The problem with most roleplaying games is that their premises collapse the moment the players fall on their asses.
Which, unless you really railroad them within an inch of their lives and fudge every dice roll, is going to happen. It’s just a fact of life. People mess up. Humiliating accidents happen. We all know that from our real, actual lives set in comfortable First World environments… and the sort of high-risk shenanigans we get up to in TTRPGs offer a lot more chances for things to go demoralisingly wrong.
The problem is, most TTRPGs try to emulate fiction, and in fiction people tend to succeed at anything that is broadly achievable. When they fail, it tends to be because it was hopeless right from the start. If the hero loses a fight, it’s because he’s not skilled enough and needs a training montage. Or his opponent was unkillable by mere steel, and he needs a special magic sword. Or some nefarious traitor slipped drugs into his breakfast stew. It’s never just because, well, he had an off day. He zigged when he should have zagged. He was a little too slow with that one parry. Hey, shit happens. You win some, you lose some. But not in fiction.
So what TTRPGs produce – partly since they have randomised elements like dice, but mostly because they have the ultimate randomised element of human beings making bad judgment calls and misreading situations because they haven’t read the script – is usually less like the sort of fiction they’re supposed to be based on, and more like a parody of the same. It’s Conan the Barbarian, except he falls on his face when trying to scale a wall. It’s Lord of the Rings, except the Fellowship wanders in circles for a week because they can’t figure out the map. It’s Robin Hood, but the Sheriff’s men spotted the ambush because someone burped at the wrong time.
And it gets worse the more high-powered and dignified the game is meant to be. There’s a reason why the origin of the hobby was a bunch of random schmoes skulking through a dungeon and trying to steal some gold without being eaten by a giant slime mold. When your first-level halfling thief trips and falls into a bottomless chasm, well, it’s about what you’d expect, isn’t it? But when a game is meant to be beautiful, evocative and heroic, the cracks start to show. When your immortal champion of light and justice trips and falls into a bottomless chasm, it’s really kind of wretched.
I think that if you want tonal consistency in your games, you really just have two options. Call them comedy and tragedy. The senseless setbacks will happen. You have either be prepared to laugh, or be prepared to cry.
I don’t mean, of course, that your only options are non-stop slapstick or wall-to-wall angst. You can run fun adventures or intricate intrigues or passionate drama or anything you want. What I mean is that the potential for comedy or tragedy (or both) have to be there right from the start. You need to set the game in the sort of universe where things can suddenly go wrong and where everyone knows that they can suddenly go wrong.
For a good example – and one of the few franchises that I think actually lends itself well to roleplaying – you can look at Star Wars. There you have epic conflicts and pulse-pounding action, to be sure. But it all takes place in a world where silly things happen, even to characters who are stalwart heroes or fiendish villains. Darth Vader goes to rout the forces of good through his terrifying presence and unmatched dogfighting skills… and gets sent spinning into space because some jerk managed to shoot him down from behind. Luke Skywalker has a vision of his friends being in danger, so he runs to the rescue… and completely blows it and ends up needing them to rescue him. It doesn’t mean that they’re not an inspiring hero and a terrifying villain, it just means that they’re both at the mercy of a bad die roll.
Among roleplaying games, the one that comes to mind for leaning into this is of course Paranoia, where things getting wildly out of control is meant to be part of the fun. It definitely embraces comedy. And in (ahem) my own labour of love, Monstrous Mishaps, I of course do the same thing. The more ridiculous and dignity-free a way the players find to succeed, the better it fits the game’s themes. Which is, I still think, an excellent way of doing it.
But I actually think that a better example for how you can open the door to randomness without going all out on it is the early Vampire: the Masquerade books I’ve been reading my way through.
And, look, I know what you’re thinking. VtM? The game that’s justifiably blamed for the entire “roleplaying is aaaaaaaaart, man!” vibe that dominated the nineties and encouraged GMs to force through their Incredibly Important Themes no matter how badly they had to mutilate the game to do it? The gold standard for pretentious, oppressive metaplot? And, well, yes, that’s fair. But I mean the very early days.
Because, you see, in those early days, the premise of the game was still that you were something that shouldn’t exist… but that you existed anyway. And that coloured everything. It took place in a world that had lost the plot, where there was no justice and no consistency, just cold facts of the environment. You were a vampire, but you weren’t a sleek, elegant movie vampire – you were just some person who had gotten stuck with the powers and limitations of a vampire and had to figure out what to do about it. You weren’t guaranteed success or failure, because if the universe had been in the habit of guaranteeing anything, it would have made sure you never existed in the first place.
You could see it in the NPCs, too. A lot of them were powerful, sure, but they were also usually not wholly successful – their backstories usually read like a laundry list of phyrric victories and disappointments, of half-measures and derailed plans. You could just hear the dice rattling in the background. The game clearly took place in a world that usually refused to serve up simple, satisfying plots, where pratfalls didn’t break the ambience but just gave you another thing to feel gloomy about. It embraced tragedy.
Needless to say, it didn’t last, but still… it makes reading those early books informative.
We’re going back to the early nights of good ol’ Vampire: the Masquerade, having previously read the first edition core and a pair of quickstart adventures. Now, we’re heading into the meat of it, with Ashes to Ashes, the first serious adventure installment. This is the one that really set the tone for the entire World of Darkness behemoth, folks. Let’s dig in.
Ashes to Ashes follow directly on the sample scenario in the core, where the characters were residents of the dreary seen-better-days vampire community of the dreary seen-better-days city of Gary, Indiana. After attending a party at Prince Modius’ mansion full of sinister undercurrents, they were ordered to get their undead asses to Chicago and meet with Prince Lodin. They weren’t told where to find him, only that Chicago vampires hang out at a place called The Succubus Club, so off they went into the night with insufficient direction and flimsy guarantees of support.
The players go to The Succubus Club and run into one hellraising Anarch and one snooty Elder loyalist, both of whom can offer suggestions for where to go next, so we have a bit of a branching path here. If they take the Anarch’s advice, they stumble right into the play example from the core book, meet Sheriff (who still isn’t the sheriff because that’s not a thing yet, just a guy whose nickname is “Sheriff”) and almost get burned alive alongside a bunch of Anarchs. If they go the Elder route, they get directed to another club where they have a run-in with vampire Harry Houdini (yes, really) and get directed to someone who says he’s the Prince but isn’t actually.
I can’t help it notice that clubs and night hang-outs play a considerable role in all these modules. They’re always lovingly described, too, with a lot of detail about what sort of music they play, what the ambience is like, and what sort of people come here. You feel like the writers were warm to the subject. In fact, you get the distinct impression that the writers thought that the main appeal of being a vampire was that you got to sleep all day and go clubbing all night, forever…
Anyway, the players eventually get sent to a sports arena just before dawn, where they get kidnapped by a bunch of armed guys who arrive in a chopper, and they wake up at a restaurant being interrogated by a Fat Bastard (TM) named Ballard, who scarfs down copious amounts of food while accusing them of having kidnapped the Prince. I love it, it’s so Gothic-surreal. Anyway, Ballard isn’t convinced by the players insisting they’ve never even met Prince Lodin, but says that they’d better find him or he’ll call a Blood Hunt on their asses, so they get sent off with Sheriff to investigate the disappearance.
The players get to examine Lodin’s haven, but before they can get very far an Anarch shows up to rescue them from Sheriff. They can either go along with it (in which case the Elders will hate them) or defend Sheriff (in which case the Anarchs will hate them). It’s kind of not-so-subtly implied that siding with the counterculture against The Man is what any cool person would do, though.
If they do side with the Anarch and let themselves get rescued, they get sent to a supposed safe haven for the day, but find out that it’s an active crime scene – someone found an ancient corpse there. They can also find some very old and potent vampire blood on the premises that can give them temporary Disciplines if they drink it, because this was the early days and White Wolf wasn’t as psychotically determined to gate the players off from anything deemed overpowered yet.
They can decide that it must be Lodin and try to get hold of the corpse, which the police has handed over to a “specialist” who’s actually a vampire hunter and who has his house trapped from top to bottom with anti-vampire traps. If they do take possession of the corpse, though, they end up mind-whammied and black out, coming to after they’ve apparently hidden the corpse somewhere but can’t remember where. Mysteeeeeerious.
With the help of a quirky tabloid journalist, the players eventually find out that Lodin was kidnapped by a rogue ghoul who’s leading a pagan cult out in the sticks and needed a new source of vampire blood after the police nabbed his last one (that’d be the corpse from the last paragraph, natch). They head over, fight a ghouled goat along the way, and finally confront the ghoul (who’s got a ton of Disciplines, because again, these were early days and White Wolf was more generous with letting characters get superpowers) and hopefully save Prince Lodin before he gets eaten by a swarm of ghouled rats. Good times all around!
There’s also a sort of sub-adventure for True Roleplayers, where everyone plays ghouls of Lodin back in the 60s where they have to bust their butts and risk their lives getting Lodin to London so that he can… play a game of chess with a friend of his. It’s meant to further bring home just what massive jerks vampires are and how shamelessly they use them for their own convenience, and that’s meant to hint at how everything in the main adventure has been informed by people’s hidden agendas and opportunistic exploitations.
All in all, this is pretty damn awesome. The story is colourful, there are a ton of fascinating setpieces, most of the NPCs are well-realised, and the plot is meant to get the players feel jerked around and unfairly treated at every step while still giving them plenty of agency and opportunities to be cool.
One thing that really stands out for me is how down to earth it all feels – all the overblown Gothic imagery is rooted in prosaic realities, and everything has an explanation no matter how bizarre it looks. And that also helps with doing something that I’m afraid the World of Darkness entirely lost its knack for later on, which is making the mortals interesting. It’s a story about vampires, sure, but the mortals they run into, all the cops and journalists and hunters and clubbers, are interesting characters in their own right, with their own foibles and goals and capabilities. The simple stuff matters, here, and the complicated stuff is ultimately built on a foundation of it.
I’m actually tempted to run this, if I could find some players who haven’t been exposed to any thirty-year-old spoilers…
We have at least arrived at the last pregenerated character to create for my Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. For those who haven’t been following along, our previous entries were:
For our big finish, we’re going to go traditional and create a Vampire – or a Moocher, as they are less politely known in Monster World. I figure we’ll make her an extremely lazy woman who uses her people skills to trick everyone else into doing stuff for her and prides herself on never having done an honest day’s work in her life. We’ll call her Marissa Mealey.
As a Moocher, Marissa needs to have an addiction to something – Vampires in Monstrous Mishaps don’t need to suck blood, but they do have to have a bad habit of some other kind to be angsty over. We’ll say that Marissa is addicted to expensive custom mattrasses, elaborate massages, acupuncture treatments, and anything else that can help the bad back she claims is keeping her from working.
