|
I failed my save against charm and backed the Razor Coast Kickstarter (though not at a level that would lead to...discussions, let us say, with spouse). In principle, I have a great deal of appreciation for Kickstarter and similar websites; getting things like Razor Coast, Jeff Dee's artwork, Swords & Wizardry, and Rappan Athuk into print is to be lauded. However, there is a darker side....
Having backed Razor Coast, Kickstarter popped up a few other projects that I might be interested in backing as well. Hmmm. Kingdom Death: Monster? No, boardgame. Tomorrow: an Apocalyptic Nightmare? No, doesn't sing. Et Tu? The Murder Mystery Evening Generator? Mneh. And then I saw it.
The Synnibarr Kickstarter project.
No, I'm not going to link to it. You can find it yourself, if you're really interested. I'm afraid to look at it, for fear that it might be close to reaching its goal...and I would prefer not to live in a world where there are that many people willing to pay for it. What next, the F.A.T.A.L. Kickstarter?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
He looks kind of like Crispin Glover.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
John, Synnibarr is not a good game, but I'm going to try to sell you on what makes Synnibarr a great game.
It's not the system, the game mechanics, the nuts-and-bolts. Those are all very first-generation. (And the Kickstarter tries for a saner system.)
It's the way that Synnibarr is unabashedly the most wahoo game setting. We hollowed out Mars, terraformed the interior, loaded giant rockets on the back, made a generation ship out of the whole thing, and sent it flying through interstellar space. Some of the FTL engines leaked and made the radioactive wastelands. Centuries thereafter, that's the game setting. Psionics! Magic! Mutations! Bio-syntha cyborgs! And daggers that do 1d4 damage.
It's like first-edition Gamma World, but with superheroes thrown in among the post-apocalyptic fantasy. It's what Clinton Boomer, Tim Hitchcock, and Nic Logue would do if they were told to write a Saturday morning cartoon show, with instructions to go crazy. Not just cyborgs. Bio-Syntha Cyborgs, dude!
It's not Pathfinder. It's not a game that delimits what level a small Cavalier has to be before she is allowed to ride a giant boar, or whether monks can use brass knuckles. It's a game where you can run so fast, the author decided he needed to write rules for turning radius and deceleration. That's how fast you can run.
Is the Nicola Tesla of RPGs.
Every role-playing game is adolescent power fantasy. Synnibarr is just a little bit more of each.
Hnn. Reminds me of phantasy star a bit.
|
|
Chris, maybe I've gotten jaded in my old age, but at this point in the development of RPGs I don't think it's possible to be great without being at least good. Back In The Day, there were a huge number of people whose creativity was catalyzed by exposure to D&D, and a whole lot of them did things with house rules that eventually turned into completely different systems...at least some of which had nothing going for them other than being not-D&D; a fair number of which had little going for them other than pure creativity untrammeled by the restraints of Apollonian rationality (and spelling & grammar, in most cases...); and a few of which were not-D&D, creative, and actually able to be played from the rule book. (Some parlayed that reactive creativity into success in other areas; see Steve Brust and Patricia Wrede, among many others.)
IMNSHO, Synnibarr sits firmly in the second group. It's Raven's campaign world and house rules, with bits bolted on as he thought of them or realized a need for them, and I've played with and heard about lots of people who did similar things. The odd little pocket universe (based on Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers) that Emerson Mitchell put together for a convention game in early 1978, frex, with its three little bitty suns, each of which was orbited by three cubical worlds (IIRC, some of them had spherically-symmetric gravity, so you had to climb up to the edges and corners; the rest had gravity normal to the plane of the cube, so walking over edges was kind of trippy).
tl;dr version: I wouldn't be a gamer if I didn't, at some level, enjoy adolescent power fantasies, but these days I prefer them to meet a certain minimum standard of quality.
It's what Clinton Boomer, Tim Hitchcock, and Nic Logue would do if they were told to write a Saturday morning cartoon show, with instructions to go crazy.
This both amuses and terrifies me.
|
Contributor
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It's what Clinton Boomer, Tim Hitchcock, and Nic Logue would do if they were told to write a Saturday morning cartoon show, with instructions to go crazy.This both amuses and terrifies me.
Actually, if you told the three of us to write a cartoon show and go crazy, it'd never get finished on time to make the kickstarter.
Much love to the project... but the above statement is fact.
Wow.
I had never heard of Synnibarr, but looking at the Kickstarter, and some reviews of the game gave me a great laugh for the last hour.
I appreciate that small treat :)