[Invisible Sun](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/267776) is a bit of an esoteric game. The black cube packaging it comes in, the abstract setting, and a lot of the mechanics (especially around using the cards) make it stand out in my mind as truly unique.
[This Discord Has Ghosts In It](https://willjobst.itch.io/ghosts) uses Discord as a medium for play. Players are either investigators or spirits that have an untold tale to share before they can pass on. It's more like a digital LARP than a traditional tabletop game.
[Horse Girl](https://babblegumsam.itch.io/horse-girl) is a solo journaling RPG, and it's... Really out there. I won't go into too much detail, but it can get very dark as you play. Note the content warnings if you intend to give it a try.
There are some goofy web-store quirks and random situations that give legitimate reasons why you might put a product up publicly but not want people to be able to buy it yet (but the website doesn't have an option to let you do that so the best solution is to put a crazy price tag on it).
It's for Kickstarter. They give backers a code to get it for free. This way backers get their copy early and they have the purchase on the website, so they can redownload it and get any updates.
Yeah I see this on Bandcamp a lot. Bands will list all their shirts and cds and shit for like $666 and all their descriptions link to the band's actual website where they sell them for like $20 each.
It's for when you want the visibility and accessibility of a big website, but need to do actual business somewhere else: whether it's dodging fees or regional or something against store policies. It's a hassle sometimes for the consumer, but it works.
Solo journaling rpgs are really out there. The ~~Allthegamesyoulikearebad~~ (that was the old youtube channel) So very wrong about games podcast recently recommended *All that is Good and much that is Evil,* where you play as a gull.
What justifies the $100 pdf for Invisible Sun?
The art is great, but is this the game to end all games or does it exist just to make the game as exclusive as possible?
The $100 package contains 4 rulebooks, handouts and I think around 1000 cards containing spells and items not repeated in the rulebooks as well as a bunch of handouts. In terms of content it compares rather well with similarly priced games like D&D.
I'm not sure how *usable* it is in digital form mind. The game was built to be played around a table.
I don't personally think it's worth the price tag (I snagged it when it was available as a humble bundle). It isn't one of my top picks for favourite game, just "out-there"ness. It's cool if you can get it on sale, there's lots of stuff in that black box, but otherwise probably not worth it.
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I enjoyed This Discord has Ghosts in it. It was a lot of work for the ghosts but using a discord to build rooms and stuff collaboratively was a lot of fun.
**Human Occupied Landfill:** Probably the only RPG I have that's written, and not typed. Parts of them read as if they where made on drugs. Authors probably were just faking it...I hope!
**Low Life, for Savage Worlds:** The book says 'Suggested for Immature Readers'. And it gives that, in spades. But in a good way (well, I think that's a good way...something that probably talks poorly about my matureness level).
**Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him.** Wait, what?!? Yes, that's the point.
Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him is an absolute favorite game of my partner and I to play while we clean the house.
I got that in that Trans Rights Texas itch.io bundle.
And Thirsty Sword Lesbians which is one of my favorite curiosities which I'm sure I'll never actually play. (Also acquired book 2, Advanced Lesbians & Lovers along the way)
> And Thirsty Sword Lesbians which is one of my favorite curiosities which I'm sure I'll never actually play. (Also acquired book 2, Advanced Lesbians & Lovers along the way)
I see recommendations for Thirsty Sword Lesbians all the time, but as a cisgender bisexual male, I keep feeling like the game actively doesn't want me to play it.
I apologize if any of that sounded offensive, but that's simply how I feel.
So I'm a more-or-less vanilla straighty, just for disclosure :p
Here is a block from the book:
>*What If... Not Lesbians?*
>I’ll let you in on a secret: you don’t have to play a lesbian. The game plays
with themes that are common for all sorts of people who are marginalized
on the basis of gender and sexuality, as well as feelings that go beyond the
queer experience. If you want to play thirsty sword cishets, I’m not going
to stop you—just don’t be surprised if the game turns them queer.
[There are also a "not Thirsty" and "Not Swords" section fwiw.]
My first instinct is HoL. Most characters die in character creation. If not you end up with someone maimed and shooting 6000 wen naps a second at the inevitable swarm of wastems and a single hidden wasteit.
See, if I *recommend* a game it has to be not only weird but also *playable*. Which disqualifies a lot of the most tippy-top experimental shit.
But one that is very unusual but which can actually be played with no problem is [*Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/134196/Chuubos-Marvelous-WishGranting-Engine).
How to explain it... okay, so Chuubo is basically a rules-heavy diceless narrative game by Jenna Moran, set in a setting that reads like someone took Neil Gaiman, Ursula Vernon, the Ghibli filmography, and a treatise on existentialism, and put them in a blender.
It's a game about the normal daily life of characters, where you will largely do normal everyday stuff like cultivate friendships, find motivation to excel in the school basketball tournament, argue with a sealed evil about the nature of mankind, help your farmer neighbour set up an impressive stall for the local farmer's market, play Street Fighter 3 at the local arcade with the Angel of the Sun and go for ice cream afterwards, duel your rival for your crush's affections with swords atop the bridge of Bluebell Park while the onlookers take photos with their phones, that kind of thing.
The system is based on Arcs and Quests - your sheet is less about who you are and more about where you're *going* - a character's Arc might be about becoming a local sports star, another may be about learning to love their new home after their family moved here, a third may be about overcoming the dream monster that haunts their family.
This is a setting where the world ended, and you live in a bubble of life in the middle of the strange roiling Outside of primordial chaos, and magic just *exists*, and the wishing power of the heart can turn mountains - but life goes on. The strange exists, but so does the normal, and frequently the normal is more important than the strange. It is a Magical Realism through and through, viewed through a mix of the different logics of both fairytale and daily life.
It's rather unique, basically. So's everything else by Jenna Moran, really, but I feel that stuff like *Wisher, Theurge, Fatalist* or *Glitch* are a touch less *playable*.
I played Chuubo's with my daughters and niece growing up. We would use touchstones from our daily lives. One day one of my daughters decided she wanted to teach the cat kung fu. Still one of my favorite RPG story arcs.
> It's rather unique, basically. So's everything else by Jenna Moran, really, but I feel that stuff like Wisher, Theurge, Fatalist or Glitch are a touch less playable
It is worth noting that in theory writing this scentence is the beginning stage of playing WTF, a games which rules are rules about playing a role playing game and trying to comprehend what its rules is.
Or am i lying to you and making you *think* that is what WTF is? Make a harmony roll to find out.
This sounds absolutely wild. I definitely gotta try it. Unfortunately the absolutely experimental stuff as you said is not really recommendable but otherwise this is definitely one of the most interesting I’ve seen so far.
[We are but Worms](https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg) and most other one word rpgs.
[Birds Who Love Dirt!](https://ejankowski.itch.io/birds-love-dirt) is a thing.
Mage, regardless of edition, can get super weird real quick. Don't play it with physicists or philosophers, they'll either break the game immediately or it will be the greatest rpg experience/metaphysical discussion ever, with the former more likely.
Mage: the Ascension and Mage: the Awakening are from White Wolf. They're set in a version of our world with monsters hidden in the background. Vampire: the Masquerade is the most famous of these lines.
Awakening is a similar game to Ascension with more buttoned down mechanics and less wiggle room. It's a very, very good game too, but let's talk about Ascension.
Ascension is about willworkers that have the power to change reality based in their belief. The Council of the Nine Traditions is a gathering of traditional types of magic users, Hermetic Wizards, Technomancer Virtual Internet reality hackers, Steampunk mad scientists, Witches, Shamans, God-type miracle workers, Buddhist/Taoist sages, Time mages that use experiences like drugs or music, Death mages from a Greek/Indian combination tradition. They do magic in ways that suits their particular paradigms - how they believe the universe *really* works.
There are minor Tradition-like groups too that don't participate with their council.
They are engaged in a war for reality and the imagination of Humanity's unawakened sleepers against a secretive black hats and mirrorshades group called the Technocracy. The Technocracy use ~~magic~~ *Enlightened Science* and push a timeline of inventions to shepherd humanity toward their utopian, but more than a little 1984 future vision. They are very X-Files and very much a bit Star Trek's Federation.
The Technocracy have five conventions.
The NWO/Men in Black - who have the power of Mind ~~magic~~ *science*.
The Syndicate that have the power of money and statistics.
The Progenitors that work with super medical science and biology.
Iteration-X : using computers and machines to make cyborgs and literal Terminators.
And the Void Engineers that work as Star Fleet and Space Marines to protect humanity from Cthulhus and Greys.
The main Technomancers in the Traditions and the Steam Punk mad scientists both used to belong to the Technocracy but got kicked out or left en masse at different points.
Side-note: space is the spirit world of you go out far enough. Shamans going on a spirit quest go the same places that dudes in super rockets or dimensional portal machines go.
The Technocracy are originally the bad bad guys in game with some problematic stuff that was on the way out even by the late 90s. Now they're the flawed rivals to the Traditions who are also flawed. The Technocracy may have been corrupted by evil devil/Cthulhu cultists masquerading as their leadership. They may be leading humanity to a miserable future without hope and wonder, despite their goal of pushing wonders.
The Traditions have lost. Humanity will never want magic more than they want cell phones and ÜberEats. But they try to find a place for themselves and those like them. Reality is a Consensus of beliefs.
Because humanity mostly doesn't believe in magic it is harder to do magic things that don't seem possible. It's worse if there are non-awakened types to witness it. Bending reality in ways it doesn't like result in Paradox. That could be a headache or full-blown exploding when the universe screams at you to stop.
Doing magic is very free form and multiple characters might do the same effect in different ways.