Marissa obviously needs to be slick to be able to work scams and cons, so we’ll give her Basic (4) Mindgames and Schmoozing. She’s also nowhere to be found where work needs to be done, which includes being vigilant for signs that some is about to be handed out, so we’ll give her Limited (3) Hiding and Keenness. She’s not got much discipline, but she’s very stubborn about not needing to show any discipline, so she’s got Limited (2) Grit. Finally, her interest in traditional medicine for her back and her habit of selling fraudulent products of other sorts have given a smattering of occult knowledge, enough for Limited (2) Weirdness.
For some reason, I immediately imagine Marissa’s parents as taking her camping a lot as a kid, thus teaching her to properly hate everything that wasn’t comfortable and air-conditioned, so we’ll give her the Forced to Go Camping childhood for +1 to Camping. She was actually a convincing outsider in her teens (hey, she is a Vampire!) so she’s got the Freaky Kid adolesence for +1 to Weirdness. These days, she is a small-time confidence trickster by trade, making her a Criminal, so +1 to Hiding. She’s got another +1 to Camping and Schmoozing from her Breed (Vampires are seductive and quite good with “ze children of ze night”), so she ends up with Limited (3) Camping, Limited (2) Grit, Basic (4) Hiding, Limited (3) Keenness, Basic (4) Mindgames, Basic (5) Schmoozing, and Limited (3) Weirdness.
As far as Values go, Marissa doesn’t like to ruffle feathers – it’s too much of a bother! She also believes in everyone’s fundamentally equal worth, since that means less pressure to do stuff. Thus, she holds to Harmony and Egalitarianism.
For Monstrosity and Dooms, I think I’ll punch it up to the max and give Marissa Basic (5) Monstrosity right from the start. After all, her lack of ambition is unlikely to have granted her any material success, but she’s great at looking dark and mysterious and Vampire-like. I’ll sink the points into Basic (4) Siren’s Voice to make it easier for her to make herself seem trustworthy, and put the last point into Minimal (1) Varg’s Ferocity – maybe being good at imitating animal sounds will impress some people who’ll think she’s One With Nature or some such?
All told, here’s Marissa:
MARISSA MEALEY
Breed: Moocher
Childhood: Forced to Go Camping Adolescence: Freaky Kid Adulthood: Criminal
For her first Friend, we’ll pick the Stereotype, Problem and Discord at random – I think we’ve used pretty much every single one at this point anyway. We’ll go with Alpha, Occult Lightning Rod and High Maintenance, a combination that makes me think of some sort of pushy nightmare customer, a retail person’s bad day incarnate.
MARISSA’S FRIEND #1: THERESE TELLER
Therese is Marissa’s only repeat customer, a woman always in the market for some new dodgy food supplement or pyramid energy regimen. That makes her quite handy for Marissa, but the downside is that the reason why Therese is so anxious for anything to make her life better is that her life is preternaturally bad. A dark cloud of inexplicable misfortune always seems to be hovering over her head, cursing her with odd ailments and strange maladies. She’s happy to accept Marissa’s cures for them… but she’ll also come pounding on Marissa’s door whenever they invariably fail to work, forcing the Moocher to improvise madly to keep the money flowing.
Stereotype: Alpha Problem: Occult Lightning Rod Discord: High Maintenance
For the second Friend, we’ll pick Romantic, Paper Tiger, and You’re Not the Boss of Me. That gives us someone who’s hot-blooded and warm-hearted, but perhaps a bit soft-headed as well…
MARISSA’S FRIEND #2: PEPPER LOVEGOOD
Marissa’s long-time best friend Pepper is on a quest for true love, something that confuses Marissa, since love seems like the definition of doing a bunch of bothersome stuff for no particular reward. This cynical viewpoint has not been helped by her having had a front row seat to Pepper’s dismal taste in men, most of whom have indeed been ne’er-do-wells who have emptied her wallet, enlisted her in their projects, and cheated vigorously on her all the while. Getting Pepper to realise that her latest romance is just as unhealthy as the last tends to strain even Marissa’s skills at argumentation, however.
Stereotype: Romantic Problem: Paper Tiger Discord: You’re Not the Boss of Me
For Marissa’s Rival, let’s go with a Deadbeat (think a stoner-slacker Zombie) who resents Marissa for having it much easier than her. I figure that she’ll be hanging around and staring creepily at Marissa through windows like some kind of haunting ghost, all while looking to “steal her life” in some vaguely defined way. We’ll pick the Approach of Shadow, the Feud of Destined and the Redemption of Tragedy for her.
MARISSA’S RIVAL: SALLY SLOUCH
Sally grew up in miserable poverty and had to work very hard to get anywhere in life. This makes her intensely resentful of Marissa, who, while also miserably poor, seems to manage to avoid working at all. Having been told by a less-than-trustworthy fortuneteller that there will come a time when their fates can be exchanged, Sally is now plotting to bring the right occult conditions about so that she can become the slacker and Marissa the wage-slave… at least when she’s not too tired to plot.
For Marissa’s Enemy, we’ll turn her stats inside-out as usual, and we end up with someone with decent Scores at Asskicking and Paperpushing, the two Legend Abilities for the Dweeb Legend. Dweebs, you see, are a kind of Slayers who like to think that they’re Paladins, so they punch you very hard in the face, but only when it’s legally justifiable. Well, a devoted crusader out to get a Vampire? That gives you a rather obvious idea, I should think.
MARISSA’S ENEMY: ABIGAIL VAN HECKNING
A petulant suburban brat of the first order, Abigail always longed for a life of adventure, Gothic romance, and having a proper excuse for hanging out in graveyards. As such, it’s perhaps no surprise that she was Called as a Slayer, and she has taken to it with gusto. She is determined to put an end to Marissa’s cursed unlife, but of course she has to figure out a way to do it that won’t get her into, you know, trouble of any kind – otherwise, her parents would ground her! Still, she’s confident that if she just hangs around and bugs Marissa enough, she’ll eventually end up in a situation where pounding an oak stake through someone’s heart will qualify as “reasonble self-defense.”
Special Abilities: Basic (4) Calling, Basic (6) Respectability
Pools: HP 7, GP 2, SP 4, BP 6
That’s it! We now have four full-feathered Monsters to send into the maws of adventure, along with supporting casts to anchor them into the setting. Now I just need to figure out some kind of scenario that could accomodate any particular subset of them. Stay tuned.
I don’t feel up for anything ambitious this week, so let’s read a fairly short little booklet, namely the Gamemaster Screen Adventures for the first edition of Paranoia. As the name implies, they’re really just an add-on to the, well, Gamemaster screen. Still, it’s the first supplement released for the game, so it might be interesting to see what direction it set off in.
So trust no one and keep your laser handy, because we’re going back to Alpha Complex!
There are three different adventures. In the first one, Robot Imana-665-C, the players get sent to repair an ailing robot. Precisely what is wrong with the robot and what it’s supposed to do when it’s functioning properly is, of course, beyond their security clearance, but it is heavily implied to them that it’s some sort of super-dangerous combat bot. It’s actually a sort of ambulatory fridge, but a series of mishaps and accidents have led to that information getting lost along the way, so now the people in charge of the robot have no idea and can’t afford to admit that they have no idea, so they’ve called in some Troubleshooters to either fix it or take the blame for having irrevocably broken it.
The actual problem with the bot is that its visual sensors have broken down, and it’s under strict orders to not cooperate with anyone without verifying their clearance level (which in Alpha Complex means, check which colour their clothes are), and it can’t verify anyone’s clearance levels because its visual sensors aren’t working. It can, however, be broadly reasoned with if some tact and patience is employed, and then all that remains is to replace the visual sensors. Which means first requisitioning a replacement, and getting the wrong parts, and arguing with requisitions about whose fault it was, and then getting the right parts but with the wrong installation instructions, and arguing with requisions about that. Alpha Complex!
Anyway, if the players manage to persevere and try ridiculous plans for long enough, and none of them succeeds at sabotaging the mission for their secret society, they might actually get through the whole thing alive. Oh, and anytime someone acts suspiciously, they get strabbed into a “Debriefing Station,” which is to say a human-sized enclose pod that measures their vital signs to check for duplicity while the Computer very gently and cheerfully questions them.
The second adventure is called The Trouble with Cockroaches. In it, the players are scrambled to deal with a fiendish act of sabotage in the form of some secret societies unleash cockroaches in Alpha Complex before the saboteurs try to shoot their way clear and escape to Outside. They get outfitted with some ridiculous experimental weaponry, including a few that places the operator well within the area of effect (as well as one weird… thing that fires one bullet straight up and another straight down, then pulls them both back again before being rendered useless), and sent to hold the line against the traitors.
This is basically a combat scenario with much shooting going on, but it’s got a Paranoia flavour through people shouting silly slogans, seeming allies turning on the players at the least opportune moment, and the Computer broadcasting helpful encouragements like, “with modern medical care many of you may once again lead at least marginally productive lives!” Cockroaches aren’t actually involved, but there are drawings of them peppered all over the pages, including an especially thick bunch right over a section titled, “WARNING! READ THIS CAREFULLY!” Heh.
The final adventure is called Das Bot: Nearly a Dozen Meters Beneath the Sea. The players get sent in a leaky old “u-bot” to investigate suspicious underwater activity just off the coast. They have to bring along an entitled, high-strung arteeest of a filmmaker as part of their cover story, and the u-bot’s brain shortcircuits at the worst possible time, forcing them to have to figure out the controls for it by trial and error before they all drown. There’s supposed to be a chart for the u-bot control panel included, but it’s not part of my PDFs. And I actually bought these off drivethroughrpg like a good boy and everything! Shameful.
Anyway, should the players survive that, they arrive at an undersea lab occupied by a bunch of explorers from a race of acquatic mutants who have built a civilised, pacifistic, enlightened, and all-around un-Alpha-Complex-like society on the ocean floor. The players might try to capture one of them for interrogation, or might even find common cause with them if they belong to the right secret societies.
All in all, these are all fun and set the tone for Paranoia. I note that they’re already rather less serious than the adventure in the core rules were, with ridiculous gadgets and clueless rebels rather than stone-cold killer combat vets and grimdark cyborg overlords. Also, apparently amphibious underwater civilisations are canon, insofar as Paranoia has anything as structured as canon.
So, we’ve read through the Cyberpunk 2013 core rules, getting our first taste of the game. So what’s the first thing the R. Talsorian Games decided to release for this property, now that they’d presumably gotten people excited for this dark, edgy new setting?
A guide for how to use the rules to run a different setting.
Which is, er… a choice.
Okay, so it makes a little more sense in context, because the novel Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams is in fact the main inspiration for Cyberpunk, not the more famous works of William Gibson. And the fact that they got Williams himself to write a supplement for it might have felt too good to pass up. So let’s have a look.
