Over The Edge Kickstarter

There are a lot of great Kickstarters going on now...too many, if you're not interested in spending all your money on potential next year releases....but one I feel I gotta back is the new edition of Over the Edge:



The original was a fantastic and rare gem, and I'd love to see what a modern iteration of the game of surreal weird adventure might look like.

Surrealism in Gaming

I'm only really aware of one specific RPG* which tackled the idea of surrealism as a core concept: Over the Edge. For it's time, Over the Edge was a masterpiece on how to represent the sort of trippy, not-quite-real experiences that were cultivated from the likes of William S. Burroughs, David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers (with a hefty dose of Burroughs influencing the setting). It was an effort to capture a unique sort of subgenre of film and fiction that was ramping up for a short time in the nineties, and in all honesty it didn't do too badly.

I was really in to the concept of surrealism in the 90's, particularly after a trifecta of exposure to the concept in the form of David Lynch's movies (Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Eraserhead), The Cohen Brothers' Barton Fink, and the film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (I had previously read Burroughs, but the idea of adapting his work to film....let alone gaming!...was not so obvious to me until I saw Cronenberg attempt it). I had a fair number of games, usually powered by GURPS (but at the time I was also heavily in to Cyberpunk 2020 and Dark Conspiracies) which were tainted by, or even completely immersed in the core conceits of the surreal, at least as best I could convey it in the medium of gaming.

Recently I wrapped a lengthy year-long campaign in Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition that was best described as "Weird Oregon," or "Something's Wrong in Coos Bay." It originally started out as a short game with a goal of starting a zombie apocalypse, Mythos style. Then it rapidly revamped in to a more conventional CoC investigation with shades of Twin Peaks: The Return influence, as I decided that it would be really interesting if this one region on the Oregon Coast had like, a dozen different intertwined CoC scenarios all going on and weaving in and out together, with a grad climax over a two month (in game) run being the 2017 solar eclipse. The game started about the time of the solar eclipse, and ended last week, so not a bad run for a CoC game! Only one character who was original to this game made it all the way to the end (with both life and sanity intact) so despite the fact that there is still more to do in the region, it will have to wait for a new, future group to explore.

This last weekend, in the wake of the CoC game reaching it's conclusion, I realized that I was A: not done with running modern scenarios focusing on the weird and horrific; and B: was still itching to do a more proper, direct homage to Twin Peaks: The Return. But...a bit more preamble.

If you're even remotely a fan of David Lynch and/or the classic Twin Peaks, and you somehow haven't seen Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime (also out on DVD/Blu Ray) then you owe it to yourself to take the 18 episode dive into the "limited event" that serves as a third season with a precise 25 year gap between the 2nd season of the original show and this one. I won't belabor the plot points of this, but let's just say that the original show ended on a remarkably disturbing "evil wins big time" sort of cliffhanger and the entirety of The Return is spent wrapping that dangling plot in an 18 hour movie that is conveniently broken up into watchable chunks.

There are also two Twin Peaks novels, written like FBI case files, designed to fill you in on all the extraneous plot points a series this complicated can never properly address. If you're a fan, these are a must read. If you just like procedurals and High Weirdness then these are for you.

So, the thing about Twin Peaks (particularly The Return) that I want to pay homage to in the new campaign are along these lines:

Magic Exists in Modern Times: but it is elusive, hard to grasp, rarely exposed for what it is in a measurable way, and is otherwise impossible to quantify or measure in a scientific or rational manner.

The Spirit World Exists, but it is Weird: in the worlds of Twin Peaks the spirits, if you want to use that term, are very real but they appear to have a strange and interesting relationship with humanity, one which often brings people to interact with them in profoundly changing ways. There seem to be spirits who want to "ride along" and live through their hosts. There are spirits which need to replace you, like changelings or doppelgangers. There are spirits who want to help.....and there are also spirits who embody dire and stark elements of humanity, such as pure good and evil. And like magic, it is essentially impossible to understand, and as soon as you ascribe motives and direction to it as I did, something will cast doubt on that assessment.