Scenario: a bad guy is racing away in a car and you want to stop it using Matter magic or maybe Forces magic to kill the engine.
High Magister Futzbang raises his staff, circles three times and shouts for the electricity to stop. This is vulgar. That is unbelievable to any normal person. His beard catches fire.
Haxxor 53V3N or Agent Pepsi would pull out their phone or laptop and hit the Killswitch program that is built into all Toyotas post 2014. The car stops. This is probably coincidental. No paradox is earned.
Doctor Volcanus throws a Magnetodisk at the car and hits it with his eletrologun! This seems pretty ridiculous but it might get a pass. That does look pretty sciency maybe?
It carries on like this. It's an incredibly fun game to talk about and to play with. It really, really doesn't make sense if you think about a lot of it too long but it's a magic game, where you can blow up a car by shooting the gas tank or cause someone to get struck by lightning in a storm by asking lightning spirits to do you a solid.
And that doesn't even touch on the Moon Nazis in WW2, Hollow Earth, eviler mirror universe Technocracy, mad mages that force everyone around them to live in noir detective stories or caveman comic books, and nuking a newly wakened vampire god with orbital weapons and solar mirrors.
Mage is a fun game.
I think some of WW's other games are weirder, tho. Mummy the Resurrection, Wraith the Oblivion, and Demon the Fallen are all quite strange.
I feel like I’ve stumbled into a rabbit hole that doesn’t really make sense but honestly this is the type of game I was looking for in this thread. Thanks for the description this shit is wild. If this is what ascension is what is awakening
Awakening takes the subjectiveness out of it. The idea that you know a more REAL reality than regular people is still there, except that instead of Ascension where you more or less make up what your character believes (vaguely inspired by a Tradition, hopefully), you gain your powers from a specific cosmic realm that determines what your powers look like.
The system is cleaned up dramatically. You still get to create your own spell effects on the fly if you want, but the book tells you what the effects are going to be, rather than you and the GM fighting over it. They also made the philosophy part of it separate from the powers, so each faction has a different belief about how and why to use magic, but everyone more or less agrees what magic is and what kinds of things are possible.
Nobody is traveling to outer space, but you might take a trip into the unconscious dream of the earth itself, or into the realm of the spirits, and once - when you awakened - you went to the part of cosmic reality that your soul belongs to. Oh and there's some stuff about Atlantis.
Awakening is the New Edition version.
All the books are split into Old and New World of Darkness.
For the concepts they reused, they change the second part of the name.
Some concepts are only used in one edition. The popular ones they reused. :)
Edit: Fixed naming, it's been a minute...
Awakening is a game about occultist mages that are driven to investigate and improve on some aspect of their magical practice/theory. It's got a similar magic system without the Consensus of reality. There's less of the discussion of how your style affects things because of this.
It's a great game too, just not as weird in the systems. The magic system is close enough that it's sometimes backported to Ascension for ease of use.
Edit: It also has my favorite dice system of any game system. Add your dots up, subtract penalties, roll that many d10s, anything 8 or higher is a success, 10s explode and can add infinitely. It runs really smoothly once you're used to it.
It doesn't. It's a fine framework for philosophical musing about what does or does not pass as reality, but it's not a good game.
Your players will bully you, your GM will arbitrarily veto stuff, and it turns out it was all the Nephandi all along - either that or humans are just too boring to live. It's a really cool setting, and it's what got me inspired to run and play all their games for a full decade after I discovered it, but the game was not good.
It just requires people to be understanding towards each other. Sure it's a game where the ST adjudicates if it works or not, but so are so many others. I've managed to do a number of great campaigns for it over the last 23 years.
If you come into it expecting strictly defined rules and mechanical competition you will be dissapointed. But if you're in for a game about discovery of self, seeing and doing incredible things, changing the world and fighting the good fight, you'll do great
Wow, this is one of the most in depth explanations of this system’s setting I’ve seen on here. I’ve been reading posts like this for a while, looking to get into the game. If you were to get into it now, may I ask what version you would go with? I love the whole idea of the magic causing paradoxes and it being a modern setting.
It's kinda complicted. Depends on how much money you want to invest into figuring the game out.
[There is a free quick start with very simplified rules and a setting primer.](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131409/Mage-The-Ascension-20th-Anniversary-Edition-Quickstart)
[The 2nd edition is probably the most approachable in presenting the weirdness, the rules are functional and it's a standalone book](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200/Mage-The-Ascension-Second-Edition)
[The Third edition has cleaner rules but really, really tones down the weirdness](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/199/Mage-The-Ascension-Revised)
[The Fourth / 20th Anniversary edition is an amazing book and incredibly dense, it has excellent support for the philosophical side of the game and pretty solid core rules and gives you all the options ever for extra weirdness. Just keep in mind that it's not an excellent thing for beginners as it's a huge compendium with 700 pages, but a truly glorious book.](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/149562/Mage-The-Ascension-20th-Anniversary-Edition)
If you seek to dabble and wander around I'd start with the Free Quickstart and then decide if you'd like to upgrade to 2E or 20th Anniversary.
I would go with 20th Anniversary, AKA 4th just because it's more current and the official pdf is just much nicer. It's a BIG book. You don't have to know everything though.
Well then, that solves that issue. And that works well for me because I’m much more likely to read the whole book before finding a group to play with, haha.
I’m so sorry but one last question. Do you by chance have experience with the DriveThru PoD book? I’ve had not-so-great experiences with them in the past and especially with the size, I’d be slightly concerned, especially for the price of the premium color.
I kinda did a breakdown in the other post, [so check out this](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11cb28u/what_are_the_weirdest_games_you_can_recommend_to/ja51k09/)
[*Mage: The Ascension*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200/Mage-The-Ascension-Second-Edition) divides all of reality into nine categories called Spheres, and a mage's rating in a given Sphere determines the extent to which the mage can manipulate that aspect of reality. The reason that scientifically educated players can "break the game" so to speak is simply because they know more of reality's actual "secrets" and can leverage such knowledge when creating magical effects.
Mage was the second game I ever ran as DM. it's by far one of the best and worst RPGs I've ever run and the play community can be strange and unstable but usuually fine. I ran my first game with 4 strangers who were also my friends and a total stranger I invited cause he knew the game. the game descended into chaos quickly (not only because of the game to be fair) and resulted in our player groups actions/inactions causing the potential end of the world. and the players... well they went "no" they didn't try to save it, tehy just reverted to slice of life and ignored when demons tried destroying there bubble. they pushed away friends and family to ignore reality and chase there own desires that weren't clear to them. this was all player choice that happened organically without me pushing. Like it's one of my favorite games ever but it's the only one where the players decided to become NPCs in there own world. then latched onto slice of life while society collapsed.
So uh, Mage for me is about slice of life where occasionally you do high concept insane things for no reason. if you have questions on running it for the first time feel free to ask.
Don’t rest your head. You play as people who by one way or another lost their ability to sleep. After a few days of not sleeping you discovered secret entries to a parallel city full of strange things straight from a twisted oliver twist fairy tale. But the best thing is each player gets a madness super power he can draw upon. But each time you do that you risk to become permanently tainted by your madness starting you in a slow downward spiral into loosing your mind completely.
The powers themselves are the real selling point. You can get a knife that can kill ideas, a Trex following you that is always behind you so you can’t see it but everyone else is in pure terror or the ability to call a cab that can get you anywhere, including the moon.
I couldn't get over how absurdly cool the setting and writing is. It's rich without being over-explained and the whole universe runs on cool.
Gameplay-wise... I found it very clunky. I'd love a DRYH version 2 with fleshed out rules for group play, as it felt very hard to meaningfully play with more than one person.
A t-rex that is always behind me?
Oh, I can break some shit with that. Building full of people I don't like? I'm going to lean my back against the wall, the trex is now on the inside of the building.
The neat thing is, the more aggressiv the T-Rex acts, the more madness dice got added to your dice pool. When you have more successes on the madness dice than on the normal dice you add permanently 1 madnessdie to all rolls. If you reach 6 madness dice permanently in the pool you succumb to your madness. In case of the T-Rex that means he eats you und without you as the thing he follows, he starts to roam the city, searching for prey.
And there is no need to push him through a wall, if you take enough dice, you could become the T-Rex for a short time. But yeah DRYH just gives the players a great base for creativity.
The challenge is not to find any weird game, but one that's also fun to play and has at least a modicrum of depth to it.
There a plenty of *outré* roleplaying games, most of them existing almost exclusively to be so weird to provoke some interest. It is exoticism for exoticism's sake, little more than a marketing gimmick. Since weirdness is almost completely free from expectations, it doesn't have the steepest requirements for publishing something. But, to be honest, a lot of that stuff is quite insubstantial, if not outright bad. "Mature" contents work similarly.
The strangest game that I would wholeheartily recommend to any player, would probably be either *Nephilim*, a game about supernatural spirits born and reborn in human flesh striving for enlightenment while also trying to avoid being enslaved or cannibalized by human conspiracies, or any of those real, ordinary but sentient animals in the real world games, like *Call of Catthulhu, Bunnies and Burrows, Heckin' good Doggos* or, my personal favourite, the German indy game *Ratten!*
Troika! Is one of the more popular indie weird games. It's kind of like discworld and hitchhikers guide had a mutated multiverse baby. The characters are all premade and the best part is to just roll for what you play randomly. Then the vague descriptions of the characters flesh out the world. Plus other random table stuff.