First off, the novel is about a dreary future where the nations of Earth has gotten thoroughly stomped by corporations who rule from space stations in orbit and tightly control the supply of things like medicinal drugs. A special breed of smugglers called “panzerboys” have taken to make runs of contraband across America using heavily armoured hovertanks. Global warming has caused the ocean levels to rise to the point where every sea-side city has a “venice” of half-submerged ruins attached to it. People upgrade themselves with cybernetics, work convoluted stock exchange schemes using global computer systems, assassinate each other by puking mechanical snakes, and just generally live on the bleeding edge of the dark future and so on and so forth.
It’s actually pretty cool stuff, and you can see how the game is based on it – it’s got the same sense of perverse glee in just how hopeless it all is, with people really reveling in their moral compromises and gradual loss of humanity. The man is gonna get you, but you’re going down guns blazing! And a lot of the worldbuilding is similar, too – there are characters in the book that are effectively Nomads, for instance, with the mechanised agriculture that has driven traditional farms out of business being given a poignant look in both the book and games.
As such, the supplement really does help with fleshing out the feel and themes of the game, even if some of the details are different. The stomping boot of corporations, desperate people banding together to survive, criminals that are in some ways heroic but also deeply morally stained… this is very much what I think Night City is meant to feel like.
Still, there are differences. Trauma Teams aren’t a thing, so if you get shot, you just get shot. If you do make it to the hospital, though, cloned limb replacements mean that anything that’s fallen off can be replaced so that you’ll never even know the difference. Hacking is a big one – there is no cyberspace, hackers (“crystaljocks,” as they are known in this setting) function very much like hackers in real life in that they exploit human carelessness far more than they make use of super-cool firewall-breaking software. Cyberpsychosis exists here too, but the rules for it are a little more unpredictable than “you go kill-crazy at Empathy 0.”
There is also an implant called a “cybersnake.” Remember what I said about how people get assassinated? Yeah, it’s super-gross and makes very little sense and is all the more awesome for it.
Unlike the core rules, here there are rules for drugs. I may have sold Mike Pondsmith short by assuming he was just afraid of moral guardians – here he mentions that he doesn’t like glamourising drugs because he’s lost friends to overdoses. Aoch. Okay, I suppose I can see why he didn’t feel like emphasising them in his own setting, then. But, in the world of Hardwired routine drug use is a thing that people engage in, so here there are rules for both short and long term effects.
There is a system for quickly generating NPCs, complete with cyberware, which is definitely something I can see coming in handy. In fact, the way NPCs are statted up here seems like it hung around for a while.
Hacking gets a long section explaining how you do it realistically and how a hack can be run like a sort of long-distance detective story – you piece together clues about who your target is, use them to guess his passwords and to figure out where else you could look for data, and then piece together more clues from what you find. It’s pretty cool, though I still have to snicker a little at the breathless way the text describes how you can write a program that does things automatically. Ah, back when it was all shiny and new.
There is a sort of loosely described campaign set in the Hardwired universe. The characters start out going over the wreckage of a cargo shuttle that crashed at sea, find themselves in the possession of a terrifying genetically engineered super-plague, and get drawn into the fight between two different corporations that sets up the events of the novel. It’s pretty good stuff, nothing special but it gives you a good idea for what cyberpunks are supposed to get up to and what problems they’ll run into while doing it.
All in all, the book was kind of enjoyable, and it actually fleshed out a few things for the main game in the process of setting up an alternate one. Still not sure I’d use it, but it’s definitely worth mining for material.
Having made our start on the hyper-90s roleplaying game of Torg here, let us embark on the first of its many supplements! It is the worldbook for the first of the six (later eight) cosms that are competing with boring ol’ Earth for the right to define reality: the Living Land, world of dinosaurs, giant bugs, and AUTHENTIC!!!! experience.
For those who don’t remember, the premise of Torg is that the Earth has been invaded by six hostile parallel realities that transform parts of the world into a different genre, all in the service of their tyrannical High Lord and his quest for the possibility energy that Earth is rich in. The Living Land is the “lost world” cosm, based on the sort of Tarzan-style pulp novels of mysterious hidden valleys and wildernesses full of primordial beasts. It is populated by three sentient races: edeinos (lizard men), stalengers (flying jellyfish) and benthes (emotion-manipulation slug things). Humans never evolved, so all humans in the Living Land realm are Core Earth natives who have either switched over or are trying very hard not to. The Living Land is also animated by the power of the nature deity Lanala, whose believers can perform miracles.
We start with a fiction piece about a Storm Knight who drives into the now-overgrown town he used to live in, looking for his daughter. He ends up fighting some edeinos and gets taken captive, and it turns out that his daughter has joined the tribe and now wants him to do the same. He refuses and gets painfully killed. It’s all kind of chilling and really brings home the fact that just because you’re a Storm Knight it doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a happy ending.
There’s a fairly detailed description of the cosm of Takta Ker (which just means “the Living Land,” but they’ll still use that name for the cosm and “the Living Land” for its realm on Earth), which is basically one big warm, misty jungle. It used to be home to both the edeinos and a sentient insect species that were developing a civilisation, but the edeinos found civilisation to be an abomination unto Lanala and so wiped them out.
Later, an edeinos named Baruk Kaah found a stone seed that had fallen from the sky, and when he planted it it grew to a great big petrified forest called Rec Pakken. Rec Pakken is a Darkness Device, one of the infernal contraptions that roam the cosmverse and bond with people to turn them into High Lords. So Baruk Kaah became the High Lord of Takta Ker and conquered the whole thing, declared himself Saar of the Edeinos, then went on to conquer a few more cosms for good measure, including those of the stalengers and benthes. Everyone was either converted to Keta Kalles, the worship of Lanala, or wiped out. Baruk Kaah plans to become Torg, a sort of super-High Lord, and become the mate and equal of Lanala. This is, of course, the blackest heresy by the teachings of Keta Kalles, so he has hidden his ambitions from all his followers.
The next chapter is on Keta Kalles itself. It teaches that Lanala created the universe to experience it, but the effort wore her out so much that she became insensate and numb. So with her last strength, she created living beings to experience it for her. Thus, the purpose of life is to experience as intensely as possible so that Lanala can share your sensations. Jakatts (followers of Keta Kalles, of whatever species) disdain all things crafted or manufactured, because crafted things are smooth and utilitarian, and that means that they have been robbed of all personality. On the other hand, a Jakatt will sit and stare at a tree moving in the wind for hours, relishing its organic unevenness.
Death exists because Lanala saw that some creatures did not want to truly live, and therefore it was better for them to die. Therefore, Jakatts will look at anyone complaining or cowering and decide that they find life to be a burden, and so should be killed. It’s horrifying, but it makes a kind of twisted sense.
There are two kinds of priests of Keta Kalles – optants, the priests of Life, and gotaks, the priests of Death. Optants worship Lanala in the straightforward way, for good or ill. Gotaks, on the other hand, are a perversion of the religion by Baruk Kaah. Gotaks exist to deal with all the things that can’t be spun as life-affirming, but which need to be done in order to carry out Baruk Kaah’s eternal inter-cosmic war. For instance, they can handle “dead things” like mechanical weapons, and perform dark rites to draw on the power of Rec Pakken (which, as a petrified but still-growing forest, is itself a perversion of what Keta Kalles is meant to stand for).
Like all High Lords, Baruk Kaah expands his realm by planting “stelae,” objects created by his Darkness Device that mark the boundaries of the realm. Rec Pakken’s stelae take the form of dried bones wrapped in vines that get buried in the ground.
Jakatts can perform miracles of Lanala through a combination of intense experience and a sort of invocation of Lanala promising her more of the same if only she grants some power. Lanala is neither male or female, but is always the opposite of the person speaking of her. This is because she is first and foremost a lover, and to worship her is to court her.
There are actually three Living Land realms on Earth, one in Canada (the Northern Land), one on the American west coast (the Western Living Land) and one of the American east coast (the Eastern Living Land). Baruk Kaah has expanded quickly, flipping more and more areas to the Living Land’s axioms, and then easily defeating modern armies whose weapons and vehicles won’t work under those axioms. He’s only slowing down after three months because he’s run out of stockpiled stealea, so now he can just take new areas as quickly as he can manufacture new ones. He’s also had a setback in failing to take Silicon Valley, since it’s a Core Earth hardpoint, a place that can maintain its own axioms even when in the middle of the realm of a different cosm. Prying the high-tech toys out of the hands of nerds takes more than just godlike cosmic power, I guess.
Baruk Kaah keeps sending covert groups of gotaks sneaking into Core Earth territory to plant more stelae (and a sort of magic land mines called “pain sacks,” to discourage people from digging for stealae). He distracts the US military by launching frontal assaults, making use of expendable gospog shock troops. The real action is in the covert ops to plant stealae, because Baruk Kaah can’t win against modern weapons where Core Earth axioms hold sway, and humans can’t win against dinosaur stampedes where Living Land axioms rule. Which does rather conveniently mean that the war will be determined by small-group actions of the sort that the player characters can take part in.
Gospogs are plant-zombie soldiers grown from fields of corpses. Baruk Kaah has his armed with looted modern weapons and driven at the enemy by gotaks. So yes, Swamp Things with machine guns are a thing in this game. I just want to make that clear. Anyway, gospogs are another one of those things that are abominations unto Lanala but that gotaks have special dispensation to interact with because Baruk Kaah says so. Some Jakatts have gotten thoroughly fed up with Baruk Kaah’s self-serving exceptions to the rules and have turned rebel.
Baruk Kaah and Doctor Mobius of the Nile Empire are surprisingly chummy, mostly because both of them really hate Cyperpope Jean Malraux of the Cyberpapacy and resent the way he keeps offering to protect Core Earth people from the two of them (not that anyone ever seems to take him up on it, mind you). Baruk Kaah also used to get along with Angrad Uthorion of Aysle, but since Uthorion lost his Darkness Device and civil war erupted in Aysle, Baruk Kaah is inclined to ignore him.
Of the three Living Land realms, the Eastern Land is fully under Baruk Kaah’s control and has the most forward momentum. The Western Land is home to those Jakatt rebels and the site of Baruk Kaah’s humiliating defeat at Silicon Valley, so things there are a lot more messy and complicated all around. It’s also where the most Core Earth humans decided to throw off their clothes and run naked into the woods to become Jakatts, because, y’know, California. The Northern Land isn’t actually intended to expand, but just serves as partly a diversion keeping Canada from coming to the US’ aid, and partly a place for the gotaks to experiment with dark shamanism that normal, Lanala-fearing Jakatts would be offended by.
