Essence-Blasting Hits of the Seventies

PREMISE

If you put your ear to any railroad in America, you can hear the old bluesmen singing their favorite songs, as clear as a bell. Even ones that aren't connected to the main lines play the blues. Back during the Forties, the best of the bluesmen picked up their belongings, followed the rail lines into New Mexico, and then fought - and beat - the Devil himself, fighting with switchblades and ancient guitars in the fires of the first atomic bomb. You can see their faces in the aurora borealis at night, illuminating the mile-long blackened bones of the Devil, or visit their animated skeletons as they jam on a plain of black glass.

There were other Tune Exalted, of course, gathering in garages, or in abandoned warehouses, or in the backs of poolrooms to tune their art, to learn the craft of channeling their primal energy - their Cool - through their music. You could see their efforts in broad daylight, transparent anima banners circling over a particular house in an otherwise normal neighborhood. The energy orgasm of Woodstock envigorated the country, but its hubris caused the Nihil that was once the Altamont Speedway. The Beatles ascended into someplace better a long time ago, but you can hear some of their new songs if you sacrifice something important of yours to a radio.

Somewhere, it went wrong. As the Seventies dawned, the rebellion and the drugs stopped being revolutionary, decaying into petulance and decadence. The mightiest of the Tune Exalted fell, brought down by their own self-destructive impulses and hedonistic appetities. Those who were left became corrupt, unable to cope with the change of the times.

You can't stop it forever. There's a great deal of anger in the mean streets of Britain, waiting to express itself in talisman safety pins and haircuts designed to channel Cool into a brutally simple backbeat and pure rage. At CBGB's, there's a new act every night, trying to muster the energy required to become a Tune Exalted. In the Southwest, there's endless duels between the Dragons, a competition for status, the coolest car, the best guitar, the swiftest sword, Cool - and for the Sacred Licks, the guitar riffs that, put together, can equal the mightiest Exalted sorcery. In the Midwest, the Tune Exalted have taken to the land as only the best country artists can, walking across - and becoming part of - the land. And in every suburb in the land, there's a new Tune Exalted waiting to step into his inheritance.

So the demon agents are waiting for their new masters to arise, so that they can fill their roles as bastards for the best rock and roll artists in the world. The producers are waiting in their studios, listening to the gentle rumble of creative spirits. Even the record companies are quiet, hoping that they can simply ride the coat-tails of the next big thing.

You're a Tune Exalted. What do you want to sing about?

SETTING:

The setting of Tune Exalted is the United States of America - but it's a United States that's been altered by the Tune Exalted, for better and for worse. The current setting, 1977, has seen approximately four major tides, each of which changed the country for better and for worse. Each wave spawned a new wave of Tune Exalted, who then guided the country through the resulting changes.

The 1920s: Smooth Alien Jazz, White Bleeding Horror

The Great War put paid to a lot of the Tune Exalted of the 19th century - the romantic conception of warfare, as exemplified in the operas and arias of theater, was barely able to affect the harsh reality of an artillery barrage, or sweep away the poison gas that rotted the lungs of soldiers where they stood. The worst came when the Operatic Exalted's power worked, creating epic sweeps of pagaentry that invariably came apart under gunfire. Glittering armor and braces of cherubim proved poor protection against a steel-jacketed bullet. The war was ultimately decided by force of arms, which then lead to bloody stalemate, eventually ending in 1918 after American intervention.

Europe, bled white by the Great War, tried to continue with a pale imitation of the Exalted vs. Exalted operatic duels that had given it its strength in the 18th century, but only succeeded in falling into greater and greater decadence. The strength of the music passed over the Atlantic, to America, where it blossomed into jazz and the blues. Both were similar in composition, but their outcomes would be remarkably different.

Jazz's Exalted took off from the impact of Prohibition, drawing its energy from African-American culture intermixing with white society for the firs time; the blues had always existed, but it began to produce its own Tune Exalted without having a significant audience behind it. But while the blues stayed relatively obscure, jazz swiftly became the music of the flappers, of the endless boom of the Twenties. Bluesmen dealt with lesser demons and devils at dusty crossroads, or in the middle of stagnant swamps; jazzmen played their music in speakeasies, used their powers to aid bootleggers in running their goods from state to state, put another electric current into a society that had already had enough.

