The Al Amarja Quartet

Welcome to the Island is an anthology of scenarios for Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger published by Atlas Games. It presents four lengthy, often complex scenarios designed to do six things. First, to show what a scenario looks like in Over the Edge, Third Edition. Second, to act as a campaign starters or slot into an ongoing campaign. Third, it is designed to present multiple story hooks and thus means to get the Player Characters involved in each of its scenarios, whether as agents of one faction or another, newcomers to Al Amarja, members of one or more of the conspiracies on the island, as street level gangsters or criminals, or as paranormals or mystics. Fourth, it is designed to showcase the island of Al Amarja and its people in all of their conspiratorial, counterintuitive, and corresponding weirdness. Fifth, it is designed to shake everything up by throwing a grenade into the room and upsetting the status quo. In other words, once the Game Master has run and players roleplayed any one of the four scenarios in the anthology, the situation on Al Amarja will not be the same as before. For example, by the end of the second scenario, ‘A Conclave of Chikutorpls, or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence.’ Frank Germaine, owner of Sad Mary’s, the hottest bar on Al Marja, may have lost control of it, whilst at the end of ‘Battle of the Bands’, the biggest band on the island may or not have been reformed and even one of the Player Characters might be a member of it! The result, whatever the outcome, is to enforce the sixth thing and that is, make Al Amarja and thus Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger the Game Master’s own and thus different from that of any other Game Master with an Over the Edge campaign.

Right from the start though, Welcome to the Island is a challenging set of scenarios. There is always homework for the Game Master to do as part of her preparation. Thankfully, each scenario references the very sections of the core rulebook that she needs to read, though there are multiples of them. There are usually a lot of NPCs to handle as well, often quite detailed in terms of their background and motivations, if not their stats. The authors of the anthology do go out of their way though to give advice and further explanation, including tips and playtest notes, with much of this supplementary information organised into sidebars and sections of boxed text. These are categorised by colour, so for example, advice and Game Master tips are always in red sections, NPCs in black, suggestions as where one scenario intersects with another in violet, and so on. Thus, Welcome to the Island is laid out in great blocks of colour that are easy on the eye.

Welcome to the Edge begins in relatively gentle fashion with ‘Battle of the Bands’. The Glorious Lords of the Edge are hosting the biggest battle of the bands on Al Marja, an event which anyone can participate in, but one in which Oblivion Function, an electronica trio, is tipped to win and win big, and so get to perform a victory concert. However, this will be a big win too for the backers of the Oblivion Function, the Movers, and there are plenty of other factions on the island who do not want that to happen. So, another band needs to be found to defeat Oblivion Function and there is only one band capable of doing that, Betwixt, one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed groups on the island. Only Betwixt split up over a decade ago and nobody knows exactly why. If somebody—by which we mean the Player Characters—is to get Betwixt back together, they are going to have to track down the four members, find out why they split, and get them to make up and put aside their differences enough to perform together once again. Which means a road trip back and forth across the island as the Player Characters track down one band member after another.

The four members of Betwixt are nicely detailed, each with their own views and revelations as to why the band broke up and reasons for getting back together (or not). Part of the scenario involves getting the old band tour bus back on the road too (although alternatives are suggested) as well as finding out what has become of the band members. There are some fun encounters to had on the road too, such as a big burrito-eating competition and an attack by a hit squad consisting of a Capella band whose singing has dangerously telekinetic heft to it, and the scenario will climax with the actual battle of the bands.

‘Battle of the Bands’ is the least weird and the least complex of the four scenarios in the anthology, in some ways more of a multi-character piece than the weird conspiracy shenanigans that you would normally expect with a scenario for Over the Edge. This makes it both a good introduction and a poor introduction to Al Amarja. A good introduction because the level of weirdness is relatively low, plus because the road trip format provides a really good reason for touring the island, but a poor one because the weirdness is low and because the introduction, at least for ordinary visitors to the island, as members of the Betwixt fan club, is underwhelming. As a scenario, ‘Battle of the Bands’ has an enjoyably languid, summertime, dust and tarmac feel to it, and as an interlude from the weirdness of Al Amarja, it is just perfect.

The second scenario, ‘A Conclave of Chikutorpls, or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence.’ both turns up the weirdness and has an easier means of introduction. It opens with the car they are in—either they are driving or being driven—knocking someone down in the street and a woman known as Chikutorpl appearing almost immediately out of nowhere. Then they begin finding flyers announcing the reappearance of the Winds of Change, the high-stakes pop-up casino owned by Chikutorpl where it is possible to bet your youth, your beauty, your talent, a memory, even your life… When they attend, Winds of Change lives up to its reputation as a raucous, racy event filled with strange games like hyperbolic billiards and immortal combat. Throughout the host is in a highly mercurial mood and seems to change almost every time the Player Characters see her. Whatever the outcome of their attendance, the Player Characters receive invitations to the next opening and that is when it gets even weirder. It turns out that the host both sent and did not send the invitations, because there are multiple Chikutorpls, each pursuing agendas of their own and seeming to threaten reality in the process. Successive events get more chaotic, and this begins to ripple out as multiple Chikutorpls’ plans have a greater effect upon attendee after attendee. Ultimately, it comes down to a showdown when all of the Chikutorpls on the island host their events to outdoor each other. Throughout the Player Characters can pursue their own agendas or get caught up with those of every other attendee, but the end result is likely to change them in ways they did not anticipate at the start of the scenario.

ParaCon is the most important cutting edge scientific and technological event on Al Amarja, if not in the world, and it is hosted by the leading paranormal figure on the island, Doctor Chris Seversen. In ‘Seversen’s Mysterious Estate’ the Player Characters get to attend the most exclusive high-tech event of the year, whether as bodyguards, as inventors, or simply at random! The scenario is one big party with a lot of guests and a lot going on, including the event being gatecrashed by an astral vampire (note this is not a spoiler, the author advises to tell the players at the start of the scenario about it attending the party in order to ramp up the tension) and a Presidentials wet works strike team. This is not so much a big sandbox as a highly populated sandbox with twenty-three NPCs to weave in and out of the event and several sequences of events for the Game Master to handle and run. It comes with good advice to that end, and it also provides a great set of NPCs which can be used beyond the party (that is, if they survive).

The last scenario in Welcome to the Island is ‘Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes’, which brings the Player Characters into contact with members of Al Amarja’s ruling family in a completely bonkers fashion. Everyone on the island receives a parcel containing a lifelike rubber mask of one of the D’Aubainnes, including the Player Characters. However, when anyone puts the mask on, they cannot take it off. Slowly the mask wearers begin to act like the D’Aubainnne family member they wear the mask off, so Jean-Christophe mask wearers starting teleporting short distances at random, Sir Constance mask wearers accrue wealth, and Sister Cheryl mask wearers become naturally disposed each other and feel stronger and better. The mask wearers also begin to hate the wearers of the other masks to the point that they will kill each other. As a rash of murders ripple back and forth across the island, it also becomes clear that someone is keeping a tally… ‘Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes’ best works if one of the Player Characters dons one of the masks and the scenario includes multiple suggestions as to why one or more of them would do so. Once they do, then the scenario becomes one of survival and investigation, closer to a more traditional type of scenario found in other role-playing games. The result is a disturbingly surreal end to the quartet.

