would have been the first to get whacked... which
would have brought you guys in investigating his death (or injury).

7. Hombre Secreto (The Plugz?)
This was in because it was in Repo Man, and because it's about a secret agent. I
wanted to get you guys down to Mex sometime, though, following some kind of dead
composer's possessed limo which was stalking piano players, but I never worked
the adventure out fully.

8. One Night in Bangkok (from 'Chess')
There was this big, 'Player of Games' style chessboard in a deserted temple
garden outside Bangkok, with the self-aware pieces representing all the big
cosmic moves going on across the world (ascensions, renunciations, etc.). The
best thing to do was to blow it up, really, because it enabled one person to
mess with too much of the big cosmic process, but you guys were still too
low-level to be introduced to it. There was this Thai bamboo mage you were going
to escort on a cross-country trip at some point, keeping him safe from his
enemies, and he would have put you onto it.

9. There is a Light (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
Two reasons: firstly, damn it all, plain style. "And Mr. High Roller, where you
gonna go? Where the real high rollers roll real low. Mr Killer-man, what you
gonna do? Oh, me and Mr. Death are going downtown too. Ain't there one
god-fearing citizen about? They're all holed up and they ain't coming out...";
and secondly, the notion that 'there is a light' - that, despite the temporality
and inevitability of it all, there was a light approaching over the sea. Some
change would come.

10. Let's Have A War (Fear)
Hmmm, Vietnam-obsessed Cliomancer envelops all of America in some kind of
non-consensual 'Nam flashback to take revenge over his father's death in the
Mekong Delta, as I recall. Basically, an excuse to 'have a war' - a Vietnam
once-off and 'Jacob's Ladder' homage, where surreality would slowly mount until
your characters (particularly Sinje) would have a chance to effect a breakout.

11. The Coat-Tails of a Dead Man (Primus and Tom Waits)
I didn't have a plan when I put this one into the compilation, but the weirdness
of the music (I swear someone's playing a saw in the background) made it a
certainty. After Ty's death, though, and based on the concept he had for a new
character as a bad-ass undead asskicker, I came up with this idea of a snoopy
mage who wanted to keep an eye on the newest up-and-coming pretender for the
Invisible Clergy - Lancy - so he resurrected Ty, changed his face, and sent him
to play piggyback, thereby "riding on the coat-tails of a dead man', as the song
goes.

12. Pablo Picasso (The Circle Jerks?)
'Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole'. Indeed. Firstly, it was in Repo
Man, and secondly - we never got around to this - was this guy who was
repainting Picasso prints with some kind of nasty magickal fluid so they could
get up off the canvas and do his various errands. All fine and well, until he
starts using them for revenge killings - which is where Sinje and Five Points
comes into things.

13. Stripped (Depeche Mode)
'Let me see you make decisions without your television... let me see you
stripped down to the bone'. Well, the second part speaks for itself, doesn't it?
The whole game was a bout stripping away concealing layers of lies and
uncovering people's motivations. As for the Television bit, the Buzzard Man
stored his victim's essential essences in TVs, from where they could answer
questions and thus help him inform his decisions.

14. Kick My Ass (Garbage)
This song is sung from the perspective of someone who is apologising to their
significant other - for getting beaten up by them. This, ladies and gentlemen,
was the song sung by all your desperate victims."The jam I was in... oh, when
things weren't working out... led me to the brunt of your swinging bout'.

15. The House of the Rising Sun (The Animals)
One wing of the House of Renunciation was permanently in New Orleans. And the
song is all about a change of heart.

16. Lonesome Valley (Fairfield Four)
Death. Actually, in this case, the Lonesome Valley also represented the
sacrifice of life for power - something any of you could have faced if you'd
gotten the chance to ascend to the Invisible Clergy, but I most expected the
pinch to come with Lancy, whose desire for a family and home life was in
permanent conflict with his desire to see justice done. If he'd had a chance to
ascend as a justice-inflicting Pilgrim, but it would have meant leaving all home
of a family behind, would he have? Well, Waynne?

17. Repo Man (Iggy Pop)
You have to ask? Actually, the bit of the song which features a witchdoctor
turning people into toadstools was the cherry on the cake.

18. Everybody Knows (Leonard Cohen)
Apart from its immensely downbeat view on things "Everybody knows the war is
over... everybody knows the good guys lost", it also includes deceit (Rex),
unresolved longing (Kirsten), corruption (Vegas), religious imagery (Thomas),
plague (Medusa). In contrast to #9, this song is all about resignation and the
end of hope. Hey, I didn't know how the game would end - you guys could have
pulled some heavy status-quo-affirming stuff and stopped the cycle of cosmic
reincarnation - and then the world as it was would have continued cycling
onwards forever. This song covered that eventuality.


--
"When you hear sweet syncopation / And the music softly moans
T'ain't no sin to take off your skin / And dance around in your bones"
Dylan Craig · Writer and Historian · Cape Town, South Africa
Contact Details: http://www.eyeballkid.co.za/contact.html

_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua