What's the best bad RPG book?

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Forked from the "best and worse" book thread ... what's the best "bad" RPG book out there? I'm thinking of products that are so horribly bad that they actually redeem themselves and become a work of notoriety as a result.

For a game as a whole, I think World of Synnibar qualifies.

But the best bad book I've personally experienced has to be the adventure N2 The Forest Oracle, which is so bad it's comedy gold (to quote Grumpy Celt) and has a thread around here that needs a bump for old times' sake.

What's your nomination?

 

[Crothian]

Hol: Human Occupied Landfill. It is bad in so many shake your head and laugh kind of ways.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I'd have to say Savage Species. It's terribly edited, and has all kinds of worthless or unbalanced rules elements in it, but simply by taking on the subject matter aggressively and openly, it made us ask: why not treat monsters as characters?

The long-term effect of that book is that almost every feat, spell, item, monster, template, monster class, and ritual in it is modified or ignored, but now I see regular monster characters, I know how to run them (albeit not the way the book says to), and it's made the game as a whole work better and more consistently. By showing us how to push the rules to and beyond their limits, it helps us understand them.

 

[TrippyHippy]

HoL: Human Occupied Landfill does indeed make bad game design into an art form.

 

[NotZenon]

rifts

 

[Bluenose]

World of Synnibar. In my opinion the biggest problem with it is excess ambition.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Hol: Human Occupied Landfill. It is bad in so many shake your head and laugh kind of ways.

I thought HOL was never meant to be played and was written in a toungue-in-cheek manner? I've never read it myself, but that is what I'd always heard about it.

 

[TrippyHippy]

There is a sense when reading HoL where you think…'with a bit of tweaking, this may work' and the writers seem to give that impression too. However, the writers also fall asleep writing the background of their own game, so I'm not sure what that tells you.

 

[Celebrim]

I thought HOL was never meant to be played and was written in a toungue-in-cheek manner? I've never read it myself, but that is what I'd always heard about it.

It's really hard to tell what White Wolf was thinking in that period. One of my friends back when WW was dominating the market was a book store owner, and he use to say that (back then) when you called customer service at WW you could smell the smoke hanging in the air.

 

[Nytmare]

I don't know how Synnibar, F.A.T.A.L., and Time Cube weren't immediately crowned as the only possible contenders for this title.