Physically, Welcome to the Island is a bright, colourful book with excellent artwork. It is also well written, and the cartography is decent.

Welcome to the Island provides four good scenarios that are all different and all easy to slot into an ongoing campaign. In fact, they work better as part of an ongoing campaign because all four will have long term effects upon a campaign, as the various factions and conspiracies work out their agendas. The is exactly what the Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger needs, a showcase of just what the island of Al Amarja can deliver—stupendously surrealistic situations and wonderful weirdness backed up with good advice for the Game Master on how to handle all of that and run the scenarios too.

Over the Edge Again. Again.

Ever hear of Al Amarja? Yes, that Al Amarja. The island in the middle of the Mediterranean that everyone denies exists, ruled by president-for-life, Her Exaltedness Monique D’Aubainne, Historic Liberator and Current Shepherdess of Al Amarja? There is no way you would go there. After all, the state health care is mandatory, especially under Doctor Nusbaum’s experimental treatment programme, as is voting. Plus it is a brutal place with state control and overwatch, whether it is the seemingly ever-present members of Peace Force and their guard baboons (and if the baboons are not in Peace Force, they are everywhere), the nationalised state Total Taxis, and more. Sure, it is unrelentingly violent. There are fights on the streets and even organised in the middle of Roller Derby League matches, but nobody is allowed guns, and you really, really do not want to see what goes on in the ice skating—or maybe you do! (Since it is a full contact sport, baby, do I mean contact...) Then there are the public hangings as well as the Festival of Fate, the highlight of which is prisoners submitting themselves to Sister Cheryl’s Wheel of Fate at Temple of Divine Experience, the result of which possibly leads to the commuting of their sentence, but more likely death or torture and death. Of course, it is a commercial, trade, and scientific free-for-all, unfettered by all the regulation we have to suffer. So go to Broken Wings District for the best parties—whether to be seen amongst the elites or disrupt the event; Flowers District to party on the streets or experience that latest in Avant Garde artwork; spend time away from the island’s weirdness in the Sunken District with a fellow exile; and so much more… And there are supposed to be sorcerers and psychics on the island, Organ Grinders harvesting for their dead god, aliens, oh so many aliens, secret world bettering technologies which the corporations are hiding because they can and the same goes for cancer treatments, and more. Yes, that Al Amarja, which does not exist and never did because it is all some damned roleplaying game, Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger from back in the nineties, put out by some weirdly progressive little gaming company in Minnesota, Atlas Games. So, none of it is real.

Except it is.

Al Amarja is real. You can get there if you know how. Plus, if you are American, the state language is English and everyone takes dollars. They will take every other currency too, because it gets exchanged into the state currency, zlotys. So if it is real, where is it? Well, not where it was in the nineties. Now it is not in the Mediterranean, but rather in the Atlantic. Freedom is still valued above all, but the government monitors everything—for your safety of course. Weapons are outlawed—especially firearms, but everyone carries something. Medical care is free at the point of delivery, but so is medical malpractice and there are no laws against that. Drugs are totally illegal, but the barista will add a shot of something to your coffee. In the teensies and the twenties, you will need look harder though, as Al Amarja slipped down a parallel time stream where Donald Trump got elected president and he let Nazis walk the streets of America again. Which means that it is different from back in the nineties, but the same, right? So if you have been before, you still need to get ready for the heady rush of unreality, because this is a whole other unreality even if bits still look familiar. And the reason for Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger? Call it the ultimate in disinformation sponsored by the government of the Ultimate Democratic Republic of Al Amarja. And if a piece of propaganda worked the first time, why not do it again? After all you are never going there, you were never going there, and you never will go there—and Al Amarja was and is fake, is it really there?

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is real though. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign is no mere update. Instead, this is a re-envisioning of Over the Edge with everything old, but new. It is still a roleplaying game of counter-culture conspiracy, weird science, and urban danger combining conspiratorial factions, strange fringe abilities, cutting-edge technology, and cross-reality incursions all under the watchful eye of an all-powerful anarchic State. The revision also includes the rules and the mechanics, which forgoes the complexities of the original WaRP system, in favour of a more luck-based system designed to drive the story with extra twists—good and bad. There is nothing to stop a Game Master from running Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger using the original WaRP system, but it is not designed with that in mind. It should be noted that Over the Edge has always been cited as one of the progenitors of the storytelling movement in roleplaying and this latest edition very much draws from that movement. The result makes demands of both the Game Master and her players. It uses simple character creation that calls for strong conceptualisation and scope for storytelling over the course of one or more story arcs. It asks the players to be ready for said characters to encounter and accept random twists—both for good or ill—to the outcomes of their actions, whilst the Game Master has to be on her toes ready to create and suggest those twists. Lastly, the players are required to commit their dice to Over the Edge and no other campaign roleplaying game. (Fortunately, Over the Edge only uses a pair of six-sided dice each.)

A Player Character in Over the Edge can almost be anything, which includes paranormal and magical gifts. This excludes plot wrecking powers such as invincibility, invisibility, flying, phasing, mind reading, shape-changing, and others. So an ex-MMA fighter turned vigilante, a doctor searching for the cure to cancer, a burned out ex-FSB agent, a conspiracy theory seeking the truth, an extreme tourist, a would-be sorcerer with an intelligent rat sidekick, and more. A Player Character though, is always human, adheres to ‘Hollywood’ reality and tenacity of the everyman, described in broad details, fits in and interacts with the setting, and is new to the island. He is described in four features—a Main Trait, a Side Trait, a Trouble, and a Question Mark. The Main Trait is what the Player Character is or does, whilst the Side Trait is something that he can do in addition to the Main Trait. The Trouble is whatever will draw or force the Player Character to act in ways that are probably unsafe, if not dangerous, to him, but will always be interesting. The Question Mark is an aspect of the Player Character about which he is uncertain or he will break or he will transgress. For example, ‘Hard-Hearted-?’, ‘Friendly-?’, or ‘Fearless-?’. He also has a name, but this is chosen last and the other players can suggest ideas for it too.

Cheyanne Lovecraft
An ex-stripper turned sorcerer’s apprentice [Main Trait] who is Intuitive-? [Question Mark] and has a talking rat mentor [Side Trait].
Trouble: Cannot resist a sob story

In addition, a Player Character has a Level. In fact, everything in Over the Edge Third Edition has a Level, ranging from first to seventh. So this is not just a Player Character’s capabilities, but also locations, backgrounds, opponents, and story arcs. What the Level does is set the degree of challenge that a Player Character will face in comparison to his own capabilities, and a Player character will typically match that. So a First Level Story Arc is about ordinary people in over their heads, a Third Level Story Arc is about notable experts in their fields, even powerful, who can get into trouble as much as they can out, whilst a Fifth Level Story Arc is about characters beyond human. Sixth and Seventh Levels are godlike and out of reach of a Player Character. Typically, the default in Over the Edge Third Edition lies at the lower end of the scale. Opponents, or Game Master Characters, are on a similar scale as Player Characters, whilst locations and backgrounds get progressively weirder the higher up they are on the scale. Where a Player Character sits on that scale with regard to the world of Al Amarja around him has an influence on the mechanics of Over the Edge Third Edition.

Mechanically, in Over the Edge Third Edition, a player does not so much roll dice as ‘cast lots’, and lots are cast only when the outcome matters and then really to encompass everything in what the Player Character is attempting to do. Thus, sneak into a warehouse to obtain a sample of Voo, the drug that makes temporarily forget everything or get away from the Charters, the independent band of pirates that predates the United States and only men can join (so technically women are men in the Charters), that is one roll. If the roll is a success, then fine. If a failure, then maybe other rolls are called for. What a player needs to do in either situation is cast his lots and aim to get seven or eight, or more. That is a success.

If a Player Character is of a higher Level than the Game Master Character, location, or background, his player gets rerolls and he rerolls one or more dice, but must keep the result. If a Player Character is of a lower Level than the Game Master Character, location, or background, the Game Master gets rerolls that the player must make and keep the result. If the Levels are equal, then there are no rerolls. Casting lots also generates twists. Each three rolled when casting lots, generates a bad twist, whilst each four generates a good twist. So it is possible to roll one good twist or one bad twist; a ‘Lightning Bolt’ or two threes, which can a two bad twists or a double-bad twist; a ‘Twist Tie’, meaning a good twist and a bad twist’; or a ‘Crazy Eight’ and two good twists or a double-good twist. It is also possible to fail a casting of the lots and still have a good twist or succeed and cast lost with a bad twist. Whatever the nature of the twist, the Game Master brings something new and interesting into play, this perhaps being the capacity that the Game Master can have when running Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger. In addition, the players can have access to Karma which is shared between them and also allows a reroll. Together they can only share one use of Karama, but since it can be regained whenever doubles are rolled, it is always better to use it than not.

Combat uses the same casting lots mechanic. The primary outcome of a bad twist in combat is damage. Three strikes and a Player Character is possibly dying, and unless it comes from a strange, alien, or paranormal source, healing is slow. Depending upon their status and potency, Game Master characters can have one or more Saves, Game Master fiats which enables them to shrug off damage.

A good third of Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is dedicated to Al Amarja. This covers Al Amarja and the outside world, the presence and role of the state, culture media and media, and more. Every district is detailed, including why somebody might go there and what can be seen there, before the book details the gangs, groups, organisations, and more. Each one comes with an expanded explanation and advice for the Game Master as to how they can be used because ultimately, the Game Master is free to use them as she chooses, to pick and discard them as needed, and in the process, make Al Amarja hers and thus different to that of another Game Master. On the downside, this does mean that the island and its weirdness is densely presented, but on the plus side, the Game Master can in part tailor the island, its conspiracies, and its weirdness to the Player Characters and what is driving them.

For the Game Master there is further advice on running the new edition of Over the Edge, this in addition to the advice that appears throughout the book, as well as on engaging the Player Characters, creating Game Master Characters, to what degree she should be preparing her game, and advice in general. Like much of the rest of the book, it is accompanied by commentaries from both of the authors and there is also a full scenario, ‘The Sun Queen Must Die’. It is designed as an introductory one-shot, in which the players should create characters coming to Al Amarja in search of a reclusive guru. Their chance to meet him takes place at Sad Mary’s Bar & Grill, known for its girl fights and radical arts performances, at the height of an unsurprisingly adult Passover celebration. Events outpace them though and potentially take a darkly weird turn…

Physically, Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger brightly and colourfully presented. The artwork is excellent, the layout a little busy in places, and the index is great. However, it takes a while for the roleplaying game as written to click. The issue is that the first fifth of the book is devoted to rules which feel out of context and difficult to quite grasp until you get to the selling point of Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger and that is Al Amarja, its setting and its weirdness.

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is weird and weird. It is weird because of what the setting is and what it is made up of, but it is weird because its resolution mechanic, which is designed as much to throw something else, a good twist or a bad twist, into the mix as much as can resolve any one situation. It forces players to fall back upon roleplaying and their character’s story and motivation rather than whatever stats or numbers a Player Character would normally have to rely upon. The lack of stats and numbers do make character creation incredibly simple, but incredibly challenging in making a player create a character with story potential. There are examples, all of them fully worked out, but the resulting ready-to-play Player Characters are not immediately obvious at the back of the book. Further the designers push the weirdness further than might be found in another roleplaying game by having the Game Master reveal interior elements of that weirdness to the players which their characters would not be aware of. Thus, the play of the game takes on extra-narrative elements, an artifice that enforces the sense of unreality on Al Marja.

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is a darker, faster-playing, even more improbable random return to the unreality of Al Amarja. Its even more storytelling-focus and ultra-light mechanics make demands of both the Game Master and her players and consequently the degree of buy-in, whether because of those rules or the unreality of the setting, is greater than might be expected. Still, what it comes down to is that just like Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger back in 1992, what stands out in Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is Al Amarja, and that is worth overcoming whatever reservations you might have about the mechanics.

2000: Three Days to Kill

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles—and so on, as the anniversaries come up. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

—oOo—

The year 2000 is significant in the gaming hobby because it marked the beginning of the ‘d20 Era’, a period of unparalleled creativity by publishers large and small—and tiny, as they used the d20 System to power game after game, scenario after scenario, supplement after supplement, genre after genre. Some new, some old, some simple reskins. And there are publishers twenty or so years later who are still writing using the d20 System. As much as publishers explored different worlds and settings using the d20 System and its System Reference Document, at its heart was one roleplaying game, launched in the year 2000—Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition. Just as Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition is the top roleplaying game today, Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition was the top roleplaying game of its day, and the advent of the d20 System let other publishers play in the Dungeons & Dragons sandpit, just as many had back in the early days of the hobby. The aim of this series of reviews is not to review Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition itself, for that would not necessarily make for an interesting review. Rather it is to look at some of the interesting titles which came out of the d20 System boom that started twenty years ago.

From the off, the d20 System allowed publishers to ride the wave of popularity that was Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition, and that started at Gen Con 2000 with adventures from publishers such as Atlas Games. Better known for roleplaying games such as Over the Edge and Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying, Atlas Games would launch its Penumbra line of d20 System supplements with one of the very first adventures for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition—Three Days to Kill. What is notable about Three Days to Kill—beyond the fact that it was the first scenario published for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition, it that it was written by John Tynes, then better known as co-designer of Unknown Armies and the Delta Green setting for Call of Cthulhu. So what you had was a horror writer designing a fantasy adventure and that is evident in certain ‘Grim Dark’ tone to Three Days to Kill. The other notable fact about Three Days to Kill is that it sees me as a reviewer returning to where I started, having reviewed the scenario in 2001 at RPG.net. Of course this will be a more likely occurrence as we proceed into the next decade, but this does not mean that such titles are not worth reviewing or revisiting.

