Psytrance: The RPG

A hypothetical psytrance RPG
similar to South Park Stick of Truth, but set in the real world of selling tabs while dealing with assholes trying to move in on your DJ set.

Gameplay Loop

Going from party to party and trying to collect money and reputation and drugs.
Where u have to find secret parties (there is a city map) to DJ at and sell drugs. You can go to normal clubs but that is more of a grind with lesser rewards. Once you gain more income, you can afford to travel to other cities and expand your empire, and later in the game fly to Burning Man, Thailand, Azora, Boom etc. with greater rewards (and risks). If you want Mexico Brazil and Israel you’ll have to buy the expansions and yes, there will be a cash shop of RMTs such as cosmetics (the latest Spacetribe fluoro jacket) and slowly becoming full-on Pay to Win with virtual sheets of Hoffmans available for 100 Euros/USD that are linked to darkweb retailers. Special Dice: Fashioned from DMT or LSD Crystals (your choice!)

Starting a Player Character

The Trancer

Not just a Magic User or garden variety Illusionist, The Trancer can set up camp and be comfortable anywhere but isn’t the versatile role, and is highly reagent dependent. If psychedelics aren’t available, the chances of The Trancer not being useless is iffy at best.

Classes Split

Trancers can also be Druids (Open Air), Illusionists, Magic Users, and Thieves (See Bag and Track Stealing).

For full title descriptions, please refer to Trancespotting

The Trancer

Trancer Level Progression
1 0-500 Drinker
2 501-1,000 Partiers
3 1,001-1,500 Confused Enlightenment Seeker
4 1,501-2500 Dancer
5 2,501-3500 Fake Indian
6 3,501-4500 Angry Upstart
7 4,501-6000 Communists
8 6,001-7500 Live Set Critic
9 7,501-9,500 Trance Nerd
(two Career Tracks – Trainwreckspotter and Track Nerd)
10 9,500-11,000 PsySnob
11 11,001-20,000 Organizer
12 20,000-30,000 Old Timer
13 30,000-40,000 Armchair Trancehead
14 40,001-100,000 List Moderator Ability: Infuriate (Note: Players may jump to this level straight from Level 10)
15 10,0001-200,000 Trance Guru: Charm, Otto’s Irresistible Dance
16 200,001-201,000 Cult Leader: Mass Hypotize
17 201,000-202,000 Sleeper Ability: Sleep
18 202,000+ Dungeon Master St Vitus Dance – At the highest levels, a Trancer can help tranceform the epistemological data structures of active participants without alchemical augmentation, and without the aid of 142BPM/10-12 Hz Alpha Waved music. All it takes is a healthy dose of Mana Points and a determined will. The overall effect also creates a 60’ diameter aura of Extra Healing

Subclass: Brewer/Alchemist

A subclass who specialized in making potions.
Level 1 – Chai Brewer
Level 3 – Mimohuasca brewer
Level 4 – Ayahuasca brewer
Level 5 – DMT Extractor
Level 6 – 2CB Chemist
Level 7 – DMT Chemist (lab grade)
Level 8 – MDMA Chemist
Level 15 -LSD Chemist (high miscibility)

Brewer/Alchemists must invest considerable time gathering reagents (herbalism is very helful) and carrying potion bottles, grinders, and such.

Subclass: DJs

The DJ is a subclass of Bard and Illusionist that, in its highest levels, closely resembles a Cleric or Druid, depending on whether they are Progressive or Full On. Their spell learning ability matches those two classes, respectively. As a reminder, all Druids are Neutral in Alignment, although Progressives are usually Lawful Evil bastards, with a level reserved for them in the 666 Layers of the Abyss.
Level Abilities
1 Trainwrecker (Spells: Confuse)
4 Sex seeking DJ (Spells: Enchant)
5 Learn the ability to press Play on an Ableton mix and bill yourself as “Live”
7 Accomplished Mixer (Spells: Mass Hypnosis)
15 Producer (Monthly income of 2 free drink tickets and 20 μg)

Race

Any race can be trancer, but most often they are (in level of frequency) Elves, Drow Elves, Half Elves, Half Wits, Machinelves, Gnomes, Hobbits/Halflings, Humans, and Half-orcs, the latter of which tend to be ax-wielding Trance Metal Orcs. Dwarves can occasionally (rarely) be trancers, and they seem to gravitate to Germanic tracks and specialize in Alchemy (see below). Fighter combos are rare, as most trancers are too Shanti or too drugged out to engage in melee.