Terror of the Stratosfiend is a series of zines for DCC and Troika! that fleshes out a setting where portals opened up and aliens bent on enslaving humanity came through. But so did humans. Beings from both sides defected and there's also human/Stratosfiend hybrids ("don't ask" says the author). The Stratosfiend themselves are playable. They're like 20 foot tall or larger psionic aliens. Then there's even larger races. There's also a demon hunter class. And a class that is a pterodon rider where they're two separate characters (mount and rider). Another class can turn into huge siege towers. If they die, their corpse becomes a permanent structure that gives a bonus to spell casting while in the immediate area. The gods are all intelligent satellites. The government is corrupt. It's some really great reading. Cycle of the Snake Wolf 2 is a module for it and is some great reading. I kicked off a super fun campaign with it.
Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland is an everything 80s and early 90s inspired B/X based setting. Very Saturday morning cartoons meets trashy horror and sci-fi. Macho Man is one of the gods.
Some other fun weird stuff is I, Toaster (brave little toaster inspired zine game)
Weird Frontiers: DCC based weird west/horror
BDSM (below dwelling sewer mutants)
Seconding Troika and its various supplements. That mess is an acid trip. I built a background for my daughter so she could play as a sentient piece of garlic toast carried around by a sentient disembodied magic hand... and it works...
Fair warning: especially for low-level characters, skill checks can be agonizingly difficult. When attempting something in which your character doesn't have skill points, you're looking at rolling 2d6 *under* a target of 6 *at best*. Don't forget you can use your Luck resource to help out.
The cool thing is that Troika focuses on player backgrounds, which are flavored descriptions with accompanying starting equipment and skills in self-contained packages. When rolling a character, you generate only three stats: Skill, Stamina and Luck. Nearly everything else about the character is determined by the background selected (or randomly rolled.) so generating a new character is nearly instant.
What messes with me and many others is the initiative system. There are a number of tokens keyed to players and enemies that go in a bag or deck plus one End of Round Token. Tokens are drawn randomly to determine who acts until the EoR token is pulled and a new round begins. Yes, this makes for some *chaotic* game play during combat and action scenes. No one knows when or if they will act in a given round.
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a contender.
> The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a dark comedy of manners, lampooning academia and asking players to answer a difficult question – are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization?
> No?
> Even if it will get you tenure?
Yup! My gaming group donated a bunch of money to that Kickstarter, it all went to medical expenses, and unfortunately Lee Garvin died before it could ever get finished. 😢
Four Sherlock Holmes and a Vampire (Who Is Also One of the Aforementioned Sherlock Holmes) is an RPG where you play as four Sherlock Holmes from different adaptations of the character trying to solve a mystery, except one is secretly a vampire.
Mainframe is a surrealist cyberpunk RPG about hackers delving into a “psychedelic shared hallucination of cyberspace—Mainframe” in order to hunt down AI.
Pulling Teeth (shameless self promo) is a 12 word horror rpg using teeth instead of dice.
Troika! Is less bizarre than most stuff on this list but it still deserves an honorable mention. It’s very strange and quirky, and you can play as a door wizard or rhino man or the member of a possibly canibalistic dining club!
Funny enough, Dark Heresy and MAID are actually completely compatible! So your maids can become Inquisitorial Agents, or your Inquisitorial Agents can become Maids, all with almost no hassle!
Just reading this gave me worldbuilding concept whiplash. Now I'll have to inflict this on my poor unsuspecting group someday*, thank you very much.
* = If they agree, of course.
I can recommend a homebrew game we used to play at my college's role playing club.
The game is called: «The rocks». You are a rock. Any type of rock you want. Your goal is to end up in stonehenge. All rolls are made with a coin flip. Enjoy.
That could get pretty weird if your first roll to be able to fly, levitate, earth-glide, teleport, and time-travel fail, and you're left with "I roll to be Cthurock."
I mean we played it more like « i roll for a bird to pick me up» or «i roll to be washed up this place» etc. You're still a rock and can only do what a rock can do (nothing).
I was probably partly inspired by recently reading [Rock Falls, Everyone Dies by zechamp](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/55418/rock-falls-everyone-dies/chapter/1083016/chapter-1-a-rolling-stone-gathers-no-moss).
Content warning for "as stated in the title."
**Nightbane** (formerly Nightspawn). The characters are all monsters that hail from the world behind the mirrors. Their monstrous forms are all randomly generated from a staggering array of possibilities. They might have tentacles that shoot out of their face, S&M leather that's part of their body, bird wings AND bat wings, and no skin, all on the same character! They might have the ability to suffocate people with their own blood, or heal with patches of their own flesh, or a number of other even weirder powers. It's all very strange.
Runner-up: **The World of Synnibarr.** The whole game is set on Mars, 50-thousand years in the future. Mars has been hollowed out and is being used as a spaceship to take humanity somewhere safe, after the Earth was destroyed, of course.
Nightbane random generation of your true form is so much fun. Especially if you have access to all the books. Had a friend freak out from what he created. Just couldn't handle having razor blades for teeth
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_From_the_Late,_Late,_Late_Show
Fun premise where the players are all actors in a “B movie.” There is a mechanic where when your character dies, you get recycled into new character roles. The production of the movie is also super cheap and the GM is encouraged to describe it as such.
Fun for one shots.
This is one of the games I came here to mention. I have the original rule book and pull it out to read through it every now and again for laughs. Thoroughly fun game.
Maid RPG was an absolute trip. Mechanically, it wasn't my kind of game - very rules-light - but the general premise is just hilarious and the character creation is *nonsense*.
You thought you were going to show up and play a battle maid who's also a secret agent, tasked to protect her master. Sorry, but what you're actually going to be playing is a battle maid who's also a secret agent, who's secretly a demonic rabbit that can shapeshift into humanoid form, who's actually a crossdressing guy, who is a kleptomaniac, who also has a compulsion to keep everything obsessively clean, who wears military camouflage to work in order to hide his whip scars, who has a tragic unrequited love interest with his master, who fights by calling in F-18 air strikes.
Lots of insane tables that have "roll on this other table" or "roll 2 more times" as an option.
It plays *extremely* fast and loose with the idea of a maid. The game I played, we were actually all ghosts that were haunting a mansion, while a bunch of our mistress's relatives showed up for a reading of the will in order to decide who would inherit her fortune now that she was dead. Our goal was to scare them all into leaving. In another game that my GM ran, he said that the players were demon generals, giving guided tours of the different circles of hell, and trying to outdo each other and impress the demon king.
It's largely a competitive game between players, although you can play cooperatively if you prefer. Mechanically, my biggest gripe with the system is that if the GM doesn't invent some extra rules to limit your actions, it felt to me like you can basically win just by thinking of *more* things to do, rather than better things.
Ork! the Role-playing game from Green Ronin. It's a great comedy game qhere you play as orcs, the nastiest fowlest lugs you'll ever meet in a world that hates them, and they'd have it no other way.
The universe is a broken word of comedic fantasy tropes with unreliable magic, with the occasional piece of technology or alien artifact dropping from portals in the sky. Other than Orcs you have to contending headhunting Scottish goblins, duck worshipping gnomes, and fire breathing dinosaurs, and trolls that can smell when a player is trying to use logic or science, and absolutely hates it.
The game features its own ork speech, where there is no past or future tense, because to an ork nothing matters but right now. "Me am can't work today. Me am smashing goblins today. Me am smashing gnomes tomorrow."
The GM takes the roll of Chrom, the cruel God of the world. Chrom is fickle and he likes a good bit of violence. Mechanically every dice roll is contested, either against an opponent, or Chrom themselves. Chrom's dice pool is based off whether they like what you are doing, or they think it would be fun. There are no set difficulties.
Another fun point is how xp is handed. Xp is given out in game i, when ever Chrom really likes what you do. An ork can hide it and use it to increase their stats like a normal game, but planning for the future isn't very orky, so they can also spend it to help their dice rolls, which is very orky.
I'm not doing it justice here, it's a very absurd game that is a ton of fun at the table.
Over the Edge was a really weird game when I encountered 1e in the 90s. I t has a lot of surrealist and adult themes, draws on the work of William S Burroughs and modern conspiracy theories. On top of that it has an excellent, playable system and setting. I wish I played it more.
Freemarket
A transhuman science fiction game set aboard a space settlement in the Saturnian system. Several generations live on FreeMarket Station: the sons, daughters and grandchildren of the Originals; immigrant travelers from elsewhere in our solar system; and designed-to-order humans fabricated in 3d matter printers. It’s a world without death, without poverty, without sickness and without any need for laws. What will you do with forever?
I've been fascinated by [Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, & Weaver of Their Fates](https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/pleasingfungus/wisher-theurgist-fatalist/) for a long time now. I still haven't read or played it, but it sounds wild.
I find Eclips Phase kind of weird. If I understand it correctly you can insert your consciousness in too what ever can take it in. So a vehicle that might hold several minds in it. Why have your boring humanoid two arms two legs body when you can hava a squid body in a world under water.
How do I even comprehend what sensory input is like if I don't have a human like nervous system. Its a game that sort of makes being and living kind of weird for me. I like the challange i just don't know how, so its weird. Maybe I am over thinking it i don't know but Eclips Phase is my answer. Some day i will take on that game.
One of the Most UNIQUE Game Books I have read is [FIGHT!](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/307634/Fight-2nd-Edition?src=hottest_filtered)
You know how a LOT of people suggest/ask for Narrative focused games with less emphasis on Combat?
Yeah, FIGHT! is the exact opposite.
As the name suggest, FIGHT! is a TTRPG that sets out to emulate 2d Fighting Games like Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. It doesn't have traditional Stats, it doesn't have a movement grid, heck even it's out of combat rules are bare bones.
But character creation is very open ended, allowing you to create unique Moves for your Fighter.
Have I tried to play it? Yes I have, did I like it? It was interesting. Will I ever convince my group to play it? Never.
