IP's that ought to have their own RPGs

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TristramEvans said:
The first phonebook is somewhat unremarkable, a dated and amateurish parody of sword & sorcery comics in specific, and comics in general. It sets up the cast, but it's not really necessary reading. The story really beings with Vol 2: High Society. This and the two-volume Church & State are the core of the novel, and stand to this day as masterpieces not just of the graphic storytelling artform, but as political satire.

Different people have opinions on the best place to stop before it falls into insanity, but if you want a complete story with a happy-ish (or at least satisfying) ending, I'd say stick with it until vol 11 "Guys". But it is issue 186 (which IIRC is part of volume 9 "Reads") which infamously Sim first laid out in a text rant the paranoia-based opinions on society that turned a large portion of his readership against him. The madness slowly consumes the book afterwards, to the point that the last two volumes are basically a "Time-Cube-esque" religious rant in comicbook form.

Note I'm avoiding the specific nature of a lot of the controversy because this is the Pub, but all this info is easy to google.

This video by comic tropes is a good, and pretty impartial overview:

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Just as a side note. I enjoy the Comic Tropes channel on youtube. Always interesting.
 
Dumarest said:
I've never played the video game or seen the movies, so I'm just assuming it's "Hot Female Indiana Jones." I could be wrong.
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You're more or less correct.

I think an Uncharted RPG that is compatible with the Tomb Raider RPG would be appropriate.

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Link: Uncharted - Wikipedia

TristramEvans said:
View attachment 9715
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Wow, now that's metagaming.
 
TristramEvans said:
The first phonebook is somewhat unremarkable, a dated and amateurish parody of sword & sorcery comics in specific, and comics in general. It sets up the cast, but it's not really necessary reading.
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I'd say that despite all this being true, if you're going to read as far as Reads or Guys, you should definitely read the first volume, because there are enough callbacks to it even late in the series. Cerebus is confusing enough when you don't have to wonder if you missed something important. Sim really did lose it, but there are still moments of brilliance throughout the series. I thought the video covered him as well as it could without being a three-hour affair.
 
If nothing else, this thread makes me want to reacquire some Cerebus comics...the early era...I think the only ones I saved were the ones with the normalman backup strip. I used to have quite a lot of Aardvark-Vanaheim, Renegade Press, Kitchen Sink, Slave Labor, Eclipse, Pacific, etc. stuff from the early '80s. I'll have to see if the first few phonebooks are available.

Edit: yeah, I only have the two with normalman back-ups. I remember being utterly confused by the ongoing Cerebus story and the Wolveroach character, but intrigued enough I kept reading for a while. Pretty sure I recall he got a C&D from Marvel's lawyers due to the prominent and repeated cover usages of Wolveroach.
312321-2930-123438-1-cerebus.jpg20190602_201402-1.jpg​
 
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Bunch said:
Wait so what Happened with the creator?
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Most common theory is that he has schizophrenia that was triggered by a week-long LSD binge and then exacerbated by his wife divorcing him.
 
Bunch said:
Wait so what Happened with the creator?
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I don't think it's controversial or overly political to say that Dave Sim became a hardcore misogynist, to the extent of describing women as unreasoning "voids" and stuff like that. Also, less mentioned but just as extreme was his transformation into a very conservative Christian. It represented a profound shift in his political identity, and he very contentiously alienated a great number of people with various opinions.

There's all sorts of speculation about what triggered all of this e.g. LSD, mental health episodes, divorce, etc. But he's a functioning adult so I just engage the opinions. After all, he's still an extremely articulate, intelligent and talented person - even though some of his opinions would alienate all but the most extreme members of his camp. And personally I think that Dave Sim is not remotely as logical as he thinks, but that's common even for people who have never had mental health episodes.

Sim is definitely a major asshole these days. I believe he's pissed off legions of people (e.g. Neil Gaiman) who wanted to be in his corner, and were for a long time. He has a statement that he insists people sign before he will communicate with him, affirming that you don't believe him to be a misogynist. That's been a huge filter on the number of people who will fuck with Dave Sim in 2019, and apparently he likes it that way. A real charmer.
 
Edgewise said:
I don't think it's controversial or overly political to say that Dave Sim became a hardcore misogynist, to the extent of describing women as unreasoning "voids" and stuff like that.
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A particular "high point" being when he claimed that women deserved to be raped because they rape men by reading their minds.