Designed for a party of player characters of First Level to Third Level, Three Days to Kill takes place in what is intended to be an isolated area in the Dungeon Master’s campaign. This is in and around the valley known as the Deeps, at the heart of which is Deeptown, a major stop along a long east-west trade route through a range of  mountains. The town’s primary interest is trade and supporting the constant movement of caravans which travel east and west along the trade road. The town council—as well as the Trade Circle, made up of Deeptown’s most important businessmen and which has a strong, if subtle grip on the town—are particularly concerned about maintaining the flow of goods and money through Deeptown. This includes accepting the presence of religions and faiths which would not be accepted elsewhere, such as the Sect of Sixty, which seeks to deceive and seduce through pleasure and hedonism. As long as no one temple or faith upsets the balance of trade through the town, they are allowed to continue ministering to their flocks. Upset or threaten that balance and the Town Council will see to it that the priests are driven from the town, the faith’s temple burned to the ground, and the faith banned in Deep Town. That is until the faith can renegotiate terms more favourable to the Town Council for the return of their priests to Deep Town.

Whilst there is an obvious balance being maintained in Deeptown, there is a more subtle counterpart beyond the earthen ramparts of the town. This is not maintained by the town council or the Trade Circle, but by a half dozen bandit ‘lords’ who prey upon the merchant caravans travelling in and out of Deeptown and the Deeps. They have learned to carry out well-executed assaults on the richer caravans, perhaps killing a few guards, but leaving travellers and merchants alive, in the case of the latter, perhaps to target them again on the way out of the valley or on a return journey. What they avoid is committing massacres. That only attracts the attention of the authorities in Deeptown and increases the likelihood of their retaliating.

As Three Days to Kill opens, neither of the top two bandit lords are happy with this balance of power. One has learned that his rival is seeking an alliance with outsiders to crush his forces and so take control of bandit operations in the valley. In order to counter this, he plans to hire a team of outside thugs, equip them, and have them assault the location where the rival is meeting his potential new allies. Not necessarily to kill, but to disrupt the meeting and in the process, undermine the alliance before it gets off the ground. Enter the player characters…

The player characters arrive in Deeptown almost like everyone else—accompanying or guarding a merchant caravan. They arrive just in time for the Festival of Plenty, an annual event put on by the Sect of Sixty. This is a pageant of wine, song, and ribald debauchery culminating in a performance of Passion of Arimbo, a popular folk tale about a farmer who follows a jolly devil into the rings of Hell. The player characters are free to participate in the festival or even work it as guards, and the scenario caters for either option. There is opportunity here for plenty of roleplaying for both the Dungeon Master and her players, enough for a session before the main plot comes into play. Alternatively, if the Dungeon Master wanted to run a shorter session, she could ignore the Festival of Plenty entirely and cut to the main plot. That though would be to miss a certain plot payoff if any of the player characters do get involved in the event’s debauchery, especially given who and what the Sect of Sixty actually worship.

The main plot to Three Days to Kill sees the player characters armed and equipped by one bandit lord to strike at another. The arming and equipping includes magical items as well as mundane ones, but the magical ones are very specific and for a specific purpose, all to be used during the assault. They consist of a Wand of Fireballs—with a single charge; an Orb of Sight—which provides low light, telescopic, and even X-ray vision; twenty Flare Pebbles; and a Sleep Arrow. A Wand of Fireballs with one charge rather than a Fireball Scroll because it models a rocket launcher; the Orb of Sight because it models low-light or IR Goggles; the Flare Pebbles because they model flashbang grenades; and the Sleep Arrow because it models a stun grenade or knockout dart. What this all models and what the climax of Three Days to Kill models—as it clearly states—is a Tom Clancy-style special ops mission in a fantasy setting. So the player characters will need to reconnoitre the villa where the meeting is taking place and plan how to carry out the assault. To that end the author includes advice on the strategies the player characters can use and their players can make skill rolls for their preparations as necessary.

Only on the journey to the villa will the player characters begin to learn that there is something amiss. There are others, priests of the Temple of the Holy Order from Deeptown, who were aware of the meeting between the bandit lord and his prospective allies—and they paid for it with their lives. However, this should not stop the party from continuing with its mission. And ideally, this mission should go as clockwork up until the point where it does not and all hell breaks loose—literally. For the truth of the matter is that the bandit lord is seeking an alliance with diabalists and when the player characters attack, they bring allies of their own. Ones that the player characters will not be expecting and are probably ill-equipped to deal with. And then there is the issue of just who killed the priests of the Temple of the Holy Order from Deeptown…

As written, Three Days to Kill consists of a simple background and a straightforward plot—at least as far as the player characters are concerned. In fact, the plot is quite complex and this will come out in play as it complications will disrupt the plans of the player characters, the bandit lord, and the Sect of Sixty. The background is detailed, covering the Deeptown and some of the surrounding Deeps valley, but is not specific, which has a couple of ramifications. One ramification is that Three Days to Kill is easily adapted to the setting of the Dungeon Master’s choice, or indeed the fantasy roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice. This is because the author leaves plenty of scope for the Dungeon Master to supply that flavour, whether that is renaming the Sect of Sixty and the Temple of the Holy Order or relocating Deeptown to fit her own campaign world. The other ramification is that beyond a certain grim tone to the situation and plot, Three Days to Kill is lacking in flavour.

For the players, Three Days to Kill presents an interesting challenge, especially with low Level player characters. The instinct for players and thus their characters is to kill, after all, it goes to the heart of dungeoneering and thus Dungeons & Dragons. Now should the player characters decide not to obey their instructions and rush in, events are likely to backfire on them. Once they attack and events escalate, should they stay and fight, then again events are likely to backfire on them. Three Days to Kill is very much a get in, perform the strike, and get out again mission, just like the special forces missions it is modelling.

Physically, Three Days to Kill is well written and nicely illustrated. The artwork of  Toren Atkinson, Scott Reeves, and David White gives the book a gritty, grainy feel which hints at the dirty nature of the situation in and around Deeptown. Yet the layout does feel cramped and the maps—obviously done using Pro Fantasy Software’s Campaign Cartographer 2—do not match that style. Some of them do feel too clean and unfussy in comparison to the artwork and sometimes feel too big for what they are depicting. The rest of the maps are more detailed and convey more information.

At the time of its release, Three Days to Kill, looked rather sparse in comparison to other adventures. After all, there is not a lot of plot and what there is takes up barely a third of the scenario. Nor is there much in the way of flavour beyond the grim, dark tone. And yet there is both adaptability and utility in Three Days to Kill, it is easier to use because of it, and not only is both plot and assault on the summit well-handled, they are supported with further plot hooks and consequences which make the setting of Deeptown and the Deeps  easier to add to a campaign. Although Three Days to Kill might be more memorable for being the first scenario published for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition, than for its adventure, it does mean that adventure is not handily serviceable.

