Thursday, December 16, 2010

it lurks

I'll tell you about last night's D&D game in another post.  Right now I must instead warn the world, for I have seen it with my own eyes.

One of the regulars at the Friendly Local Game Store is Tim.  He's seems like a nice guy.  He was playing in my game for a few sessions when a schedule shuffle at the store but another game in conflict with mine.  Too bad, as he always struck me as the kind of player every DM loves: dude never hesitates to get himself and by extension the entire party in trouble.  When he and Wheelz dropped out in favor of another game a few folks seemed worried I would take offense, but I run my games specifically with a low buy-in and no major continuity hang-ups so stuff like that is no real problem.  I feel everybody should play in the game they want to be in and not worry about bruising my precious little ego.

So anyway, back to Tim.  This evening he has with him a forboding black-bound tome, maybe as thick as a metropolitan phone book.  Easily 800 pages in girth, maybe closer to a thousand.  It is presented to me as soon as I enter the joint with everyone already in attendance sporting a grin of repressed mirth.  Engraved on the cover are five sinister silver glyphs:

F.A.T.A.L.

Some sick, demented friend of Tim's printed the entire game, had the wretched thing library-bound and gave it to him as a gift.  The Seventh Seal is broken.  The Rough Beast slouches towards Bethlehem.  The world has come undone.

For those of you not in the know, FATAL is one of the three worst RPGs every written.  I am not kidding.  There are exactly three worst rpgs ever written and this is one of them.  One of them is Hybrid, which was written/is always being written by a schizophrenic.  Some places in the text seem to make sense, but any attempt to digest the whole thing makes it abundantly clear that it is the product of the mind of a literal-as-in-he-has-a-diagnosis madman.  The second one is Racial Holy War, an incomplete manuscript designed for nazi skinhead fuckwads to play out their sick, twisted fantasies of shooting people with darker skintones than their own.  The third is FATAL, the game that dares ask "What if Beavis got hepped up on caffeine and tried to write a fantasy heartbreaker?"  It's racist, sexist and simply horrible.

There are lots of broken, badly written games that I will defend.  Back in the 90's on RPGnet World of Synnibarr and SenZar got heaps of abuse but I think both have a lot of neat stuff in them.  Lot's of third tier material has good stuff in buried under half-formed ideas and poor execution.  FATAL is just shit.  If you want more info you should follow one of these two links.  Here's what you need to know in a nutshell: there's a rule for determining your potential anal circumference, i.e. how big your asshole will stretch when things are jammed into it.

So Tim says to me "You know, you could run that tonight if you wanted to."  I reply "That is a statement of fact.  I could run FATAL tonight if I wanted to.  I could also run out and get a Prince Albert but that ain't happening either."

You know what about this scenario really gets me?  It's not that someone killed a tree to bring this abortion of a game into material existence, just for a goof.  It's the library quality binding.  Pretty much every other game (except two) better deserves that treatment.  Makes me want to get some good books rebound, like an all-in-one DMG/PHB/MM/FF.

27 comments:

  1. So what you're saying is that we should hide our kids, hide our wife, and hide our husband too?

    I do not know the game, but from your post I can tell that this is indeed a foul abomination, perhaps even A Ting That Must Not Be. I will light a candle for your soul, friend.

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  2. This head of the frothing commenter swarm demands pics of this abomination against gaming!

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  3. Wow! Worst than Spawn of Fashaan?!

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  4. I could also run out and get a Prince Albert

    Nothing I can say would even top that. However, now I can never look at you without thinking of this phrase and chuckling evilly to myself...

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  5. Any game with anal circumference rules is not right in the head.

    There have been some chilling FATAL threads over at Big Purple. *shudder*

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  6. Nooooooo! That is the thing which cannot be, made flesh. Ok maybe not flesh, but still.

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  7. Disregarding all matters of taste and the game still simply sucks. I just downloaded it again to remind myself of why I deleted it last time I downloaded it. Now I must delete it again...