Attributes

Drugs have varying effects and cooldowns.
A Trip Meter that can go up or down with different drugs and great DJ mixes. The goal of reaching 100% is that you enter a bonus combat zone with mythical creatures (see combat)
Trancers are Strength -1, Intelligence +1. Wisdom: unaffected, Dexterity +2, Constitutuion +1, Charisma unaffected
Strength – affects your ability to lift speakers and in melee combat
Intelligence – affects many dialogue checks and drug synthesis; helps in learning more languages which will aid in their international travels.
Wisdom – can help in avoiding the “bad” drugs (cocaine, heroin, meth) and things like throwing a huge party with no acid supply.
Dexterity – affects poi, DJing, ability to pull off exotic dance moves
Constitution – affect the amount of time you can dance, and stay up. The most crucial stat; if it is at least 15 you will win the game very quickly.
Charisma – affects dialogue checks, the ability to get people to attend your events, convince police that this is a legal event, and reception to your DJing if you are visible

Alignment

In the context of this game, “liberal” equates with Chaotic, and “conservative” equates with Lawful, with Good or Evil up to an individual’s choice or temperament.
Trancers can be any alignment, but they tend towards Chaotic Good. As they adopt more and more conspiracy views, they drift towards Chaotic Neutral and finally Chaotic Evil and suffer 5 points Intelligence and Wisdom loss.
Alt-Right trancers start at Lawful Evil.

Skills

In addition to the subclass of DJing, and Alchemist, Deco, skills can be picked up such as Music Production, Poi and Fire Spinning, Chai making, drumming, spliff following, etc
DJing is a minigame like Tetris where u have to mix blocks.

Exploring the Millieu

Reputation

Reputation (and XP) may be gained in a variety of ways, such as DJing a great set, having good acid, bringing sound or a generator, bringing nitrous, helping clean up, etc and lose rep by selling bad drugs, stealing, making Nazi threats, etc
There are different factions (Goa, Progressive, Chillout, etc) and u can gain rep from each faction via quests.
If your rep falls below 0 with any of the factions, that’s when the fun starts. You may be able to with proper positioning to get them to fight each other like in Doom.

Parties

“Parties” has a double meaning is Psytrance: The RP. The volume of the event, while boosting morale, may attract police, or worse, other criminals. Cops, pretty thieves, and rival Djs and drug dealers have to be dealt with, not counting faction wars and the occasional ex.

Weapons

Trancers usually use their Whits to escape situations, sowing confusion where possible.

Equipment

Trancers usually have access to a wide variety of psychedelic drugs which can alternately confuse, enchant, enrage, or put to Sleep their friends and enemies.

Vendors

At large festivals there is a goa flea market.

Armor

Trancers rarely use armor, as it restricts their ability to Shimmy and Shake.

Morale

Wavers year by year, throw +1 on good years and when hit by new tracks.

Combat

Let’s be real, any RPG is doomed unless there is combat. Poi and fire twirling can be used as weapons. The combat is in a visionary world, like mythical creatures while tripping.
You have to be on enough of the right drugs and music to be able to enter combat in these mini instances. A lightning round.
Various bosses can be sprinkled throughout the game and world, such as Doctor Spook in San Francisco (who skateboards around and zaps you with Walmart beams), Robin Triskele in London (who summons minions, avatars of Youth, etc you have to fight then after you defeat them she goes poof in a cloud of smoke) and Goa Gil in Goa (who will grind you to a pulp over 30 hours in an epic endurance battle in his compound near Anjuna Beach).

Experience

100 Playing a non-trainwrecked set
200 Taking LSD (see below)
1000 Playing a non-trainwrecked set that gets the trance cheerleader twerking
1500 Smoking DMT
3000 Surviving a busted renegade party
-1500 Attending a progressive trance party

LSD is actually calculated for the number of drops you take at once. 5 points for one drop, 25 for 2, 125 for three. 625 for 4. If you take one Turbo drop (saturated solution of LSD in strong alcohol solution, around 1200μg) it’s 10,000 xp.

Trancers as NPCs/Wandering Monsters
You can have NPCs and monsters culled from Trancespotting
Trancer Gatherings number 1-100 (usually much higher outside the USA) and can be heard from at least 500′. If they are encountered in a group, they never have the initiative, but solo they are usually Tripping and almost always do, even to the point of having the Thieves Hiding in Shadows ability. They will usually befriend the adventurers and confuse them with gibberish rivaling the fabled Necronomicon. Adventurers will usually lose their willpower, join the group of Trancers for 3-6 months, at which point they will be unavailable for adventuring while various countermeasures, such as Intervention or Deprogramming, fail.

Trancers as a group have infiltrated all major races and most social humanoid races in this milieu and no one is exempt from their crafty wiles, even the gods from all 9 sections of the Astral Planes (I.e. Loki, Bacchus, Quetzalcoatl etc).

Trance Metal Orcs

A whole different approach is to play a Trance Metal Orc, with lots of mead, which would also make excellent NPCs when traveling in Scandinavia.