—oOo—

John Tynes was kind enough to respond to my review when I tagged him on Twitter. He gave his recollections about how the scenario came about and thoughts about it since.

Reviews from R’lyeh thoughtfully reviews my #DnD adventure Three Days to Kill, the very first one published for 3rd Edition under the OGL twenty years ago this summer.

A short thread about this adventure. #WOTCstaff https://t.co/sq3jgzxIS2

— John Scott Tynes (@JohnScottTynes) March 23, 2020

Friday Filler: Never Bring a Knife

So the heist went like clockwork. You got in, emptied the safe, grabbed the jewelry, and filled all of the holdalls with cash. Now all you need to do is get it back to the rendezvous point and divide the loot. Except… you know that the gang has been infiltrated by undercover cops, either because of an informant or because you are one of the undercover cops. Unfortunately, you only know what you are—a loyal Hardened Criminal or a sneaky Undercover Cop, or a villainous Hardened Criminal or an upright Undercover Cop enforcing the law. Anyone else could be either… And as questions are asked, protestations of loyalty and honesty are made, tempers flare, and the only way the matter is going to be settled is with a showdown shootout!

And if that sounds like the plot of almost any ‘Heist Gone Wrong’ film, from Rififi to Reservoir Dogs, you would not be wrong. It is also the set-up to Never Bring a Knife, a social deduction game from Atlas Games which can be best described as Reservoir Dogs meets The Resistance. Accusations and bullets will fly in this game until one of the gang goes down in a hail of lead and loyalties are revealed, betrayals are suffered, and either the Hardened Criminals are arrested by the Undercover Cops or make their escape from the police. Designed for four to eight players, it should be no surprise that the adult and violent inspiration and game play of Never Bring a Knife means that it carries a minimum playing age of seventeen years old and over. Now this does not mean that younger participants cannot play Never Bring a Knife, the rules being simple enough, but parental permission should be sought. That said, not every game needs to be designed with younger players in mind, and that is certainly the case with Never Bring a Knife.

Besides the short rulebook, Never Bring a Knife consists of sixty two cards. Eight are handy Reference cards, though all of the cards used in play have clear instructions on their use on them. Ten are Role Cards, divided between five Hardened Criminal and five Undercover Cop cards. Sixteen are Wound Cards, used to track each gang member’s Wounds as he suffers them. The first gang member to suffer three Wounds triggers the end of the game. The rest of the cards form the play deck.

The Gun cards inflict Wounds, a gang member suffering a Wound for every two Gun cards which end up in his stack at the end of a round. Armour cards cancel out Gun cards, but only the one each. If this reduces the number of Gun cards in a gang member’s stack at the end of a round, he suffers one less, or even no Wounds. Money cards in a player’s stack at the end of a round can be kept and banked and is expended to heal a Wound or to be able to look at another gang member’s Role card. Crime cards are used to force a gang member to discard Money cards, which will prevent him from paying for healing or to look at other gang members’ Role cards. A Hit can be purchased using Money cards and used to inflict a Wound on a gang member or banked for later in the game, so great for that last inevitable betrayal so in keeping with the game’s genre. An Intel card enables a gang member to examine, but not reveal, another gang member’s Role card. The Mole card forces a gang member to swap his Role card with that of the Boss, which may or not change the gang member’s allegiance.

Game set-up is simple. Each gang member receives a Role card and can look at it. One last Role card is placed in the middle of the table to represent the Boss. He will come into play when the Mole card ends up in a gang member’s stack. The Hit card and the Mole card go into the discard pile and so will come into play in later rounds, hopefully when dramatically appropriate! Each gang member not only gets to look at his own Role card, but also of that to gang member to his left. This is each player’s initial clue as to the true identities of his fellow gang members.

Never Bring a Knife is played over a series of rounds. At the start of each round, each gang member receives four cards. They then take it in turn to play one card at a time. The first card a gang member plays must be on another gang member and the first card played on a gang member must be face up. After that, a gang member is free to play his cards on anyone, including himself, but all cards are now played face down. Obviously, a gang member will want to play Gun cards on his rivals—especially if he knows them to be of an opposite Role, but keep the Armour and Money cards for himself. The former as protection, the latter because they can be used to purchase further actions. Once a gang member has had four cards played onto his stack, he cannot receive any more, but play continues until each gang member has had four cards played on him.

Once done, each gang member reveals the four cards in his stack and resolves them. This can be done in any order and may involve spending Money cards saved from earlier rounds. Wounds will be suffered, Money cards will be used heal Wounds or examine the Role cards of other gang members or the Boss (in the middle of the table, so this is useful if the Mole card is played at any time), Armour cards to stop Gun cards, Intel cards to examine the Role cards of other gang members or the Boss, and so on. Money cards and Hit cards can be kept to be used in subsequent rounds. At the end of the round, each gang member keeps any Wounds he suffered during the round which he could not heal by spending Money cards or stop with an Armour card. If at the end of a round, any gang member has three Wound cards in front of him, then he has fallen, and not only does the game end, but everyone on his team—either Hardened Criminals or Undercover Cops—loses and everyone on the other team wins.

Mechanically, play is quick, and the four-card hand combined with the four-card limit on each gang member’s stack keeps everything simple and elegant. A gang member might be killed in a couple of rounds, but a game will probably last a round or two longer than that. Physically, Never Bring a Knife is nicely presented. The rule book is easy to read, whilst the cards themselves are clear and easy to understand. A nice touch is that the artwork varies on each of the Role cards and different designs are used on the Gun cards. This gives the game a little more variety in its look. 

What is interesting in Never Bring a Knife as a social deduction game, is not just that each gang member will need to identify the Hardened Criminals and Undercover Cops in the gang, but will need to keep himself and his fellow team members alive. So the Money cards play as big a role in the game as the Gun cards. Initially each gang member will know about himself and the gang member to his left, whilst also wondering about the gang member to his right who knows whether he is a Hardened Criminal and a Undercover Cops. This is each gang member’s initial clue, the second being the first cards played on each gang member, which may or may not suggest their allegiance. After that, gang members will have to rely on Money and possibly Intel cards to discover who their friends and enemies are.

Throughout the game though, gang members are free to say whatever they want to each other, so they can agree to work together, issue threats, spread lies, debate about the Roles of their fellow gang members, share information, and even outright lie. A gang member’s role will only be revealed to everyone at the end of the game. It is here that gang members are free to roleplay too and given the genre which inspired it, Never Bring a Knife is ripe for film quotes and film-inspired roleplaying, which adds to the flavour of the game. Or, of course, a gang member might have enough of all the talking, cajoling, and threatening, lose his temper and just blaze away with his Gun (cards). Lastly, both the Hit and Mole cards have the capacity to add last minute twists to the outcome of the game if played at the right time, further emulating the genre that the game is inspired by. 

Never Bring a Knife is a fun stand-up, shootout showdown, which fans of heist films will enjoy roleplaying their way through. Its simple rules enable gang members to play out the story of heist gone wrong in hail of bullets, desperation, and recriminations. 