Surrealism is the Medium By Which The Tale Unfolds: the core concept of surrealism is the notion of the "irrational juxtaposition of images," but to a greater extent, to honor the Lynchian elements of surrealism is to not merely juxtapose imagery but concepts, people, places and emotions. Surrealism can have moments of stark horror contrasted against almost simplistically irrational normalcy. Twin Peaks, for example, was an idyllic northwestern town of nice, simple people, and yet it was a center of the drug trade, and a spiritual centerpoint in what could best be described as a gateway to the Other (the Black Lodge) by which spirits benign and malevolent seek to interact with the local people, or even to escape. And it is clear from The Return that there are other "points of interaction" with the Other throughout the world.

The idea, though, is that this juxtaposition of sharp contrasts is important to convey the story. In Twin Peaks this is the simple but dramatic lives of the town residents, played against the background while key figures (Dale Cooper) find themselves faced with existential threats from The Other. To do this in the new game (I am returning once more to GURPS as my engine) the player characters will need to be the key figures, but they will be investigating something that is extremely Abnormal, the Other, which rests quietly among an otherwise mundane and idyllic town.

Surrealism AND High Weirdness are the Formula: it's not fair to throw all the weight on surrealism itself, which is a framing tool. Rather, it is also necessary to engage in the weird, the strange and the unusual. In GURPS terms, everyone is a Weirdness Magnet.

Each Player Will Have a Different Interpretation of Events: if the goal is to work, I feel that one of the best ways to pull it off will be to have each player enjoy the experience of the campaign, but ultimately arrive at a different conclusion about what they experienced meant, and what the events played out to be. This will be tough.....by nature gamer groups tend to work to consensus and try to resolve these plots. I had a certain degree of this mystery in the CoC campaign, but in the end they did find mechanisms and lore that allowed for a degree of consensus on what happened. If I pull the plot off for the High Weirdness game, then they will each experience the same story, but arrive at interestingly different conclusions.

As this experiment progresses I'll relay more. It will be interesting....my group has persevered and made it's way through a lengthy CoC campaign, and they did well, so I feel like this new GURPS Surreal High Weirdness campaign may well work as intended. Back when I used to run these in the nineties I had a diehard core of players who had all read and watched the same books and shows that I had, so we were "all on board." Now, thanks to the CoC game, I may have a group that is at least ready to accept what I throw at them.....

*I think Unknown Armies is a close 2nd, but it still provides a coherent narrative structure. You can accomplish surrealism in UA (as you can with CoC), but it's not the core conceit of the game.

Over the Edge Bundle

Over the Edge was one of the best of the 90's era of gaming, a weird minimalist game system about surreal adventures in the vein of Burrough's tales of Interzone, on the enigmatic island of Al'Amarja. There's a ton of PDFs now available for around $17 (at last check) over on the Bundle of Holding. OtE remains one of my favorite games that I've inexplicably never actually run....I think it was a game ahead of its time, and Atlas would do well to consider properly re-releasing it in a new edtion in this era where indie and experimental RPGs are all the thing now.

Good Stuff in the Mail, PS4 Announcement and More

Still reading Magic World. It's definitely a good book, and it's got plenty of content to support some robust campaigns. If you've ever played the old Elric! RPG then a lot of the content in here will feel familiar. It's key feature right now is that it works well as a streamlined version of Runequest, so if you're looking for a faster "get into the action" RPG that doesn't deal with as many technical details, MW is a great choice. The fact that it is 100% compatible with the rest of the BRP line just means adding to the system is that much easier. You could easily use this with any of the fantasy settings already out in print for BRP, for example, or pretty much any BRP-compatible product. All of the old out of print Elric! books would work with MW almost as-is.

My numerous beginning-of-year purchases keep rolling in. My copy of Over the Edge 20th Anniversary Edition arrived, a decent ebay score ($50 for the book instead of $75). I love this game, and to this day it still boggles me that I didn't run it back in the day. I drew a lot of inspiration from OTE in my early nineties games, especially Cyberpunk 2020, Dark Conspiracy and GURPS....but OTE was a bit too minimalist in terms of the game engine for my tastes back then. Nowadays I'm a lot more receptive to its brand of mechanics, which feel positively quaint compared to some current popular indie systems out there.

Aside from that, Beyond Red Crater for Mutant Epoch and my print version of Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition arrived from Lulu. Both great books. Last night during the Wednesday game some of my players brought up Mutant Epoch again, expressing interest in trying it out. I may have to throw it down as the next game to play when the current Pathfinder campaign ends.

