Synnibarr vs WotC

[Geekrampage]

I would like to add my - appreciation - of the World of Synnibarr, and note that I named one of my dogs Raven C.S. McCracken.

 

[darjr]

I must admit that he was pioneering if not striking first. I do not give a lot of credit for the local distribution but it does seem as if it was really being sold early on.

 

[jolt]

I have the most recent edition (whatever that is), but it's packed away somewhere and I don't feel like looking for it. I got it a couple of years back on the secondary market for a good price. It's wild and crazy and completely over the top, but it never feels multi-genre at all. It's for the same reason that putting lightsabres and X-Wing fighters into D&D doesn't suddenly make it a space opera game.

It's all Extreme Power Action!!! but the genres are little more than descriptive tags bolted onto damaging abilities. Whether something is martial arts, or high tech, or psychic powers etc. has little bearing on anything. It's superheroes on LSD. And not just just Marvel and DC either but also 90's Image. Imagine trying to play GURPS but how many points you have to build your character is randomized and every setting book ever written is simultaneously in play. So your group of Valkyrie ninjas could be protecting Witchworld from Clan Tremere vampires while trying to guide the Horseclans out of the Village into Aquilonia with the worldship flying through the Thranx Commonwealth and trying to avoid the undead Klingons in their cloaked Autoduel vehicles (and that was just session 0). But it does all of that while never feeling like any of those genres.

As written, the rules are a mess. It feels like a series of stream of conscious notes that haven't coalesced into a finished product yet. I did run the game once and it worked. But you have to be willing to do a freeform "rulings not rules" kind of game and get everyone to buy into that. You also have to be willing to ignore any sentence that begins with or ends with, "But that's not how it works". It's an interesting curiosity piece, but is not remotely worth the asking prices on the secondary market.

 

[Alzrius]

This thread really makes me want to pull my copy of Synnibarr (a beat-up old copy of the second edition that I picked up for a song at a used bookstore a few years back) off the shelf and page through it some more. I knew it was widely regarded as one of the worst RPGs ever made when I bought it, but somehow I don't think I ever appreciated just how it had earned that reputation.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I have sold RPGs for nearly 30 years, and if I have ever heard of this game, I have long since forgotten it.

 

[Dausuul]

Yeah, I played Synnibarr with Raven as well, as a teenager. Met him at DragonFlight convention at UW in probably '91 by randomly signing up for a session he was running, enjoyed it, played another, bought the edition that was then for sale (big blue three ring binder, all black and white printing), and signed up for sessions at another convention or two over that year/the next, and then joined his home group in '92, I think, playing regularly with him until my family moved back to NH from WA in May of '93.

Raven worked part-time at Wonderworld Books & Games in Burien, WA, which was the Seattle suburb where we lived, so my younger brother and myself often met up with him at the store so he could drive us over to his apartment for the session. Or my mother might drop us off, or sometimes another player would pick us up and bring us home on his way to/from his own place. If you look a the 1993 edition (or just the wikipedia page on it) you'll see it's printed by Wonderworld Press, which was the same company/owner as the game store. That was a pretty great game and comic shop, BTW. Still have my Tundra Press edition graphic novels of The Crow I bought there. I think I got my copy of Pauli Kidd's Lace & Steel there too.

Before we moved back, the 1993 2nd edition had been released, and both my brother and myself are in there named as playtesters, with our PCs named. Still have my autographed copy at home. Also before we moved away, Raven made a point of accelerating his campaign schedule a bit to get us to 50th level and onto our God Quests, for our PCs to get the chance to win godhood. Which they did. I have a vivid memory of one of, or THE last session on the actual God Quest (we played a few times after, with our characters as deities, as well) in which Raven's RPing of a vicious, intimidating antagonist brought me (a stressed-out teenager whose parents were in the middle of a divorce and was imminently about to move away from most of my friends and back to the East coast) to actual tears. It was an intense and amazing session. I still retain some lessons I learned about GMing from him.

I think he told me that our PC gods were included in the one expansion/supplement book it got, but I never picked up a copy. Which I should probably remedy.

