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.
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.
For some reason I took to rereading The Suethulhu Files this week. Much like The Binder of Shame, it’s the sort of trainwreck that just endlessly amuses the geeky mind. But I have to admit that the years have changed my view on it a bit over the years. These days, I’d describe it like this:
It’s the story of how the worst kind of GM runs a game for the worst kind of player in the worst kind of setting, and how it drives both of them crazy.
Now, the first and the last part of that is simply the text as written. The GM (referred to as “Marty”) does just about every single thing that GMs ought not to but that most GMs invariably end up doing when first starting out. He not only railroads, but railroads ineptly, creating scenarios that are ridiculously fragile and kept together solely by GM fiat. He takes everything personally and uses his control over the world to stomp down on anyone he doesn’t like. He is firmly opposed to the players actually doing stuff, seeing their role as just fawning over the majestic awesomeness of his settings and his NPCs. And he thinks he’s much, much smarter than he actually is.
And the setting… well, it’s CthulhuTech, which may just be the gold standard for games that learned all the wrong things from the World of Darkness. It’s really no wonder that Marty took to it, because it seems to have been created by a whole bunch of Martys. The whole thing is a constant, breathless gushing about the omnipotence of clandestine organisations, with the players existing to be tiny cogs in the machine, at best. A lot of people consider it to be depressing, because the players can’t save anyone. I consider it to be boring, because it’s so abundantly clear that the players don’t have to save anyone – the writers aren’t going to let their pet NPCs fail, so the world will be saved without the players’ involvement. Proper dark fantasy games call on you to be a hero, because if you don’t do it, no one else will. In CthulhuTech, your best bet is really to hunker down somewhere and wait for the Ashcroft Foundation to fix everything.
So that much I’m on board with, but honestly now… the narrator (“ZeRoller”) is no prize either. In fact, he seems like the sort of player who’d make my grey hairs multiply. He nitpicks. He scoffs. He demands to short-circuit the GM’s scenarios through what he considers super-clever solutions, and treats it as an outrage when he can’t. He behaves, all in all, as every bit as much of a control freak as Marty – it’s just that while Marty is a lazy, self-satisfied control freak, ZeRoller is a neurotic, overzealous one. Neither sounds like they’d be much fun.
Now, I think that ZeRoller would probably defend himself here, and claim that he’s not normally like that, but Marty’s smug insistence that his shoddy worldbuilding is the work of GENIUS!!! just drove him up the wall and made him want to disprove it. And I can absolutely believe that! Marty no doubt brought out the worst in him… but I wonder if he didn’t bring out the worst in Marty, too. If I ran a game for someone and they kept trying to break the setting by invoking bits of science that I simply had no clue about (and that they might not understand as well as they thought – ZeRoller admits himself in a few places that he was actually mistaken about something he argued for), I’d start itching to take them down a peg. That’s no excuse for Marty, of course, because just because you’re tempted to abuse your position it doesn’t mean you should, but yeah… I may not condone, but I sympathise.
In particular, ZeRoller keeps claiming that what drove him into those apparently endless arguments about the finer points of chemistry and physics with Marty was that Marty just wouldn’t back down and admit that ZeRoller’s ideas would work, but that it’d be a lot more convenient for the game if he just pretended not to have thought of it. And again, that would definitely have been the mature way to do it.
But.
But if some odious know-it-all was all up in my face and insisting that there was obviously a way to break a setting I’d poured my heart and soul into crafting… I’d need to swallow my pride pretty hard to agree with him. It’d feel like… “yes, it’s true, you’re much smarter than me, but please take pity on my poor, feeble intellect and treat me with kid gloves!”
I mean… I’m forty-five years old, and the idea still sets my teeth on edge. Marty was still in college at the time, presumably absolutely bubbling with youthful testosterone. I’m… not really surprised that his reaction was more like, “oh yeah? Bring it on, bro! Do your worst! My man-brain can beat your man-brain with one hemisphere behind its back!” Again, it’s not what a wiser man would have done, but… yeah.
All the same, like I said, it’s absolutely worth going back and reading more than ones. We can all use the reminder to not be like Marty. And ZeRoller… well, at least he’s entertaining, I have to give him that much!
Mister Monster's Workshop 