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  9. [Edit: bad link...]

    I'm pretty much picturing this video as a literal recreation of the events.

    I do wish I'd downloaded the "FATAL Theme" when I had the chance. It sounded like Cookie Monster singing death metal.

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  10. Suddenly it's all clear: The writer of "The Human Centipede" was a FATAL role-player.

    Cause. Effect. Hot Shower with disinfectant.

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  11. If none of you folks have ever encountered FATAL, Darren MacLennan's review at rpg.net (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml) pretty much covers everything you need to know and revile.

    I downloaded FATAL when I was 15 and encountering free RPGs on the web like Risus and Thrash. Needless to say, it weirded me the fuck out.

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  12. And I see that you've already put that review in the post. Need to read more good next time. :)

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  13. Word of warning to anyone else googling "Prince Albert" [shiver]at work; make sure your boss is not standing behind you. Or your friends for that matter.

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  14. only three? what about...

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  15. I can't come up with a humorous quip about an Anal Circumference table.

    I, ME, ADAM of BARKING ALIEN.

    You know its bad when its beyond my ability to poke fun at something any more than the mere existance of the thing does by itself.

    I am in awe of its ickiness.

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  16. Stuart, the Wraeththu RPG is not very good but nearly any metric I would care to use. But it just isn't in the same league.

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  17. At least, if you got the Prince Albert, with F.A.T.A.L., you could calculate the change it made to your Urethral Diameter and the bonus it gave you to your Coercive Uterine Stretching rolls.

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  18. So isn't FATAL the hands-down winner of worst actual role-playing game, since the other two candidates are really just unfinished manuscripts? It may be an abomination, but at least it exists in a playable form (to use the phrase loosely.) FATAL wins by default, no?

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  19. There's only one way to get revenge: run it.

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  20. @Bigby:

    From what I've read of Human Centipede it has the same air of childish attempts at being shocking, incompetent execution, yet actual uneasiness because it's such a labor of love.

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  21. You think that's bad, just wait for the LARP version.

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  22. LOL @ Jerry Cornelius.

    Hey, looks like the Eternal Champion is alive and well.

    I downloaded F.A.T.A.L. in a fit of "is this game really as fucking bad as Jason and Darren say on RPG.net?" And yes, it is as bad as they say. Sadly, the review is more fun to read than the game.

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  23. Just reading Jason and Darren's review in conjunction with the "Author's Defense" left me feeling the cosmic-level horror more strongly than Call of Cthulhu, and that had me shaken for days. I could hardly do anything without having to stop, hug one of the dogs, and give thanks that they cannot read and can thus never learn about F.A.T.A.L.

    Clearly, my mind has been warped since then, for reading of your encounter with the beast provides me with a chuckle most cruel. :D

    The worst part isn't even the rules for things that shouldn't have rules (though that's pretty horrible itself); even if you accept the defense that the horrifying stupidity, racism and sexism was just a joke or somehow okay (which it's not) and could be removed or ignored, the worst part is the bell curve. xd100/2-1 is not a roll that ANYONE should have to make as any part of a game... complexity is not a valid defense!

    If D&D had asked me to do Calculus, I would have gone back to video games.

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  24. Some bastard gave me a copy in the early days of PoD printing - he ran off a half dozen using Lightning Source and included a CD in the front cover.

    I forgot about it for years until I was going through my boxes of old games and magazines in storage last January...

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  25. I downloaded it once after hearing how bad it was. I should have listened.
    So I downloaded it and read a bit through it.
    I don't remember if the bleeding eyes were just part of my lively imagination but they might have been appropriate.
    Even going to 4chan doesn't leave one with such a feeling of being dirty and wrong and full of shame.

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  26. OMG! WANT! Mainly because I like random gaming stuff that is unique. It would go well with my collection of strange crap. Plus, it makes a great way to scare the few friends I have remaining. Haha.

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