Dark Kain
Explorer
5 out of 5 rating for The Strange Corebook
So we have a game that sports Demons, Dragons, Golems, Robots, Green Men from Mars, Animated Heart Trasplants, Crazy Cyborgs (addicted to grafting body parts), Dark Energy Pharaohs, Shoggots, The Jabberwock and Professor Moriarty. And somehow it manage to blend them in a way that Makes Sense and is incredible fun to play!
Welcome to the Earth of The Strange, where basically any fictional story worth of mentioning spawns dozens of "recursions", worlds in miniature where most of the populations is made of literal NPCs that follow blindly their made-up lives with near-zero autoconscience, while only a selected few are capable of recognizing the nature of their world, learning how to travel to our own Earth and how to benefit from this (often not in a friendly way).
Of course there is also the problem of 100% genuine Earth natives thinking that an army of Undead Skeletons armed with Laser Rifles would be a good investment.
All due to a billions years old alien thingamajig made to create a galactic network that wasn't really ready to the overwhelming amount of fiction the modern human society produces and consumes daily.
The game use the Cypher System ruleset that, by now you surely know ad nauseam, is the same rule system of Numenera. That system was good for Numenera, but is just wonderful for The Strange: a game were a GM is involved in narrating a story about stories gains quite a lot from eschewing DM dice rolls entirely and keeping a purely narrative approach of having things happen when they should (or when it is cool) and rewarding XPs to the players for this. Not to mention that the whole Descriptor/Type/Focus character creation is even better in The Strange, giving the ability to change your character's persona on the fly by swapping foci (a procedure that requires two minutes top, but create notably different characters) when translating (aka traveling and adapting) to a new recursion.
And the amount of gaming potential is incredible: want to play Doctor Who meets X-files? The Earth is your playground. Traditional heroic fantasy with a twist? Ardeyn. Political based Sci-fi? Ruk. Mafia wars (where everybody is an humanoid crow)? Crow Hollow. Lovercraftian horror? Obviously. World of Darkness styled horror? Easy as pie with a couple of extra rules to be a vampire or a licantrope as a bonus. Want to play Superman VS Goku? I swear there is a recursion just for you. So go and grab this manual: even if somehow you don't like the rule system (Don't worry: I won't judge) it is filled with enough ideas to keep you GMing for a couple of centuries.
So we have a game that sports Demons, Dragons, Golems, Robots, Green Men from Mars, Animated Heart Trasplants, Crazy Cyborgs (addicted to grafting body parts), Dark Energy Pharaohs, Shoggots, The Jabberwock and Professor Moriarty. And somehow it manage to blend them in a way that Makes Sense and is incredible fun to play!
Welcome to the Earth of The Strange, where basically any fictional story worth of mentioning spawns dozens of "recursions", worlds in miniature where most of the populations is made of literal NPCs that follow blindly their made-up lives with near-zero autoconscience, while only a selected few are capable of recognizing the nature of their world, learning how to travel to our own Earth and how to benefit from this (often not in a friendly way).
Of course there is also the problem of 100% genuine Earth natives thinking that an army of Undead Skeletons armed with Laser Rifles would be a good investment.
All due to a billions years old alien thingamajig made to create a galactic network that wasn't really ready to the overwhelming amount of fiction the modern human society produces and consumes daily.
The game use the Cypher System ruleset that, by now you surely know ad nauseam, is the same rule system of Numenera. That system was good for Numenera, but is just wonderful for The Strange: a game were a GM is involved in narrating a story about stories gains quite a lot from eschewing DM dice rolls entirely and keeping a purely narrative approach of having things happen when they should (or when it is cool) and rewarding XPs to the players for this. Not to mention that the whole Descriptor/Type/Focus character creation is even better in The Strange, giving the ability to change your character's persona on the fly by swapping foci (a procedure that requires two minutes top, but create notably different characters) when translating (aka traveling and adapting) to a new recursion.
And the amount of gaming potential is incredible: want to play Doctor Who meets X-files? The Earth is your playground. Traditional heroic fantasy with a twist? Ardeyn. Political based Sci-fi? Ruk. Mafia wars (where everybody is an humanoid crow)? Crow Hollow. Lovercraftian horror? Obviously. World of Darkness styled horror? Easy as pie with a couple of extra rules to be a vampire or a licantrope as a bonus. Want to play Superman VS Goku? I swear there is a recursion just for you. So go and grab this manual: even if somehow you don't like the rule system (Don't worry: I won't judge) it is filled with enough ideas to keep you GMing for a couple of centuries.
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