Editing Scum: We Is Scum (section)

==Themes and Mood==

* '''The Disposable Children'''
In ''Scum'', life isn't worth much. There's a hundred teenagers like you on the estate, and all of them have started in the bottom of society, and will likely end there too. Teenage mothers beget at least half a dozen mewling sprogs each, and they'll go on to be teenage parents themselves. Numbers multiply and there's always another child on the way. Life ends easily with the stab of a knife or with a drug overdose. Those that survive have little to do but perpetuate the cycle of misery. 

* '''Hedonism'''
The key to happiness then, is to live for the moment. The ''Scum'' are hedonists in the truest sense: they drink, have sex, smoke, take drugs and fight because there's nothing better to do, and nothing to lose by doing so. The game systems in place encourage this sort of attitude - if you want to succeed you have to embrace the hedonistic aspects of life, and throw yourself into danger. You shouldn't be worrying about consequences, but instead living for the self-gratification of the moment.

* '''Filth'''
The world of ''Scum'' is dirty, in every sense of the world. In depicting the world and in shaping the scenarios the GM should be aware that he should be viewing through a lense of grime and filth. Graffiti lines every wall, glass is always broken and rats rummage through uncollected trash.  The ''Scum'' move through this dirty world comfortably, because its all they've ever known.  The filth of the streets should be reflected in the NPCs as well. Everyone's dirty somehow - everyone has a guilty secret, be it sexual perversions, a secret drug habit or a warped and bigoted mind. In this sort of setting it becomes easier to see our protagonists as the heroes (or at least, anti-heroes). They might not be paragons of good behaviour, but there still not as f**ked up as the generation above them, and at least they are still young enough to change...

* '''Sex'''
Tied in with hedonism and filth is ''sex'' - we're talking about teenagers here, with little supervision and an attitude of "do what feels good". Is it any wonder that sex is a major theme? The protagonists happily have quick and dirty sex in the piss-stained alleys, or give each other hand jobs in darkened corners of sticky nightclubs. The GM and players shouldn't shy away from narrating sex - this isn't a game where you just cut to the next scene. On the other hand, sex should generally be depicted as tawdry and filthy, and all about pleasure rather than love.

* '''Dark humour'''
As players, how can we deal with all this relentless darkness? Well, you could play it straight, and just simulate the awfulness of it all, but that can be wearing after a while. What we do in this game is to approach everything with an eye of dark humour. The same sense of humour that lets you laugh at a limping war veteran slipping on a banana skin will let you laugh here. It's funny, even if the old man lands with a sickening crunch. Hence we allow our players and player characters to laugh as well. They catch an old lady masturbating over a copy of Razzle - they laugh. They knife a fellow scum, and then sell his body to the kebab van for fresh meat - they laugh. This is fiction, you're allowed to laugh. Getting in the right mood for this sort of humour is essential - watching British dark comedy like ''Jam'' or ''League of Gentlemen'' can help.

* '''Hope and Money'''
A major theme for ''Scum'' is the hope of escape. The place where they are is undesirable, and to succeed in life they have to get out of the estate. The walls that hold them in aren't physical ones though, but rather a combination of poverty, poor education, poor prospects and peer pressure. ''Scum'' aren't ones to recognise any of these factors though, save for their poverty. For them ''money'' is all you need to get out. The game scenarios invariably revolve around cash, and the dream of escape that cash represents.

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