(Ed. note – this all actually happened with a couple hundred people at a Lord of the Rings party thrown by Burning Elf in upstate New York. I was in full shaman attire and went into a local grocery store and wowed the kids with flash paper.
The local town was invited to the all-night event, one lady freaked out when she saw our orc camp, and became convinced it was devil worship. Everyone calmed down somewhat when they got their first glimpse at the Fellowship of the Ring film, which was being projected. It all worked out, the local villagers played the role of the farmer hobbits.)

Achtung!

HUMANS! ORCS! LISTEN UP AND IGNORE AT YOUR PERIL!!
LIVE FROM NEW ORK, IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT
Get your stinking hands off of me you damn dirty human!! The infamous upstart orc band from New Ork the Bleeding Black Sheep will rise from our table of heavy fat ladened food and do our trance black metal war music and scare the living bejeezus out of the pansy elves. Get there by then or you will have to do toilet duty.

History

Costumed Tolkien gatherings are popular throughout Northern Europe and the former Soviet Union – thousands of Middle-earthers have reenacted episodes from The Silmarillion in the forests outside Moscow while the repressive government of Kazakstan is now detaining “Tolkienists” alongside hippies, anarchists, and punks. Tolkien gatherings are serious affairs: One elvish feast that Persson attended took months to prepare. The central meal included honeyed bread, mulled wine, roasted boar, blueberry pie, and Psilocybe mushrooms. People shot arrows, danced, and bathed naked in the streams, taking care to remain in character at all times. This meant that participants not only removed all references to the modern world (smokers switched to pipes) but abandoned Swedish for their own version of Quenya. The boys from Za Frûmi enjoy these elvish fetes, but they really get off on playing orcs. “I like the orcs’ cultural way of life,” says Persson. “They are crude and primitive but still in some ways more advanced than us.” Sometimes dozens of orcs congregate in smaller, more esoteric gatherings, garbed in elaborate costumes featuring la tex, prosthetics, and Orientalist armor. In addition to mounting raids and practicing their vocabulary words, the orcs sometimes stage shamanistic rituals around the fire. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to remember it’s not really happening,” says Persson. “It’s not dangerous in any sense. People would not actually start killing one another. But you can get so deeply in character that you forget yourself.”
There is a long tradition of metal Orc bands in Sweden. We hope to continue that tradition for an Orc presence at the Lord of the Rings party next month, mixing it up of course with hard hard trance…

FUCK THE ELVES!!!

Burzum was a black metal band that appeared circa 1992-97. Varg Vikernes named his band Burzum after one of Tolkien’s words for darkness (in the language of Morder, the word Burzum means darkness). He also chose “Count Grishnackh” as his black metal name (after one of the orcs in the Lord of the Rings series). So what if he allegedly burned down three churches in Sweden. So what if he has neo pagan/nazi beliefs. AND SO WHAT if he stabbed and killed his friend and fellow co-producer over a matter of money (which he is serving 21 consecutive years for). I think that his music is awesome, and that he should deserve an honorary cut in the lord of the rings soundtrack. Any thoughts to this?

ORCS

The Lawful Evil 13th Level Fighter/Magic User/Thief Assasin, the Most High of the Uruk Hai,
My Heinous Hai-ness Highness, Your King,
MACHINE ORC @tranceam.org >:-(
Herr Trancellor OggMod
Evil Trance Orc Queen Lisa – guitar, whip
Wylie – the Cave Troll
We need more in our band of killers! Fire twirlers! Torturers! Black shamans! Lady Orcs! Half-Orc Perps!
WHO WILL BE SARUMAN? SAURON?

Music

(We orcs eat for the previous DJ set on a picnic table next to the dancers, throwing food around, getting in food fights, etc Then, after the dj stops, the mike comes over to the table and we have a little orc skit… and ends with one says
LIVE from NEW ORK it’s SATURDAY NIGHT!!!
Then the orcs go grab their instruments.. maybe playing Kiss’, Rock and Roll all Night. The drums at the beginning of the song can be set to loop so that we have time from the
LIVE from NEW ORK it’s SATURDAY NIGHT!!!
to Rock and Roll all Night. to get in position and jam.
My thoughts are, Black Metal. Skinny Puppy, Ministry.. and maybe Ozzy!
We gotta get together and rehearse with CDs and get ur set together. We can all tag team different tracks…
At the VERY least we will have a band lip synching to death metal and S.U.N. Project and some scandotrance with a lead singer/DJ, guitarist (Mark Lorenz) and a drummer (Terry Spacehopper).
While a band is always a great idea, I think a good place to start is what kind of music we should play as orcs. Why don’t we all assemble a playlist for like an hour – and the genre should encompass punk, metal, speedmetal, trance, maybe even goth and diamanda galas stuff.
Maybe we should also have some good standbys, like
Iron Man – Ozzy Osbourne
Run to the Hills – Iron Maiden
Shook me all night long – ACDC
Violence School – Dead Milkmen
I wanna be sedated – Ramones
Every Day is Halloween – Ministry
VX Gas Attack/stuff from Rabies/Cleanse fold Manipulate Skinny Puppy
S.U.N. Project
My idea was that we alternatively get on the decks, and when we are not on the decks, do Orc dancing weird things with whips and chains and weird machinery and the like.
More track ideas – Die Form, Slayer, Venom, Exodus, Motorhead, Merciful Fate, Nuclear Assault, Celtic Frost, Death from Canada..

