Hey kids, remember the 90s and when we didn’t have enough real things to worry about so we had to make them up? Riding the back of both the CCG and the conspiracy theory craze, in 1995 Steve Jackson Games released a CCG version of their 80s classic card game Illuminati (inspired on The Illuminatus Trilogy).

If we ignore the usual CCG issue of slack playtesting leading to rules clarifications, there were only really two key flaws in the game. Firstly the card stock was cheap compared to its competitors in the market. More of an issue was the second problem. Unlike most CCGs where you tended to only handle your own cards, unless you were playing for keeps, you needed a way to keep track of who owned what cards once a game was finished as cards passed between players.

The cheapness of stock had an advantage, you got a lot of cards for in a booster pack. And even if the game proved something of a pain to play, the cards themselves felt like a great artifact of the times, both in the satiric nature fo the game and the capturing of the general interest in conspiracy theories. 

I was at university at the time, in a tiny satellite campus dedicated to just Food Science and Environmental Studies in Grimsby. We had a single non-sports society at the time, The Discordian Society. Again, inspired by The Illuminatus Trilogy, and one of the groups in the Illuminati game. The society seemed to only involve (failing in?) organising trips to see weirdos doing presentations on aliens/UFOs etc and showing bootleg VHS copies of banned/unavailable films in the main lecture hall. INWO fit into that culture of pop conspiracy just as well as The X-Files or a SCHWA t-shirt did.

Illuminati NWO is probably the CCG I got closest to collecting the entire set of cards, but as I have mentioned, my CCG playing time probably only spanned 2-3 years and I never got any of the later add-ons such as the Church of SubGenius approved INWO SubGenius.

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Again, it’s been a while so let’s bring you up to date with what this is. I’m listing as best I can from memory, in the general sort of order that I played them, all the RPGs, wargames, CCGs, fantasy boardgames and associated nonsense that I have ever played. All to come to the conclusion that Call of Cthulhu is the best RPG ever printed.

Last time I talked about the second worst CCG I played, so lets skip ahead a few games and get into what is the worst CCG I played, possibly the worst game outright.

Summer 1996, and I am getting into my first flush of anime fandom. I’m at the second convention I’ve ever attended, Minami Con 2 in Portsmouth, and there’s an official anime CCG on sale. What’s more it has characters from three shows I was into in a big way at this point – Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard and Ranma 1/2. Plus, the other show it drew from was Bubblegum Crisis, and everybody seemed to have good things to say about that, so this could be a way to get into that fandom too. Two of my interests had collided, it was a dream come true.

I was super excited so grabbed a deck (possibly two?) and couldn’t wait to get back home to force someone to play it. I cracked open the deck and the production value was quite high, nice looking cards with colourful art from the shows. What’s more, you could play this as a solitaire game, so I didn’t even have to wait to get home to play it. This was going to be great!

Except… the rules made no goddamn sense. 

A few months later, I was back at university, where we finally had access to the World Wide Web. Excellent, I thought, I can get some errata for that dumb anime CCG I bought in the summer and finally play it properly.

The errata did not help matters all that much. They may have been longer than the original rules. Never a good sign.

Eventually they put out a second set with new rules and characters from Armitage III, Dominion Tank Police, Phantom Quest Corp., Project A-Ko, and Oh My Goddess. I’d been here before though with Spellfire, and so I abandoned Ani-Mayhem as a bad idea. I don’t think I even noticed when they released a Dragonball Z set as the games death rattle.

I’m sure there were even worse, even less popular CCGs, in fact the next few I’ll be talking about never set the world on fire either, but Ani-Mayhem was the dirt worst for me. On the plus side though, at least it was so bad I never bought any booster packs and so saved my money.

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This is a tale of bad choices, wasted money and photos of idiots dressed as elves.

But enough about TSR, what about me?

Well I never dressed as an elf, but I did pick the wrong CCG game to play and then wasted a bunch of money on it. I would go onto to do this four more times before learning my lesson, but those are posts for another day.

Caught on the back foot by Magic: The Gathering‘s launch and subsequent success in 1993, TSR created their own CCG. With it being based on D&D one might think that they would have been onto a winner. As successful as Magic was, TSR had the grandaddy of fantasy gaming IP in their back pocket. That had to count for something? Right?