New York is part of the Eastern Land and is ruled mainly by gangs, including one called the Links who are former computer geeks who act like they’re in a video game. There is a holdout zone ruled over by the mayor where things are kept as civilised as possible, though. Also, a lot of museums had Eternity Shards (cultural artifacts that are loaded with possibility energy, and can thus grant various powers to Storm Knights) that have since been looted and are now in the possession of various gangs. Oh, and the Statue of Liberty is rubble, because what’s an alien invasion without some destroyed landmarks?
Philadelphia is a Core Earth hardpoint and are under constant attack by Jakatts. Getting supplies in to feed the refugee population is a constant problem. The Living Land also contains “resistance communities” who are characterised as noble, square-jawed pioneer types who refuse to be driven off their land by “survivalists” who are characterised as knuckle-dragging macho-men who like guns to an unhealthy extent. See what I mean about the whole game having somewhat of a black and white morality?
The Northern Land is home to two major dark evil rituals. One of them creates a sort of giant being of water that is controlled by a gotak. Those water beings are dead things infused with artificial life, thus abominations unto Lanala. Another infuses a Jakatt with an inner fire that makes them powerful, but which eventually kills them – effectively, it requires a Jakatt to commit slow suicide, which is also an abomination unto Lanala. Baruk Kaah has spread some convenient lies and rationalisations to make it seem like he’s still toeing the line, but a lot of Jakatts would be very upset if they ever learned the full story of what is happening in the Northern Land.
There is a brief mention of the Land Below, which is a sort of subterranean realm that seems to have been created through interaction between the Living Land and the Nile Empire – think Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
The US is reeling from losing a third of its territory and dealing with hordes of refugees because of it. It has also been secretly taken over by the Delphi Council, who are a bunch of cynical politicians and military officers. They have special forces called Spartans who roam around doing shady things for the supposed greater good. For one thing, they don’t like resistance communities (since every person living in one constantly bleeds possibility energy for Baruk Kaah to soak up) and keep trying to forcibly relocate them, or kill them all when that’s not possible. They also don’t believe that some Jakatts have turned on Baruk Kaah but consider all Jakatts to be the enemy, and consider humans who have become Jakatts to be traitors. You get the idea, they are hardasses who hate all compromise.
Los Angeles has been all but abandoned since the Living Land is getting perilously close, so the movie industry has mostly moved to Florida. Movies about daring explorers venturing into the Living Land to fight edeinos are becoming popular, some of them shot on site by enterprising Storm Knights. There is also a lot of academic interest in exploring the Living Land and cataloguing the dizzying ecological diversity that has sprung up there, so biologists tend to launch expeditions into darkest Pensylvania.
Canada is trying to remain unruffled, and have at least politically weathered the changes better than the US. The Cyberpope is making overtures and promising Quebec his protection, but no one is listening to him very much because he’s a loser and everyone hates him.
Laws of the realm! The Living Land has absolutely no magic, very little social organisation, and even less technology. Things like currency and time keeping are impossible to even think about without creating a contradiction, and machinery simply will not work there for anyone who isn’t a Storm Knight. It’s got a very high spiritual axiom, though, making very powerful miracles possible (though only Lanala’s, since she’s the one true god of the Living Land). Lanalan miracles revolve mainly around granting strength, speed and heightened senses, as well as dealing with animals and surviving in the wilds.
The Living Land is also covered in a mist that gradually decomposes all dead things (canned goods stay fresh while sealed, but you need to eat the contents very fast once you open them), and compasses simply fail to work in there, even for Storm Knights. Both are adjustments Baruk Kaah has made to make the place as inhospitable as possible for invaders. A Jakatt can use a miracle to see through the mist without problem.
We get a section on creatures, of which there is obviously a considerable number. Most Living Land creature are either great big lizards, great big insects, or great big amoebas. There are spiders so large that when they stand still their bodies are shrouded by the mists above you and their legs can be mistaken for tree trunks. You may scream now.
There is a section of adventure design, starting with the oft-repeated claim that the Possibility Wars can’t be won through military means or through the hard-men-making-hard-choices shenanigans of the Delphi Council but only by true heroes doing good and heroic things. The stated reason for that is that you need to spread tales of heroism to re-energise the people in a realm before you can remove the stealae without killing them, but, er… I kind of feel like you could in fact win the war by yanking stelae left and right and writing the deaths off as “unavoidable collateral damage”? I mean, that’s very bleak and clearly not the tone the game designers wanted to go for, and fair enough, but I would have liked something a bit more solid. Like, maybe you cannot yank stelae if too many people within its zone have given up hope, because it feeds on their desperation? Something like that might work.
There are a bunch of adventure ideas, like escorting convoys through the Living Land, searching for Eternity Shards (which are sometimes living creatures in the Living Land), sabotaging a gotek site of human sacrifice that strengths Rec Pakken, and exposing a conspiracy by the Delphi Council to exterminate an edeinos tribe who’s rebelling against Baruk Kaah and are therefore potential allies. All good stuff.
Finally, there are a bunch of character templates, including (as I mentioned in the post about the main game) both human converts to Keta Kalles, edeinos and stalenger converts to Core Earths’ axioms, edeinos and stalenger Jakatts who oppose Baruk Kaah for his religious hypocrisy, and Core Earth humans who hold to their own axioms in the face of the Living Land. Which is still pretty cool.
All in all, I really liked this book. The Living Land was, I understand, not very popular with the fanbase, who preferred to go off to the Nile Empire and have pulp adventures. I guess I can see why, but it’s a shame. This was the first book released for the line and the one that dealt most closely with the writers’ own home country, and you can see that a lot of love and care went into really expanding on every detail of it and stuffing it shock full of plot hooks, characters, and political and social complexities. It honestly feels like you could make a whole campaign without ever leaving this part of the setting, running any number of stories verging between post-apocalyptic survival and mystical-wilderness exploration, with some gritty political intrigue at the home front for salt.
Oh well. History has spoken, and the lost world of Torg, appropriately enough, got left behind.
Welcome back to my not-quite-weekly series of character creation in my lovingly hand-crafted game, Monstrous Mishaps. As those who hang around here know (there are some of you, right? I’m not talking exclusively to a bunch of net-thrawling bots?), MM is a parody urban fantasy game where the characters are supernatural creatures in human form… light on the “supernatural creature,” heavy on the “human form.” Upholding the dark splendour of Vampyredom when your powers of hypnotism amounts of having vaguely sincere eyes isn’t easy!
Since I decided last time to not go for the obvious archetypes, I’ll forego making this dude a shock jockey vlogger or something. Instead, let’s make him a big, burly nurse. Hey, just because you have a foul mouth it doesn’t mean you can’t be nurturing, it just means that it’s always going to be tough love! We’ll call him Bradley Bulle.
As a health care professional, Brad will need a decent Quackery Score. Quackery is Derived from Camping and Nerdery, so let’s give him Basic (4) in both. Since I picture him as a big, looming guy, and of course he needs to be stubborn to deal with fussing patients, we’ll also give him Limited (3) Fitness and Limited (3) Grit. He’ll need to keep records, so we’ll let him have Limited (2) Paperpushing. Finally, we’ll give him Limited (2) Asskicking to better hold people down while they’re getting their shots.
I figure that Brad was interested in biology from an early age, so I’ll say he was a Bug Fancier as a child and an Eco Brat as a teenager. That gives him +1 each to Nerdery and Camping, for Basic (5) in both, so he’s got some actual professional competence – a rarity in the setting he lives in! As a nurse, I figure he’s effectively a Blue-Collar Schmoe, even if he’s an unusually well-educated one, so add 1 to his Fitness, leaving him at Basic (4). He gets +1 to Dramatics and +1 to Grit from being a Loudmouth, giving him Limited (2) in the one and Basic (4) in the other.
For Dooms, I’ll put a point in Siren’s Voice, just because I think it’s funny if Brad is such an imposing presence that he can get people’s attention by glaring at them from behind. He has to start with a point of Garuda’s Swiftness since that’s his Primary Doom as a Loudmouth, so he has Minimal (1) in both.
For Values, Brad is hard-working and stubborn, so he holds to Stoicism. I think he’s also very practical about morals, thinking that what matters is making things as good as possible for as many people as possible and never mind who has to get screwed over for it, so I’ll also give him Utilitarianism.
After calculating our Derived Abilities and Pools, we end up with this:
BRADLEY BULLE
Breed: Loudmouth
Childhood: Bug Fancier Adolescence: Eco Brat Adulthood: Blue-Collar Schmoe
Next up is Friends. I have no particular ideas, so I’ll just reach into the grab-bag of Stereotypes, Problems and Discords for some that I haven’t used yet. I arbitrarily pick Arteest, The Enemy of the Good, and Big Brother is Watching. Combined with Brad’s grumpy I-don’t-have-the-energy-for-this-crap-so-take-your-medicine attitude, that suggests someone with a… different take on medicine.
Brad’s Friend #1: Frieda Fairweather
Frida is a fellow nurse at the clinic where Brad works, and she’s equally devoted to her job – in fact, she’s a tremendous perfectionist. Her idea of what is perfect, however, run very contrary to Brad’s and tend towards smiles being the best medicine and everyone’s personal lives needing to be micromanaged to ensure “inner health.” This would work out better if she actually had the people skills to be a functional soul-healer, but Brad had to admit (just not to her face) that she sometimes has a point.
Stereotype: Arteest Problem: The Enemy of The Good Discord: Big Brother is Watching
Using the same method for the second Friend, I find myself with Careerist, Paper Tiger, and Smug Straight Edge. Hmm. Perhaps we have room for an edgy Internet personality after all?
Brad’s Friend #2: Sebastian Sajber
Sebastian and Brad attend the same gym and have bonded over their shared uncompromising stance on life. Sebastian has a modest side hustle having exaggerated opinions on lifestyle and politics online, and frequently uses local characters as inspiration for his rants, which has resulted in him having to meet Brad in a more professional capacity as well…
Stereotype: Careerist Problem: Paper Tiger Discord: Smug Straight Edge
Moving on to the Rival, I scrape the barrel a little and find myself with Freak, Attention and Faith. That makes me picture some sort of wild-bearded street prophet yelling at people to repent. Let’s make him a fellow Loudmouth – Monsters of the same Breed butt heads more often than not (especially since having that be canon justifies player groups having diverse characters!).
Brad’s Rival: Nutty Elmir
Nutty Elmir is a local character who is a devoted member of the little-known Latter-Day Church of the Holy Hollering. In accordance with this holy creed, he spends his day walking around town with a sign, yelling verses from the Hollering Bible at people. Brad has gotten on his bad side due to their common ground – Brad just happens to be the town’s only other member of the Latter-Day Church of the Holy Hollering, and he’s taken to shouting back at Elmir and correcting his errors. Everyone else mostly just wishes they’d both be quiet, but they are, after all, on a mission from God.
