General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
I’m an old-schooler. I love the classic Dungeons and Dragons feel and game. But I’ve also learned to love just about everything else out there in RPG-land. Even those games that leave you scratching your head or trying desperately to make your head work the same way the game works. I love having my expectations challenged and even defeated by odd-ball games that seem to come completely out of left field.
I love a good surreal RPG experience every now and then to remind me just how off-the-wall gaming can be.
It’s my imagination, I like to see it getting a real workout every now and then. And here are five of my favourite games that really seem to come out of nowhere.
Lacuna Part 1: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City
If I had bought this game, I wouldn’t have ever run it. However, I sat down for a game with a cool GM who pulled this out of his bag and handed each of us a scantron-style record sheet, a short pencil, and “Control-authorized dice”. We made mystery agents in a scene that felt like it was from the Men In Black movie. We rolled for everything except our ability scores – even our names! We were the men in black, patrolling the Jungian subconscious like Agents from the Matrix. But the longer we stay in the subconscious, the more difficult it gets to communicate with Control, to the point where part way through our first game Control was standing up with his back turned to the gaming table shouting obsceneties at the wall and telling us that we were completely off-course. You can do anything with this game – everything you try is done with a difficulty of 11 – if you can roll an 11 on your attempt to do something, you do it. Want to do the Jump program from the Matrix? Roll an 11. Want to shoot another person’s bullet out of the air? Roll an 11 or better. But every time you fail, things get weirder. It quickly went from Agents in the Matrix to Agents running around in Naked Lunch meets Heavy Metal Magazine. I’ve played this four times now, and no two games were remotely alike.
Toon
Not really a traditional “surreal” RPG, Toon was definitely my first surreal gaming experience. Toon is the original cartoons RPG from Steve Jackson Games. And really, there’s nothing like a cartoon RPG to bring out some truly surreal gaming experiences. I have vague and somewhat disturbing recollections of a magic mushroom, a caterpillar with a shoe fetish and a dope-smoking lizard exploring the depths of space, and cookies, in a game that even had the Game Master wondering what the heck was going on. When you make a game with basically no rules, it can be startling to see where the players take it.
Don’t Rest Your Head
Another recent discovery of mine is Fred Hicks’ game of insomniac superheroes in a world where nightmares are real and they want to kill you because now you know they are real. Take the modern world and modern typical people, but then have them stay up for four days until they start to hallucinate… turns out those aren’t hallucinations. The nightmares are real and have a whole world that exists in places you can only get to by looking at the spaces between. And now that they know that you know they are real, they want to kill you. Because if you don’t sleep, you can’t dream. Fortunately, when you haven’t slept for long enough, you gain bizarre powers making you a minor superhero in this messed up world. The mechanics of the game reinforce the feeling of insanity and insomnia, with the ability to use dice representing these things, and hoping you don’t get so tired that you fall asleep (because if you do sleep, you WILL die). Take the intensity of Fight Club, and mix with the world of a Nightmare Before Christmas. Shake and pour.
Over the Edge
I think this was the first game to actually be marketed as surreal. The system is simple, the setting mostly believable. But the edges of the world of Over the Edge are a lot more like the hallucinations of Interzone in Naked Lunch, mixed with a liberal dosage of the Steve Jackson vision of the Illuminati. The fact that we started playing this right after the movie of Naked Lunch came out probably had a lot to do with the surreality of the games we played in the setting. We hunted for the meat of the giant aquatic centipede, we had missions given to us by payphones that grew anuses and then excreted the mission briefings into our hands, and we ate some mighty fine pea soup. All in a day’s work on Al-Amarja. The mechanics went on to become the basis for Risus, an excellent free rules-light RPG.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen
So tell me, Sir Pumpernickel, how it is that you destroyed the world with a mere game? Ah! Well, it wasn’t the whole world, but we had just picked up the most extraordinary tome that described itself as a “role playing game” but was truly a gateway to a world of tall tales and travels. It was, of course, the only copy of the book that survived the explosion of the printing press where it was being published – but that’s another story that I believe Miss Elliot will tell us about shortly. We sat back and consumed much wine and experimented with this whole concept of “role playing”.
And of course, an honourable mention definitely goes to Discordia! by Wicked Dead / John Wick. The roleplaying game where everything is true, especially things that contradict each other.
What surreal games have you tried? What games have you played that became surreal?
I'm jealous. It's one of those games I've read but not played. Yet.
I remember a Call of Cthulhu game I played at GenCon's Chaosium "Cthulhu Masters" event one year. This was held in one of the locker rooms of the stadium back in Milwaukee, a cold and echoing place that was completely removed from the bustle just outside. I was playing an Aliens scenario, with cthulhoid horrors instead of aliens, and my character was the ice-cold corporate shill. Around the time that we were deep in the complex and my PC's sanity snapped like a fragile twig, I remember the game becoming completely surreal, with us making decisions that were perfectly reasonable at the time but later seemed horrible and bizarre. [Note to self: even incredibly insane people shouldn't mistake an alien for a baby and try to nurse it. Seriously. Just don't.]