No, it did not.

The problem was they panicked.

The finished product was a mess, not unplayable, not the worst CCG in the world (we shall get to that in due time), but it was so, so sloppy and half-arsed. Rather than commissioning new original art, they just sliced up existing AD&D art into card sized shapes. Not just art, but also hex maps.

It was so devoid of detail that some of the original cards were just a name and a picture. Later on they would use photos of LARPers. I don’t know what the LARPers or the customers did to deserve that. The quality of the card stock used for the cards was pretty cheap too. The only thing it really had going for it was that you got a lot of cards in a booster.

Launched in 1994, it unfortunately coincided with my university holidays and a summer job. So I had plenty of money to spend on CDs I no longer listen to, RPGs I never played and this TSR CCG that arrived at our local games shop/club/Apple dealer. I was not alone in being tricked by the TSR & AD&D name, all our club started playing. Some bought the ridiculously over-sized rules clarification book they produced. TWICE. Some even bought their later CCG, the less rushed Blood Wars. 

I think I was into it for about a year, moving onto other CCGs in 95/96, before finally being turned off the whole CCG deal by one of the worst games I have ever attempted to get my brain around.

So, Spellfire, one more step on the road to TSR’s eventual downfall and takeover by Wizards of the Coast. It was pretty bad, and I’d have been better off without it, but at least it wasn’t Dragon Dice.

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The best produced, best written, bad roleplaying game ever made.

For starters, what other RPGs boast a GEOF DARROW cover? Were full colour throughout? And printed on high end glossy paper? Just as an inanimate object, Underground was better than pretty much anything else on the market.

Sorry, Ray Winninger’s Underground.

Not entirely sure why Winninger got to prefix his game. Sure, he’d written some good DC Heroes material, in particular a Watchmen adventure and the great Watchmen sourcebook. But beyond that his name didn’t mean much to me.

It came out in 1993, and it shows. I believe the original plan was for three books, each satrising a different concept of heroism, with this one taking on the American ideal, and specifically superheroes. It’s a big old allegory for the treatment of Vietnam veterans, but with super powers and big guns.

It’s Marshal Law the RPG, basically. Which is fine, as I love me some Marshal Law.

I think the other heroic ideals to be dealt with that never came to fruition were the ideal of the Teutonic Knight (there’s some sketched in background involving Germany and the Church of Scientology iirc) and some form of “Eastern Hero” (wuxia infuenced maybe?).

I can’t say for sure because I sold it a few years ago.

Despite the setting and idea of the game being right up my alley, not to mention incredibly well written, the game itself is a clunker of a rule system. I never managed to run a game, the character generation alone drove me up the wall. A friend, Barry, managed to get a few sessions out of it, before he had the PCs cross over into his D&D campaign and we forgot all about struggling with Underground.

It’s a shame, because on every other level, the writing, the art, the production, it’s a great game. Everything works together to create this game world. Except the game itself.

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Hey gang, remember this? Posts where I talk about every RPG/Wargame/Boardgame I’ve played? Well it’s back.

And what better place to pick it up again, than R Talsorian Game’s mecha-themed roleplaying game, Mekton. Running on the same system as their Cyberpunk RPG, I picked up Mekton II second hand while at university. Then never got round to playing it. This is a recurring theme in my RPG purchases.

That didn’t stop me purchasing their next edition of the game Mekton Zeta, and its supplement Mekton Zeta Plus. While Mekton II, like earlier editions of Teenagers From Outer Space, didn’t really wear its influences on it’s sleeves, Zeta was clearly shouting I AM AN ANIME RPG. The cover had upgraded from Ben Dunn’s pastiche on Mekton II, to having the real thing in a painted Yuji Kaida cover. Inside you had a chapter called “Running Anime” that addressed how to get an anime tone to your games.

As good as the basic game was, once you added the Mekton Zeta Plus supplement, it really became the anally retentive mecha fan gamer’s dream. Not only would it let you create stats for pretty much any mecha you might want to imagine, the level of detail meant if had “official stats” for mecha (like weight/height etc) you could effectively reverse engineer a mecha into the game stats.

RTG eventually were involved in the second volume of the anime magazine V-Max, leading to anime gaming articles where you could see the power of that reverse engineering in practice. Do you want to pilot Giant Robo in a RPG? Well volume 2 issue 2 of V-Max gave you that chance.

