Remember when making stuff up on the Internet was fun? When someone could post something silly and checking it out was interesting and not a desperate attempt to fight back real world horrors? Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, created by Trevor Roberts was one such online story. It purported to be a site dedicated to the strangest National Park in North America. Not only did people enjoy the concept, they pitched in and expanded the idea with their own contributions. Designer Christopher Robin Negelein takes the idea one step further into the realm of reality by creating Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG. He sent along a review copy for me to check out for this review. Should you take your family here instead of The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota? Let’s play to find out.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a small parcel of land located somewhere in Texas. Explorers found what initially seemed like a cave system but soon became clear that it was the internals of a massive living being under the soil. Part living dungeon, part journey into alien anatomy, part source of science bending resources and part tourist trap, the pit has gone through several different identities since its discovery in the 1970s. It’s been a roadside attraction, a national park, a corporate mining site and an abandoned industrial area since then.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG allows players to set their stories during any one of these eras. It’s a complete RPG built with the Cypher System that explains those rules clearly. The classes are built out of the basic ones most Cypher Games use though they’ve been reflavored to fit the slightly satirical feelings of corporate horror that percolate through the original materials. For example, the face style character is flavored as a Marketeer to sell the unusual discoveries in the literal bowels of the pit to the company, the tourists or whoever is paying the party at the time. Each type is built to three tiers rather than the full six, which implies that games using this setting are meant for shorter ones. I can see groups that fall in love with this setting doing something generational with it by playing out small campaigns in different eras of the park.
The game does a few things outside the basic parameters of the baseline Cypher System I found interesting. The biggest change is Grit, which breaks off XP into sole use for character development. Grit becomes the pool spent on in-game things like intrusions and narrative declarations. Some groups truly dislike XP as plot candy and this seems like a way to appeal to those turned off by the idea. Players who spend too much time in the pit can pick up mutations and some of the eras offer cypher-like one off high tech gadgets that the players might be given as a reward…or as a punishment to go test for screwing up. My favorite unique rule is the Conformity score. Rather than losing sanity points or gaining stress, players pick of levels of Conformity as reaction to the weirdness of working inside the breathing caves and trickling bile rivers of the Pit. The more messed up things they see, the more their minds balance it out by becoming sticklers for paperwork and protocol. After all, the reason your last expedition died is because they obviously ignored the safety videos during the prep for the mission, so you’re going to make damn sure this new team is going to be able to recite those videos back to you chapter and verse. Perfectly normal behavior from people who spend their days in an alien landscape.
White the direct market of Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG might seem small, I think there are some folks who might be interested in using the material in this book elsewhere. The most obvious one is running this quirky setting in your favorite system. Beyond that, this could become a fun setting for surreal horror games like Triangle Agency or Over The Edge. Why fly all the way to Al Amarja when the Pit is just a few hours drive away? On the mechanical side, the classes feel like they could work well for a Jurassic Park campaign. Grab some dinosaurs from Predation and you’re 90% of the way there.
Bottom Line: If you’re into weird tourist traps, Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG is worth your time to explore.