I don't know if it qualifies as surreal, because I never played it. I was at the Origins where it debuted and I remember that a number of people who played this game described it as surreal. The RPG was Sandman.
The concept of the RPG pretty much required you play published adventures. The idea was that you were an amnesiac who kept waking up in different roles in different times and places. There was even a contest with a prize for the first person to correctly guess who the players were supposed to be.
I think that it disappeared after the whatever products were released that Origins. I always wondered what the real concept was, but haven't been able to find anything on it since that year.
__________________ David A. Blizzard
"The only constant I am sure of is this accelerating rate of change" - Downside Up by Peter Gabriel
I’m an old-schooler. I love the classic Dungeons and Dragons feel and game. But I’ve also learned to love just about everything else out there in RPG-land. Even those games that leave you scratching your head or trying desperately to make your head work the same way the game works. I love having my expectations challenged and even defeated by odd-ball games that seem to come completely out of left field.
I love a good surreal RPG experience every now and then to remind me just how off-the-wall gaming can be.
It’s my imagination, I like to see it getting a real workout every now and then. And here are five of my favourite games that really seem to come out of nowhere.
Lacuna Part 1: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City
If I had bought this game, I wouldn’t have ever run it. However, I sat down for a game with a cool GM who pulled this out of his bag and handed each of us a scantron-style record sheet, a short pencil, and “Control-authorized dice”. We made mystery agents in a scene that felt like it was from the Men In Black movie. We rolled for everything except our ability scores – even our names! We were the men in black, patrolling the Jungian subconscious like Agents from the Matrix. But the longer we stay in the subconscious, the more difficult it gets to communicate with Control, to the point where part way through our first game Control was standing up with his back turned to the gaming table shouting obsceneties at the wall and telling us that we were completely off-course. You can do anything with this game – everything you try is done with a difficulty of 11 – if you can roll an 11 on your attempt to do something, you do it. Want to do the Jump program from the Matrix? Roll an 11. Want to shoot another person’s bullet out of the air? Roll an 11 or better. But every time you fail, things get weirder. It quickly went from Agents in the Matrix to Agents running around in Naked Lunch meets Heavy Metal Magazine. I’ve played this four times now, and no two games were remotely alike.
Toon
Not really a traditional “surreal” RPG, Toon was definitely my first surreal gaming experience. Toon is the original cartoons RPG from Steve Jackson Games. And really, there’s nothing like a cartoon RPG to bring out some truly surreal gaming experiences. I have vague and somewhat disturbing recollections of a magic mushroom, a caterpillar with a shoe fetish and a dope-smoking lizard exploring the depths of space, and cookies, in a game that even had the Game Master wondering what the heck was going on. When you make a game with basically no rules, it can be startling to see where the players take it.
Don’t Rest Your Head
Another recent discovery of mine is Fred Hicks’ game of insomniac superheroes in a world where nightmares are real and they want to kill you because now you know they are real. Take the modern world and modern typical people, but then have them stay up for four days until they start to hallucinate… turns out those aren’t hallucinations. The nightmares are real and have a whole world that exists in places you can only get to by looking at the spaces between. And now that they know that you know they are real, they want to kill you. Because if you don’t sleep, you can’t dream. Fortunately, when you haven’t slept for long enough, you gain bizarre powers making you a minor superhero in this messed up world. The mechanics of the game reinforce the feeling of insanity and insomnia, with the ability to use dice representing these things, and hoping you don’t get so tired that you fall asleep (because if you do sleep, you WILL die). Take the intensity of Fight Club, and mix with the world of a Nightmare Before Christmas. Shake and pour.
Over the Edge
I think this was the first game to actually be marketed as surreal. The system is simple, the setting mostly believable. But the edges of the world of Over the Edge are a lot more like the hallucinations of Interzone in Naked Lunch, mixed with a liberal dosage of the Steve Jackson vision of the Illuminati. The fact that we started playing this right after the movie of Naked Lunch came out probably had a lot to do with the surreality of the games we played in the setting. We hunted for the meat of the giant aquatic centipede, we had missions given to us by payphones that grew anuses and then excreted the mission briefings into our hands, and we ate some mighty fine pea soup. All in a day’s work on Al-Amarja. The mechanics went on to become the basis for Risus, an excellent free rules-light RPG.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen
So tell me, Sir Pumpernickel, how it is that you destroyed the world with a mere game? Ah! Well, it wasn’t the whole world, but we had just picked up the most extraordinary tome that described itself as a “role playing game” but was truly a gateway to a world of tall tales and travels. It was, of course, the only copy of the book that survived the explosion of the printing press where it was being published – but that’s another story that I believe Miss Elliot will tell us about shortly. We sat back and consumed much wine and experimented with this whole concept of “role playing”.
And of course, an honourable mention definitely goes to Discordia! by Wicked Dead / John Wick. The roleplaying game where everything is true, especially things that contradict each other.
What surreal games have you tried? What games have you played that became surreal?
Wow, these are some really off-the-wall games you've picked out. I've heard of them but didn't buy any. I may try one here and there. If I ever get back to going to cons, I know I'll play them there, because that's the time where I play every game except D&D since my home game is a "D&D only" club due to my players' taste.