Not that I did. Instead I ran a couple of heavily derivative campaigns of the my own design. The first was MYSTERY HUNTER ROBO. Which was basically X-Files with giant robots. Including one based on Ninjzz from The Bots Master. This is what happens when you players make their own robots. The problem I ran into was that only about half my RPG group liked anime. So after I put that on hold, we formed a splinter rpg & anime watching group and ran a sequel campaign called HADES EXPLORER Q. Or HEQ for short.

In that campaign the heroes travelled in the titular ship to another dimension called Hades where the villains of Mystery Hunter Robo (a terrorist organisation made up of dragons) had come from. They then got mixed up in the politics of that world while trying to prevent an invasion of Earth.

A third campaign, BONE MACHINE, never got off the ground and instead I returned to the campaign years later using a different anime themed RPG, but that’s another post.

Other campaigns I had sketched out but never ran included GIGA INFINITUS: THE BIGGEST ROBOT IN THE UNIVERSE and I.D.O.L. FORCE. The latter involved David Bowie forming a team of new robot piloting pop stars to battle his former team mates, the now evil Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. In the 70s the three had piloted a Getter Robo style combining mecha together.

If you are interested in finding out more about the game, check out MektonZeta.com

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My neck’s slowly getting back to game strength, so it’s time to return to my journey through my personal gaming history.

While a lot of gamers in the 90s were huge fans of Mark Rein·Hagen’s Vampire the Masquerade, I prefered Jonathan Tweet’s Over The Edge. The pair had created Ars Magica earlier in their careers, and their subsequent individual games are continuations both in gaming mechanisms and story elements.

However, rather than the abiding goth/metal/spiritualist/ecologist overtones of Rein·Hagen’s games, Tweet’s is (as a gamer I ran it with at university once said) Naked Lunch The RPG.

Taking place on the amoral Mediterranean island of Al Amarja, it’s a surreal thriller of game, one whose direction can vary greatly depending on the group of players. In part this is down the mix of influences Tweet brings the background of the game, but more over it is down the incredibly simple ruleset and the infinitely flexible character generation system it supports.

Like Tweet’s rewrite of D&D for the 3rd Edition, OTE is notable for being able to put the rules on a single page. Unlike D&D, it isn’t backing that up with pages of skills, spell lists, character classes, powers and monsters. Each character is described by three stats that are unique to them and a flaw. For anything else they either simply roll 2 dice for or they cannot do it at all. It’s a system that you can easily tear from the background material and use to for any material you want, as long as you’ve got a group who are willing to collaborate rather than play a RPG as some sort of contest between the players and the GM.

A typical Over The Edge game involves the player characters as tourists visiting (or fleeing to) Al Amarja. The why is usually down to the players, they might choose to start as a group or be thrown together by fate and the vagaries of Al Amarja’s immigration controls.

For instance, the last campaign I ran, the players were all recruited by a secret conspiracy who were battling a satanic children’s author in New York prior to being sent to Al Amarja to uncover the conspiracy said children’s author was part of. This being Over The Edge, both conspiracies were actually part of the same larger conspiracy, The Movers, a conspiracy so fractured, large and unwieldy that no one knows who is in charge (one published adventure explores this by having someone just decide that if they act like they are the leader it will have pretty much the same effect as if they were).

Having bought most of the material that was published for the game, I can safely say you can probably just get away with using the core rulebook. A lot of the adventures are fall between two stools, too detailed to improvise around, but not not detailed enough to hold you and your players interests. One of them is even a run around the sewers… Even EVERY Neverwinter Nights level designer figured that out as a setting, you don’t really need to drop money on clichés like that.

You’ll probably be able to put something better together using the vast amount background colour the rulebook provides and the characters your players create. The sourcebooks are stronger, and often have better adventures than the stand alone adventures, but they are not essential. Personally I really liked the Player’s Survival Guide, Weather The Cuckoo Likes and Friend or Foe? Thinking about it, while there’s nothing really essential in terms of supplements for running the game, the Survival Guide is definitely worth picking up. Lots of good ideas in there that go beyond just Over The Edge.