Conspire Like Its 1992

It is interesting to note that the three great modern roleplaying games of the 1990s—a decade dominated by fear of the New World Order, the belief in UFOs and UFOlogy, and the birth of the digital age—are all conspiracy roleplaying games. Two of these, Pagan Publishing’s Delta Green for use with Call of Cthulhu and Conspiracy X from first New Millennium Entertainment and then Eden Studios, Inc., published in 1997 and 1996 respectively, are post-Magic: The Gathering, digital age settings of global scale. The other is none of these. Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger, published by Atlas Games by 1992, is set on a single island that almost nobody has heard of and is rife with not with just a few conspiracies as Delta Green and Conspiracy X are, but a multitude, involving altruists, extra-dimensionals, extraterrestrials, mad scientists, mobsters, religious cults, street gangs, and of course, traditional conspiracies a la the Illuminati. All this takes place on Al Amarja, an obscure island off the coast of Italy in the Mediterranean, liberated from Mussolini by president for life, Her Exaltedness Monique D’Aubainne and transformed into an independent state which steadfastly refuses to join the United Nations or any other international body and does not maintain an embassy anywhere in the world. Here, where English is the official language and the American dollar is the official currency, the discerning businessman can trade unencumbered by copyright and trademark laws and safety regulations, and law enforcement resistant to bribery. Worshipers are free to follow what faith they like as they do not disrupt the peace, so Christian Scientists, Scientologists, and Satanists can be found on the island as can ‘Sommerites’, religiously oriented fans of rock star Karla Sommers. There are no churches or other official places of worship on Al Amarja, except for The Temple of the Divine Experience, a combination of multi-religious worship centre and dance club. Colonised and in turn conquered Greeks, Romans, North African Muslims, Catalans, Castilians, various Italian states, and ultimately, the newly unified Italy, Al Marja is a crossroads in the Mediterranean, through which smuggled ivory and other forbidden animal products can be trafficked, legal and illicit business can be conducted, and persons of all kinds and come and go—if the right palms are greased that is… Meanwhile the discerning tourist can find all manner of pleasures illegal elsewhere, or in the case of narcotics, illegal, but not policed by the Peace Force. Though not guns, private ownership being extremely frowned upon and strictly policed by the only armed body on the island—the Peace Force.

There are many reasons to come to Al Amarja. Off the beaten track tourism or to take up a business opportunity are obvious draws, or perhaps you are looking for someone. Perhaps you want to conduct scientific research or medical experiments unhindered by ethical guidelines, then Doctor Chris Seversen or Doctor Fürchtegott Nusbaum might be interested in your work or maybe D’Aubainne University might offer you a grant. Perhaps you want psychic powers? Either way, there is nowhere better to study fringe science than Al Amarja where scientists are known as Oppenheimers. Perhaps you are a devotee of rock star, Karla Sommers, then Al Amarja is home to her true fans. Or is there some secret organisation you want to track down, whether to expose or join? Then according to some conspiracy theorists that organisation—be they secret masters, lizardmen, aliens from outer space, and so on—operates on Al Amarja.

All of these character concepts—and more—are supported by the simplicity of the rules for character generation. A character is defined by four traits, three positive and one a flaw. The first of the positive traits is a character’s central trait, which essentially describes what he is, for example, ‘Baltimore Homicide Detective’ or ‘Avenging Mother’. Where the central trait can be fairly broad, the other two positive traits have to be more specific. They are side traits and they define either a particular skill or aspect of the character, for example, ‘Good Behind the Wheel’ or ‘Charismatic’. One of these three traits is a character’s superior trait, one his good trait, and the third an average trait. All traits and flaws are rated in a number of six-sided dice, so the superior is assigned four dice, the good trait three dice, and the average trait just two dice. The fourth trait is a character’s flaw, for example, ‘Obsessed with the New Age’ or ‘Speed Junkie’.In addition, every trait—including the flaw—has a ‘sign’, something that can be noticed by others, for example, ‘Jittery’ for ‘Speed Junkie’ or ‘Always looking to frame a shot’ for ‘Photographer’.

Beyond the traits, a character also needs a motivation, a secret—preferably a dark secret, and someone they hold to be important, whether someone they know or someone they hold to be an ideal. Lastly, each character needs an illustration, hand drawn by the player, no matter how bad. 

The character creation process is mechanically very quick. Coming up with a concept and appropriate traits is necessarily as easy because of the freedom for a player to create what he wants, but the process is partly collaborative because the Game Master has to work with each player to define their character to help bring out what is interesting about the character and what will make a good story. The process is slightly easier in that there is a set way of interpreting a particular trait, so that two characters might have the same trait, but describe them differently. The process is also very open, so whilst some sample traits and flaws are listed, a player does not have to choose from them and can build almost any type of character, from the most mundane to the most powerful. The rules though specifically advise players against power gaming when designing their characters since it is likely to garner their characters greater attraction and greater trouble.

Vittoria Oborín

• The ‘perfect’ housewife

Languages: English, Italian, Russian
Attacks: 2d (knitting needles)
Defence: 2d (Sometimes Oleg threw crockery!)
Hit Points: 14
Traits

• Mother knows best (Superior) 4d: “Whatever the situation, whatever the drama, whatever the danger, I am sure that we can find a way to deal with and learn how to be better people.”
• Prim & Proper 3d: Always looks her best, no matter the situation. The right outfit for the right occasion.
• Intuition 2d: “Sometimes I just get a funny feeling about someone…” (Sign: a twitch of the nose.)
• McMafia Widow (Flaw): “I can’t help what my husband and my father were, and I never knew anything about their criminal enterprises. It was also so shocking when I found out. No, really…”

Secret: Serial Killer
Motive: To find her backpacking son, Daniel

Mechanically, Over the Edge employs simple dice pools rolled to exceed a task number—4 for a very easy task; 7 for an easy task; 11 for a moderate task; 18 for a difficult task; 18 for a very difficult task; and 21 for a nearly impossible task. The difficulty for an opposed task is the opponent’s roll. A player simply rolls the dice for the appropriate trait to beat the target difficulty. The more a result exceeds the target difficulty, the greater the success, whilst equaling the target difficulty results in a draw and the more a result is lower than the target difficulty, the worse the outcome. If a character has an appropriate trait, then his player rolls the dice for that trait, otherwise he rolls two dice if an average person could do it. If a character has an advantage, then his player gets to roll a bonus die and drop the lowest die from the roll. Conversely, a penalty die means that the highest die is dropped. Bonus and penalty dice cancel each other out, whereas a flaw reduces the number of dice a player will roll.

In addition, a character also has dice in his experience pool, beginning play with one. They are earned for good play by the Game Moderator and can be used for two purposes. The first is to add to a character’s dice pool, just a single die for each action. Once used, an experience die is spent for that session and cannot be used until the next, but the reason for their use has to be justified in narrative terms. The other use is to improve a character, to improve an existing trait or taking a new one. This costs five experience dice and again needs to be reflected in terms of the narrative.