I'm mostly trying not to get into the specifics as I can't come up with succinct descriptions of his views without directly comparing them to certain modern day extreme views of certain fanatics. His controversies are plastered all over the net, though.


Edgewise said:
Also, less mentioned but just as extreme was his transformation into a very conservative Christian. charmer.
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That's only part of it; Sim created his own religion combining The Bible, the Torah, and The Quran, all interpreted by him (being a person with no religious education) through the lens of everything being a direct analogy of the late 20th century.
 
I see my problem here. I saw Thrud and everyone else saw Cerebus. I thought something happened to Thruds author. Nope he still seems saneish.
 
Bunch said:
I see my problem here. I saw Thrud and everyone else saw Cerebus. I thought something happened to Thruds author. Nope he still seems saneish.
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Thrud is still going strong, particularly in the Oldhammer blog-o-sphere

2013-01-09-thrud_the_barbarian.jpg


(what I like best about Thrud is that it's actually the name of Thor's daughter in Norse Mythology)
 
TristramEvans said:
Thrud is still going strong, particularly in the Oldhammer blog-o-sphere

2013-01-09-thrud_the_barbarian.jpg


(what I like best about Thrud is that it's actually the name of Thor's daughter in Norse Mythology)
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I've loved him ever since I bought the white dwarf personalities miniatures box in grade school.
 
TristramEvans said:
That's only part of it; Sim created his own religion combining The Bible, the Torah, and The Quran, all interpreted by him (being a person with no religious education) through the lens of everything being a direct analogy of the late 20th century.
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Wow, I missed that. I was barely paying any attention to Cerebus by the time he had reached this point, so I hadn't quite picked up on the extent of it. It was pretty insufferable to read his responses in the letter columns, smugly sure of his superior grasp of Logic and Reason, while being anything but.
 
Edgewise said:
Wow, I missed that. I was barely paying any attention to Cerebus by the time he had reached this point, so I hadn't quite picked up on the extent of it. It was pretty insufferable to read his responses in the letter columns, smugly sure of his superior grasp of Logic and Reason, while being anything but.
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For some reason, that sounds familiar...:grin:

The other info in the thread about him is just disturbing, though.
 
Actually, as somebody brought up Over The Edge on another thread, I always wondered whether the rules could be adapted to make a version of Casablanca (the movie) as a RPG.
 
Trippy said:
Actually, as somebody brought up Over The Edge on another thread, I always wondered whether the rules could be adapted to make a version of Casablanca (the movie) as a RPG.
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OTE had a great rules-light system, easily adaptable and an excellent choice for on-the-fly one shots. When I found out that the rule system had been released as an open source document, I was disappointed to find out that no one had really done anything with it.

(my screen name comes from an OTE character, the last character I played before my decade-and-a-half hiatus)
 
Tulpa Girl said:
OTE had a great rules-light system, easily adaptable and an excellent choice for on-the-fly one shots. When I found out that the rule system had been released as an open source document, I was disappointed to find out that no one had really done anything with it.

(my screen name comes from an OTE character, the last character I played before my decade-and-a-half hiatus)
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I wondered if that was an OTE reference back when you first showed up here.

I'm with you on wishing the system got more attention. There are some products out there, and someone did a Thundarr the Barbarian conversion, but I wish it was getting the same level of devotion that Apocalypse World gets. I suppose OTE is so simple that it doesn't draw people to tinker with it. Apocalypse hacks involve making lots of playbooks, which is something you can sell. With OTE, you can just spin out an idea to your players off the top of your head, then they can probably just make the characters on the spot and you can start playing. It is almost too easy for its own good.
 
Baulderstone said:
I wondered if that was an OTE reference back when you first showed up here.
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Well, there's a story behind that...

[politely gives everybody a chance to run away as I slip into 'let me tell you about my character' mode]

So I was playing a 'pube', a young girl who had went through the process of having her declared legally an adult, as one can do on Al Amarja. A streetwise scrapper in her early teens with a knack for computer hacking.

You ever create a character that sounds great in your head, only to find that things don't quite gel in actual play? That's what happened here. For whatever reason - certainly not the GM's fault - I just wasn't that engaged with the character as the game progressed.

So when things went bad in a fight with a Throckmorton, even though the character was 'only' unconscious from the knife wounds, I told the GM to let the character die, and that I would start working on a new character. Because none of the other PCs were around to witness this (in or out of character), I wasn't going to say anything to them when they showed up to play, so there could be the full effect of them finding the character's corpse in play.

