Festive strains of Mariachi music burst in through the front doors of KBBL TV, accompanied by a pair of truly bizarre men. Maybe a man and woman. They juggle a half dozen VHS taped between them in dizzying, almost hypnotic patterns. The security guards don't know how to respond, so they don't. The receptionist, too, sits in stunned silence.

The androgynous juggler takes more and more of the tapes unto him/herself until only one remains in his/her partner's soil-encrusted hands. The latter slips into the back while the former mesmerizes the staff with a seductive dance that keeps members of both sexes confused and aroused.

An intern with a tray of mocha lattes intercepts him near the broadcast booth. He takes one look at the interloper's filthy rags and decides, "Your not supposed to be here." The Aghori plucks a latte from the tray and pours into into his favorite cup, one he fashioned from a human skull. He takes a sip, then fixes the intern with his depthless eyes and whispers, "Boo!" The poor kid is around the bend before his lattes hit the floor.

Soon thereafter, the trespasser is rooting through the booth's cluttered innards like a worm in a corpse. He locates one of the VHS decks, slides his tape inside, and waits for the regularly scheduled commercial break. Then, he splices in a series of satirical ads designed to undermine a local biochem manufacturer. Two minutes and thirty seconds later, he's on his way out the back door. When he exists, alarm will sound.

Pranking! This month, I'm bringing into focus an idea that made its blurry debut in my post-cyberpunk riff, Datarchy. Pulling off elaborate stunts to make a political point is a great narrative structure for one-shot games. Pick your target, plan your prank, and get on with it.

Towards that end, I give you Static: a modern magic (kinda) game set in the fascinating world of direct action. Players will use culture jamming, norm breaking, and protest tactics to disrupt the monolithic organizations that dominate society, then take them down by any means necessary. A game of Static should proceed through four steps...

Step One: Pick Your Target

Organizations are defined by their institutions, their power structures. Companies have financial, material, and legal assets. Religions have clergy, symbols, and rituals. Governments have bureaucracy, authority, and violence (the root of all authority). Jot down one, central institution for your target organization, then surround it with a few support structures. These will become separate Threats that the players will have to knock out before they can take the organization down.

For example, I might create a polluting manufacturer like this...

Main Structure: Biochemical factory on the Ohio River.

Support Structures:

• Local economy is dependent on the company.
• Factory has a dedicated security force.
• Supply lines (raw materials, finished products, toxic waste).
• Financial assets, mostly property and stock.

Or I could build me a political machine like this...

Main Structure: Local TV News station/propaganda machine.

Support Structures:

• Support of local religious leader who preaches politics.
• Owner is a close, personal friend of the mayor.
• Crack squad of lawyer/assassins!

The GM should stack Threat points on these structures just as if they were mook fights. That probably means a lot of points on the main structure and 1-2 rolls worth of Threat on the support structures, but that's not the only way to do it. You could also created strong support structures and then reinforce the main structure with side-goals and Nemeses.

Step Two: Create Your Culture Jammers

What separates Static's heros from your average protester is their crazy meme magic! By breaking taboos and hacking social reality, they gain an almost supernatural power over normal people. This is a more personal take on the culture jamming techniques they wield against organizations. It's built into their clothes, their language, and their mannerisms. It's an entire persona designed to freak the mundanes. Here are a few examples...

Wounded Lolita is a tiny, Japanese girl who likes to wear frilly dresses and carry a parasol where ever she goes. Always juxtaposed with this harmless facade is a fake injury: a black eye, an arm in a sling, a bandaged head, etc. It's always a little too bloody, a little too painful-looking, for most people's comfort. Caught between their altruism and their revulsion, Lolita's victims are easy to cajole, intimidate, or smack around with her beatstick parasol.

Syzygy is an acutely androgynous young man who tap dances between male and female personas so fast it would make Fred Astaire's head spin. Most people's social scripts for interacting with men and women are so different that this ambiguity leaves them paralyzed, which allows Syzygy to blow through light security, storm high society parties, and bluff his way out of the trouble that inevitably ensues.

The Other is a chimera, an archetypal outsider who makes it a point to NOT fit in where ever she happens to be. That could mean dressing like a homeless woman while casing a highrise office building or workin' up her best Afro to storm a KKK meeting. Whatever her enemies hate and fear the most, that's what she becomes.

(A few more options to consider: Punks, Aghori Mystics, and the Yes Men.)

Slap a 5-4-3 spread of Traits on there and you're ready to rock. The level-5 Trait should be your character's favored protest tactic, something like Cybercrime, Vandalism, or Tactical Frivolity. Select your level-4 Trait with an eye towards escaping the authorities: Freerunner, Flash Mobber, Black Bloc, etc. Round those out with a useful level-3 Trait like Breaking & Entering, Smooth-Talker, or Trust Fund Baby.

Step Three: Open Hostilities

First, the bad news: No one can attack the organization's main structure until at least one of its support structures is taken out. The good new is that your first round of attacks are without Nemesis opposition; let the players choose their support structures and prank themselves up to the dice pool limit just as if it were a mook fight.