Finally, the Enemy… which, for some variety, I’ll not make a Slayer but another Monster. A Monster Enemy is likely to be what is called an Abomination, which effectively means, “a Monster who is way way way the hell too into being a Monster, I mean, honestly!” We haven’t seen any Wussbags here until now, and they’re one of my favourite Breeds – they are effectively Lovecraftian entities that have a Lovecraftian neurotic fear and lothing of everything that’s the least bit upsetting – so let’s have one of those.
Brad’s Enemy: X-94-Zeta
X-94-Zeta, as she calls herself, is supposedly a scout for a proud and ancient Alien empire, sent to evaluate Earth for membership in the Galactic Federation. The Galactic Federation is all about peace and harmony and being nice to people, but it’s also got oddly rigid rules about honourable retribution against anyone who fails to be peaceful, harmonic, and nice to people. It only took X-94-Zeta five minutes in Brad’s company to decide that he needed to suffer in the name of cosmic justice.
There we go! One more nitwit, with a supporting cast, added to the pile. Next time will be the last character, who will be a smooth-talking Moocher. I’ll just have to think of something suitably ridiculous for her to have a dark, forbidden thirst for…
Today, I thought I’d continue my readthrough of Vampire: the Masquerade with two early adventure supplements that are each meant to work as stand-alone introductions to the game: Blood Nativity and Alien Hunger. Both are also set in locations other than Chicago and neighbouring cities, where the game seems to have otherwise stayed pretty focused in the early days.
Blood Nativity is the shorter and simpler one. The players start out as humans in Cleveland who are blissfully unaware of the existence of vampires, but a bunch of Elders have decided that they’re going to sire a bunch of neonates as part of a power play, so the players get invited to dinner at a fancy Blues club. The idea is that things will get progressively stranger over the course of the evening until the Elders all choose one player to embrace, whether by hypnotism, seduction, or force.
The Elders are a fairly fun bunch. They include such individuals as an opinionated afro-sporting Brujah grrrrrrl, a Gangrel sportsball fanatic, a beer-bellied Nosferatu, and a Malkavian who thinks that the entire world is a dream she’s having. Though there’s a mention that the Tremere of the group won’t embrace anyone he hasn’t apprenticed for years since that’s not how the Tremere do things. Fair enough, but then why is he even in the story given that the premise is that the guys are going to pick some unaware people off the street and embrace them?
Anyway, the players wake up the next evening thirsty for bloooooooood. The Elders have left a few ghouls to give them basic instructions, but it’s now their job to get themselves fed for the first time. So it’s out on the street and start stalking some late-night pedestrians. This is really messed up and I sort of love it.
Okay, so I admit that I’m prudish enough to squirm a little at the description of two high school cheerleaders who the GM is instructed to describe in lavish terms how delicious they look…
Anyway, when stalking around on the street looking for someone to munch on, the players get attacked by a couple of Anarchs and their pet street gang, since the players have unknowingly been poaching on their territory. Once they wrap up that fight, one way or another, the police shows up and arrests anyone who’s still standing.
The players end up in jail, with dawn approaching. How easy it is for them to get out again before it’s too late depends on how much restraint they showed – if they were caught snacking on a gangbanger, it’s not looking good. If they do get out, their behaviour has also been noted by the Elders and the Prince, and will determine their future as vampires in Cleveland.
Honestly, I think if I was a vampire in Cleveland, I’d be inclined to move just from how stupid I’d feel saying “a vampire in Cleveland,” but never mind.
This one is longer and more complicated. It starts with the players being, again, unknowing people, this time in Denver. There are pregenerated characters, or you can make your own if you prefer. Either way, they have all having been kidnapped by Vampire Louis Pasteur…
… no, really, in the World of Darkness Louis Pasteur faked his death and became a vampire and he’s been working on a way to reverse vampirism ever since then, look, I told you that these early books were kind of silly…
… anyway, Vampire Louis Pasteur has kidnapped them and administered an array of serums to turn them into vampires (of different clans, since they got different serums). He plans to later administer another array of serums that are supposed to turn them back to human again, but before that can happen he gets attacked and killed by the Prince of the city and his two cronies, who have been fooled by one of his enemies into thinking that he’s conspiring against them. They set the house on fire and leave. The players wake up in the basement of a burning house, feeling weird and not knowing why, in the company of three oddly tasty-looking people (three other experimental subjects, who experienced Rebirth when Pasteur, as their effective sire, died and became human again – at this point in the game line, that was still a thing that could happen).
The players manage to get out and have to try to figure out what the hell is going on. They get saddled with an annoyingly persistent – and clever – police detective who thinks they had something to do with the murder and the fire. They get contacted by another vampire who explains a few facts of the world to them, but before they can get too chummy he gets nabbed by the Prince as well. They also get a Blood Hunt declared against them and have to duck opportunistic vampires at every turn until and unless they can convince the Prince that they’re not part of some kind of enemy action.
They can also investigate Vampire Louis Pasteur and find out that he was doing some kind of experiments, and that he had a human partner who they can find. They can also discover that a rogue ghoul has stolen the last remaining samples of the turn-back-to-human serums, and if they find him, he might hand them over if they turn him into a vampire first. Finally, if they have put all the clues together right and haven’t lost a ton of Humanity and/or bought a ton of Disciplines, they can administer the serums and regain their humanity… if they still want it.
All said and done, I really like these two adventures. They’re vivid, they’re immediate, and they work by really making you think about what it would be like to become a vampire and suddenly have amazing powers, inhuman urges, and a ton of potential enemies out to get you. The NPCs, likewise, are quirky and fun, and have intricate and slightly unwholesome relationships to each other – it all feels very much like the social circle of a bunch of angsty, maladjusted twenty-somethings, which is where I think the WoD games always really shine.
So far so good. Next up, whenever I get around to it, is Ashes to Ashes, where we go to Chicago and settle in to stay there for a while.
All right, being entirely too tired, depressed and headachey to post anything innovative, this week I’ve decided to read a little more of the classics. A while ago, I read the very first roleplaying game ever published in Swedish – Dragonbane, first edition. This time, I thought I’d move on with the only two supplements ever published for it before the second edition kicked in.
Starting with the very first roleplaying adventure published in Swedish: Spindelkonungens Pyramid (“The Pyramid of the Spider King”).
There’s actually three different version of this thing: one for the first edition, one technically that was sold along with the second edition but actually runs on first-edition rules, and one that was sold on its own where they had translated it to the second edition. Yeah, I don’t quite know what’s up with that.
In this adventure, the players find themselves in the caravan city of Cerand, which lies at the edge of the Toora Desert (which is a pun, by the way: in Swedish torr means “dry”) beyond which lies the exotic land of Faar. Get used to the punny names, by the way, because there’s going to be a lot of them. At one point the players get attacked by two giant spiders named “Spinn” and “Dell” (from the Swedish spindel, “spider”), there’s a demon called Puutch (from puts, “polish”) who has been bound to polish a pole for eternity, there’s another, crocodile-like demon who is hanging around in a pool of soggy goo and is called Träsck (träsk = “swamp”)…
Anyway, they’re hired by a one-legged dude named Assar the Sorcerer to break into a nearby pyramid and get him three particular doodads from it – all other loot they can keep. I kind of like the fact that there’s a built-in reason why he can’t just go with them and help them with his presumably uber-strong magic skills… The pyramid is the burial site of Arach the Spider King, who I think we’re quite free to picture as The Rock, and is guarded by, well, a whole bunch of giant spiders, including a big bugger called Lepera.
So it’s a dungeon, basically, with a lot of quirky traps like a room that starts spinning wildly when you enter it, a paper floor with the aforementioned crocodile-demon beneath it, a bucket that contains a liquid that’s harmless in itself but makes you smell delicious to spiders… And yes, there is a really big spider guarding the final treasure room.
Something that gives it all some extra flavour is that there are ways to circumvent the main path, but that it’s not necessarily a good idea. If the players look around, they can find a hidden stairway in one place and a pole to slide down in another, and if they follow them all the way down they end up in the catacombs beneath the pyramid. And there they can find a bunch of trolls and goblins, under contract of a nearby tyrannical king, have dug themselves in and are now working on setting off an explosive under the main treasure chamber so they can get at the goodies. The adventure notes that these rival adventurers aren’t necessarily hostile and that some arrangement might be made with them, so there’s a possibility for some diplomacy in the midst of the spider-squashing.
All in all, it’s really colourful and funny, but I also can’t help it note that, much like the sample adventure in the rule book… that this thing is a meatgrinder. Like, every monster has a gazillion hit points and hits like a truck, and this is a game that’s very unforgiving about how many hits you can take. You’d want to have a whole bunch of big guys in plate armour if you were going to push straight through. Possibly you could finesse it, but that would require a lot of creativity and an agreeable GM, because there’s not really that much you can do about a monster coming at you through a narrow corridor.
Oh, and the second two editions of the adventure comes with a bonus adventure called The Secret of the Skeleton Village. It was originally published in the company’s newsletter, Sinkadus, before turning up here. It’s kind of forgettable, so I’ll spoil the ending: the secret is that there’s a chest with gold and silver in it in the church. Which is guarded by skeletons. So… yeah. The only two things that stand out is that one, there is a reference to a priest casting a spell, which is a thing that only happened in the first edition, and two, there’s another mention of the chivalrous god Eledain and his noble knights. The latter actually gets picked up in a second-edition adventure, making it quite possibly the only example of consistent worldbuilding for the game’s original and rather sketchy setting.
Tvillingbergen (“The Twin Mountains”) is a more bog-standard dungeon crawl. The players hear a rumour that two bickering wizards were buried together with their treasure by their sons, who got along rather better and who later left the area. They investigate, and sure enough, there’s a tomb full of skeletons. And a ghost (this edition was big on ghosts. I think there was at least one in every published adventure). And also, the mummies of the wizards will rise and attack if you disturb one of them, but if you disturb them both at once they’ll both rise and attack each other, which is a fun touch.
Along the way, there are trolls, a newly introduced race called reptile men that were totally D&D troglodytes with the serial number filed off, some will o’ the wisps, and a couple of new spells that get dutifully described for player use. Also, the loot includes one of those demon weapons that were mentioned in the core.
I’ve actually run this one, but I got to admit that I nerfed the whole thing shamelessly to avoid killing my players. Because again, the NPC stats are kind of ridiculous. I kind of feel like there is a certain mismatch between the tone of the game, with its pleasantly pastoral Swedish Astrid Lindgren descriptions, lovably silly NPCs, and punny names, and the absolutely brutal rules. Like, I can get behind some dark and dangerous gameplay, but then I’d expect the setting to be described as less… cosy.