All this covered in a chapter of less than thirty pages, including ten pages for character generation, four pages for the base mechanics and optional rules, and eight pages on combat, which is outcome based. Combat is handled as opposed rolls, with the difference between a successful roll and the failed roll being multiplied by the weapon type to determine the amount of damage inflicted. Combat can be very deadly, especially when firearms are involved. The Game Moderator has her counterpart to this chapter, which is of roughly the same length. This gives her advice aplenty, starting with how to edit a player character to help it fit in with the player group and not be too powerful, and how to handle both money and the mechanics. Its focus is twofold. The first is on fringe powers, encompassing magic spells and psionic powers, with some twenty of the latter being listed, such as Automatic Writing, Hunches, and Sub-Vocalisation. Only a few magic spells are listed, leaving the Game Moderator and player to work together to create what the player wants his character to learn (unfortunately, there is little advice to that end). Learning either takes a lot of effort and experience dice and there is a chance that all that effort is for nought and the dice are wasted.

The other focus is on running Over the Edge, covering starting the series, how to use the setting and keep track of everything, handling the weird and the remarkable, designing and running adventures, how to screw with the player characters, and so on. It is a really good section, backed up with an example of how and how not to run a session, and how to adjust for errors and so on.

The opening players’ chapter and the Game Moderator’s chapter together amounts to a quarter of the Over the Edge, leaving the rest to what is essentially background to Al Amarja. This begins with an ‘Overview’, an introduction to the island intended for those native to Al Amarja—or at least have lived there for a while—and are familiar with the basics of living and getting by there, including geography, climate, politics and power groups, law and order, economics, population and customs (including why the noose is a fashion item), language—primarily English, but with five different ways to say yes, hot spots and places to avoid, drugs, and media. This runs to just six pages and really amounts to sets of pointers. They are points to start from for the Game Moderator, for whom the rest of the book is designed for.

This begins by building on the ‘Overview’ with a ‘Deep Overview’, expanding on the basic information presented so far before subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects of Al Amarja. So ‘The Edge’ presents the premier city on the island, whilst ‘At Your Service’ details various businesses in the city. ‘Forces to be Reckoned With’ presents the aliens, artists, bureaucrats, conspiracies, cults, gangs, individuals, politicians, rubbish collectors, scientists, students, vigilantes, and more who have a hand, an interest, and some influence in what goes on on the island of Al Amarja. Every place, every establishment or institution, every organisation is accompanied by a Game Moderator character and a story hook, giving the Game Moderator numerous ideas and suggestions for her game. The number of power groups and conspiracies on the island, ranging from inner and outer aliens, organised crime, and religious cults to politicians, weird scientists, and occultists could be seen as a problem when running Over the Edge, threatening to overwhelm a campaign, but the point is clearly made that the Game Moderator should really only concentrate on a few rather than all of them, leaving some to become interested in the player characters’ activities later on. One very useful addition here is a table listing all of the organisations, groups, and cults and their relationships with each other which nicely helps the Game Moderator begin to grasp the web of conspiracies which covers Al Amarja.

To support the running of the roleplaying game, the Game Moderator is provided with three scenarios or plots to get her player characters involved in the wonder and weirdness of Al Amarja. The three are designed as one-shots, intended to be played each time with different characters before the players create the characters that they want to play in a full campaign. As a means to showcase the rules and also the three styles of play in Over the Edge—espionage, supernatural mystery, and partying over the Edge—this is fine, but it feels like a waste of three decent scenarios with which to feed the characters into that campaign. The first scenario, ‘Contact on Al Amarja’, casts the characters as bodyguards for a courier delivering a message on the island, which in true espionage style turns into a MacGuffin hunt. In the second scenario, ‘The Bodhisattva’, the characters are fringe scientists on an information exchange in and of course it goes weird, whilst in the third, ‘Party on Al Amarja’, the players are free to create a group of friends, colleague, or family members, who go on vacation on the island. None of the three is really that straightforward, the second being event and time driven, whilst the third is much more of a freeform with greater capacity for the input of the Game Moderator. Given how weird Al Amarja is meant to be—and is—it is strange that the first scenario misses out on the opportunity for the characters to enjoy all of the delights of the airport, literally the first port of call for travellers coming to the island. Rounding out the three out is another trilogy, this time of detailed campaign outlines, each basically given two pages for the Game Moderator to build from and each really very good. 

Physically, Over the Edge is well presented for a book of its time—the second edition was released in 1997—and is certainly well written. It is entirely black and white throughout, clean and tidy, with some decent pieces of artwork, though some of it is underwhelming by modern standards. One issue with the content is the plea made to reviewers not to reveal the roleplaying game’s secrets and even over thirty years later that is difficult adhere to. That said, the setting of Al Amarja is so dense with secrets it is difficult to know where to start.

Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is a toolkit. The tools are inspired by the works of William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, David Lynch, and Robert Anton Wilson, amongst others. The result is Interzone meets Mulholland Drive, a hive of wretched scum and cultists, a kitchen sink of conspiracies put through a surreal blender, strange tourism on the American dollar, the weird accepted by the ordinary, and the player characters confronting this mess and getting used by it. Plus there is still room for the Game Moderator to add her own conspiracies and cults. Yet as much as the conspiracies have their plots, Over the Edge is not necessarily intended to be a plotted roleplaying game, but rather more a freeform, improvised style of game, with the Game Moderator having a idea of the antagonists’ plots whilst reacting to the actions of the players and their characters. This is something that would have been quite radical in 1992 when the first edition was published and is thoroughly supported by the simple, but solid mechanics which although designed to accommodate innumerable concepts and ideas, do not impede the narrative. The essays on narrative and storytelling are groundbreaking and lay the groundwork for the roleplaying games that the designers would create in the years to come and doubtless would influence game design in the late 1990s (after the Collectable Card Game craze) and the early 2000s.

Above all, what shines through in Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is the setting. Al Amarja is a Game Moderator’s dream, rich in detail and rife with ideas, populated with plots which will fuel a campaigns for months and months. Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is as fresh and as modern as it was in 1992—add protagonists and let the weirdness begin.

—oOo—

In 2012, Atlas Games published a twentieth anniversary edition of Over the Edge—and it is this version of the roleplaying game that is being reviewed. Aside from the fetching blue leatherette hardcover, it includes a sixteen page full colour insert that consists of five mini essays from the publisher, the designers, and subsequent contributors. These explore the game’s origins in the APA, Alarums & Excursions, and beyond, placing Over the Edge in context and grounding it in the early nineties—and even the eighties. These even the suggestion that Over the Edge could be shifted back into the Reagan era along with a list of suitable props. This would firmly place it before the Information Age, but the Over the Edge 20th Anniversary Edition was published in 2012, a decade or so after the start of the Information Age. The game’s designer comes firmly down on the side of the argument that the two do not mix and if they did, on Al Amarja, it would not be so much the Information Age as the Misinformation Age.

