We find ourselves in media finem mundi today as we crack open C.J. Carella’s 1996 game Armageddon. It’s a spiritual (har) successor to the earlier WitchCraft, whose backstory/metaplot included hints of a looming future catastrophe à la Gehenna in the World of Darkness. Well, in Armageddon the catastrophe has stopped looming & shown up good […]
Today’s apocalypse is still on the horizon but it makes up for it by being the literal John-of-Patmos-huffing-cave-vapors Apocalypse. Next on the shelf is The Seventh Seal, 2002, from Creative Illusions. The PCs in this game are all Sentinels, humans chosen by Archangels to receive a small measure of divine power to use in the […]
The apocalypse goes on with a Gallic shrug in today’s game, Wasteland: les terres gâchées. It’s a French RPG, so I’ll give the original terms from the text along with my translations for them. A thousand years ago (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), civilization came to a crashing end. Battles for dominion […]
The world continues to have ended in 1998’s Tribe 8. A thousand years ago, the world came to an end. It may have been on its last legs already but the arrival of the Z’bri tipped it over the edge. Are they aliens? Demons? Monsters from another dimension? To this day no one knows, but […]
Continuing in the post- or peri-apocalyptic vein, today’s character is brought to us by a|state, a 2001 game from Contested Grounds. If Kult is the Clive Barker RPG, then a|state is the China Miéville one. Think Perdido Street Station with a soupçon of Dark City thrown in for good measure. Every single human being lives […]
It’s a segue from action-adventure-intrigue to the post-apocalyptic section of the shelf today. Day seventeen’s character is for the 1984 third edition of The Morrow Project (TMP). The premise of the game is that starting in the early 1960s, a mysterious wealthy industrialist named Bruce Morrow began to show certain powerful & influential people undeniable […]
The weirdness gets played straighter today as we segue into Eden Studios’ 1997 game Conspiracy X. As the name would imply it’s essentially a tabletop version of The X Files. The PCs are members of a secret organization called Aegis that fights to protect humanity against Greys, Reptoids, Atlanteans, Nazi occultists, US government collaborators with […]
Those of us who were around for the 1980s & 90s will remember that tabloid papers were a much bigger part of North American pop culture then. The milder variety was a mix of celebrity gossip & fraudulent cures – clickbait on paper, if you will – but the wilder papers were a peek into […]
The blazing action continues with Mike Stackpole’s 1983 adventure RPG, Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes (MSPE). It started life as a simple “present dayification” of the Tunnels & Trolls ruleset but by the time it was saw daylight as its own game it had become a complete & distinct entity unto itself. It remains an […]
Next in line, Extreme Vengeance by Tony Lee. This 1997 RPG is an exercise both in simplicity & genre emulation of a sort. I say of a sort because it’s not exactly emulating the action movie genre; it’s emulating being the lead in a 1980s-90s action movie. The special abilities a character can call upon […]
Rummaging In The Junk Drawer 