The Strange

[Lord Heru]

Hey all, so I recently discovered a new game system called The Strange by Monte Cook Publishing (the same people and basically the same rules that the game Numenera used). And while I could write my own synopsis for it, I think I will just use the one they provide on their Facebook page:


"In The Strange role playing game, player characters explore limited, alternate worlds called recursions. Recursions are seeded from the power of human imagination, and take form from stories, novels, movies, comic books, and myths. Fictions become realities! Player characters explore these recursions, defend the Earth from what lives within them, and maybe even create recursions of their own!"


With some introduction stuff here - http://www.montecookgames.com/welcome-to-the-strange/ - and a free PDF here - http://www.montecookgames.com/product/the-strange-corebook/


And no, I am in no way affiliated with it. I am just a superfan, and I have only had the book for less than a week. hehe


Basically, in my head it combines the concepts behind such awesome things like Stargate, Sliders, and the Myst Universe into a whole that makes sense, works very well, and has the potential to let play go on for a while with fresh ideas cropping up. The system is also a lot more easily understood than some others, with less need for advanced mathematical number crunching than some other gaming systems.


What is also pretty cool is that as one's mind goes from topic to topic the game can follow. Say, right now I am interested in science fiction well the recursion the players go to could be scifi, but if next week I really like cyberpunk then they can go to a recursion that is a massive single city of high tech industrialization. And then say next week I read an awesome Harry Potter story and I want my players to go to Hogwarts, I totally can do it. And then around November the last Hobbit movie comes out, and I think it would be nifty to have an adventure in Middle Earth, guess what, I can do it.


I totally love the system so much that I brought it to work with me, and on my downtime I was reading it again and again with every sentence in every chapter being analyzed and read till I understood it. And that is rare, most of the time I glimpse through things and skip to chapters that interest me.


So yeah, I wanted to post this message to seek what others think about it and to potentially garner interest on something using it. It has so much potential and I would love to see something run or played in or using this system.


Till next time.

 

[El Phantasmo]

I was a backed of Numenera and also the Strange - but my initial positive take on the system has waned to almost complete disdain recently. I'm converting them both over (With setting changes as well) to the nWoD systems latest incarnation (As used in all their World of Darkness games following the God Machine update). My issues with the Cypher system are many and varied but I won't expand on them here.


The Strange is a nifty idea, but there are some weird elements that have tainted it (As in I read it once and put it down as a "I'll get back to that when I have time and the energy needed to overhaul it ... because it needs it!"). Much like Numenera it has the feel of someone published a bunch of notes and design ideas that were a first draft and didn't actually revise/refine anything. It could have been great but ... if I could return KS stuff for a refund I would, put it that way. I've played more cohesive systems and settings that are available for free from DTRPG.


I too initially though of Stargate/Sliders/Myst and several other type analogies ... however it's actually much more akin to Inkheart and other such stories where people vanish into computer games or books. Except it isn't as much fun.

• The name. In-setting the agencies of Earth etc all refer to this dark-energy network not as the Chaosphere, not as some "Phenomena Alpha" type designation but as "The Strange". In character conversations are literally "So, we're on a mission, we've got to go into the strange...". Something about the name fundamentally sits oddly to me.
  
• Translating between recursions - whilst not too much of an issue - sometimes, when using certain types of gates, means your in-recursion nature and powers can come with you - Like a magician from the computer game MMO universe of Aerdyn manages to translate up to Earth and instead of being "manifested" here as a normal human appears as the dog-faced thing (Native of Aerdyn) including his weird magic powers. I dislike that intently - to me translating between recursions, as fictional constructs, should allow that sort of stuff, but when translating up to the real universe "Prime world" everything from a recursion should be stripped. It makes literally no sense to have a magic user suddenly appear on Earth and start throwing fireballs. The Strange/Chaosphere cannot work against the laws of reality - and those "Standard Physics" laws mean that you can't start throwing around fireballs ... otherwise we'd all be at it.
  
• Recursions are limited in size with only the very oldest and most fueled (With XP) being capable of getting as big as Earth. Normally they're one hell of lot smaller. Yet ... no-one inside wonders what the hell is up with that ... even those who can see the Strange (Instead of some kind of sky etc) just ... accept it. None of them think; "What's beyond this? This small land that appears to have appeared out of nowhere, has people on it that likewise appeared out of thin air...". Well, apart from those with "The Spark" McGuffin meaning they do realise (But those people are rare). The rest are, at best, automata that just repeat certain actions and are devoid of any real sentience/sapience.
  
• Designating recursions as "Standard Physics", "Mad Science", "Magic", "Psychic" etc. Seems very, very limited and a very poor way of trying to drop something in to shoe-horn in the translation gimmick. Example - Standard Physics - Under "finctional leakage" someone writes some hard sci-fi book that becomes a real fad/trend on earth and subsequently someone somehow manages to create a new recursion based on it. In it are all sorts of sci-fi doo-dads that simply are so far beyond our current real-world understanding to achieve but - in the rules - a player could harvest the tech and bring it back and it just works - not because it actually works, but because somehow there's something that just makes it work. It could be a Meson cannon or something equally scifi ... but bring it back and it works. How? How can a fictional universe based on standard physics spawn such a thing? Say I bring it back to the real world - where no-one has the knowledge of how to create such a thing and it's purely fictional ... and open it up to find out how it works. What's inside? As no-one has the capacity to create said item on earth they couldn't have in the recursion hence back on earth ... it's full of socks? Kittens? There's a lot about the setting that makes no internally consistent sense. It might be "cool" for a "narrative" type game but when you actually delve into it there are so many gaping holes in the logic that anyone I know IRL would tear it asunder in moments.
  

The way I'm adapting it, once I get round to it, will be that the Dark Energy network tapped into and bridged the multi-verse. Each "recursion" is actually a universe-sized reality unto itself, not some poor-mans VR playground. Each universe buds into the multiverse (Thus making each creator of a multi-verse its God in effect).


There are elements I liked in it; some of the art is nice (Some isn't), the concept behind (But not the current execution of..) Planetovores, Ruk (Again a great idea but is implemented poorly) and "fictional leakage". Besides that there's a couple of cool names for things I guess. I'd say it's probably my biggest gaming-purchase regret. I'd consider Exalted 2E less flawed as a system and setting that "The Strange" and it's flaws are many and well known - hence the immanent 3rd Edition.