Over the Edge Is BACK, Baby...
Many many years ago I wandered into the bookstore at the Palouse Empire mall in a little town with a big name. The manager at the time, who was a fellow member of the Palouse Empire Science Fiction Association, spotted me, grinned ear to ear, and said something along the lines of "wait here! I have something for you!" She disappeared into the back room for a few minutes, then emerged with this green softcover book. She thrust it into my hands. "I just played this for the first time last night and thought of you. I will sell you my personal copy of the game on the condition that you run it!"
That was my introduction to Al Amarja*, and to this day it remains one of my favorite games. I still have that old, battered, dog-eared first edition copy, and a copy of the better organized and slicker second edition as well as the special hardcover twentieth anniversary version of the second edition with some additional asides. (OtE is part of what gave us the setting of Eberron? Who knew?) I bought all the supplements, the players' survival guide, scoured the website for more, got the fanzine (all four issues), and somewhere I have a little sample copy of another bit done for OtE about an obscure Egyptian deity who has been hella fun to play with over the years. I haven't run it in a long, long time, and in truth my tendency has always been to enjoy the weirdness without getting too much into the dangerous parts, but it's one that stays on my list. I've blended other games with it, and one of my favorite such mashup is Burn Notice, Martian Edition...there are worse places to end up than Miami, dontcha know. (And the fan hack that blended OtE with Feng Shui, which I have long since lost in the mists of dead hard drives and recycled printouts, was a thing of elegance, beauty, and equal opportunity arse kicking.)
Now, there are a few drawbacks to the game's metaplots. The first and second editions did not make it terribly clear, but the 20th Anniversary Hardcover noted that the original game is officially set "sometime in the 1980's" and at least one of the original major plots was set to go off on January 1, 2000...which, when you're running it in 200x, can get a bit weird. See first ed Cyberpunk for more of the same. The future arrived and our flying cars didn't, man. (laugh) But these things happen, and the metaplots were still all kinds of awesome and if perchance they contradicted one another in places...that just makes more room for the PCs to save the day, or at least save their own bacon.
So of course you might expect that when they kickstarted a new edition for the 25th Anniversary I would be all over that. And you'd be right.
I have finally gotten around to poking through the backer preview, and this is not a re-tread of the 1992 version of things. There are a lot of familiar names and places, but assuming that the Island we all know and love is the same as it always was will be hazardous to your health. The system has changed to be more fluid, more narrative, and (in my humble opinion) more fitting the nature of life on the island. Awesome as WaRP was in 1992 compared to the clunkier and more crunchy things that then dominated the hobby, there has been a quarter century of exploration done since, and what was once bold and refreshing then feels a bit stilted now. So bravo to the gang at Atlas for having the courage to jettison the framework! This of course means that character generation has also changed, but not as much as you might think. It's still pretty wide open, and if anything there are more limits on your available design space now, but they're limits that make sense. (And as the man says, everyone who's a fan of WaRP already has a copy, and why just redo what has already been done? It isn't like the 1992 version isn't out there, can't be had for love or money, and will stop working once the new edition is released.)
We're now about six months out from the official release, assuming everything stays on the originally estimated schedule, and I'm penciling in another little tour of the Edge soonish. In fact, my first thought upon getting a game suggested by the awesome Ben Woerner (Dark Shadows) was...hey! How about a spy campaign set in Al Amarja? That'd be awesome! John Le Carre and Phillip K.Dick and Octavia Butler write a miniseries...
* For those of you who are not familiar with this game, I usually describe it thusly: take Wild Palms, Twin Peaks, Blade Runner, The Naked Lunch, Repo Man, and every episode of the Twilight Zone you've ever watched. Toss them in an industrial grade blender and set on frappe for thirty seconds. Chill, season to taste, and serve. At the time of release it was one of the stranger settings available on the market, although a later game by Atlas called Unknown Armies got just as strange in different ways, and finding ways of blending the two is something I spent a while doing.