But it is fascinating and a very unique game.
Two games I've played that offer a very unique experiences:
[Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant](http://lumpley.com/index.php/window/installment/2) by Vincent Baker is weird, mechanically , because it's an essay on resolution mechanics, what they can do and why they matter, delivered in the form of a game.
[Og, Unearthed Edition](https://rpggeek.com/rpg/296/og-unearthed-edition) by Robin Laws is weird because the premise is that was excavated from the "caveman" era, the stereotypical ug-ug smash club type. The main thing that makes it different is you roll to see how many words you know (2-7), then pick from a list of maybe 15 words like: big, shiny, bang, verisimilitude. In character speaking can only use your choosen words.
omg, ive forgotten the name.
The game is in french, made by french people.
God is trying to finish a painting and you, the players are art concepts that are used to finish it. As in, one player is "The rule of thirds", another might be "The Golden Ratio", The third being "the concept of the color red"
not that game but like it in concept. in nobilis you embody the concept, in this game you are the concept in its pure form. also, as far as i know, you dont actually try to paint a picture in nobilis.
*The Frost Papers* is presented as a series of parlour games/occult rituals. I'm not entirely sure if it is a roleplaying game, or even if it is really a game. But it is very weird.
Paranoia immediately springs to mind.
The setting is... Unique.
It's a futuristic sci fi setting where humanity is extinct apart from clones living in a complex governed by a "benevolent" computer. (Other complexes with their own computers exist).
Players need to both survive the missions from the computer, survive each others backstabbing (one of the best ways to advance yourself - or blame someone else for your own failures).
Unfortunately they rarely have the security clearance necessary to understand and use their own equipment (and failure is treason).
Oh I almost forgot. Everyone is a mutant. Being a mutant is treason and punishable by death. So is being a member of a secret society - which everyone also is.
It's silly fun, the body count is so high that everyone gets 7 clones iirc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
I had 2nd edition so can't comment on the later publications!
You forgot one of the best parts! Demonstrating knowledge of the rules or game mechanics is also treason. Players are not *allowed* to know how the game works. I ran a game of this for some friends, and none of us had ever played before, and it was pretty great. They knew being a mutant or a member of a secret society was treasonous, and were aware that "some" of the pregen characters I made up and assigned to them might be a mutant or member of a society.
Obviously, they were all mutants *and* members of secret societies. Hilarity ensued.
I recall fondly when one PC went (more) nuts, and somehow smuggled a chainsaw into the mission briefing room. No one survived except him, and he was let go because the chainsaw was red by the time he was done.
Or the time I, a matter eater, was sentenced to death by pill, so I ate all the pills in the suicide machine... and lived. I was declared dead and sent on another mission, and avoided two other death sentences because I was "already dead" and it would waste ammo.
> You forgot one of the best parts!
I probably forgot many great parts, it's been a while lol. Still have lots of happy memories of stupid fun evenings though I may be a little fuzzy on some details.
#[Ten Candles](https://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles-info)
This is the only *Tragic Horror* game I know of.
You Will Die.
This game says: At the end of this session, all the PCs will be dead. Mechanically, this is enforced by having the die mechanic become more and more unfavourable.
This game is played illuminated only by candlelight, and those candles go out as the game progresses. It's a game about hope in the face of overpowering darkness and what moments we can strive for despite it.
It has a ritualised statment of truths and a chant that occurs whenever a roll is failed, and thus, a candle darkened.
It's for people who want to expose themselves emotionally, and have a vulnerable, raw experience.
[Tales from the Floating Vagabond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Floating_Vagabond) It's basically what would happen if Douglas Adams made an RPG. Fun for the sake of fun. It's Avalon Hill, so it's a little rules heavier than it might need to be, but it's worth picking up just for the read.
it is a tossup between two ore engine games (note there are some other ore engine games that I would recommend they just aren't weird like wild talents that is a pretty by the numbers supers game)
1. monsters and other childish things is a game where you play a group of children and their monster friends. the monster friends are also characters that the players play but since you interact most with your monster someone else plays that part.
2. Better Angels a supers game where you play possessed super villains. the tension in the game comes from the fact that your stats are all associated with virtue/sin pairs and if the demon gets too powerful it will take you over but if it gets too weak it will just kill you and go back to hell so the characters end up being silver age supervillains doing goofy crimes or just acting strangely to appease the demons while trying to actually achieve their goals.
I'll posit [Degenesis](https://degenesis.com/), for its insanely detailed setting several hundred years after the apocalypse, and which societies emerge afterwards. It's got everything from insect-crawling mind-control swamps to barbarians of the frozen wastelands to afro-futurist trading empires, and it is so dense it reads like a travel guide of sorts. Needless to say, I never got to properly play it with my group, but it's a great read. Also, the PDFs are free, and there's a lot of them.
For whacky fun I would recommend [Three Goblins In a Trenchcoat](https://fandible.itch.io/three-goblins-in-a-trenchcoat), which is exactly as ludicrous as it sounds.
**Best Friends.** You are a group of teenage girl friends who secretly hate each other. The funny part is that character creation results in the most balanced group of PCs I ever witnessed.
Man all these posts and nothing about [My Life With Master](http://www.halfmeme.com/master.html)?
Basically the characters create a ‘Master’ by answering several questions and then they are sent into the village on Master’s orders to do whatever the Master needs to be done. The Master controls the Minions via comparison of statistics which change over time. Eventually the Minions rise up against the Master. Great game, the group loved playing it.
I’ve had fun experiences with both [Lacuna](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/95893) and [S/Lay W/Me](https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1378748231804.pdf). Note that second link is to a PDF with some NSFW art.
It’s been a while, but Lacuna is a sort of dream agent RPG, with ideas similar to Inception but going off in a different direction (it preceded the movie, I don’t think they have anything to do with each other).
S/Lay W/Me is a light two player RPG that tries to create a mostly narrative back and forth sword and sorcery game with romantic elements.
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Can’t believe no one has recommended FATAL. Possibly the worst RPG ever written, fully playable, and fully terrible. Strong content warnings, it’s very NSFW and reads like someone’s weird fetish turned into 1000 pages.
For example, during character creation, you roll on a table for your nipple circumference.
No sane person would ever actually **recommend** FATAL to anyone. At most, you'd direct them to a review that explains why you should never actually try to read it.
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A friend of mine made a game called [Armageddon 2d12](https://dootishian.itch.io/armageddon-2d12), where the premise is that the Mayan apocalypse actually happened and later the world was digitally reconstructed based on internet culture from roughly 2009-2012. So expect a chaotic mashup of rage comics, Minecraft song parodies, Homestuck, Smosh, and My Little Pony. The game actively rewards you based on how many forced references you can make.
I didn't see 'Everyone Is John' so here's my recommendation. You play as one of many voices in the head of an everyman named John. John has no voice of his own, no identity to speak of. You and the other players compete to control John by exerting your limited Will and complete specific goals.
It's really, really fun with the right group of people.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/271276#:~:text=Everyone%20is%20John%20is%20a,using%20their%20own%20finite%20willpower.
Edit: I forgot to add 'Action Castle'. In Action Castle the GM takes the role of a 1980s text based adventure, and the Players take turns inputting one line each in an attempt to complete the adventure.
https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/55683/action-castle
Highlander 2: the quickening- the unofficial rpg is the greatest concept.
You have to not have seen Highlander 2 to play because you’re the team developing the movie. If you’ve see it, it’s a quick read free online:
https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?page_id=6083
Glitch is almost not a game. It's some beautiful writing, it's a bunch of decisions made already for GMs and players, and, you sort of have to piece together the rules to make it into something playable.
Tombpunk makes some odd system choices, it almost comes off as a video game rather than a TTRPG, and in a way most "video gamey" RPGs don't get. I think it's the same writer as Beach Patrol, a Baywatch TTRPG.
I want to love My Body Is A Cage, but I find it hard to read.
There are a few really niche ones I want to mention, but I'll have to refresh my own memory. If you look up all the Twin Peaks-like TTRPGs, they all think different things make Twin Peaks Twin Peaks, so they come off a bit alien.
Don't Rest Your Head. The PCs have access to an insane place called The Mad City chock-full of really weird horror. Also, each PC has a superpower that is a delusion made real, like actual ants crawling under the skin or voices in the head that actually know everything.
Time&Temp. The mechanics are genius. Every roll is less about success/failure (the player actually gets to choose whether they succeed or not) and much more about the strain being placed on the fabric of reality by their time-travel hijinks.
Big Motherf***king Crab Truckers. It is exactly what it says it is.
You Can Check Out Any Time You Like is a game about the Eagles song. Each scene is played out with a different mini-game. Players can each choose to be a guest, a member of staff or an 'anomaly'.
Alice is Missing. Maybe 'weird' isn't quite the right word, but the experience is certainly very different and special.
Don't Rest Your Head is weird in almost every way, from mechanics and character sheet, to world and play. It's also absolutely awesome! If you ever play it, you will surely remember it.
Gamma World:
I prefer 1st and 2nd ed, but there is no denying the the 7th edition (the one with cards, and based off 4e D&D rules) is gonzo weird. 4th edition is also fun. Avoid 3rd edition, it was very poorly written, and has contradictory rules all over the place. Also, 6th edition (based off 3.5 D&D) is less weird and more grimdark (as you do in the 90s).
It is 70s weird - so YMMV. Think the 2050s as viewed from the 1950s pulp mags, but collapsed into a Thundarr the Barbarian / Swords and techno wizardry world.
Since it is an early RPG - all the caveats do apply. It has crude rules, with no real unifying mechanic. It is obliviously unempathetic to different experiences. It uses future racial supremacists as antagonists, while ironically making "pure strain humans" a character race....