I've got mobilized interest in a Tuesday night bi-weekly game now, one which we will host from home so my wife can play (playing from home in theory making child management easier). It looks like the crew who want to play are up for it as an alt-game night, so I'm proposing Magic World to start off with, and will then plan for future games that include Starships & Spacemen, Remnants, Survivors of the Fire and Over the Edge. If time permits I may get even more games in sometime down the road, but I think those are the top dogs I want to focus on right now (assuming Mutant Epoch gets some time on Wednesday night, that is!)

In video game news the Playstation 4 was announced (albeit not shown) yesterday and the top points of interest and contention that video game journalists are bringing up right now seem to be:

1. PS4 is just a consolized PC (so was the Xbox 360)
2. The cloud gaming option is evil
3. Lack of backwards compatibility is evil
4. Sony is evil
5. And it will be out in time for the Holidays this year.

So, business as usual I see!

No price announced for it, but if the thing costs more than $400 I am definitely out (I can stomach paying less than that for day one buy-in, but only barely). I don't care about backwards compatibility at all, which is because I just bought a PS3 so I have that covered (and if I want to play more than is offered on that, I'll find a PS2).

Anyway.....eager to see what Microsoft announces next.

This Week in RPGs: Remnants, Maschine Zeit, Starships & Spacemen, Beyond Red Crater, and Over the Edge

At long last and after an address snafu (which the customer service at OneBookShelf fixed immediately and to their credit, even though the error was mine) I now have the print versions of Maschine Zeit and Remnants. I've been reading both in electronic format, but not perhaps as dilligently as I would like; for me, games seem to work better in the print medium, and the PDFs are just more effectively useful as quick references, not for reading.

I'll post more about those two soon, but some quick comments:



Remnants is a "post-apocalyptic giant Kaiju vs. relic mecha" adventure setting with a nice ruleset to support it. The book is concise and well-written, with the setting content front-loaded and the rules in back (a popular indie style). It's a tight game, and I really plan to run this soon.

Remnants just got its first expansion book as well: The Broken Lands is $6 in PDF right now and having just downloaded it I shall include details on it as well in my Remnants review, which I'll hopefully get to in a week or two at the most. I can tell you right now, the review's going to be one of those fanboy gushy ones, I really like this game.



Maschine Zeit is inspired by the "haunted space station (or ship)" genre of horror SF. It's heavy on the expository fake clippings and bits of text that string together to form some sort of campaign picture. I am still wading through this one, as the PDF version wasn't quite as optimal as Remnants was for easy reading. The rules, as I've scanned through them so far, are really minimalist. Not sure if this is going to prove to be a better "idea/inspiration" book for a preferred system (i.e GURPS or BRP) or if it will stand on its own legs. I'm not a minimalist storyteller style rules kind of guy....I like a bit of meat on my games. We shall see, as with the print edition I should be able to finish plowing through it.

One oddity: for a future full of haunted space stations there are a lot of old school internet and news clips scattered through the campaign section of Maschine Zeit. I would think that in the next century or two blogs and internet anything, never mind news clips, will all be so quaintly "21st century," archaic relics of a bygone era of simpler communication.

Despite my worries that the system in Maschine Zeit is going to be a bit lean, I still picked up all the modules, and must say its a fine read and interesting premise. More to come on this, of course.



Today I ordered print copies of Mutant Epoch's latest module "Beyond Red Crater" and Goblinoid's revised 2nd edition of Starships & Spacemen. I rather like S&S, it's right at the lower end of the threshold of rules complexity for my tastes, and the homage/spoof of the Star Trek classic universe makes this a rather fun product....anyway, I have all of Goblinoid's other games in print now (except for Time Master) so this will more or less complete the GG collection of retroclones and homages that make for some great retro gaming.



Last but not least I spotted a copy of the 20th Anniversary release of Over the Edge. This is one of the greatest RPGs out there which I somehow never got to play or run when it was actively in print. I need to rectify that....as my old gang would attest, we had some wildly surreal and over-the-edge style adventures back in the day, albeit using Cyberpunk 2020, Dark Conspiracy, Call of Cthulhu, Kult, GURPS and Unknown Armies. How Over the Edge escaped our attention is beyond me.

Anyway, reviews of all of the above as soon as I receive and finish reading them!