Still, maybe everyone just did precisely what I did, and scaled down the opposition to something the players could handle. Certainly I don’t remember the game as exceedingly lethal back when I played it. Of course, for some reason my players were always walking around in full plate armour and swinging claymores, so maybe I was just way too nice about starting equipment…
This week in my habit (I don’t want to overestimate my future attention span by calling it a “series”) of reading classical RPGs, I’ll be turning my attention to a game near and dear to my heart for its sheer earnest ridiculousness. Presenting Torg: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars, published back in 1990. Quite possibly the most 90s game of them all, it featured things like ninjas fighting dinosaurs on air ships hovering above the Nile. Possibly to rescue a captive wizard. With his spells uploaded in a cybernetic implant. It’s glorious.
So, when we first open the box, we find the now-familiar holy trinity of a Rule Book, a World Book and an Adventure Book. Opening the former, we are told that this game will allow us to roleplay in the world of the much-renowned The Possibility Wars trilogy of novels…
Wait. Stop. What?
Yeah. There were novels that you were assumed to have read going into this. I don’t mean that they were an existing property that someone made a game for. I mean that someone actually decided that their game needed three complete novels just to introduce it. Like, you can’t just read the novels, because they stop just when the story is getting interesting, and you can’t just play the game without reading the novels, because they explain a ton of the background for the current situation that the games only go over in a cursory manner.
I guess it’s oddly comforting to know that my generation wasn’t the first one to think that spreading a story over multiple forms of media was a good idea…
Getting hold of those novels, by the way, used to be impossible because, surprise – they weren’t exactly leaping off the shelves, so they’d gone out of print in a big way. But, lately they have resurfaced online, so I’ve finally read them. They’re called, in order, The Storm Knights, The Dark Realm and The Nightmare Dream (yes, really).
So let’s take a step back…
THE POSSIBILITY WARS
The books concern the invasion of Earth (later called “Core Earth” for convenience) by six alternate realities, or “cosms.” Each cosm has its own “axioms” that determine what is and is not possible in them – in some, magicians casting spells is completely normal but any technology more advanced than a broadsword is pure fantasy, in others neither one works but there are gods who routinely grant miracles in return for prayers, in other still all three may exist in a mad kitchen sink. Some cosms have the misfortune of being ruled by a High Lord, a sentient being who has bonded with a piece of primordial evil called a Darkness Device and become the arbitrator of what is and isn’t possible in that cosm. They are uniformly not nice people, because Darkness Devices are sentient and malevolent and refuse to bond with nice people.
High Lords are greedy for something called “possibility energy” that they can extract from other cosms by invading them and gradually converting their axioms to their own. As these acts of metaphysical imperialism progresses, causing one geographical region after another to make a genre switch, possibility energy is released and absorbed by the High Lord through his Darkness Device.
Of the six invaders, the two that get much screen time in the books is Baruk Kaah, High Lord of the Living Land, and the Gaunt Man, High Lord of Orrorsh. The Living Land is a sort of lost-world setting where humans never evolved and humanoid dinosaurs called Edeinos rule the Earth. Technology and magic are both “impossible” in the Living Land, but it has a ridiculously high spiritual axiom that makes the land literally… well… living and responsive to the prayers of those who live in harmony with it. Orrorsh is technically a world of Victorian horror, but it’s actually more like a particularly edgelordy brand of D&D – think dark jungles, bizarre monsters that want to eat you, and a scheming necromancer behind every bush. Which has poisoned thorns that dissolve your flesh if you get pricked by them. You get the idea.
Baruk Kaah starts spreading the Living Land over North America, and we get some nicely flavourful scenes where the heroes are trying to survive, zombie-apocalypse-style, in a world where technology no longer works and people keep Lord of the Flies-ing into neo-savages at the slightest provocation. Orrorsh turns up in Indonesia. Meanwhile, a cliched 1930s supervillain named Doctor Mobius appears in Egypt and declare a new Nile Empire, Britain becomes linked with a high fantasy world called Aysle, France falls under the sway of evil Catholics (because again, it was the 90s so Catholics were considered almost per definition evil… okay, so admittedly one of the protagonists is a Core Earth Catholic priest, so I guess it’s not quite as bad as all that, but still…) from a theocratic Dark Age world and Japan becomes a high-tech cyberpunk dystopia but no one notices because the writers kind of assumed that Japan was already a high-tech cyberpunk dystopia. Again again, it was the 90s.
The heroes are a bunch of random survivors who turn out to be Storm Knights, a sort of special people who can maintain their personal axioms even where another reality holds sway – so essentially, a Storm Knight from Earth can still shoot dinosaurs in the Living Land because when the Living Land says that crude dead objects have no power, the Storm Knight can just say, “sez you!” and start blasting. They come together and blunder through a few different cosms, mostly the Living Land and Orrorsh with a bit of the Nile Empire and Aysle towards the end. Along the way, they find an Eternity Shard, a special cultural artifact infused with possibility energy that make for potent weapons against the High Lords.
There are three major developments from the novels. Firstly, the Gaunt Man becomes trapped in a “possibility storm” in his Indonesian lair, and it’ll take him 30-odd supplements to finally free himself. His treacherous second-in-command takes over and issues orders in his name, but he can’t find the Gaunt Man’s Darkness Device, so he’s not a High Lord yet. In Aysle, likewise, the High Lord Uthorion gets ousted from the body of the cosm’s rightful ruler that he’s been possessing for the last few centuries, so now that nice lady is technically the High Lord and a civil war breaks out between the two of them. Catholic strawman Pope Jean Malraux, finally, gets his personal axiom scrambled with that of a cyberpunk cosm called Kadandra, so now he’s the Cyberpope and France pivots from having been shunted back into the middle ages to being shunted into a dark future full of circuitry-engraved crucifixes and an Inquisition that can sentence you to simulated purgatory.
Yes, that all sounds ridiculously messy and over-complicated. Because it is. Welcome to Torg.
As for the quality of the books? Ehhhhh. They’re… not good. They’re of about the same quality as a lot of fiction pieces in roleplaying books, except here they go on for hundreds of pages. The descriptions are so-so, the characters behave only vaguely like human beings, and the understanding of narrative tension is limited at best. The way the villains are presented suffers especially from this, because we keep being told that they’re nightmarish monsters that we should tremble in fear of, but they still keep toppling over whenever a protagonist flicks them on the nose.
Also, I hate Ace Decker. He’s an obnoxious Gary Stue of the first order. See, he’s called “Ace” because he’s so incredibly good at everything! War hero, sports hero, charismatic politician, considerate lover, there is no end to his awesomeness! At one point, he manages to steal his brother’s girlfriend despite being in a coma at the time, because he’s just that incredibly sexy and fascinating. Also, his brother promptly turns evil out of mad jealousy, just in case we were tempted to sympathise with him. Aaarrrgggghhhh.
All that said, the books are definitely useful for setting the tone of the game and showing you what you’re meant to be dealing with – car chases, pulse-pounding infiltrations of enemy territory, exotic locations, and of course six different genres (seven if you count Core Earth as having the genre of “semi-realistic contemporary action movie”) all mixing together and being played to the hilt. The GM should probably read them, but not more than once.
THE RULEBOOK
All right, so now let’s get to the actual game!
The rulebook starts by introducing us to the system, and hoo boy, it’s a doozy of a system. See, the developers apparently decided that since they had a game where you could run into such a startling variety of things, what they needed as a system that could model absolutely freaking everything, from two kittens play-fighting to the Death Star blowing up a rebel planet. And they tried. By God, they tried!
The basic way they set about it was by having an logarithmic stat progression, where an increase of 5 points means that the value has been multiplied by ten. If your Strength is 8 and mine is 13, then I’m ten times as strong as you. This means that you can model a wide range of things without going into ridiculous numbers. A car still only has Toughness 20 or so compared to a person’s Toughness 8, even though something that would almost certainly mortally wound the person would cause a slight scratch to the car at most.
Die rolls are d20 roll-over, but you don’t just read the number you rolled and add it to your stat – no, each number on the die corresponds to a particular value that you have to look up, with a 1 being -12 and a 20 being +7. 10s explode, and so do 20s if you’re a Storm Knight who is trained in the action you’re attempting, so you always have a chance at succeeding at anything that is remotely physically possible even if it’s a tiny one (the highest stated difficulty, 25, is called “never tell me the odds!”). All of which is terribly complicated, but it does mean that most rolls are going to result in something close to the related stat – if you have a First Aid score of 12, then you can expect a result around 12 most of the time. It makes eyeballing your stats easier. Which is nice, though I feel like you could probably have managed something similar by using some kind of dice pool instead…
But that’s just the beginning! See, now that we have a generic system, we need to create specific cases for every freaking thing that can possibly happen! In particular, one thing that the writers were apparently very keen on was to avoid fights where everyone just kept repeatedly rolling to hit, so there’s a ton of ways to intimidate, distract, misdirect or trick your enemies, all of which have their own complicated subsystems. There are three different kinds of damage (shock, wounds and KO) that are tracked separately. There are mechanics for negotiation and getting into someone’s good graces, with possible risks for trying to push too hard. There are rules for how you can push yourself to the limits, and how far you can push depending on your stats and the maximum stats for your species, and what the consequences in fatigue will be. And and and and and and…
And we haven’t even gotten to the cards yet. See, Torg comes with a special deck of cards that are used in two ways. Firstly, a card is drawn for each round in combat to determine who goes first (it’s always all the good guys first or all the bad guys first) and also introduces some additional circumstances to that particular round – again, to keep two rounds from just being repetitions of each other. Secondly, cards are dealt to the players, and each card provides some special buff or ability when played. You can’t just play them because you have them, though, first you have to move them from your “hand” to your “pool.” You can move a card into your pool once per round, and you get new cards when you successfully perform an action in a round that’s the “favoured” action (which is determined by the initiative card). Once a card is in your pool, you can play it at any time, in any combination.
Are you whimpering on the floor yet?
I’ve never actually dared to run Torg, but I’ve tried some test fights on my own, and yeah – I will admit that it seems like it could kind of be fun once you got the hang of it. The cards give you more shiny buttons to press, and it is nice to have some added incentive to not just do the same thing every round but to mix things up and interject your attacks with witty insults and fancy footwork. But man, the sheer amount of complexity here…
Anyway, the final part of the basic rules (yes, these are still “basic”) is the use of possibilities. Storm Knights have those as a special resource pool, and they can spend them to resist injuries, roll an extra time for an action and add the results together, or ignore the axioms around you for a short while. Between possibilities, cards, exploding 20s and taking less damage from the same combat result, Storm Knights have a lot of advantages over “Ords,” or boring normal people. The idea seem to be that they’re action heroes; not superhuman per se, but events kind of conspire to give them openings and let them escape by the skin of their teeth.