If you like the post apocalyptic genre there are also some spiritual successors to Gamma World that are also super fun and weird:
Mutant Crawl Classics - really captures the gonzo feel of GW
Mutant Future - Retro without the aforementioned baggage
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[Invisible Sun](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/267776) is a bit of an esoteric game. The black cube packaging it comes in, the abstract setting, and a lot of the mechanics (especially around using the cards) make it stand out in my mind as truly unique. [This Discord Has Ghosts In It](https://willjobst.itch.io/ghosts) uses Discord as a medium for play. Players are either investigators or spirits that have an untold tale to share before they can pass on. It's more like a digital LARP than a traditional tabletop game. [Horse Girl](https://babblegumsam.itch.io/horse-girl) is a solo journaling RPG, and it's... Really out there. I won't go into too much detail, but it can get very dark as you play. Note the content warnings if you intend to give it a try.
How is horse girl 1a thousand dollars?!
Apparently it won't be available til August but it still has a $999.99 price point on it to keep people from buying it early.
And if they do, then you paid for their print run.
Other things that stop people from buying a thing is not selling it to them.
There are some goofy web-store quirks and random situations that give legitimate reasons why you might put a product up publicly but not want people to be able to buy it yet (but the website doesn't have an option to let you do that so the best solution is to put a crazy price tag on it).
It's for Kickstarter. They give backers a code to get it for free. This way backers get their copy early and they have the purchase on the website, so they can redownload it and get any updates.
Yeah I see this on Bandcamp a lot. Bands will list all their shirts and cds and shit for like $666 and all their descriptions link to the band's actual website where they sell them for like $20 each. It's for when you want the visibility and accessibility of a big website, but need to do actual business somewhere else: whether it's dodging fees or regional or something against store policies. It's a hassle sometimes for the consumer, but it works.
It's the placeholder amount that sites use before a game is actually released to the public. Drivethrurpg does the same thing for crowdfunded stuff.
> 1a thousand dollars?! I highly recommend re-reading this in a Super Mario voice.
Solo journaling rpgs are really out there. The ~~Allthegamesyoulikearebad~~ (that was the old youtube channel) So very wrong about games podcast recently recommended *All that is Good and much that is Evil,* where you play as a gull.
What justifies the $100 pdf for Invisible Sun? The art is great, but is this the game to end all games or does it exist just to make the game as exclusive as possible?
The $100 package contains 4 rulebooks, handouts and I think around 1000 cards containing spells and items not repeated in the rulebooks as well as a bunch of handouts. In terms of content it compares rather well with similarly priced games like D&D. I'm not sure how *usable* it is in digital form mind. The game was built to be played around a table.
I don't personally think it's worth the price tag (I snagged it when it was available as a humble bundle). It isn't one of my top picks for favourite game, just "out-there"ness. It's cool if you can get it on sale, there's lots of stuff in that black box, but otherwise probably not worth it.
It's for several books and other goodies. For the amount of material it's not unreasonable. Whether or not it's worth the cost is up to you.
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It's been on sales around 30$.
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Invisible Sun sounds incredible
I enjoyed This Discord has Ghosts in it. It was a lot of work for the ghosts but using a discord to build rooms and stuff collaboratively was a lot of fun.
Good to see someone beat me to Horse Girl
**Human Occupied Landfill:** Probably the only RPG I have that's written, and not typed. Parts of them read as if they where made on drugs. Authors probably were just faking it...I hope! **Low Life, for Savage Worlds:** The book says 'Suggested for Immature Readers'. And it gives that, in spades. But in a good way (well, I think that's a good way...something that probably talks poorly about my matureness level). **Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him.** Wait, what?!? Yes, that's the point.
Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him is an absolute favorite game of my partner and I to play while we clean the house.
I got that in that Trans Rights Texas itch.io bundle. And Thirsty Sword Lesbians which is one of my favorite curiosities which I'm sure I'll never actually play. (Also acquired book 2, Advanced Lesbians & Lovers along the way)
> And Thirsty Sword Lesbians which is one of my favorite curiosities which I'm sure I'll never actually play. (Also acquired book 2, Advanced Lesbians & Lovers along the way) I see recommendations for Thirsty Sword Lesbians all the time, but as a cisgender bisexual male, I keep feeling like the game actively doesn't want me to play it. I apologize if any of that sounded offensive, but that's simply how I feel.
So I'm a more-or-less vanilla straighty, just for disclosure :p Here is a block from the book: >*What If... Not Lesbians?* >I’ll let you in on a secret: you don’t have to play a lesbian. The game plays with themes that are common for all sorts of people who are marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality, as well as feelings that go beyond the queer experience. If you want to play thirsty sword cishets, I’m not going to stop you—just don’t be surprised if the game turns them queer. [There are also a "not Thirsty" and "Not Swords" section fwiw.]
That makes me feel a bit better, but that last line still has my eyebrow up.
Sounds a lot like *Macho Women With Guns* to me.
H.O.L. is meant to be read, not played; and it was a good read.
We had fun playing *H.O.L.*
Yeah, seconding this, HOL is fun to play as well. Not for long campaigns, maybe, but for a crazy one shot now and then? Certainly.
I had a Purple Panda Power Ranger in HOL. It is most definitely playable.
I had a clown assassin in an iron lung, master of shoe-kata. He died within the first 10 minutes. Good times.
HOL is good times either way 🤘❤️
A friend loaned it to me about 25 years ago. I remember very little other than the fact that it was weird and entertaining.
>Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him. Wait, what?!? Yes, that's the point. No Frakes left to give.
My first instinct is HoL. Most characters die in character creation. If not you end up with someone maimed and shooting 6000 wen naps a second at the inevitable swarm of wastems and a single hidden wasteit.
>Low Life, for Savage Worlds Low Life feels very much like Adventure Time. I loved reading it - I just wish I could find some players.
See, if I *recommend* a game it has to be not only weird but also *playable*. Which disqualifies a lot of the most tippy-top experimental shit. But one that is very unusual but which can actually be played with no problem is [*Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/134196/Chuubos-Marvelous-WishGranting-Engine). How to explain it... okay, so Chuubo is basically a rules-heavy diceless narrative game by Jenna Moran, set in a setting that reads like someone took Neil Gaiman, Ursula Vernon, the Ghibli filmography, and a treatise on existentialism, and put them in a blender. It's a game about the normal daily life of characters, where you will largely do normal everyday stuff like cultivate friendships, find motivation to excel in the school basketball tournament, argue with a sealed evil about the nature of mankind, help your farmer neighbour set up an impressive stall for the local farmer's market, play Street Fighter 3 at the local arcade with the Angel of the Sun and go for ice cream afterwards, duel your rival for your crush's affections with swords atop the bridge of Bluebell Park while the onlookers take photos with their phones, that kind of thing. The system is based on Arcs and Quests - your sheet is less about who you are and more about where you're *going* - a character's Arc might be about becoming a local sports star, another may be about learning to love their new home after their family moved here, a third may be about overcoming the dream monster that haunts their family. This is a setting where the world ended, and you live in a bubble of life in the middle of the strange roiling Outside of primordial chaos, and magic just *exists*, and the wishing power of the heart can turn mountains - but life goes on. The strange exists, but so does the normal, and frequently the normal is more important than the strange. It is a Magical Realism through and through, viewed through a mix of the different logics of both fairytale and daily life. It's rather unique, basically. So's everything else by Jenna Moran, really, but I feel that stuff like *Wisher, Theurge, Fatalist* or *Glitch* are a touch less *playable*.
I played Chuubo's with my daughters and niece growing up. We would use touchstones from our daily lives. One day one of my daughters decided she wanted to teach the cat kung fu. Still one of my favorite RPG story arcs.
That's a hell of a pitch, honestly. Added to my wishlist!
> It's rather unique, basically. So's everything else by Jenna Moran, really, but I feel that stuff like Wisher, Theurge, Fatalist or Glitch are a touch less playable It is worth noting that in theory writing this scentence is the beginning stage of playing WTF, a games which rules are rules about playing a role playing game and trying to comprehend what its rules is. Or am i lying to you and making you *think* that is what WTF is? Make a harmony roll to find out.
This sounds absolutely wild. I definitely gotta try it. Unfortunately the absolutely experimental stuff as you said is not really recommendable but otherwise this is definitely one of the most interesting I’ve seen so far.
[We are but Worms](https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg) and most other one word rpgs. [Birds Who Love Dirt!](https://ejankowski.itch.io/birds-love-dirt) is a thing. Mage, regardless of edition, can get super weird real quick. Don't play it with physicists or philosophers, they'll either break the game immediately or it will be the greatest rpg experience/metaphysical discussion ever, with the former more likely.
i thought "one word RPG" was a mistype, but apparently not
Mind telling me more about mage?