However, because there were other factors in play, the GM told me there was a Tulpa in the area, and since the other PC's would expect to find my character once they got to the area in question, would I mind playing the Tulpa, pretending to be my character? Especially as that would just add to the impact when after thinking the character was okay they eventually find out she actually had been dead that whole time?

As it turns out, playing a being pretending to be my old character, doing everything it could to try to prevent anyone else (and itself) from discovering the truth, and having to react much more directly to the expectations of the other characters, was much more enjoyable and engaging than playing the character I had originally came up with.

(the other PCs never did find out the truth)
 
Tulpa Girl said:
Well, there's a story behind that...

[politely gives everybody a chance to run away as I slip into 'let me tell you about my character' mode]

So I was playing a 'pube', a young girl who had went through the process of having her declared legally an adult, as one can do on Al Amarja. A streetwise scrapper in her early teens with a knack for computer hacking.

You ever create a character that sounds great in your head, only to find that things don't quite gel in actual play? That's what happened here. For whatever reason - certainly not the GM's fault - I just wasn't that engaged with the character as the game progressed.

So when things went bad in a fight with a Throckmorton, even though the character was 'only' unconscious from the knife wounds, I told the GM to let the character die, and that I would start working on a new character. Because none of the other PCs were around to witness this (in or out of character), I wasn't going to say anything to them when they showed up to play, so there could be the full effect of them finding the character's corpse in play.

However, because there were other factors in play, the GM told me there was a Tulpa in the area, and since the other PC's would expect to find my character once they got to the area in question, would I mind playing the Tulpa, pretending to be my character? Especially as that would just add to the impact when after thinking the character was okay they eventually find out she actually had been dead that whole time?

As it turns out, playing a being pretending to be my old character, doing everything it could to try to prevent anyone else (and itself) from discovering the truth, and having to react much more directly to the expectations of the other characters, was much more enjoyable and engaging than playing the character I had originally came up with.

(the other PCs never did find out the truth)
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Yes I've had a character I thought would be awesome to play but failed in reality. More than once.
 
Tulpa Girl said:
Well, there's a story behind that...

[politely gives everybody a chance to run away as I slip into 'let me tell you about my character' mode]

So I was playing a 'pube', a young girl who had went through the process of having her declared legally an adult, as one can do on Al Amarja. A streetwise scrapper in her early teens with a knack for computer hacking.

You ever create a character that sounds great in your head, only to find that things don't quite gel in actual play? That's what happened here. For whatever reason - certainly not the GM's fault - I just wasn't that engaged with the character as the game progressed.

So when things went bad in a fight with a Throckmorton, even though the character was 'only' unconscious from the knife wounds, I told the GM to let the character die, and that I would start working on a new character. Because none of the other PCs were around to witness this (in or out of character), I wasn't going to say anything to them when they showed up to play, so there could be the full effect of them finding the character's corpse in play.

However, because there were other factors in play, the GM told me there was a Tulpa in the area, and since the other PC's would expect to find my character once they got to the area in question, would I mind playing the Tulpa, pretending to be my character? Especially as that would just add to the impact when after thinking the character was okay they eventually find out she actually had been dead that whole time?

As it turns out, playing a being pretending to be my old character, doing everything it could to try to prevent anyone else (and itself) from discovering the truth, and having to react much more directly to the expectations of the other characters, was much more enjoyable and engaging than playing the character I had originally came up with.

(the other PCs never did find out the truth)
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If I am running a campaign, I often treat the first session as the pilot. In TV pilots, when you go back and watch them later, the characters are often somewhat off-model compared to what they are later. After the first session, if people want to retool their character a little, I am fine with it.

However, your story is a fantastic way to handle it in OTE. That is perfect.
 
Tulpa Girl said:
Well, there's a story behind that...

[politely gives everybody a chance to run away as I slip into 'let me tell you about my character' mode]

So I was playing a 'pube', a young girl who had went through the process of having her declared legally an adult, as one can do on Al Amarja. A streetwise scrapper in her early teens with a knack for computer hacking.

You ever create a character that sounds great in your head, only to find that things don't quite gel in actual play? That's what happened here. For whatever reason - certainly not the GM's fault - I just wasn't that engaged with the character as the game progressed.

