Campaigning in the World
of Atlas Shrugged
 

1. Playing with Rand's Roles
2. The World After the Collapse
3. A Disintegrated United States
4. Characters and Rationality
5. The Plot and the Bridge
6. Sex, Love, and Resolution

Some years before I started writing GURPS Steampunk, I ran a somewhat unusual GURPS campaign that may be of interest. It started out when I mentioned to a few of my regular players that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged might offer an interesting setting for a series of role-playing games. The response was unexpectedly enthusiastic, so I included a serious proposal in my next list of possible campaigns, and then put together an actual group of players for whom I ran two years' worth of monthly sessions, with successful results. Here is an account of the whole project.

For those who haven't done it, role-playing — at least my approach to role-playing — is best described as participatory fiction. There are game aspects, including the use of dice or other random mechanisms to determine the outcomes of characters' actions; but the core of the process is that a group of people make up fictional characters and tell about their actions for each other's entertainment. Ideally, each player's improvisations suggest further improvisations to other players, in the manner of jazz musicians jamming after hours; that's the "participatory" aspect.

But human actions don't take place in a vacuum; they're set in a world, where they find goals for their actions to attain, and which resists their actions in various ways. In role-playing, the world is supplied by the game master.

It might seem that using the world of Atlas Shrugged as a setting would be an easy task, demanding very little creativity. After all, Rand already did the hard work of imagining it; all that's necessary is to remember how she portrayed it, right? Not necessarily. In the first place, the questions readers ask of novelists are not the same as the questions role-players ask of game masters; the game master needs to think much more closely about "how things work." In the second place, setting the campaign too close to the actual plot of Atlas Shrugged would have lessened the players' enjoyment. After all, that story has already taken place, and its outcome is known to anyone who's read the book.

But role-players want their characters to have freedom of action; and more, they want to believe that what their characters do can make a difference to the outcome. So I looked for a way to develop a different narrative in the same setting. There were various possibilities — the historical past of Atlas Shrugged, or the early course of the Strike, or elsewhere in the United States during the events of the novel — but I decided to address a question many people find interesting: the course of the reconstruction of civilization. I chose a starting date for my campaign ten years after the first page of Atlas Shrugged.
 

© 2001 William H. Stoddard