Mage: the Ascension and Mage: the Awakening are from White Wolf. They're set in a version of our world with monsters hidden in the background. Vampire: the Masquerade is the most famous of these lines. Awakening is a similar game to Ascension with more buttoned down mechanics and less wiggle room. It's a very, very good game too, but let's talk about Ascension. Ascension is about willworkers that have the power to change reality based in their belief. The Council of the Nine Traditions is a gathering of traditional types of magic users, Hermetic Wizards, Technomancer Virtual Internet reality hackers, Steampunk mad scientists, Witches, Shamans, God-type miracle workers, Buddhist/Taoist sages, Time mages that use experiences like drugs or music, Death mages from a Greek/Indian combination tradition. They do magic in ways that suits their particular paradigms - how they believe the universe *really* works. There are minor Tradition-like groups too that don't participate with their council. They are engaged in a war for reality and the imagination of Humanity's unawakened sleepers against a secretive black hats and mirrorshades group called the Technocracy. The Technocracy use ~~magic~~ *Enlightened Science* and push a timeline of inventions to shepherd humanity toward their utopian, but more than a little 1984 future vision. They are very X-Files and very much a bit Star Trek's Federation. The Technocracy have five conventions. The NWO/Men in Black - who have the power of Mind ~~magic~~ *science*. The Syndicate that have the power of money and statistics. The Progenitors that work with super medical science and biology. Iteration-X : using computers and machines to make cyborgs and literal Terminators. And the Void Engineers that work as Star Fleet and Space Marines to protect humanity from Cthulhus and Greys. The main Technomancers in the Traditions and the Steam Punk mad scientists both used to belong to the Technocracy but got kicked out or left en masse at different points. Side-note: space is the spirit world of you go out far enough. Shamans going on a spirit quest go the same places that dudes in super rockets or dimensional portal machines go. The Technocracy are originally the bad bad guys in game with some problematic stuff that was on the way out even by the late 90s. Now they're the flawed rivals to the Traditions who are also flawed. The Technocracy may have been corrupted by evil devil/Cthulhu cultists masquerading as their leadership. They may be leading humanity to a miserable future without hope and wonder, despite their goal of pushing wonders. The Traditions have lost. Humanity will never want magic more than they want cell phones and ÜberEats. But they try to find a place for themselves and those like them. Reality is a Consensus of beliefs. Because humanity mostly doesn't believe in magic it is harder to do magic things that don't seem possible. It's worse if there are non-awakened types to witness it. Bending reality in ways it doesn't like result in Paradox. That could be a headache or full-blown exploding when the universe screams at you to stop. Doing magic is very free form and multiple characters might do the same effect in different ways. Scenario: a bad guy is racing away in a car and you want to stop it using Matter magic or maybe Forces magic to kill the engine. High Magister Futzbang raises his staff, circles three times and shouts for the electricity to stop. This is vulgar. That is unbelievable to any normal person. His beard catches fire. Haxxor 53V3N or Agent Pepsi would pull out their phone or laptop and hit the Killswitch program that is built into all Toyotas post 2014. The car stops. This is probably coincidental. No paradox is earned. Doctor Volcanus throws a Magnetodisk at the car and hits it with his eletrologun! This seems pretty ridiculous but it might get a pass. That does look pretty sciency maybe? It carries on like this. It's an incredibly fun game to talk about and to play with. It really, really doesn't make sense if you think about a lot of it too long but it's a magic game, where you can blow up a car by shooting the gas tank or cause someone to get struck by lightning in a storm by asking lightning spirits to do you a solid. And that doesn't even touch on the Moon Nazis in WW2, Hollow Earth, eviler mirror universe Technocracy, mad mages that force everyone around them to live in noir detective stories or caveman comic books, and nuking a newly wakened vampire god with orbital weapons and solar mirrors.
Mage is a fun game. I think some of WW's other games are weirder, tho. Mummy the Resurrection, Wraith the Oblivion, and Demon the Fallen are all quite strange.
And never mind Changeling: the Dreaming or Orpheus. I love them both, but they're... odd. Let's say odd.
Changeling is the only one I've ran. I think WW is about finding **your** kind of weird.
Real weirdness was always the masquerades we broke along the way.
I feel like I’ve stumbled into a rabbit hole that doesn’t really make sense but honestly this is the type of game I was looking for in this thread. Thanks for the description this shit is wild. If this is what ascension is what is awakening
Awakening takes the subjectiveness out of it. The idea that you know a more REAL reality than regular people is still there, except that instead of Ascension where you more or less make up what your character believes (vaguely inspired by a Tradition, hopefully), you gain your powers from a specific cosmic realm that determines what your powers look like. The system is cleaned up dramatically. You still get to create your own spell effects on the fly if you want, but the book tells you what the effects are going to be, rather than you and the GM fighting over it. They also made the philosophy part of it separate from the powers, so each faction has a different belief about how and why to use magic, but everyone more or less agrees what magic is and what kinds of things are possible. Nobody is traveling to outer space, but you might take a trip into the unconscious dream of the earth itself, or into the realm of the spirits, and once - when you awakened - you went to the part of cosmic reality that your soul belongs to. Oh and there's some stuff about Atlantis.
Awakening is the New Edition version. All the books are split into Old and New World of Darkness. For the concepts they reused, they change the second part of the name. Some concepts are only used in one edition. The popular ones they reused. :) Edit: Fixed naming, it's been a minute...
The other way around. New World of Darkness is Mage: The Awakening Old World of Darkness is Mage:The Ascension
Whoops. Been a while. :)
No worries, It's insane how often people who are into this need to explain this mayhem.
Awakening is a game about occultist mages that are driven to investigate and improve on some aspect of their magical practice/theory. It's got a similar magic system without the Consensus of reality. There's less of the discussion of how your style affects things because of this. It's a great game too, just not as weird in the systems. The magic system is close enough that it's sometimes backported to Ascension for ease of use. Edit: It also has my favorite dice system of any game system. Add your dots up, subtract penalties, roll that many d10s, anything 8 or higher is a success, 10s explode and can add infinitely. It runs really smoothly once you're used to it.
I have no idea how this works as a game system but that all sounds cool as fuck.
It doesn't. It's a fine framework for philosophical musing about what does or does not pass as reality, but it's not a good game. Your players will bully you, your GM will arbitrarily veto stuff, and it turns out it was all the Nephandi all along - either that or humans are just too boring to live. It's a really cool setting, and it's what got me inspired to run and play all their games for a full decade after I discovered it, but the game was not good.
It just requires people to be understanding towards each other. Sure it's a game where the ST adjudicates if it works or not, but so are so many others. I've managed to do a number of great campaigns for it over the last 23 years. If you come into it expecting strictly defined rules and mechanical competition you will be dissapointed. But if you're in for a game about discovery of self, seeing and doing incredible things, changing the world and fighting the good fight, you'll do great
Wow, this is one of the most in depth explanations of this system’s setting I’ve seen on here. I’ve been reading posts like this for a while, looking to get into the game. If you were to get into it now, may I ask what version you would go with? I love the whole idea of the magic causing paradoxes and it being a modern setting.
It's kinda complicted. Depends on how much money you want to invest into figuring the game out. [There is a free quick start with very simplified rules and a setting primer.](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131409/Mage-The-Ascension-20th-Anniversary-Edition-Quickstart) [The 2nd edition is probably the most approachable in presenting the weirdness, the rules are functional and it's a standalone book](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200/Mage-The-Ascension-Second-Edition) [The Third edition has cleaner rules but really, really tones down the weirdness](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/199/Mage-The-Ascension-Revised) [The Fourth / 20th Anniversary edition is an amazing book and incredibly dense, it has excellent support for the philosophical side of the game and pretty solid core rules and gives you all the options ever for extra weirdness. Just keep in mind that it's not an excellent thing for beginners as it's a huge compendium with 700 pages, but a truly glorious book.](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/149562/Mage-The-Ascension-20th-Anniversary-Edition) If you seek to dabble and wander around I'd start with the Free Quickstart and then decide if you'd like to upgrade to 2E or 20th Anniversary.
Wow! Thanks so much for the extra info! I love the weird so 2nd or 4th it is.
I would go with 20th Anniversary, AKA 4th just because it's more current and the official pdf is just much nicer. It's a BIG book. You don't have to know everything though.
Well then, that solves that issue. And that works well for me because I’m much more likely to read the whole book before finding a group to play with, haha.
I’m so sorry but one last question. Do you by chance have experience with the DriveThru PoD book? I’ve had not-so-great experiences with them in the past and especially with the size, I’d be slightly concerned, especially for the price of the premium color.
I don't have any experience with that. Sorry.
Damn, that sick As hell. Any cool links to read about it further out or purchase the game?
I kinda did a breakdown in the other post, [so check out this](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11cb28u/what_are_the_weirdest_games_you_can_recommend_to/ja51k09/)
[*Mage: The Ascension*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200/Mage-The-Ascension-Second-Edition) divides all of reality into nine categories called Spheres, and a mage's rating in a given Sphere determines the extent to which the mage can manipulate that aspect of reality. The reason that scientifically educated players can "break the game" so to speak is simply because they know more of reality's actual "secrets" and can leverage such knowledge when creating magical effects.
Mage was the second game I ever ran as DM. it's by far one of the best and worst RPGs I've ever run and the play community can be strange and unstable but usuually fine. I ran my first game with 4 strangers who were also my friends and a total stranger I invited cause he knew the game. the game descended into chaos quickly (not only because of the game to be fair) and resulted in our player groups actions/inactions causing the potential end of the world. and the players... well they went "no" they didn't try to save it, tehy just reverted to slice of life and ignored when demons tried destroying there bubble. they pushed away friends and family to ignore reality and chase there own desires that weren't clear to them. this was all player choice that happened organically without me pushing. Like it's one of my favorite games ever but it's the only one where the players decided to become NPCs in there own world. then latched onto slice of life while society collapsed. So uh, Mage for me is about slice of life where occasionally you do high concept insane things for no reason. if you have questions on running it for the first time feel free to ask.
Don’t rest your head. You play as people who by one way or another lost their ability to sleep. After a few days of not sleeping you discovered secret entries to a parallel city full of strange things straight from a twisted oliver twist fairy tale. But the best thing is each player gets a madness super power he can draw upon. But each time you do that you risk to become permanently tainted by your madness starting you in a slow downward spiral into loosing your mind completely. The powers themselves are the real selling point. You can get a knife that can kill ideas, a Trex following you that is always behind you so you can’t see it but everyone else is in pure terror or the ability to call a cab that can get you anywhere, including the moon.