Clothes

We will ALL wear the same orc masks. I’m going to a costume shop and looking for the orc face mask that best looks like the image on our home page: Budget: around $10 per mask, payable when we see you there… hopefully the prosthetic glue on type, the most comfortable (i wore one straight thru Burning Man 3 years ago) It will be up to you to get weapons, whips, chains, black clothes (dark grey for the Orc Armani set), weird Gwaresque contraptions, strap-ons, elf ear necklaces, darts, morning stars, shurikens, torture tools, and crystal meth lab gear >:-( I’ll get extra Gum Arabic and remover if you need to take a bath, Sauron forbid. Keep in mind it will take you around 30 minutes to assemble the mask. We are getting there Friday morning to build our base, New Ork City. So – if you are going to be in costume – and so far me, lisa, and mark will be – let me know or don’t come as an orc. This is your warning you sad sacks of shit! DID YOU HEAR ME YOU SCUM! YOU WILL PREYED UPON AS QUICKLY AS AN ENCROACHING ANT FROM A RIVAL COLONY!!! WE WILL BE ABLE TO SMELL YOUR DISGUISE LIKE A PACK OF DOGS AND WILL TOSS YOU INTO OUR DUNGEON TENT FOR A GENEROUS REAMING!! Also send an email to trancemetalorcs-subscribe@yahoogroups.com This does NOT apply to Wylie who will be our Cave Troll. He doesn’t even need a mask.
We will help you assemble your costume and makeup for a very small cost, which will pay for the accoutrements that will not cost all that much (be ready to pay up you don’t want just blackface and a burlap sack!) If you’re really ugly in a human way you will be welcomed in our group, as our standards for beauty are opposite that of the humans. (Astrid – YUCK!) It’s also be cheaper, as we won’t need facial add-ons for you.

Culture

Our banner is the Orcstika Omstika. We wear it proudly on our armbands

Camp New Orc City

Also, we will bring a bigass jambox if we can set New Ork up far enough where the music from that pussy assed elf trance thing does’t interfere. Orc village – skulls on stakes, blood banners, roast pig with a big mushroom in its mouth. In battleorcs will cut the ears off of elves and wear them as necklaces – maybe we can sell elf ears back to the humans for food or something. One of the tents in our village will be a dungeon tent for prisoners… we can abduct elves and bring them there to make half orcs… We need a Saruman to breed new orc spawn.. We have to decorate a motorcycle that will drive in in the middle of the set and have a guest superstar orc dj get off and man the decks… Also, we can get a meal together of gruel and gristle at a picnic table near the stage right before we go on – hit each other with legs of lamb etc.
Within the orc camp we will have a captive elf dome tent. Like visitors at a zoo, you can come watch the elves being elves. They go about their little lives, in their elf nest,and we control the inputs and outputs. Ha ha. See the little elves. It’s a great ride! Fun for all the little orc kids with their mutton cotton candy and elf voodoo dolls! “I get Delirious!”

Commerce

Also we should discuss how we can be the security at all the parties. The hippies had the Hell’s Angels, the trancers can have the New Orcs.
We will have orc money – gold pieces – that we can barter with. Gold pieces are good for our soup – lentils and bluegreen algae! plus mutton cotton candy and elfin voodoo dolls.
Various signs around our camp –
Now Entering New Orc City – Population 13 14 15. Crossed out, keeps shrinking.
Bring all the evil shit you can think of – I’m bringing many skulls, candles, weapons, warpaint, etc
LONG LIVE THE HORDE!!
War Not Peace,
Burn the Elves,
Hatefully ours,
May your Hit Points be bountiful, and your thirst for blood never be slaked,
FUCK THE ELVES! YOU WILL BE BURNED!!
We are for the war but against the troops.

Link to Wired article, 2001

Winning the Game

The ultimate goal is some psytrance king or queen (like in Super Mario) then plot twist he/she is a narc who likes Sasha & Digweed and is the final boss battle.

Here is a recent inspiration that is set to be released this month (October 2020):

We have some level 25 Lawyers in case there is any copyright infringement. Feel free to “steal” this idea; you’re not making any money regardless.