So when things went bad in a fight with a Throckmorton, even though the character was 'only' unconscious from the knife wounds, I told the GM to let the character die, and that I would start working on a new character. Because none of the other PCs were around to witness this (in or out of character), I wasn't going to say anything to them when they showed up to play, so there could be the full effect of them finding the character's corpse in play.

However, because there were other factors in play, the GM told me there was a Tulpa in the area, and since the other PC's would expect to find my character once they got to the area in question, would I mind playing the Tulpa, pretending to be my character? Especially as that would just add to the impact when after thinking the character was okay they eventually find out she actually had been dead that whole time?

As it turns out, playing a being pretending to be my old character, doing everything it could to try to prevent anyone else (and itself) from discovering the truth, and having to react much more directly to the expectations of the other characters, was much more enjoyable and engaging than playing the character I had originally came up with.

(the other PCs never did find out the truth)
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Is that how you got your forum handle:grin:?

Bunch said:
Yes I've had a character I thought would be awesome to play but failed in reality. More than once.
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Yup, and then there are the characters you thought would suck, but they didn't. You all know I'm going to mention Traveller, so for a change, I'm just going to state "a lot of lifepath or randomly generated characters" fit there:tongue:!
 
Tulpa Girl said:
As it turns out, playing a being pretending to be my old character, doing everything it could to try to prevent anyone else (and itself) from discovering the truth, and having to react much more directly to the expectations of the other characters, was much more enjoyable and engaging than playing the character I had originally came up with.
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It's a shame that the GM never found a way to spring that on the rest of the party, but on the other hand, it also works as a super-devious GM trick to get you to enjoy a PC that you're tired of.

Ye Olde Doppelgänger Trick! "Yeah, you're actually a shapeshifter, but now stuck in the role of your old PC...orders are to blend in and gather intel until contacted." It also works as a great way to resurrect a PC without seeming like a softy.
 
AsenRG said:
Yup, and then there are the characters you thought would suck, but they didn't. You all know I'm going to mention Traveller, so for a change, I'm just going to state "a lot of lifepath or randomly generated characters" fit there:tongue:!
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And even if they do suck, you can still have a lot of fun with them before they die. Stormbringer 1st edition was the second RPG I ever played, and it has random character generation that is brutally unfair, yet fantastic at the same time. I learned early that playing the pathetic, doomed character as comic relief could easily be as fun as being the cool badass.

And then there was my character for the first Babylon 5 RPG, The Babylon Project, which was set before the TV show. I was playing a psychic of the weakest possible rating, and from a stats-on-the-page perspective, my character was largely useless. Yet, behind the scenes I was betraying every other PC as well PsiCorp and becoming the world's first big dust trafficker (Dust is a drug that boost psychic power). I was basically the Walter White of the B5 universe. All the other players kind of pitied my character, while I was responsible for every bad thing that happened to them.

I remember being completely stressed out during the last session as I tried to hold everything together. It was literally that same horrible but thrilling feeling I would later get watching Breaking Bad. I actually did manage to keep the deception going, and the capper was that the party managed to recover a stash of dust, and they unanimously decided that I should have it as I had it so rough during the campaign.

None of the other players ever knew what was really going on, but the GM and I still talk about that one to this day.
 
Edgewise said:
It's a shame that the GM never found a way to spring that on the rest of the party
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Well, circumstances did dictate that the group wanted to go back shortly thereafter to the building where my character died to follow up on some stuff.

Funny thing... by sheer coincidence the building in question 'accidentally' caught fire and burned down before they got there.

Fire codes are kinda lax in Al Amarja, you know? (no, seriously, I think it actually mentions that in the rulebook)

Also, at one point the tulpa encountered the Throckmorton that killed my character - it didn't recognize him, as it had never seen him before, but as a player I knew it was him from how he reacted to the presence of the tulpa-in-guise-of-old-character. Fortunately, the dice gods smiled, and I rolled several 6's as I ran my knife into his throat.
 
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Poltergeist: The Legacy would make for an interesting background for a horror investigation RPG.
 
Tulpa Girl said:
OTE had a great rules-light system, easily adaptable and an excellent choice for on-the-fly one shots. When I found out that the rule system had been released as an open source document, I was disappointed to find out that no one had really done anything with it
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There was supposed to be a Lamentations of the Flame Princess Al Amarja supplement last year, but I'm not sure what happened to it.
 
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