There is one of those choose-your-own-adventure chapters that seems to have been in vogue around this time. You play as a mercenary flying a plane over the Living Land but having to make an emergency landing and make your way to safety. It’s nice enough, though I keep failing at it – they put in a time limit at one point, and I’m not sure if it’s meant to be impossible to overcome, because I never manage to get anywhere before it runs out…
Then we get an exhaustive account of just how possibility-physics work and what the logistics is of the High Lords’ invasion. See, a High Lord first has to send some agents into a cosm to place “stelae” that marks out boundaries between two areas that can have different axioms despite being in the same cosm. At this point, both the area contained within the stelae and the area outside of it will have the native cosm’s axioms, so no one will notice anything at first. But then, the High Lord creates a portal called a Maelstrom Bridge, which takes the form of some sort of physical path that drops down from the sky (Baruk Kaah’s, as described in the books, looks sort of like a giant tree or vine). That connects the area within the stelae to the invading cosm, and the axioms begin to fight. Since the area within the stelae is smaller, the axioms there lose, and the invading cosm inflicts its axioms – it becomes a “realm” of the invading cosm.
After that, what happens depends on the exact strategy of the High Lord, but he’ll always try to extend the stelae network and spread the realm further. To conquer successive areas he needs to flood them with people who accept his axioms, which he can do by just sending armies of his own people into them (which is what Baruk Kaah does), or by converting the natives to his way of thinking (which Jean Malraux tends to be big on). Ords who spend time in a realm all eventually disconnect from their home cosm and become denizens of the realm’s cosm. This has the side effect of releasing their possibility energy, allowing the High Lord’s Darkness Device to gobble it up. Having transformed once, they are now without possibility energy, so if they for any reason transform again – for instance, if the realm switches to a new set of axioms – they simply cease to exist.
This last part adds another wrinkle. Once an area has been taken by a High Lord, just uprooting the stelae so it switches back to its original axioms is problematic, since it will cause the death of a number of innocent people. The only way to avoid that is by a complicated procedure whereby a Storm Knight has to play a Glory card, something that can only be done when rolling a result of 60+ on a single die roll (something that is just vaguely possible with a combination of a favourable condition from an initiative card, playing a card that allows an extra roll, spending a possibility for an extra roll, and/or rolling a 20 on one of all those rolls. And remember, you need to have first drawn a Glory card and moved it to your pool for it even to be possible!). Having done that, they can spread tales of their heroic deeds, thus giving the people hope and letting them regain some possibility energy. All of which does give you an all-purpose reason to go adventuring, but it seems a little overblown and overly mechanical, especially since it’s so freaking hard to pull off. I mean, it’s not like yanking a stela is easy in itself, given that the High Lords tend to defend them with everything they’ve got…
We also get the first mention of gospogs, which are a sort of all-purpose shock troops that the Gaunt Man have invented and shared with his High Lord allies. Gospogs need to be planted on a field of corpses, and grow up to a sort of plant-zombies. A field can be planted more than once, and each time it yields a smaller harvest of more powerful gospogs. Gospogs of the first planting are all the same kind of Swamp Thing lookalikes, but later plantings take on unique appearances based on the cosm they grow in.
We finish up with chapters on magic and miracles. Those have a lot in common, in that they are both distinct powers that can be attempted, though spells have to be learned separately while holy people of a given religion tends to know all its associated miracles. Spells rely on one of four different magical abilities (conjuration, divination, apportation and transformation), while miracles depend on a single one (faith). Spells cause damage to the caster in proportion to how far beneath a particular target number he rolls (this target number is usually higher than the one to just succeed at the spell, so a casting will likely hurt a little even if you pull it off). Miracles, on the other hand, can be enhanced by the cooperation of other people who share the miracleworker’s religion.
All religions are true in Torg. That is, they are true in some cosm, somewhere, and the gods reach out across the cosmverse to aid their believers in other cosms, insofar as those cosms’ spiritual axioms allow it. Fair enough.
Core Earth has low magic and spiritual axioms, incidentally, but they’re not zero (whereas the Living Land has no magic at all, because there the idea that Man could impose his will on Nature in any way is ridiculous. Also, Nippon Tech – the Japanese cyberpunk cosm – has just enough to make some super-ninjitsu possible but no more, because there the idea that you can make anything happen just by willing it is ridiculous). Things like levitating marbles or speaking in tongues are possible there, just not things like teleportation or faith healing. Oh, and there is one character in the books who’s psychic (she’s part of a Soviet parapsychological institute), which I’m not sure where it fits in. Possibly it got covered in a later book, they certainly published enough of them. Anyway, suffice to say is that while Core Earth is presented as our world, it isn’t, not quite.
THE WORLDBOOK
The Worldbook starts with a description of the state of Core Earth. North America is obviously in a state of upheaval what with large swaths of it having turned into Jurassic Park. The leadership is also in some disarray, with the sitting President and Vice President both believed dead (there were some hints in the novels that they might be alive, but nothing came of it), and the guy who took over the Presidency after them being assassinated by a sinister cabal known as the Delphi Council. South America is mostly uninvolved.
South-east Asia has Orrorsh sitting smack in the middle of it, spewing out monsters. Australia is battening down the hatches to hold it off. Japan has turned into Nippon Tech and its shadowy High Lord is doing vaguely described sneaky things to conquer the world through economic manipulation. He does have the benefit that most people haven’t even realised that he’s invaded yet – at most, they’ve noticed that something called the Kanawa Corporation managed to come out of nowhere and capture a lot of market value oddly quickly.
Europe has had a number of shocking turnarounds, with Aysle under Uthorion overrunning Great Britain and Scandinavia (though Sweden managed to rebuff him – not sure if the writers were aware of just how much absolutely nothing we had as a national defense back then…) and then suddenly getting friendly under Pella Ardinay, and France first losing all technology later than the printing press and then rebounding all the to cybernetics and virtual reality. Germany has reunited (because remember, this was written before that, y’know, actually happened) and is the world’s most properous nation at present, and the Soviet Union is sort of ineffectual and in confusion despite being the only country to immediately repel its invader (of a seventh cosm called Tharkold). The Cyberpope has his eye on Spain and Italy, but he’s more interested in becoming seen as the “true” pope there than in physically invading.
Africa and the middle east has the Nile Empire under Doctor Mobius. He’s waging a fairly typical war of conquest, trying to expand in every direction at once. So far he’s on the advance, and a lot of people are worried at how close he’s getting to both Jerusalem and Mecca.
We also get a rundown of something called “the Still World.” See, it was a plot point in the novels that the Gaunt Man had created a machine that would drain the physical energy from the planet by stopping its rotation, which he would then absorb alongside all the possibility energy, and that would turn him into the Torg, which is a sort of super-High Lord (and yes, there are rules for what kind of abilities the Torg would have. No, it’s not meant to ever happen and the game would effectively be over if it did, but this is Torg so there will be rules!). Obviously he can’t do that right now, but the rotation-slower was never stopped, so the game helpfully provides rules for what happens if nothing is done about that. Spoiler: it results in the world ending within a few months and the whole game becoming unplayable. So no GM is ever going to allow that to happen, but this is Torg, so there will be rules!
Anyway, then we move on to individual realms. Orrorsh is a world where things are rather like nineteenth-century Europeans thought they were. That is to say, Europe is the sole bastion of civilisation in a world of darkness, savagery and black magic, which can be combated by stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen with bushy moustaches but can never be fully overcome. However, it’s actually like that because that’s how the Gaunt Man likes it, and he’s intentionally kept Europe relatively clear of the madness because he finds it useful to have some people around who hasn’t gotten too desensitised to a proper scare. In the leadup to the invasion, he tricked the Victorians (the alt-British empire who dominates Europe in Orrorsh) that they had inadvertantly let the monsters escape from their world into an innocent world of helpless heathens, and that therefore they, as men of honour, had no choice but to run over and White Man’s Burden the crap out them. Of course, the Gaunt Man’s monsters didn’t actually need the Victorians’ help crossing over to Core Earth, but since the Victorians were native to Orrorsh’s axioms, the moment they streamed into Core Earth they started flipping areas over to Orrorsh.
So yeah, south-east Asia has now lost 100 years of technology and is being conquered by a bunch of snooty, condescending white guys who honestly think they’re helping. While the nights have gotten filled with vampires, werewolves, serial killers and black magic. The Gaunt Man is a clever bastard… though of course, he can’t really benefit from it right now, since he’s stuck in that possibility storm for another thirty books or so.
The Living Land is spreading over the US and Canada. It’s covered in eternal warm mist and full of Edeinos. The Edeinos have a religion called Keta Kelles that center on the worship of the nature goddess Lanala. Worshippers of Keta Kelles are called Jakatts, and they strive to always live authentic lives, without anything artificial or anything that stands between them and the full experience. Danger and struggle is good, because it causes you to live intensely (dying isn’t good, per se, but it’s preferable to die than to live less than fully), whereas leisure and comfort are bad, because they mean you’re wasting your life.
… so basically, Jakatts have the same apparent philosophy as the White Wolf writing staff always espoused. But the refreshing thing is that while in World of Darkness games, the desirability of AUTHENTIC!!! struggle and pain was always treated as self-evident… here the whole thing is treated a lot more neutrally.
See, Keta Kelles isn’t portrayed as inherently bad, though Baruk Kaah’s crusade to convert everyone to it (for his own selfish purposes) is. There are heroic Jakatts who have turned against Baruk Kaah without turning against Keta Kelles. There are heroic humans who have converted to Keta Kelles and gone back to nature but who are fighting Baruk Kaah because he’s perverted Lanala’s way.
But the thing is, it’s not treated as inherently good, either. There are heroic ex-Jakatts who have abandoned Keta Kelles and gone over to Core Earth because hey, cars are cool! There are heroic humans who absolutely do not want to go back to nature and are fighting Baruk Kaah for that reason.
I don’t know, that always struck me as nice. Like, we can agree to disagree on indoor plumbing, just as long as we’re all on board with Baruk Kaah being a big fat jerk!
Anyway, in addition to edeinos, the Living Land also have stalengers (big flying jellyfish) and benthes (little squishy things that can attach themselves to other creatures and manipulate their feelings). Both are sentient beings from previous cosms conquered by Baruk Kaah who converted to Keta Kelles. It’s also full of freaky animals who are any variety of reptilian, insectoid and amoebal, for extra nasty surprises when taking a walk in the woods.
Aysle! It’s a high fantasy realm, though it’s a little less Arthurian romance and a little more Warhammer-only-cleaner, with flintlock pistols, academies of stuffy wizards, and noble houses scheming against each other. It has a wide variety of sentient races (“folk” in the game’s parlance) including humans, elves, dwarves, trolls, giants and… Vikings. Yeah, apparently those are considered a species of their own, and they’re also evil and still obey Uthorion. Pella Ardinay is the Lady of Light and the wise high queen of the realm, and is cooperating with the local governments in regards to getting rid of Uthorion, but some people are noticing that she doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to pick up and go home… Also, she’s technically the High Lord, meaning that she’s got a Darkness Device whispering in her ear. Basically, imagine if Galadriel had taken up the One Ring and now Sauron was scheming to get it back while it was slowly corrupting her – that seems to be the idea behind Aysle.
