The Truth Is Still Out There

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Grist for my nascent X-Files game. Excellent.
 
Why was there never an official XFiles RPG?
 
Why was there never an official XFiles RPG?
They misspelled X-FIles as "Delta Green", wacky I know. Seriously though, that's a great question. I joke about Delta Green but that's actually too serious a rules set for X-Files IMO. I'm just starting to read a supplement to Monster of the Week that purports to have X-Files type additions to the game about running phenomenon-based mysteries, so maybe that will be the magic bullet. Perhaps the rights were unavailable or too expensive? That would be my first guess.
 
They misspelled X-FIles as "Delta Green", wacky I know. Seriously though, that's a great question. I joke about Delta Green but that's actually too serious a rules set for X-Files IMO. I'm just starting to read a supplement to Monster of the Week that purports to have X-Files type additions to the game about running phenomenon-based mysteries, so maybe that will be the magic bullet. Perhaps the rights were unavailable or too expensive? That would be my first guess.

Yeah, I guess rights cost is probably the issue, but we got a CCG. Granted that was during the CCG boom and only lasted a few months for some specific reason I can't recall off the top of my head (but it was one of the few CCGs I collected and enjoyed).
 
I remember that! I never played it though. I'm actually in the middle of curating my rather extensive PDF collection to put together a selection of resources for a Supernatural/X-Files game. I'm actually having fun. I don't even know what rules I want to use yet, so I'm just tripping down the back alleys of my collection going Oooh! forgot I had that...
 
I remember that! I never played it though. I'm actually in the middle of curating my rather extensive PDF collection to put together a selection of resources for a Supernatural/X-Files game. I'm actually having fun. I don't even know what rules I want to use yet, so I'm just tripping down the back alleys of my collection going Oooh! forgot I had that...
Which also begs the question, why didn't Supernatural get an official RPG? Its the perfect setup. Heavily armed murderhoboes roam the back roads killing monsters and getting up to shenanigans.

What system couldn't you use for it?
 
Which also begs the question, why didn't Supernatural get an official RPG? Its the perfect setup. Heavily armed murderhoboes roam the back roads killing monsters and getting up to shenanigans.

What system couldn't you use for it?

I thought it did have one, using Cortex
 
Sure there were X-Files influenced games, particularly in the late 1990s/early 2000s when X-Files was hugely popular.

We played both of these:

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Delta Green was for BRP, and really was a cool way to play Call of Cthulhu; whereas Project Twilight was Storyteller, and was a cool way to approach Classic World of Darkness. These games were pretty much the stand-in games for X-Files back then.
Both were really good and we had alot of fun, but if I had to revisit any I don't think the Storyteller system floats the boat for me anymore, so I would have to choose Delta Green - and I have the current slipcase edition of Delta Green, it's really good :thumbsup:
 

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Yeah I remember seeing the Conspiracy X covers, but I never played them. It was very much something along the lines of X-Files.

Looking back, there was a big 'conspiracy culture' in the late 1990s/early 2000s, which seems to have dispersed somewhat.
Especially late 1990s, it was part of the vibe for some reason. Movies like The Matrix and stuff like that fed off it as well.
I guess this is may have been why White Wolf managed to pretty much dethrone TSR for most of the decade, especially the late 1990s
 
Yeah, in the 90's everything was a "secret war" in the shadows, from angels in The Prophecy to Immortals in Highlander.

It was a much easier fantasy to indulge when there wasn't an overt war on the surface of society, I imagine. It's hard for me to get into that premise these days, it's tied so closely to the former zeitgeist.
 
There's a conspiracy theory here that the presenters on our national channel are vampires working with aliens kept young by being injected with baby blood. A distant relative sometimes rants about it.

Tubridy said: “The difficulty is that you’ve got good people finding insane ‘nonformation,’ let’s call it that.


“I’ll mention the most stupid thing of them all, which is that they’re injecting baby blood into RTÉ presenters to make them look younger.
 
A little background as to why this is making news now. From an Inverse article...

In December 2020, the government enacted the Intelligence Authorization Act, which called for the release of an unclassified and all-sources report on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) — the official military term used for unidentified flying objects. The act was included in the mammoth appropriations bill that also included financial aid checks for people living with the economic fallout from Covid-19.
 
Yeah, this is interesting as they're objects the US military actually can't identify or match their behaviour to known aircraft. It'll be interesting to see what if anything they find out.
 
The most I expect to come from this is a "there's definitely something we can't identify" which is, yeah, a non-answer, but that's what UFO's are; doesn't necessarily mean they're of alien origin.

(I do believe in aliens, but not necessarily that they've came to our insignificant planet in an insignificant section of an insignificant galaxy; my gut feeling is that "alien abductions" and similar are caused by the same sort of brain glitch as fairy abductions, but filtered through modern sensibilities.)
 
Being capped at (really a good bit below) the speed of light is what always makes aliens very unlikely for me.

It'd still be interesting to find out what these are. I've seen stuff like odd parallax effects, low flying drones, etc. Those are all obvious though, so it's probably something more subtle and not all one phenomena.
 
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I think if there were visitations, they are extra dimensional, not extra terrestrial.
 
Apparently it's pretty easy to insert conspiracy thinking into the current zeitgeist. I won't step over the line into politics here, but this post has been brought to you by the letter Q.
The issue is that fictional conspiracies are cool and respectable, while real-world conspiracy theories are dumb and boring.
 
Eden Studios' Conspiracy X 2.0 can do anything X-filesy you want. 2.0 is the Classic Unisystem version. Before that there was a GURPS version and the 1st edition which had its own system, but I'm unfamiliar with either of those.
 