When deciding who should hit what, there are a few things to consider. First, the GM gets to trot out a new Nemesis each round after the first, up to one Nemesis per player. Second, each support structure gives the Nemeses 1 Held Die, apiece, every round until it falls. However, you don't have to defeat all of the support structures in order to destroy the organization. When the main structure falls, everything falls. Choose your poison: spend time weakening the Nemeses from the outside, or take aim at the heart as soon as you get an opening.

Step Four: The Big K.O.

Once your first round of surprise attacks are over, the Authorities start coming out of the woodwork. These aren't detailed characters with back stories or motivations; they don't even get Traits. They're just the faceless embodiments of a role. Their target number is 5 whenever they're acting within their role, and 2 when they're not. Needless to say, they should stick with their schtick.

The Suit stands for Big Business. He wields lawsuits and credit cards with equal ease. You can go all Agent Smith and make him a combat maven in mirrorshades, or take the subtler routes of bribery and blackmail. Details are Details.

The Badge is here to protect and serve... the rich and powerful. His eponymous badge commands the instant obedience of all but the most subversive elements, which is where his gun comes in handy.

The Book derives his authority from a higher power: religion. Of course, divine intervention is hard to come by, so he usually gets things done with his hordes of rabid followers.

The Face is a celebrity, plain and simple. His power comes from his throngs of salivating fans and the fact that most people will bend over backwards to give him what he wants... even if it's a culture jammer's head on a pike.

The Voice is a media entity with slightly less star power: a journalist or pundit, lobbyist or spokesperson. He's quite adept at repairing subverted symbols and disrupted social institutions, but useless outside his chosen medium.

As explained above, the GM has the option of bringing out a new Nemesis every round after the first, but they can also create side goals and mook Threats. The players don't have to deal with them, they win as soon as the main structure is taken out, but ignoring them could result in loss of precious Chi, harm to bystanders, or other collateral damage.

When the Threat on the main structure reaches zero, the session's over.

Generating Static

The culture jammer's sack o' goodies is crammed full of entertaining game inspiration, ranging from RPG mainstays (violence, vandalism) to the positively puckish (frivolous lawsuits, street theater, subvertising). The following is a taxonomy in broad strokes; there's plenty more material out there to be researched. I'd start on (big surprise) Wikipedia's List of Protest Tactics and Examples of Culture Jamming.

Vandalism

It seems only natural to kick things off with violence. Opening water mains and blocking roads with burning cars are effective ways to disrupt an organization's supply lines or keep a city's first responders busy. Power outages, broken windows, molotov cocktails hurled onto the street... you don't have to injure anybody to cause a lot of delicious chaos.

Cybervandalism

It's not all spamnets and DOS attacks. The classy kind of cybervandalism involves replacing your enemy's website with something satirical, offensive, or incriminating. Those kinds of pranks can get a corporate entity in hot water with their business associates, which will help choke off their financial and political resources.

Red Tape

Both government agencies and corporations will be hard pressed to fend off a jamming while they're neck deep in improperly-filed forms and frivolous lawsuits. This is also a great way to draw attention to accounting books that haven't been properly cooked. If you can trick people into thinking that there's money in it for them, you can pull off the analog version of DOS attack.

Reality Hacking

Organizations rely on their symbols. Reality hackers turn those symbols against their makers by editing them in subversive ways, then sending them back out into the media landscape. (There are some very nice examples on Wikipedia's Subvertising page.) On June 17th, 2007, a group of vandals hacked into Czech TV and broadcast a fake nuclear explosion. Good stuff.

Flash Mobs

The internet has made it possible to produce organized, collective action with very little centralized control. Flash mobs are groups of people who gather at a time and place, engage in some seemingly spontaneous behavior, and then scatter to the four minds. In a Whirl-Mart, for example, protesters pose as shoppers, then proceed to walk around the targeted store like mindless zombies.

Tactical Frivolity

Whoever first thought to themselves, "Wouldn't it be cool to make the cops arrest clowns on national TV?" is a freakin' genius. Protesters sometimes perform street theater, dance, juggle, etc. in order to create a carnival atmosphere. The same technique can be used by small groups of culture jammers to put security teams off balance or prevent the use of violence by Authorities.

Dual Powers

This one's a little esoteric, but I think it has potential. The theory is that you can weaken an institution by creating an alternative institution to serve the same or similar purpose. As people are lured over to the new way of doing things, the old way is weakened. Warehouse stores, entertainment outlets, and even religions could be susceptible to this kind of subversion.

You can play Static very low-powered, where the jammers' tricks are all psychological, or you can amp up the absurdity until you're taking on the Secret Masters of western civ with nothing more than Photoshop and fashion sense. In my playtest game, a team of anarcho-libertarians took on Kirk Cameron's vast Organic Foods empire, and the robotic ghost of Willie Nelson got caught in the crossfire. Take that as you will.

Next Up: Power-mad yogis and the thought-forms who love/hate them!