[The Strange] Where did it go wrong?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com

Nexus

Legendary Pubber
Joined
Apr 26, 2017
Messages
1,023
Reaction score
1,646
Or did it? It seemed to start off pretty well with a good deal of excite and buzz but the faded fast and now it appears to be, more or less, inactive with very little discussion, no new products in the works, etc. I admit have trouble dealing with it, specifically coming up with exactly what PC, well, do, that isn't essentially somewhat odd Earthly adventures and occasionally raid Recursion almost as they're dungeons, for the games magical item stand-ins. Is that what they play style is supposed to be or have I and others missed some vital element(s)?
 
I backed the Strange Kickstarter, but I must admit I never got further than reading the core book. I think it struggled due to two key issues: niche appeal and an assumption gap.

In terms of niche appeal, and to address your ‘what do PCs do’ question, my take on the game premise is that you are part of a secret organisation battling unseen but cataclysmic foes across multiple realities. The idea that only one of the realities is really-real is relatively unimportant (in my mind) versus the reality-hopping part of the premise. I don’t think there are a huge number of people who regularly play games like this. I certainly don’t play them personally, don’t know anyone who does and don’t even read about them often on forums. And I’m a GURPS player so in theory multi-genre is something my game-of-choice is well suited to.

This leads onto the second issue: the assumption gap. I know that I read the Kickstarter blurb and through that, even though I wasn’t interested in world-hopping I was interested in ‘straight’ fantasy. And the Strange had a recursion that was straight fantasy. Sci-fi is my seconds favourite genre, so the fact that there is a sci-fi recursion means double value, surely? The reality was that these recursion were very slim in terms of material if that was what you really wanted (certainly that was the case in the original Kickstarter materials, it may have changed overt time with follow-up products). So, you were getting a poor fantasy game and a poor sci-fi game. Suddenly it wasn’t such a great product.

I also think the generic version of Cypher came out fairly shortly after The Strange (2015 vs 2014 respectively) didn’t help. I know that I transferred my interest in using The Strange as a core to generic gaming moved over to Cypher and this new product was better suited to that task in my opinion.

Ultimately, The Strange was Bruce’s baby and MCG seems more focussed on delivering what Monte wants to put out.
 
Last edited:
Reply from the sister thread on rpg.net (I hope that's okay)

It's a really cool, clever idea but I'm with you in that I'm not sure what a regular session or arc is supposed to be. It'd certainly make a good show like Doctor Who, Sliders, or even Rick & Morty.

The eventually became my impression as well. This would make an interesting show using exploration, perhaps based around the central characters getting “lost” somehow. Which given that they're is the Estate, your assumed allies/bosses that premise could be a little difficult. It seemed to have figured out almost everything. PCs could to to them and ask.

I'm always on the lookout for the next game that can be Lords of Creation. I love games where characters can hop between worlds and genres. TORG is probably the next closest thing.
The Strange seemed like it should have been that, and it had a lot of neat ideas. I find a lot of things about the Cypher system kind of limiting, though, and to be an ill fit for things that aren't Numenera.

Yeah, the idea were cool and reminded my of Torg but with a lack of real urgency and need to delve into this odd realities aside from curiosity. Planetvore were kind of a vaguely developed threat and things coming from Recursions seemed to be something of a self correcting issue. They depowered and became normal or faded away unlesss fairly mundane.

I had some issues with the system as well, it just didn't feel like a good fit with the setting,

It seemed to have a weird lack of urgency. You could always just go home. The translation mechanic meant that you couldn't do much 'fish out of water'-stuff in alien worlds.

The ability to just leave at will and automatically go home was a big spoiler for me. It killed allot of tension and neutered some potentia threats and plot lines. Normally, I'm all for types of PC empowerment over their fates but that one was kind of limiting. They wasn't even much of a risk of things following them.

You (almost) couldn't take anything with you, so you couldn't bring antibiotics to the cyborg ostriches or steal gold from the deep ones in Lovecraftland.