Raven was a wonderfully creative and charismatic GM (or "Fate" in Synnibarr parlance). He had fronted rock bands and made a living for some period busking on the street. I saw him wolf whistle at a woman across a street and throw her a grin, and she grinned back and waved. This was with him standing next to his crapbox rusty car and two gangly awkward teenagers, just as we were leaving Wonderworld for game night. But he was a pretty handsome fellow, with a muscular, gymnast's frame, a thick late-80s/early 90s black mullet and mustache, and a brilliant white smile flashing underneath the latter. He was a good and generous dude, and something of a pretty good mentor figure to me, a homeschooled teen, at the time. An example of someone trying to live a swashbuckling, creative, romantic life and be both friendly and manly, as well as generally kind.

I never heard of a conflict with Peter Adkison from him, as far as I remember, but maybe that happened in '93 or something after I moved away.

Raven and I reconnected on FB a few years ago, and he sent me playtest files for the new 3rd ed of Synnibarr by email, which I feel guilty over not reading yet.


I mean, it's hard to say what counts as the "first cross-genre game". IIRC Jon Peterson's work documents that 1977's Superhero: 2044 was the first superhero RPG, and that digging into the history, it actually started as the author's D&D campaign which transitioned to a modern/superheroes setting by the PCs passing through a gate, before becoming an actual "full" superhero RPG.

But definitely by the time I met Raven and bought that Big Blue Binder 1991 edition he had been working on Synnibarr and running it for YEARS, and a decade isn't at all implausible. I met a bunch of his other and former players. Mostly stoners and metalheads, and generally nice folks. They talked about the various iterations of the rules, including one where you could make up spells on the fly if you could compose a rhyming incantation at the table, and Raven would work with you on the spot for what it did.

And when I first encountered Synnibarr I had never seen anything like it. I was a fanatical Dragon reader, and always perused all the ads as well as read the reviews, and an obsessive game store shelf browser. I read or at least examined and skimmed every game I could possibly lay eyes on. I had GURPS and liked it. I started in on Palladium with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness. But while BRP and GURPS were universal systems intended to handle nearly any genre, usually that was one genre at a time, or maybe mixing two. Synnibarr's maximum overdrive mix of fantasy, sci-fi, superheroes and martial arts all rolled into one heady ball of craziness seemed unprecedented.



Yup. Exactly. Seeing his reactions to BLM and CHAZ on FB since we reconnected there a few years ago have been disappointing. I've "debated" with him a little about some of his stuff, but I don't want to get into politics here. His crazy post about the Ensure seems related. Some mental health struggles, it appears, along with extended economic ones, combining with his longstanding penchant for dramatization and storytelling, to exaggerate what he's been through. I don't doubt that it's based on his reality, though. I know he's gone through some really rough years, a house fire where he lost most everything, etc. I suspect something similar is going on with the Adkison grievance. Dramatizing and exaggerating a real event to the extent of distorting the facts.


No, you've misread him. He's making a ballpark estimate of how long it would take to write all that IF one were to do it in one pass, to support his claim that he'd been working on it for many years prior to the publication of the 1991 edition, since the rules do indeed seem to have gone through several iterations prior to that.


Yup.

So... he was basically Eddie Munsen?

 

[Wicht]

I have sold RPGs for nearly 30 years, and if I have ever heard of this game, I have long since forgotten it.

The RPG.net review of Synnibarr should be required reading in high school.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

The RPG.net review of Synnibarr should be required reading in high school.

RPG.net didn't exist when I was in high school!

 

[Dan Davenport]

I've been online friends with Raven for years now. In that time, I have found him to be a delightful loon full of boundless enthusiasm.

I should probably mention that I'm the reason people first think of giant mutant fire clams and flying grizzlies with laser-beam eyes when they think of Synnibarr.

 

[MGibster]

I have sold RPGs for nearly 30 years, and if I have ever heard of this game, I have long since forgotten it.

If you asked me to give you a list of RPGs my memory, Synnibarr wouldn't make the cut as I'd never think of it. But when someone mentions it I remember it. One of my friends owned Synnibar, but we never actually got around to playing it. Kind of like Battlelords of the 23rd Century.