Given how light the rules are in Over the Edge, it is surprising that they get revisited in these essays. In 1992, those rules were radically light and fast, designed to facilitate the narrative rather than simulate a story, but as radical as the storytelling mechanics were over twenty five years ago, the design of mechanics has moved on. In fact, they moved on a decade after Over the Edge was published, emphasising the same types of storytelling as the roleplaying game did. So the designer examines the new mechanics of the past decade (this was 2012, remember) and suggests ways in which to incorporate them into Over the Edge. These include ‘Fail Forward’, the ‘Kicker’ from Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer for starting each session with something compelling, the ‘Beliefs’ system from Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, and running short campaigns a la Paul Czege’s My life with Master. In turn, these feel like a natural fit for Over the Edge and its storytelling style.

—oOo—

Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger only received two editions and bar the Over the Edge 20th Anniversary Edition from 2012, has been out of print for several years. Between those two editions there was very little change to the setting of Al Amarja and given that the second edition was published in 1997, the setting has not been updated in some twenty years. All that changes with Over the Edge: A Roleplaying Game of Weird Urban Danger, a third edition of the roleplaying game currently being funded on Kickstarter campaign, which will see changes to the setting and the mechanics, taking account of the changes in game design and storytelling games that Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger helped start.

Free RPG Day 2018: Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts

Now in its eleventh year, Saturday, June 16th was Free RPG Day and with it came an array of new and interesting little releases. Invariably they are tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. Atlas Games rarely contributes to Free RPG Day, but for 2018 offered us Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts. This is a quick-start for the 1998 roleplaying game of power and consequences in which broken and obsessed people risk everything to change the world. That world is just like ours, but Magick is real and essentially willpower multiplied by understanding equals what you wished for. Designed as an introduction to the Unknown Armies Third Edition Roleplaying Game funded on Kickstarter in 2016, explains the game’s concepts and rules, gives a short scenario to play through, and four pre-generated player characters to use with the scenario.

The Occult Underground can be found anywhere and is populated by all manner of fantastic and fearsome persons. Some of these creepy weirdos are Chargers capable of altering the world in ways no human can and so hold positions of power, whilst others are Checkers, those who seen the weird and the wonderful and are drawn to ‘check’ it out some more… Most player characters are Checkers, capable of performing certain magicks. Notable amongst these are Avatars and Adepts. The former aspire to become Archetypes—such as the Mother, the Naked Goddess, and the Mad Scientist—and the more like an Archetype an Avatar acts or imitates, then the greater his magic and the more he can bend reality. The latter can Do Stuff, but getting to Do Stuff relies upon an Adept’s obsession with something like sex, cars, guns, cleanliness, and so on. For example, of the four pre-generated player characters in the adventure, two are Avatars and two are Adepts. Vince Kirkland is an Avatar of The Guide and can always send someone in the right direction or give good advice, whilst Jada Parker is an Avatar of The Warrior and can pursue a purpose without suffering stress and inspire those around her. Ellen Kaloudis is a Fulminturgy Adept, a gunslinger who knows spells such as Serious Demeanour and .45 Caliber Exorcism, whereas Greg O’Neil is a Cinemancy Adept who can enforce cliches with spells like Stock Wardrobe and What Could Go Wrong? Their spells require Charges which can be generated by wearing a totem, like a gun for lengthy periods for the Fulminturgy Adept, and enacting movie cliches for the Cinemancy Adept. Essentially the differences between Avatars and Adepts are that Avatars have fewer magickal powers, but can use for free, whereas Adepts have more, but need to power them with Charges.

Characters are defined by what they have seen—Shocks; what they can do—Abilities; what drives them—Passions and Obsessions; who they are—Identity; and who they know—Relationships. Shocks represent the mental trauma a character has suffered from the worst effects of Helplessness, Violence, the Unnatural, and so on. Measured on a set of meters, they track how a character reacts to them, the possibility being that they will become hardened to them and callous or burn out from the stress. Abilities are broad talents like Dodge, Knowledge, Notice, Pursuit, Secrecy, and so on. There are just ten of them. A character has three Passions—Fear, Rage, and Noble, as well as an Obsession, the latter typically tied to his Identity. This Identity is what the character does, typically a role like Police Detective or Taxi Driver. Identities can substitute an Ability where appropriate. So in a car chase, a character with the Police Detective Identity might use it to substitute the Pursuit Ability. Similarly, a character’s Relationships—Favourite, Guru, Mentor, Protégé, and Responsibility—can substitute an Ability or identity where appropriate. Abilities, Identities, and Relationships are all measured as percentiles, typically in the range of 20% to 60%.

Mechanically, Unknown Armies uses a percentile system. Rolls of 01 are critical successes, 00 of critical fumbles, whilst matched successes—successes in which doubles are roll—are unusually good, and matched failures—failures in which doubles are roll—are unusually bad. On occasion, such as when acting in accordance with a character’s Passion or rolling as part of his Identity, a player can flip-flop result, either to get a successful result or to get a better success. Beyond this, Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts covers the rules for Stress checks, coercion, combat, medicine, and therapy. Of these, Stress checks are a little like Sanity rolls in Call of Cthulhu, but designed to account for more types of shock and to have a more immediate effect upon what a character can do. The explanation for how the mechanics work are not as clear as they could be and Game Master will need to give them a very careful read to understand and be able to impart that to her players. Nevertheless, it is clear from the rules that Unknown Armies is a fairly brutal system and the setting quite harsh.

In comparison, the explanation of the abilities of the two Avatars and the two Adepts are much more clearly written and it is here that Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts begins to be more flavoursome. Good explanations of all four are provided as well as backgrounds for each of the Cabal, the quartet who make up the quick-start’s pre-generated characters. Character sheets are provided for each.

The flavour and detail continue in ‘Maria in Three Parts’, the scenario in Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts. It opens with all four characters receiving a text from Detective Renee Jefferson, a shared contact, requesting their aid. The local police department has come across the weirdness of the occult underground before and in response, which has led to the establishment of ‘Blue Line’. This is an unofficial network of law enforcement officials set up to help each other when dealing with the occult, which includes Detective Renee Jefferson. Contact has been lost with one of Blue Line’s more reliable consultants, so she wants the player characters to go check on her. The resulting scenario involves a good mix of investigation and manic action, hopefully culminating in confrontation with an entertainingly snazzy antagonist. It should provide a good or two’s worth of gaming, though part of the first session will taken up by a fair amount of explanation.

Although Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts is attractively presented, it is not as well organised as it could be. The problem is that the backgrounds for each of the four pre-generated characters are separate to their character sheets, and this is compounded by the fact that the magickal abilities for each of them is again presented separate to them. This means that the Game Master needs to do some physical printing and separating out, and then collating of the sheets. Certainly the layout of the booklet could have been better organised.

Of all the releases for Free RPG 2018, Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts is perhaps the most difficult and the most challenging to both run and play. The rules are quite intricate and need a careful read through as the concepts behind both feel underwritten and are far from easy to grasp, let alone pass onto the other players. Yet both rules and concept support a fun quartet of pre-generated characters and an engaging scenario, and this is where Free RPG 2018, Unknown Armies: Maria in Three Parts really shines.