Easily in my top ten RPGs, the setting, rules and highly customisable character generation make it one of the best RPGs of the nineties. Possibly THE best. And if you are loving Durarara and like RPGs then you definitely want to pick Over The Edge up. Their mixes of the mundane, the weird and warring factions are pretty similar. Certainly enough that watching Durarara reminded me I had this post waiting to be finished in my drafts.

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Remember what I said about Kevin Siembieda’s writing being like a fountain of mad ideas hitting paper? Rifts is that writ large.

Around 1990, an idea emerged in the games industry. It may have been born out of the sheer number of games on the market, or it may have come from the success GURPS enjoyed. That idea was a multi-genre, single setting, role playing game.

There were two main proponents of this approach. There was West End Games’ TORG, which I never played, but always wanted to. And then there was Palladium’s post-TMNT hit, Rifts.

Rifts is pretty much Siembieda’s previous games (Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Heroes Unlimited, Beyond the Supernatural and Robotech) thrown into a blender. You’ve got wizards, super powered aliens, Lovecraftian horrors and giant robots all inhabiting the same world.

Unsurprisingly, this means the game is horribly unbalanced. At least in the early editions. I have heard that the modern iteration of the game is more solid in its design. But back in the day you were dealing with a game system that got so out of control in terms of rules, character classes and settings that they ended up selling a separate index to the game.

That ran to two books.

They also produced a Rifts Colouring Book.

This situation was kind of the endemic of the games market as a whole in the nineties, as games began to choke on their own settings. While bad decisions like Dragon Dice were more the downfall of TSR, the sheer number of setting and settings in those settings didn’t help. Likewise, the World of Darkness line choked on White Wolf’s attempt to maintain some sort of in game continuity.

So you went from a market in the 80s that was distinguished by masses of games which led to the multi-genre games, to a market that was now distinguished by masses of sourcebooks for existing games. Either way you had lots of people buying lots of game books that they never used.

Your typical Rifts book would be full of poorly laid out background material for a geographical location that seemed to only exist to add a ton more character classes, magic and equipment options into an already stuffed to bursting game. Oh, and some new monsters to kill. Or play as Racial Character Classes.

Not all these classes were balanced either in terms of power or material supplied, and you were best not mix and matching between books or you might find yourself playing a wizard or dragon surrounded by ninjas jacked to the gills on cybernetics who spent every session fine tuning their equipment lists.

Despite that imbalance and rules/setting bloat, the fact that there is just so much utter madness slung together makes it a fun game. I had a great time playing a Time Wizard, blowing up evil pyramids in Glastonbury by sending bombs into the future.

Like Mutant Chronicles, Rifts was one of those 90s games that had ambitions of becoming a multimedia franchise. It did eventually make it to videogames. Unfortunately the Nokia N-Gage was the platform.

One last note, back when I first got on the internet at university, there was this DarkWorld RPG that was mentioned on rec.arts.anime. It was basically an anime flavoured rip-off of Rifts, that started off hiding its influence in a thinly veiled fashion like Mayfair’s unlicensed D&D accessories, before giving up with this file that just went ahead and listed Palladium stats for The Dirty Pair, Lum and The Sailor Scouts.

It’s not that surprising that it existed given Palladium’s history with Robotech and Macross II games, but the amount of effort that had gone into it still leaves me gobsmacked today. I’m a lazy gamer and do as little prep as possible, preferring to improvise, so this sort of exercise in cataloguing a world and stats is alien to me.

I’m presuming that the Tony Figueroa who wrote it is the same Tony Figueroa who is now the chair of the Fanime convention. Can anyone confirm that?

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Back in June, when I last touched this strand of the site, I hinted that I was going to cover RIFTS next. Well it turned out that I’d forgotten to cover what was actually my first encounter with Palladium Books – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.

Based on Eastman and Laird’s classic anthropomorphic Frank Miller & Chris Claremont parody, TMNT the rpg tapped into the same upswell in popularity that TMNT the comic had. It was a massively popular game, only suffering a down turn when the cartoon came along and the TMNT started to be seen as a kid’s thing rather than indie comic cool.