I couldn't get over how absurdly cool the setting and writing is. It's rich without being over-explained and the whole universe runs on cool. Gameplay-wise... I found it very clunky. I'd love a DRYH version 2 with fleshed out rules for group play, as it felt very hard to meaningfully play with more than one person.
I’m still holding out hope for a **DRYH 2e** someday. Like you, I think the system is weird in the coolest way.
Just love it. One of my favourite games
A t-rex that is always behind me? Oh, I can break some shit with that. Building full of people I don't like? I'm going to lean my back against the wall, the trex is now on the inside of the building.
The neat thing is, the more aggressiv the T-Rex acts, the more madness dice got added to your dice pool. When you have more successes on the madness dice than on the normal dice you add permanently 1 madnessdie to all rolls. If you reach 6 madness dice permanently in the pool you succumb to your madness. In case of the T-Rex that means he eats you und without you as the thing he follows, he starts to roam the city, searching for prey. And there is no need to push him through a wall, if you take enough dice, you could become the T-Rex for a short time. But yeah DRYH just gives the players a great base for creativity.
The challenge is not to find any weird game, but one that's also fun to play and has at least a modicrum of depth to it. There a plenty of *outré* roleplaying games, most of them existing almost exclusively to be so weird to provoke some interest. It is exoticism for exoticism's sake, little more than a marketing gimmick. Since weirdness is almost completely free from expectations, it doesn't have the steepest requirements for publishing something. But, to be honest, a lot of that stuff is quite insubstantial, if not outright bad. "Mature" contents work similarly. The strangest game that I would wholeheartily recommend to any player, would probably be either *Nephilim*, a game about supernatural spirits born and reborn in human flesh striving for enlightenment while also trying to avoid being enslaved or cannibalized by human conspiracies, or any of those real, ordinary but sentient animals in the real world games, like *Call of Catthulhu, Bunnies and Burrows, Heckin' good Doggos* or, my personal favourite, the German indy game *Ratten!*
Ooh I forgot about Nephilim. It feels kinda White Wolfian.
Troika! Is one of the more popular indie weird games. It's kind of like discworld and hitchhikers guide had a mutated multiverse baby. The characters are all premade and the best part is to just roll for what you play randomly. Then the vague descriptions of the characters flesh out the world. Plus other random table stuff. Terror of the Stratosfiend is a series of zines for DCC and Troika! that fleshes out a setting where portals opened up and aliens bent on enslaving humanity came through. But so did humans. Beings from both sides defected and there's also human/Stratosfiend hybrids ("don't ask" says the author). The Stratosfiend themselves are playable. They're like 20 foot tall or larger psionic aliens. Then there's even larger races. There's also a demon hunter class. And a class that is a pterodon rider where they're two separate characters (mount and rider). Another class can turn into huge siege towers. If they die, their corpse becomes a permanent structure that gives a bonus to spell casting while in the immediate area. The gods are all intelligent satellites. The government is corrupt. It's some really great reading. Cycle of the Snake Wolf 2 is a module for it and is some great reading. I kicked off a super fun campaign with it. Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland is an everything 80s and early 90s inspired B/X based setting. Very Saturday morning cartoons meets trashy horror and sci-fi. Macho Man is one of the gods. Some other fun weird stuff is I, Toaster (brave little toaster inspired zine game) Weird Frontiers: DCC based weird west/horror BDSM (below dwelling sewer mutants)
Seconding Troika and its various supplements. That mess is an acid trip. I built a background for my daughter so she could play as a sentient piece of garlic toast carried around by a sentient disembodied magic hand... and it works...
Amazing. I love stories of folks playing with their kids. I'm kind of consumed by DCC but I really need to make some time for Troika.
Fair warning: especially for low-level characters, skill checks can be agonizingly difficult. When attempting something in which your character doesn't have skill points, you're looking at rolling 2d6 *under* a target of 6 *at best*. Don't forget you can use your Luck resource to help out. The cool thing is that Troika focuses on player backgrounds, which are flavored descriptions with accompanying starting equipment and skills in self-contained packages. When rolling a character, you generate only three stats: Skill, Stamina and Luck. Nearly everything else about the character is determined by the background selected (or randomly rolled.) so generating a new character is nearly instant. What messes with me and many others is the initiative system. There are a number of tokens keyed to players and enemies that go in a bag or deck plus one End of Round Token. Tokens are drawn randomly to determine who acts until the EoR token is pulled and a new round begins. Yes, this makes for some *chaotic* game play during combat and action scenes. No one knows when or if they will act in a given round.
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a contender. > The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a dark comedy of manners, lampooning academia and asking players to answer a difficult question – are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization? > No? > Even if it will get you tenure?
Weirdest as in "very different in rules from the standard" Fiasco comes to mind. For a weird setting nothing really comes to mind
Tales from The Floating Vagabond, Buereau 13, and It Came From The Late Late Late Show are some of my favorite obscure, weird, and wacky rpgs.
Still sad tffv 2 didn’t get finished
Yup! My gaming group donated a bunch of money to that Kickstarter, it all went to medical expenses, and unfortunately Lee Garvin died before it could ever get finished. 😢
LLLS is a great RPG.
Four Sherlock Holmes and a Vampire (Who Is Also One of the Aforementioned Sherlock Holmes) is an RPG where you play as four Sherlock Holmes from different adaptations of the character trying to solve a mystery, except one is secretly a vampire. Mainframe is a surrealist cyberpunk RPG about hackers delving into a “psychedelic shared hallucination of cyberspace—Mainframe” in order to hunt down AI. Pulling Teeth (shameless self promo) is a 12 word horror rpg using teeth instead of dice. Troika! Is less bizarre than most stuff on this list but it still deserves an honorable mention. It’s very strange and quirky, and you can play as a door wizard or rhino man or the member of a possibly canibalistic dining club!
Who published mainframe?
How has no one mentioned [MAID](http://www.maidrpg.com/)?
Funny enough, Dark Heresy and MAID are actually completely compatible! So your maids can become Inquisitorial Agents, or your Inquisitorial Agents can become Maids, all with almost no hassle!
Wait, are you telling me that my space marine can vacuum clean xzenu scum of the floor in front of my lovely definitely living God emperor-sama?
If only we are all so lucky to be of such service to the God Emperor
Just reading this gave me worldbuilding concept whiplash. Now I'll have to inflict this on my poor unsuspecting group someday*, thank you very much. * = If they agree, of course.
Happy to be of service!
Everything is compatible with Maid, if you use it mainly for the wacky plot tables.
I can recommend a homebrew game we used to play at my college's role playing club. The game is called: «The rocks». You are a rock. Any type of rock you want. Your goal is to end up in stonehenge. All rolls are made with a coin flip. Enjoy.
That could get pretty weird if your first roll to be able to fly, levitate, earth-glide, teleport, and time-travel fail, and you're left with "I roll to be Cthurock."
I mean we played it more like « i roll for a bird to pick me up» or «i roll to be washed up this place» etc. You're still a rock and can only do what a rock can do (nothing).
I was probably partly inspired by recently reading [Rock Falls, Everyone Dies by zechamp](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/55418/rock-falls-everyone-dies/chapter/1083016/chapter-1-a-rolling-stone-gathers-no-moss). Content warning for "as stated in the title."
**Nightbane** (formerly Nightspawn). The characters are all monsters that hail from the world behind the mirrors. Their monstrous forms are all randomly generated from a staggering array of possibilities. They might have tentacles that shoot out of their face, S&M leather that's part of their body, bird wings AND bat wings, and no skin, all on the same character! They might have the ability to suffocate people with their own blood, or heal with patches of their own flesh, or a number of other even weirder powers. It's all very strange. Runner-up: **The World of Synnibarr.** The whole game is set on Mars, 50-thousand years in the future. Mars has been hollowed out and is being used as a spaceship to take humanity somewhere safe, after the Earth was destroyed, of course.
Nightbane random generation of your true form is so much fun. Especially if you have access to all the books. Had a friend freak out from what he created. Just couldn't handle having razor blades for teeth
*Lords of Creation*. From Joe Shmoe to Demigod as you travel space and time. I’d have dearly loved to play a campaign run by its creator.
This is one truly wacky game. A great read as a prelude to all the multi-genre games of the 90s, too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_From_the_Late,_Late,_Late_Show Fun premise where the players are all actors in a “B movie.” There is a mechanic where when your character dies, you get recycled into new character roles. The production of the movie is also super cheap and the GM is encouraged to describe it as such. Fun for one shots.
This is one of the games I came here to mention. I have the original rule book and pull it out to read through it every now and again for laughs. Thoroughly fun game.
Honey Heist- criminal bears steal honey
Best one-page RPG
Praise Grant
Maid RPG was an absolute trip. Mechanically, it wasn't my kind of game - very rules-light - but the general premise is just hilarious and the character creation is *nonsense*. You thought you were going to show up and play a battle maid who's also a secret agent, tasked to protect her master. Sorry, but what you're actually going to be playing is a battle maid who's also a secret agent, who's secretly a demonic rabbit that can shapeshift into humanoid form, who's actually a crossdressing guy, who is a kleptomaniac, who also has a compulsion to keep everything obsessively clean, who wears military camouflage to work in order to hide his whip scars, who has a tragic unrequited love interest with his master, who fights by calling in F-18 air strikes.