I'd love to have you brother.:kiss:
 
The most I expect to come from this is a "there's definitely something we can't identify" which is, yeah, a non-answer, but that's what UFO's are; doesn't necessarily mean they're of alien origin.

(I do believe in aliens, but not necessarily that they've came to our insignificant planet in an insignificant section of an insignificant galaxy; my gut feeling is that "alien abductions" and similar are caused by the same sort of brain glitch as fairy abductions, but filtered through modern sensibilities.)

About two months ago a coworker filmed a UFO above her home. She’ll freely admit it could be an ass hooked a giant light to a drone and flew it in the wee hours, but pretty much everyone who has seen her video has called her an alien-obsessed lunatic.

It’s as though people have hardwired “IFO” to “aliens” in their brains, and are instantly dismissive of anyone who brings up UFOs.
 
That makes sense since they did do a MiB one.
Then again, the MiB game struck me at the time as the game they made because they couldn't get the X-Files license. Even without an RPG, I remember the game store I worked at in the '90s always had Mulder and Scully staring from some product. They seemed to be on at least one genre magazine cover a month, along with all the merchandise we carried.

I personally think that an X-Files RPG back in the mid-90s, when people still cared, would have been a disappointment anyway. People buying it would have been hungry for details about the mythology, but we now know there was never really anything there anyway. It would have been similar to the Babylon 5 RPG that came out around then, which had to completely omit the Shadow War because there simply wasn't enough information at the time. And at least Babylon 5 did have a coherent background in the first place.

Mechanically, it is also easy enough to run with plenty of systems that existed at the time. I was running Call of Cthulhu, Over the Edge, GURPs, WoD and Kult around that time, and they all would have been easy enough to use in their own ways. X-Files protagonists are ordinary humans with investigative training.

I'll admit that if someone had gotten out an X-Files game around the time season 3 was airing, it would have been a guaranteed business success. I just wouldn't be surprised that once people got done looking through the book, with all of its photos from the show, they found there wasn't much content there. Compared to Conspiracy X and Delta Green, which both had brilliantly developed backgrounds for a GM to use, an X-Files RPG would have felt hollow.

WEG got lucky with Star Wars. It came out at a time when the business world cared so little about Star Wars that WEG was actually allowed to expand the setting on their own. I don't think they would have had that kind of freedom with the X-FIles at its height of popularity, so they would have been stuck giving you a bestiary of MotW from episodes your players had already seen. I'm of the opinion that WEG hobbled itself by being so attached to using licenses rather than original RPG settings it could truly develop. Conspiracy X and Delta Green stayed alive for decades, but the MiB game is a historical footnote, even if it was a perfectly fine game.
 
are instantly dismissive of anyone who brings up UFOs
There's a lot of stuff like this. There's some interesting deep sea sounds maybe related to continental plates, i.e. you can possibly "hear" the low resonance vibrations of the plates moving, but mention of them often devolves into "the Cloverfield monster isn't real lol". I work and teach a few areas affected by stuff like this and it can get tiring.
 
Mechanically, it is also easy enough to run with plenty of systems that existed at the time. I was running Call of Cthulhu, Over the Edge, GURPs, WoD and Kult around that time, and they all would have been easy enough to use in their own ways. X-Files protagonists are ordinary humans with investigative training.

Agree, of course a license would have added eyes on the product, but with additional costs and probably some loss of control over the direction of the game.

Add to that an X-files game would have been entering into an already crowded market, almost every major game company having an offering that was similar, and many pre-dating the X-files by many years (1993) so they had already built up a player base. X-files itself was derivative of earlier horror / conspiracy fiction which had obviously influenced the gaming market.

I'm probably missing a few, but there were at least 8 established games quite capable of running an X-files like game out there when X-files hit the TV screen.

Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium (1981), Cthulhu Now for modern games was added in 1987
Stalking the Night Fantastic, Tri-Tac Games (1983)
Justice Inc, HERO (1984)
Danger International, HERO (1985)
Gurps Horror, SJG (1987)
Chill, Pacesetter (1984), Mayfair (1990)
Dark Conspiracy, GDW (1991)
Millennium's End, Chameleon Eclectic (1991)

X-files TV show (1993)

Horror Hero, HERO (1994)
Conspiracy X, (1996)
Delta Green (1997)

There's a lot of stuff like this. There's some interesting deep sea sounds maybe related to continental plates, i.e. you can possibly "hear" the low resonance vibrations of the plates moving, but mention of them often devolves into "the Cloverfield monster isn't real lol". I work and teach a few areas affected by stuff like this and it can get tiring.

People like to make fun of people, and thinking outside the box is hard... :cry:
 
Agree, of course a license would have added eyes on the product, but with additional costs and probably some loss of control over the direction of the game.

Add to that an X-files game would have been entering into an already crowded market, almost every major game company having an offering that was similar, and many pre-dating the X-files by many years (1993) so they had already built up a player base. X-files itself was derivative of earlier horror / conspiracy fiction which had obviously influenced the gaming market.

I'm probably missing a few, but there were at least 8 established games quite capable of running an X-files like game out there when X-files hit the TV screen.

Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium (1981), Cthulhu Now for modern games was added in 1987
Stalking the Night Fantastic, Tri-Tac Games (1983)
Justice Inc, HERO (1984)
Danger International, HERO (1985)
Gurps Horror, SJG (1987)
Chill, Pacesetter (1984), Mayfair (1990)
Dark Conspiracy, GDW (1991)
Millennium's End, Chameleon Eclectic (1991)

X-files TV show (1993)

Horror Hero, HERO (1994)
Conspiracy X, (1996)
Delta Green (1997)



People like to make fun of people, and thinking outside the box is hard... :cry:
You forgot Dark Matter. It’s the best of the bunch
 
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