The fictional bleed places (Oz, Westernland, Lovecraftland) felt like theme parks. The NPCs there weren't really real, and couldn't really change in any meaningful way.

I couldn't figure out what to do with the setting.

I liked the “Bleed” settings. The rules for The Spark was vague enough to allow for interaction with most NPCs just with occasional odd limits in young or limited Recursions. I might have been doing it wrong but I played most NPCs are aware, kistg with strong 'blinders' on about aspects of their worlds (like sleepers in the Matrix or unawakened Hosts in Westworld).

The limits on taking or using things from or bringing things to these worlds or just being able to leave at will wer a limiting issues. It seemed like the game's writer had similar issues as the published adventures seems to often have some fiat reason to side step some of these rules.

Those more limited worlds that still might make for interesting encounters (that ability to just skedaddle at will would still be a problem).

I was rolling around some setting changes that I was making or considering that I mentioned here that I thought might make things more interesting. They didn't take some of the above issues into account though as I wasn't sure how to adjust them. \\



 
For me, it’s all about the system. Numenera at the time was frustrating and inconsistent and made some assumptions about your group. It felt like it hadn’t seen the light of day passed Monte’s cadre. The Strange was an improvement, but the damage had been done, in a sense. The cypher book was better yet, but at this point I was just cold to the idea.

It’s funny, because I actually like the character swap thing and the nice little trifold character sheet. I love the setting work in both of them. But they need a mechanics guy and someone to force some rigor at particular points.
 
For me, it’s all about the system. Numenera at the time was frustrating and inconsistent and made some assumptions about your group. It felt like it hadn’t seen the light of day passed Monte’s cadre. The Strange was an improvement, but the damage had been done, in a sense. The cypher book was better yet, but at this point I was just cold to the idea.

It’s funny, because I actually like the character swap thing and the nice little trifold character sheet. I love the setting work in both of them. But they need a mechanics guy and someone to force some rigor at particular points.


I had system issues too but then had problem trying to work/jigger/maim my go to systems into working with The Strange's setting. :-/
 
Huh. You think The Strange would work well for doing something like Stargate Universe?
 
nothing particularly wrong with it, but a primary conceit of The Strange is that your character changes. you change a portion of your character and actually become a different entity. part of it stays the same though. So... i don't know how much of the strange it would really be at that point. a lot of world hopping, but not so much character changing.
 
nothing particularly wrong with it, but a primary conceit of The Strange is that your character changes. you change a portion of your character and actually become a different entity. part of it stays the same though. So... i don't know how much of the strange it would really be at that point. a lot of world hopping, but not so much character changing.
The stones. I would add a weaponized version allowing PCs to transfer with unwilling others
 
The official line at MCG is that any supplement for the Cypher System is basically a supplement for The Strange: Any of the world books they're producing for the Cypher System can be used basically as-is for Strange recursions. I think this is accurate both creatively and also from a business standpoint. (The amount of effort you put into producing a new supplement for The Strange could be put into a Cypher System product and inherently have a larger audience.)

With that being said, The Strange started as the premise for a novel Bruce Cordell wanted to write and transformed into an RPG, and I think the legacy of that (and a few other issues) made the game less appealing:

- The core rulebook spent most of its focus on two very unusual recursions (Ardeyn & Ruk), which made it difficult for people reading the book to really get a good feel for how the Strange works as a baseline.
- There were a number of metaphysical conceits that I think made the exploration of alternative realities less interesting than it should have been. (I talk about how to tweak these in The Strange: Cosmological Changes.) Basically, the ways in which technology and creatures transfer to reality makes it really difficult to set up stakes that feel meaningful.
- In core areas of the cosmology (like "how translating to a new recursion works"), the rulebook was unclear on whether it was describing the mechanical experience of the PLAYER or the lived experience of the CHARACTER. This also made the setting harder to grok.