Thoughts, plot points, locations, enemies and so forth: - The Sacred Licks can be adapted into any song, but they're primarily held by major families - each family gets its power from ownership. Los Angeles is held by a quartet of major families, each of which has at least one major Lick; each private army takes its power from the Lick. But there's a lot of lost Licks out there, all of which are being fought over by the Dragon Samurai - mariachi from Mexico, but anybody with a guitar and a sword can cut a path through the desert. Think of "Six-String Samurai" meets "Desperado", with lots of overt magick; corrupt civilizations contrasted against struggling villages, scumholes, and wandering mariachi samurai.

- The United States is not the US as we know it; it's been radically transformed by the Tune Exalted. All of the major cities are there, and you can live in places in the US that don't look a thing different from our world, but there are

- There are Deadlands in the United States as well. Near Memphis, there's mass of pasty white flesh miles wide, maybe a thousand feet high, rolling through the countryside and devouring anything it touches. It's tended by a small legion of sycophant demons and the reanimated corpses of groupies. If you search the top of the mass of flesh, you can find a mouth and a black pompadour. The mouth will occasionally mutter something Southern, usually about fried peanut butter sandwiches or burning love. At the same time, though, there's a young man with a gold jacket and a guitar supposedly stolen from the Devil's corpse wandering through the south, waggling his hips and throwing that trademark smirk. The King's body may be rotting, but the King's spirit isn't done by far.

- Glamour as a mechanic again. This time, instead of being spent, Glamor measures how much energy your character has; a low-Glamor Exalted is an up-and-comer, like Beck around the time of "Loser", while a high-Glamor Exalted is, say, Radiohead at this particular moment. You see where this is going, huh? You can nurse a moderate amount of Glamor for a long while, or a high Glamor for a short period, but the public is fickle, and they'll eventually find themselves a new flavor of the month. You can retain your experience as a experienced, wearied Exalted, like Elvis Costello - well known, but hardly burning up the charts - or you can attempt the painful experience of rebuilding yourself into a new persona, exchanging skills and memories for a new persona, like Madonna. The higher your Glamor, though, the more you can do - so you can risk it all with high Glamor, attempt to do something big, or you can live with the frustration of knowing that you could do better but never had the guts to go for the big hits.

- Anybody can play guitar; anybody can be a Tune Exalted. This isn't an exclusive club; you just have to play music. There are musicians who have decided to shun the Exalted idea completely, believing that the music has nothing to do with the channeling of magic - and they're perfectly viable player characters, because they don't have to cope with the constant temptation and pitfalls of being an Exalted.

- While I hate to sound like a music snob, I'm avoiding the portrayal of country-western as Nashville - as the liner notes for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? point out, contemporary country music is essentially bubblegum music with Hallmark lyrics. Exalted country-western artists focus around the land, and its harshness; murder ballads, the bleak and the scary, the bizarre and the unexplained. An Exalted focused on country-western can step into the land as if he's pulling a blanket over his head, sleep under the ground for a night, then wake up and walk away without a speck of dirt on him. Or walk the world as a wolf. Or summon help from a nearby town without saying a word.

- Instead of charms being based on skills, you'd base them off of music styles, and make them broad. Rock and roll has its own charm tree, so does country and western, and so forth down the line - but you could pick and choose depending on what music style you like. Or, you could use magic like Tribe 8's Synthesis, with your effect determined by your successes.

- Things I'm trying to avoid:

• Demonization of agents and record companies. Yes, they're bastards; obviously. Since it's too obvious to make them the villains, I'm choosing to make agents literally demons, but helper demons - think of Smithers to the Exalted's Mr. Burns. The record companies are more like remora; they want to glom onto an Exalted's side, not ruin his life.

• "Love will conquer all." Rock and Rule did this, and I want to avoid painting rock and roll as nothing but magic, love, sweetness and light; a Tune Exalted can have his magic and his music eat him alive if he's not careful.

• Rock movement X was the greatest thing on the face of the earth, and it is automatically the Most Magic. Yeah, well, I've seen too many musical movements turn into parodies of themselves; while hippies may have considered themselves the harbingers of truth and light and goodness, most of them were...well, hippies. Punks supposedly had an intellectual vein to their movement, but at its worst, it was essentially brutal stupidity set to music. New Wave was the most intellectual, but had a tendency to turn fey and affected if left alone too long. No music is immune from destruction.

• The Town Elders are out to get us! Yeah, yeah - we've all seen Flashdance, or at least had somebody give us the gist of it. The Tune Exalted are an extremely powerful force; the average Town Elder would rather have them around doing things for the community than being chased away for Ye Olde Actes of Perversione.

I should post this before my computer fries. If anybody wants to add on, go right ahead; ditto if you want to use it.