Campaigning in the World
of Atlas Shrugged
 

Ayn Rand wrote about the difference between melodrama, which is about conflict between a man and other men, and drama, which is about a man's conflict with himself. I think it's clear that this campaign was largely melodrama, and thus wasn't a perfect re-creation of Rand's fictional idiom. On the other hand, it re-created one aspect of Rand's idiom. Atlas Shrugged has many sources, but one of them was the pulp fiction of the era between the World Wars; it follows their conventions remarkably closely, even to the speeches where the villain explains his plan and his motives to the hero — except that in Atlas Shrugged, the "villains" are John Galt, Francisco d'Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjold, and the story ends with the heroes deciding that the villains were right. (Nietzsche's phrase about the transvaluation of values comes to mind, despite Rand's disavowal of Nietzsche's influence.)

My players wanted a game devoted to larger-than life characters and exciting action; Rand's setting certainly gave them that. And I wanted to look at the process of reconstruction after the fall of the United States; running this series of games made that possible. The new Taggart bridge not only tied the former United States together again; it tied the campaign together, as a focus for all the characters' actions and a target for their adversaries.

Rand was also known for intense sexual scenes, though this was by the standards of the 1940s and 1950s — current fiction tends to be more explicit. Sexual and romantic attractions were a part of this series of games also. I specified that the actual physical acts would not be described, following the idiom of classic Hollywood films; in fact, I thought that explicit description would tend to lessen the intensity of such scenes.

As it worked out, the various characters became involved in a variety of sexual encounters. Beauchamp and Stark had an intense affair, broke up, and then reunited when Beauchamp discovered that she was pregnant (this was the player's choice, not the result of a dice roll). Eden ended up accepting a proposal from her administrative assistant, after the final battle, when the prospect of her dying made him decide to tell her of his feelings. Cavalieri didn't fall in love with anyone, but became strongly attracted to her Texan rival. Kennealy was already married and had children, but in the Kennedy idiom, he was an active womanizer; both Kennealy and Stark met the Chicago woman whom I portrayed as an example of prostitution "as it might be and ought to be". In this, as everything else, Kennealy was the most ambiguous of the characters.

Ayn Rand said that the goal of her writing was to portray an ideal man. Our goal, somewhat less lofty, was to portray larger-than-life, dramatically interesting characters and to give the players the pleasure of assuming their personae. On that count, this campaign was a success, and Rand's setting and narrative idiom helped make it so. And conversely, running this series of games not only let us cast light into how things worked in Rand's world, but made doing so a necessity.

© 2001 William H. Stoddard