So, basically, a lot of little things added up to a lot of potential players saying, "I don't know what to do with this." And that's not good for an RPG.

Personally, I love the game. Wish I could play it more.
 
Last edited:
I am one of the many people who Kickstarted the Strange, but never got around to playing it. I have played a few Numenera campaigns.

I really enjoyed the setup of the universe(s). I loved reading the material. However, I thought the game rules were pretty clunky. If you are familiar with Cypher system, your character will change their Foci when they enter a different Recursion, changing a chunk of your power set and character identity. This ironically compounded with a pretty severe shortage of Foci available in the core book for the 3 given recursions. In Numenera, players have 27 different Foci to choose from. PC's translating to Ruk in the Strange have 7.

It also carries with it one of the problems of Numenera: Player's can't meaningfully interact with the mystery of the setting. The benefit, is GMs don't have to do much to justify any random, surreal challenges they want to throw at the players. The drawback is the players can never really get a handle on the world they live in.

Based on my own reading of it, and watching the online discourse for the Strange, it seemed like people were immediately looking for more. They were looking at Numenera and Cypher System to fill in for the lack of worlds and character options for what was pitched as a world-hopping, character changing setting.
 
I thinks of it in the same way as I think of the old tv show Sliders, a lot of good new ideas that were never properly executed, an awesome first draft that never got properly revised and fleshed out. Resulting in a lot of good cool stuff to mine for ideas and little I would play as is. The best pitch I've heard for playing is rival agencies competing for access to recurisions and the players gaming out the various the various turf wars to advance their own agendas. It sounded like a cool campaign but the both the book and the system don't really shine in that area.
 
I thinks of it in the same way as I think of the old tv show Sliders, a lot of good new ideas that were never properly executed, an awesome first draft that never got properly revised and fleshed out. Resulting in a lot of good cool stuff to mine for ideas and little I would play as is. The best pitch I've heard for playing is rival agencies competing for access to recursions and the players gaming out the various the various turf wars to advance their own agendas. It sounded like a cool campaign but the both the book and the system don't really shine in that area.

How do you imagine such a war be fought, out of curiosity. What would be the goals and such?
 
How do you imagine such a war be fought, out of curiosity. What would be the goals and such?
We talking the Sliders war with the Neaderthals? Man, I thought I was the only person that watched those seasons. I honestly don't quite know how to approach the task the last seasons really crashed hard again and again about how awful Team Slider was and how generically bad the Neanderthals were in the end nobody cared about sides anymore.

If were talking The Strange well thats another matter. It'd vary a little with what the focus of the campaign would be but definitely Gurps Infinity war is a must for how to framework the recursions around the home planes. Maybe flesh out some reasons why a recursion would ally with the different factions. If were going to eyeball a Chronicles of Amber or even a Myst courtly take I'd peruse some of the Feng shui stuff on junctures, attunements and what happens when stuff goes wrong. For a more explorational style of conflict I'd go to Gurps Cabal for ideas and that bit about how maps shape reality (also adding more factions, The Bloom was the only I really liked to use and it wasn't even called that in the corebook).

Going to how I generally prefer Cold war focus rather then Hot War. smaller battles give players more spotlight political intrigues give more weird items and allies to play with. Hot Wars are fun for war gamers but focus more on making sensible decisions to win (this tends not to be the case with players in my experience). Also Cold War creates recursions where the conflict is actually being fought and where its more behind the scenes.

Moving to goals in such a conflict it would broadly breakdown into two camps 1)fighting over the privileged place Earth holds as prime recursion generator. Ooh I'd such looking at some of the SCCPS for ideas about how and whys (seriously check "here were dragons", bigfoot, and the Hanged King for inspiration). Double ooh for the Magnus Archive podcast for why cthulhoid entities would be involved but not be the cthulhu mythos. 2) base the goal around a simple question with profund consequences like in Robert Zelazny's A Night In the Lonesome October. In that book it was the question do we open or close the door that resulted in a big occult wizard war in the victorian era. Here it would be do we stop making new recursions? and have the different groups branch off that one question.
 