Marauding dragons are another thing that exists in the realm, and so are Cockney-speaking goblins who got transformed by the axiom wash and are now lurking in unused subway tunnels. Dwarves and giants are fighting street to street across Belfast. Trolls are running wild in the Scottish highlands. I got to admit, that does sound sort of fun.
The Cyberpapacy! This is the cosm that there’s the least information about in the novels – it didn’t actually exist in its final form until the last chapter, after all – and all in all, it’s a bit underwhelming. The idea is that it’s cyberpunk, but instead of evil corporations you have an evil church who sends cybernetic soldier-priests to persecute unbelievers. There’s a giant virtual space called the GodNet, which is full of secret church data for daring hackers to steal, guarded by virtual gargoyles and simulated warrior angels.There are also rules for cybernetics, most of which seem suspiciously close to the ones from Cyberpunk (which was published two years earlier), complete with retractable razor claws and chips that can give you basic fluency in skills that you are pristinely untrained in. Cyberware poses the risk of suffering “cyberpsychosis” that increases the more hardware you have installed, though you can lessen the risk by using a drug called Jaz.
There’s a French Resistance, because of course there is, and also an orthodox, technology-hating faction of the Cyberpope’s church who aren’t happy about how he’s pivoted from “technology is bad” to “give me AAAAAAAAALL the technology!” That’s about it, though, and it’ll be quite a few books before the cosm gets its dedicated book.
The Nile Empire… is a little hard to explain. It’s supposed to be the pulp cosm, but the problem with that is that the whole game is pretty pulpy as it is. It’s all two-fisted heroes fighting scheming villains at the top of speeding trains, probably over a map to an ancient temple in the middle of a dinosaur-infested jungle, so how do you add more pulp to that? Likewise, the book tries to make a big deal about how everyone in the Nile Empire is either Good or Evil with nothing in between, but, er… I can’t actually think of a single character anywhere in the books I’ve read so far that wasn’t very clearly either a hero or a villain. There are some characters who might be on the shady side of good or on the redeemable side of bad, at least if you squint a little, but they are few and far between.
A better way of putting it might be that the Nile Empire is a cosm where 1930s gee-wiz gadgets, mystical secrets of the ancient world, and all-around pseudo-scientific “just pretend it makes sense” handwaving are facts of life. It’s not quite a superhero cosm, because it never quite gets that garish or self-contained; it’s more like a proto-superhero setting, one where there is still some sort of connection between the fantasy and the reality. You might have a woman who can turn invisible, but she won’t also project indestructable force fields; she’ll fight by sneaking up on people and punching them. The technology can do amazing things, but it’s not otherworldly space-age artifacts covered in glittering circuitry but big, clunky contraptions with oil stains and grinding gears. Wizards don’t throw fireballs, they breed monstrous animals and cook up strange poisons. There is a slightly grubby, self-made look about it all.
Anyway, the epitome of this mish-mash is Doctor Mobius, who is a mad scientist who was originally an Egyptian Pharao’s treacherous brother who tried to become a god through usurping the divine office of the pharao before being killed and ultimately resurrected by the descendants of his followers through a magical ritual. Which is… even Torgier than all the rest of Torg, I must admit.
Nippon Tech is the other cyberpunk realm, the one with evil corporations and ninjas but without cybernetics and hackers. It’s a cosm of intrigue and corporate warfare where everyone is always stabbing someone in the back for vengeance or gain. In fact, it’s an actual cosmic law that a certain percentage of any group of people are always scheming to destroy it from within. It has slightly better technology than Core Earth, but no more than it can be disguised as being the cutting edge of development. The rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer, again by inescapable cosmic fiat. The combination of a very low magic axiom and a spiritual axiom that’s not high enough to compensate makes the cosm feel creepy and dead. I feel like the writers didn’t like Japan much – the sheer negativity here is kind of noticeable given the even-handedness that the Jakatts were portrayed with.
Martial arts make things a bit more interesting, though. They work by channeling chi which it turns out is just another word for possibility energy. Martial arts are special skills that gives you semi-magical abilities. To learn one, you need to overcome certain ritual tests and swear to certain restrictions. The one outlined is ninjitsu, because everything needs more ninjas.
The book is concluded with a series of character templates. See, the writers were for some reason not thrilled with the idea of people just making characters up, so instead you’re supposed to choose one of a bunch of templates and then just distribute some skill points. There is a grudging note of how you could make up your own templates, and how to do that, but clearly they consider it to be ill-advised.
And these templates are, in parts, kind of weirdly hyper-specific. As in, some of them are really just the protagonists from the novels with their names erased – I don’t think there are that many Ayslish knights who were killed by Uthorion but who vowed to return and were eventually reborn in a Core Earth body! Like, it feels like that was just that one particular character. And there is definitely only one character as disgustingly perfect as Ace Decker, oh yeah, I recognise you, you smug jerk! “The National Hero,” verily and forsooth…
I mean, it’s not a big deal, especially since it’s actually really easy to just create your own character from scratch, but… I almost wonder if the original intention was that you’d just play the protagonists (and possibly also that the game would only ever be an add-on to the books, which were to be the main event?) and they only made things more generic at the last minute.
THE ADVENTURE BOOK
The first half of the adventure book is general advice on GMing. Most of it is what you’d expect, but there’s also a lot of stringest insistence on making an interesting story – to cheat as much as you have to to make sure that the dramatic beats are kept. And, look, I’m not necessarily hostile to that, but… it just seems like a waste to have a super-complicated system and then just overrule it whenever it spits out results you don’t like. Like, if it’s all going to be used as a rough guideline anyway, why not just create something that’ll provide a rough guideline and trust the GM to adjust it as needed?
I also feel a little like the game is trying to be all things for all people. The kind of player who wants a stringent physics-engine that perfectly simulates the setting in every particular is not going to like a luck-based card game that can completely mess up the realism of it. The kind of person who wants to play a luck-based card game isn’t going to think it’s fun that some enemies can’t be beaten by any combination of skill and luck, because their Toughness is just too high for your weapon. And neither is going to be happy when the GM just steps in and overrules the outcome of the game to make a better story. I dunno. Maybe I’m wrong and it all makes a delicious combination that’s more than the sum of its part, but it just looks a bit like the writers got over-enthusiastic and threw in everything all at once… which, let’s face it, would fit in quite nicely with their design ethos as a whole!
Anyway, there are some handy pointers on how to handle the different genres of the cosms and how things are supposed to feel and work in each one. That’s all good.
Then follows a sample adventure called Before the Dawn. Remember that rotation-stopping machine that the Gaunt Man left behind? This is about doing something about it. So the players have to succeed, or you bought the game for nothing because the setting will be unplayable! No pressure or anything…
The adventure starts with the players driving through the Living Land to deliver emergency supplies to a human settlement when they run into a damsel in distress chased by a bunch of edeinos. Having rescued her, they find out that she’s a brilliant scientist’s beautiful daughter (she’s from the Nile Empire, where every brilliant scientist is required by law to have a beautiful daughter) and her father has been strong-armed by Doctor Mobius into building a digging machine that can traverse the planet’s crust. The evil doctor has now sent them with a bunch of minions to the Living Land to make some sort of exchange with the edeinos there.
The players proceed to free the scientist and can then meet with the edeinos themselves, exchanging Mobius’ weapons for what turns out to be a Fabergé egg. Or they can just fight the edeinos and steal it, though the edeinos have a pet dinosaur along that might stomp on them if they try. Either way, they follow what scant clues they are given and take the digger back to the Nile Empire, where they have to sneak into a military base and hijack a plane. After a dog fight against some Nile Empire aircraft, they fly the plane to a spot in the Pacific Ocean, where they find a sunken ship guarded by one of the Gaunt Man’s demons, who can however be bribed into leaving without a fight with the egg. In the ship is the machine, guarded by some animated pirate skeletons, and if they can put it into reverse it’ll get the world back to spinning properly again.
All in a day’s work.
Well, I again feel that there are a lot of points where the GM is expected to really force the players to go along with the plot because otherwise they won’t get to the other cool setpieces. But in fairness, a lot of those setpieces are really cool and flavourful, and at the end the players should have gotten a pretty good idea about how three different cosms work. Plus, I will grant you that for a game that started with an actual series of novels, Torg is so far showing no signs of the dreaded “the uber-NPCs do all the important stuff” syndrome. When the first adventure published is about averting the actual end of the world, it certainly puts the player characters front and centre – in the passenger seat, perhaps, but in the spotlight even so.
FINAL THOUGHTS
My constant snarking aside, I am extremely fond of Torg, in all its overdesigned glory. There is just such geeky, sincere love shining through every fussy, meticulous special case and detailed description of something that will never actually matter in the game. There’s a lot of stupid stuff in it, but it never feels lazy or phoned in. Someone cared an awful lot when writing this. It’s honestly kind of sad when you look at games from even ten years later on and see how listless and by-the-numbers they are in comparison.
One thing that does bother me a bit is that the situation never feels quite as dire as the text tries to make it out to be. The invasion is meant to be the literal end of the world unless heroes can somehow avert it, but none of the High Lords honestly feel that threatening – sure, most of them feel all but impossible to budge in their own realms, but none of them ever feel like they’re in much danger of spreading further. Two of them (Uthorion and the Gaunt Man) start out hobbled, two more (Jean Malraux and Kanawa) just sort of sit there twiddling their thumbs while trying to enact some sort of non-military strategem that doesn’t feel overly likely to work, and of the two who do have armies marching (Baruk Kaah and Doctor Mobius), they both seem to be militarily outmatched and unlikely to get much further now that they’ve lost the element of surprise.
The second edition did seem to try beefing up all of them, while also fixing some other problems, but it honestly leaves me cold. I think the best way to ignore the overarching strategic situation and look at it from a frog’s-eye perspective; millions of people have been displaced, everything is in chaos, enemy agents are scheming behind the scenes everywhere, and even if Core Earth will probably win in the end there’s still room for heroism. The Axis were at a disadvantage for most of World War Two, after all, but that hasn’t exactly prevent the writing of a thousand stories set within that conflict. It’d be nice if the books didn’t push the “we’re all doomed, really!” angle so hard, but… yeah.
Of course, I also have no idea if I could ever run this thing, because the hyper-complexity of the rules would seem to make it a nightmare whether I had players who were new to it (which would mean I’d have to advise them every step of the way, which would be burdensome) or players who were familiar with it (which would mean that they’d frequently know better than I would, which would be insufferable!). Still, it’s one of those games that keep calling to me. We’ll see.
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