While UA recently had a new edition come out, I was never really able to get into that one as much...although I have a few contributions on the fan wiki that might still be there and there was a collaborative novel done through that site that was absolutely fan-freakin'-tastic. If you like your Urban Fantasy with a post-modern twist on the magick, and don't mind your gaming gritty, it might be worth your time.
That was my introduction to Al Amarja*, and to this day it remains one of my favorite games. I still have that old, battered, dog-eared first edition copy, and a copy of the better organized and slicker second edition as well as the special hardcover twentieth anniversary version of the second edition with some additional asides. (OtE is part of what gave us the setting of Eberron? Who knew?) I bought all the supplements, the players' survival guide, scoured the website for more, got the fanzine (all four issues), and somewhere I have a little sample copy of another bit done for OtE about an obscure Egyptian deity who has been hella fun to play with over the years. I haven't run it in a long, long time, and in truth my tendency has always been to enjoy the weirdness without getting too much into the dangerous parts, but it's one that stays on my list. I've blended other games with it, and one of my favorite such mashup is Burn Notice, Martian Edition...there are worse places to end up than Miami, dontcha know. (And the fan hack that blended OtE with Feng Shui, which I have long since lost in the mists of dead hard drives and recycled printouts, was a thing of elegance, beauty, and equal opportunity arse kicking.)
Now, there are a few drawbacks to the game's metaplots. The first and second editions did not make it terribly clear, but the 20th Anniversary Hardcover noted that the original game is officially set "sometime in the 1980's" and at least one of the original major plots was set to go off on January 1, 2000...which, when you're running it in 200x, can get a bit weird. See first ed Cyberpunk for more of the same. The future arrived and our flying cars didn't, man. (laugh) But these things happen, and the metaplots were still all kinds of awesome and if perchance they contradicted one another in places...that just makes more room for the PCs to save the day, or at least save their own bacon.
So of course you might expect that when they kickstarted a new edition for the 25th Anniversary I would be all over that. And you'd be right.
I have finally gotten around to poking through the backer preview, and this is not a re-tread of the 1992 version of things. There are a lot of familiar names and places, but assuming that the Island we all know and love is the same as it always was will be hazardous to your health. The system has changed to be more fluid, more narrative, and (in my humble opinion) more fitting the nature of life on the island. Awesome as WaRP was in 1992 compared to the clunkier and more crunchy things that then dominated the hobby, there has been a quarter century of exploration done since, and what was once bold and refreshing then feels a bit stilted now. So bravo to the gang at Atlas for having the courage to jettison the framework! This of course means that character generation has also changed, but not as much as you might think. It's still pretty wide open, and if anything there are more limits on your available design space now, but they're limits that make sense. (And as the man says, everyone who's a fan of WaRP already has a copy, and why just redo what has already been done? It isn't like the 1992 version isn't out there, can't be had for love or money, and will stop working once the new edition is released.)
We're now about six months out from the official release, assuming everything stays on the originally estimated schedule, and I'm penciling in another little tour of the Edge soonish. In fact, my first thought upon getting a game suggested by the awesome Ben Woerner (Dark Shadows) was...hey! How about a spy campaign set in Al Amarja? That'd be awesome! John Le Carre and Phillip K.Dick and Octavia Butler write a miniseries...
* For those of you who are not familiar with this game, I usually describe it thusly: take Wild Palms, Twin Peaks, Blade Runner, The Naked Lunch, Repo Man, and every episode of the Twilight Zone you've ever watched. Toss them in an industrial grade blender and set on frappe for thirty seconds. Chill, season to taste, and serve. At the time of release it was one of the stranger settings available on the market, although a later game by Atlas called Unknown Armies got just as strange in different ways, and finding ways of blending the two is something I spent a while doing.
While UA recently had a new edition come out, I was never really able to get into that one as much...although I have a few contributions on the fan wiki that might still be there and there was a collaborative novel done through that site that was absolutely fan-freakin'-tastic. If you like your Urban Fantasy with a post-modern twist on the magick, and don't mind your gaming gritty, it might be worth your time.
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