The official line at MCG is that any supplement for the Cypher System is basically a supplement for The Strange: Any of the world books they're producing for the Cypher System can be used basically as-is for Strange recursions. I think this is accurate both creatively and also from a business standpoint. (The amount of effort you put into producing a new supplement for The Strange could be put into a Cypher System product and inherently have a larger audience.)

With that being said, The Strange started as the premise for a novel Bruce Cordell wanted to write and transformed into an RPG, and I think the legacy of that (and a few other issues) made the game less appealing:

- The core rulebook spent most of its focus on two very unusual recursions (Ardeyn & Ruk), which made it difficult for people reading the book to really get a good feel for how the Strange works as a baseline.
- There were a number of metaphysical conceits that I think made the exploration of alternative realities less interesting than it should have been. (I talk about how to tweak these in The Strange: Cosmological Changes.) Basically, the ways in which technology and creatures transfer to reality makes it really difficult to set up stakes that feel meaningful.
- In core areas of the cosmology (like "how translating to a new recursion works"), the rulebook was unclear on whether it was describing the mechanical experience of the PLAYER or the lived experience of the CHARACTER. This also made the setting harder to grok.

So, basically, a lot of little things added up to a lot of potential players saying, "I don't know what to do with this." And that's not good for an RPG.

Personally, I love the game. Wish I could play it more.

May I quote your post on the sister thread?
 
Another model to look at for adding consequence would be Glorantha, the setting for Runequest. Characters can go on Heroquests, where they travel to the god plane and take part in myths, imbuing them with magic that they can take back to the world. Characters can also attempt to change myths, altering the world, although this can have dire consequences.

I don't know much about The Strange, but treating the fictional recursions as the equivalent of Glorantha's god plane might be interesting.
 
Sure. Proper credit, yada yada.

Oh I had a question from the material on your website (Great stuff, btw!). Would you imagine the "Quantum Leap" style translation might be a feature of more advanced, established Recursions (They're firmer, have more of their 'reality' and its difficult to just have new being appear whole cloth) or more simplistic, less flexible one (they can't shift much to adapt to new "characters") or maybe either?
 
Oh I had a question from the material on your website (Great stuff, btw!). Would you imagine the "Quantum Leap" style translation might be a feature of more advanced, established Recursions (They're firmer, have more of their 'reality' and its difficult to just have new being appear whole cloth) or more simplistic, less flexible one (they can't shift much to adapt to new "characters") or maybe either?

That's a nifty thought (the distinction between recursion types). I'd default to either, though. On a meta level, I'm often making the choice based on which one seems like it would be the most fun for a particular recursion/scenario. To some extent, this decision is also based on, "Do I have a cool idea for a quantum leap?" If not, I'll probably default towards Man With No Name.
 
That's a nifty thought (the distinction between recursion types). I'd default to either, though. On a meta level, I'm often making the choice based on which one seems like it would be the most fun for a particular recursion/scenario. To some extent, this decision is also based on, "Do I have a cool idea for a quantum leap?" If not, I'll probably default towards Man With No Name.

Thanks!

Rolling it around for a little while, I'm leaning towards make "Quantum Leaping" more common in smaller, more fixed Recursions that don't have allot of room for "improv" and new additions. There maybe some really old, really established ones or others with some permutation that encourages Recursors being insert into an established character, but its more typical in smaller ones such as the odds that are essentially the same 'story' on endless loop (which the addition of new 'actors' might break it out of..) I'm not sure if The Strange will be a natural phenomena that some ancient, powerful race harnessed for various functions (and might be breaking down and mutating) or something an even more Sufficently Advanced species actually created somehow (and again might be breaking, evolving or serving some mysterious and possibly unknowable even inhuman purpose).
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top