While it suffered a little from the Palladium’s somewhat perfunctory typesetting and layouts, it did benefit from being written by the late, great Erick Wujcik. While both Kevin Siembieda and Erick Wujcik’s books used the same rule system at heart, Wujcik’s are a joy to read, and feel like a complete product whose parts gel together. His own interest in martial arts really comes through and it feels like there’s a clear vision to his books. Siembieda’s on the other hand, often seem the work of someone trying to get every mad idea out of his head onto paper and not caring how they tie together. But more on that when we get to Rifts. Hoo boy.

I mainly played this during my teenage years, before selling it during the peak of the general Turtles craze in the UK. I picked another copy up later in ’96 when it seemed that 50% of Travelling Man’s second hand game stock were copies of this game. I think I’ve played a few sessions of the non-licensed follow up After The Bomb – anthropomorphic animals in a post apocalypse, but they were too brief to get a grip on what that was about.

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A short one this, as it was a blink and you’d miss it game for me. And for a change I’ll focus more on my own experiences playing it rather than the game itself.

Talislanta is kind of the anti-D&D in that it turns its back on the Tolkien-esque fantasy for some all together more alien. Think more along the lines the “Dreamworld” stories of HP Lovecraft. To get this point over it used to advertise itself with the slogan “No Elves”.

This is all well and good, except this was the time our most reliable Gamesmaster decided to get experimental for once in his life…

He decided he’d hide the game from us. No character sheets, no dice rolling, no concept of how the game worked. However he made the one BIG mistake you can make in a no character sheet game – he made our characters into idiots who had no idea of their limits.

Basically we had no idea what our characters considered themselves good at, and so we did very little. Rather than promoting roleplaying it made us all into cowards. It’s one thing to not be able to calculate your chance of doing Task A. It’s quite another to not know whether you’d be any good at Task A whatsoever. The campaign didn’t last long, and I think we were soon back to AD&D or possibly the next game I’ll write about…

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A little out of sequence, but I’ve not done one of these in ages and this particular game has some relation to the bulk of what I’ve spent 2009 writing about on here.

You see, in everything but name, Teenagers From Outer Space is “Urusei Yatsura: The Role-playing Game”. I first picked it up around the time I was getting into anime, and I think I knew where its influences lay back then. Not that you’d have known it from the 2nd edition I found in a second hand book bin in Hull. That was printed in 1988 and had a cover that was more reminiscent of Galaxy High (coincidentally a show Japanese studio Telecom had worked on). I now see that the very first edition had had a more obviously anime inspired cover, so maybe it’s failure to set the world of fire led to this more traditional approach (interior art edges perhaps closer to Archie Comics house style than US Takahashi-clone).

But the actual contents were clearly inspired by Urusei Yatsura. The rules allowed you to play either humans or varying degrees of alien. Aliens had super powers such as flight, shooting electricity (Lum!), breathing fire (Ten!) and the like. Humans also had more powers like being incredibly endurable (Ataru), filthy rich (Mendou) or super strength (Shinobu).

Where the influence really shown through though was in the 20 mini-adventures, some of which you can see direct parallels with specific UY episodes, and in the some of the “goodies” (equipment) which included duplicating guns, mind swapping earmuffs and boy/girl guns.

In 1997, R Talsorian Games didn’t hide their anime influences under a bushel, and had released the Bubblegum Crisis, DBZ and Votoms games at this point. So they put Mekton Zeta and a re-release of TFOS under their ANimechaniX banner (inexplicable capitlisation RTG’s own).

This time the game had a firmly anime/manga aesthetic, drafting in US furry artists (that US furry/anime fandom connection raising it’s head again!) & Stratelibri (Italian gaming company) bods for the art (as well as a few left over bits of Scott Ruggles art from the 2nd edition). And it expressly mentioned anime in the actual text of the rulebook. Combined with extra material dealing with specifically Japanese bits and pieces, it finally felt like the product it always should have been.

So how does it play? Very well, if you like rules light, fast, silly games. Same basic mechanics as the bulk of RTG’s games (stat+skill+die roll vs. difficulty), but stripped down for speed. And unlike Cybergeneration (which I’ll get to later) I actually got my monies worth out of this game. The play style it lends itself to definitely fits more into my improv-tinged gaming ethos. The third edition may even be in my top ten favourite RPGs. We’ll see, if I ever get round to finishing this series of posts!

Possible bonus US RPG Scene/Anime Scene collision later tonight!

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