I own and applaud all five games. Good choices! I remember reading Over the Edge, putting down the book, and saying "What the ****?" It was great.
Paranoia 1e, which was darker than 2e, could definitely get surreal as well. What a fun game, even if I prefer a lighter tone.
My PARANOIA XP game tended toward the surreal. I try very hard to keep it "your character is you, but if you were in the Alpha Complex." In other words, I try to make the players be the only people who see the whackiness of Friend Computer and Alpha society for what it is, but it's not like they can do anything about it.
Quite effective when I add in Cthulhoid monsters and alien entities when they go off track, too.
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I could totally see Paranoia turning into something quite surreal - unfortunately my play experiences with it didn't turn out that way... the game became a game of backstabbing idiocy instead of truly bizarre play.
That said, one of my players recounted a game of Paranoia XP he ran where he kept sending the players spam messages on small bits of paper throughout the game, interspersed with messages from their secret societies and from their superiors (three UV citizens who were working against each other). Since just about everything they were getting sent was treasonous (especially spam!), one of the players just started eating the notes after reading them. After a particularly bizarre blast of spam and secret notes going around, that player failed a roll and at the same time choked on his mouthful of secret notes, sending bits of chewed up treason spitting across the table and into his happy orange fizzy drink.
No list of surreal games is complete without the Low Life setting for savage worlds. It's a post-apocalyptic world populated by sentient cockroaches, Hostess snack cakes, poo, tapeworms, and other bizarre beings.
No list of surreal games is complete without the Low Life setting for savage worlds. It's a post-apocalyptic world populated by sentient cockroaches, Hostess snack cakes, poo, tapeworms, and other bizarre beings.
Such a great setting, too. I wish that it was a self-contained game, though. Also, I wish that I could have found players for it.
Other "surreal" games I have played are:
Paranoia (the original)
Ghost Busters (The original... well, surreal setting, not game)
Top Secret (again, surreal setting, not surreal game)
The Ghost Busters setting was in the dark, by candle light, in a house that was supposed to have been haunted. We were so freked out by the "ghosts", and we kept hearing things, and seeing shadows, and movement, and all of the other stuff that just made the game a bit too... bizzare... for words.
The Top Secret setting...
I grew up for the top half of my teen years (15-19) at Quantico Marine Base in Northern Virginia. The main DM (one of them) was a guard at the Quantico brig... which is where John Hinkley was housed for a bit after he shot President Reagan. About a month after the assassination attempt, the guard ran a Top Secret mission where we wre to break into the brig at Quantico and "neutralize" the suspect Hinkley. The Administrator used real floorplans from the brig, including putting Hinkley in the actual cell he was stored in, and we had to get through the actual defenses, and everything. It was a bit mind-boggling that we were playing reality (almost) with an RPG.
__________________ "...And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that, with it, Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy.'"
I could totally see Paranoia turning into something quite surreal - unfortunately my play experiences with it didn't turn out that way... the game became a game of backstabbing idiocy instead of truly bizarre play.
This is because Paranoia is da da, not surrealism.
__________________ Dark God of Facetiousness and Vaguely Lobsterlike Things
I've played it. However, it doesn't really work anymore unless you sit down with the players ahead of time and force them to watch a few episodes of Dallas - and that is a torture beyond belief.
However, it makes it WAY more surreal to watch a game being played now if you do have that background, because the characters are so all over the place. Imagine watching an episode of Numb3rs where Charlie Eppes is the take-charge kind of guy and Don ends up in the back seat, acting as a liaison man and interface between the uber-geek in charge (Charlie) and the FBI hardass Megan Reeves. (Of course, all that means nothing if you don't watch Numb3rs).
Anyways, the game play is pretty simple. Characters try to Affect each other using Persuade, Coerce, Seduce and Investigate, and if an Affect attempt succeeds, the target must give up something (control, information, power, etc).
Each character has stats for affecting and defending using each of these abilities as well as a Power & Luck stat. Major characters can even gain control of minor characters through the Affecting rules, allowing them to get more done, or to do things without being quite as open about it. Unlike most games, there are distinct "winning" rules, as the characters are often at direct odds with each other through a plotline, and who comes out on top will affect future stories.
The game has three full "scripts" to play through. Each major character has a set of victory conditions to "win" the script (basically what they have to control by the end of the game). This allows for the power disparity to work well, as J.R. has significantly better stats than most of the other characters, but usually has such high power needs that it can be difficult for him to succeed at his tasks - however it remains possible that one or more other characters can succeed at their tasks while JR succeeds at his. Best of all, like in the TV show, the characters are often fighting for control of the same resources, at cross purposes, in order to "help" the same end cause. J.R. is speculating, while Jock is protecting - if either one wins then Ewing Petroleum will win... but they are directly fighting one another to help the company out in their own way.
It's a very social RPG - there are no rules for violent confrontation, as close as it gets is coersion which is handled much like you would expect in an 80's TV show - when it really comes down to pushing and shoving, you have your thugs do it.
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