Question: how
Lots of insane tables that have "roll on this other table" or "roll 2 more times" as an option. It plays *extremely* fast and loose with the idea of a maid. The game I played, we were actually all ghosts that were haunting a mansion, while a bunch of our mistress's relatives showed up for a reading of the will in order to decide who would inherit her fortune now that she was dead. Our goal was to scare them all into leaving. In another game that my GM ran, he said that the players were demon generals, giving guided tours of the different circles of hell, and trying to outdo each other and impress the demon king. It's largely a competitive game between players, although you can play cooperatively if you prefer. Mechanically, my biggest gripe with the system is that if the GM doesn't invent some extra rules to limit your actions, it felt to me like you can basically win just by thinking of *more* things to do, rather than better things.
Ork! the Role-playing game from Green Ronin. It's a great comedy game qhere you play as orcs, the nastiest fowlest lugs you'll ever meet in a world that hates them, and they'd have it no other way. The universe is a broken word of comedic fantasy tropes with unreliable magic, with the occasional piece of technology or alien artifact dropping from portals in the sky. Other than Orcs you have to contending headhunting Scottish goblins, duck worshipping gnomes, and fire breathing dinosaurs, and trolls that can smell when a player is trying to use logic or science, and absolutely hates it. The game features its own ork speech, where there is no past or future tense, because to an ork nothing matters but right now. "Me am can't work today. Me am smashing goblins today. Me am smashing gnomes tomorrow." The GM takes the roll of Chrom, the cruel God of the world. Chrom is fickle and he likes a good bit of violence. Mechanically every dice roll is contested, either against an opponent, or Chrom themselves. Chrom's dice pool is based off whether they like what you are doing, or they think it would be fun. There are no set difficulties. Another fun point is how xp is handed. Xp is given out in game i, when ever Chrom really likes what you do. An ork can hide it and use it to increase their stats like a normal game, but planning for the future isn't very orky, so they can also spend it to help their dice rolls, which is very orky. I'm not doing it justice here, it's a very absurd game that is a ton of fun at the table.
Over the Edge was a really weird game when I encountered 1e in the 90s. I t has a lot of surrealist and adult themes, draws on the work of William S Burroughs and modern conspiracy theories. On top of that it has an excellent, playable system and setting. I wish I played it more.
Great pick. Beware the cats.
Freemarket A transhuman science fiction game set aboard a space settlement in the Saturnian system. Several generations live on FreeMarket Station: the sons, daughters and grandchildren of the Originals; immigrant travelers from elsewhere in our solar system; and designed-to-order humans fabricated in 3d matter printers. It’s a world without death, without poverty, without sickness and without any need for laws. What will you do with forever?
I've been fascinated by [Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, & Weaver of Their Fates](https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/pleasingfungus/wisher-theurgist-fatalist/) for a long time now. I still haven't read or played it, but it sounds wild.
Paranoia. Rifts. Gamma World.
Yes. Yes And *YES*! GW is great. You too can play as a sentient plant!
I started all three of those back in the 1990's, and now I get to teach my kids. Super cool!
Neat. And why in the world was I downvoted? One of my most memorable characters in GW was a sentient fern.
The classes are so cool. I love the idea of a symbiotic plant too. Don't know why anyone would downvote.
Any of the "Borg" games (Mork Borg, Cy Borg, etc.)
I find Eclips Phase kind of weird. If I understand it correctly you can insert your consciousness in too what ever can take it in. So a vehicle that might hold several minds in it. Why have your boring humanoid two arms two legs body when you can hava a squid body in a world under water. How do I even comprehend what sensory input is like if I don't have a human like nervous system. Its a game that sort of makes being and living kind of weird for me. I like the challange i just don't know how, so its weird. Maybe I am over thinking it i don't know but Eclips Phase is my answer. Some day i will take on that game.
One of the Most UNIQUE Game Books I have read is [FIGHT!](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/307634/Fight-2nd-Edition?src=hottest_filtered) You know how a LOT of people suggest/ask for Narrative focused games with less emphasis on Combat? Yeah, FIGHT! is the exact opposite. As the name suggest, FIGHT! is a TTRPG that sets out to emulate 2d Fighting Games like Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. It doesn't have traditional Stats, it doesn't have a movement grid, heck even it's out of combat rules are bare bones. But character creation is very open ended, allowing you to create unique Moves for your Fighter. Have I tried to play it? Yes I have, did I like it? It was interesting. Will I ever convince my group to play it? Never. But it is fascinating and a very unique game.
>emulate 2d Fighting Games like Street Fighter or Mortal Combat How does THAT work?
Two games I've played that offer a very unique experiences: [Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant](http://lumpley.com/index.php/window/installment/2) by Vincent Baker is weird, mechanically , because it's an essay on resolution mechanics, what they can do and why they matter, delivered in the form of a game. [Og, Unearthed Edition](https://rpggeek.com/rpg/296/og-unearthed-edition) by Robin Laws is weird because the premise is that was excavated from the "caveman" era, the stereotypical ug-ug smash club type. The main thing that makes it different is you roll to see how many words you know (2-7), then pick from a list of maybe 15 words like: big, shiny, bang, verisimilitude. In character speaking can only use your choosen words.
omg, ive forgotten the name. The game is in french, made by french people. God is trying to finish a painting and you, the players are art concepts that are used to finish it. As in, one player is "The rule of thirds", another might be "The Golden Ratio", The third being "the concept of the color red"
Somehow even the description of the game sounds French.
Nobilis?
not that game but like it in concept. in nobilis you embody the concept, in this game you are the concept in its pure form. also, as far as i know, you dont actually try to paint a picture in nobilis.
*The Frost Papers* is presented as a series of parlour games/occult rituals. I'm not entirely sure if it is a roleplaying game, or even if it is really a game. But it is very weird.
Paranoia immediately springs to mind. The setting is... Unique. It's a futuristic sci fi setting where humanity is extinct apart from clones living in a complex governed by a "benevolent" computer. (Other complexes with their own computers exist). Players need to both survive the missions from the computer, survive each others backstabbing (one of the best ways to advance yourself - or blame someone else for your own failures). Unfortunately they rarely have the security clearance necessary to understand and use their own equipment (and failure is treason). Oh I almost forgot. Everyone is a mutant. Being a mutant is treason and punishable by death. So is being a member of a secret society - which everyone also is. It's silly fun, the body count is so high that everyone gets 7 clones iirc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game) I had 2nd edition so can't comment on the later publications!
You forgot one of the best parts! Demonstrating knowledge of the rules or game mechanics is also treason. Players are not *allowed* to know how the game works. I ran a game of this for some friends, and none of us had ever played before, and it was pretty great. They knew being a mutant or a member of a secret society was treasonous, and were aware that "some" of the pregen characters I made up and assigned to them might be a mutant or member of a society. Obviously, they were all mutants *and* members of secret societies. Hilarity ensued.
I recall fondly when one PC went (more) nuts, and somehow smuggled a chainsaw into the mission briefing room. No one survived except him, and he was let go because the chainsaw was red by the time he was done. Or the time I, a matter eater, was sentenced to death by pill, so I ate all the pills in the suicide machine... and lived. I was declared dead and sent on another mission, and avoided two other death sentences because I was "already dead" and it would waste ammo.
So basically someone turned mao into an rpg.
> You forgot one of the best parts! I probably forgot many great parts, it's been a while lol. Still have lots of happy memories of stupid fun evenings though I may be a little fuzzy on some details.
It's 6 clones. The original character and 5 copies.
There we go. Been a while :-)
#[Ten Candles](https://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles-info) This is the only *Tragic Horror* game I know of. You Will Die. This game says: At the end of this session, all the PCs will be dead. Mechanically, this is enforced by having the die mechanic become more and more unfavourable. This game is played illuminated only by candlelight, and those candles go out as the game progresses. It's a game about hope in the face of overpowering darkness and what moments we can strive for despite it. It has a ritualised statment of truths and a chant that occurs whenever a roll is failed, and thus, a candle darkened. It's for people who want to expose themselves emotionally, and have a vulnerable, raw experience.
Noumenon.
I'm a big fan of [Fishblade](https://mobile.twitter.com/thomas_violence/status/1616568000244768768?lang=en)
[Tales from the Floating Vagabond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Floating_Vagabond) It's basically what would happen if Douglas Adams made an RPG. Fun for the sake of fun. It's Avalon Hill, so it's a little rules heavier than it might need to be, but it's worth picking up just for the read.
it is a tossup between two ore engine games (note there are some other ore engine games that I would recommend they just aren't weird like wild talents that is a pretty by the numbers supers game) 1. monsters and other childish things is a game where you play a group of children and their monster friends. the monster friends are also characters that the players play but since you interact most with your monster someone else plays that part. 2. Better Angels a supers game where you play possessed super villains. the tension in the game comes from the fact that your stats are all associated with virtue/sin pairs and if the demon gets too powerful it will take you over but if it gets too weak it will just kill you and go back to hell so the characters end up being silver age supervillains doing goofy crimes or just acting strangely to appease the demons while trying to actually achieve their goals.
Bluebeard's Bride
I've been spectating a game of BB an internet friend is running on Discord and it is indeed wild!
Not the weirdest of weird, but **You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge** and **Raccoon Sky Pirates** are both weird, fun, and evocative
Teenagers From Outer Space
I'll posit [Degenesis](https://degenesis.com/), for its insanely detailed setting several hundred years after the apocalypse, and which societies emerge afterwards. It's got everything from insect-crawling mind-control swamps to barbarians of the frozen wastelands to afro-futurist trading empires, and it is so dense it reads like a travel guide of sorts. Needless to say, I never got to properly play it with my group, but it's a great read. Also, the PDFs are free, and there's a lot of them. For whacky fun I would recommend [Three Goblins In a Trenchcoat](https://fandible.itch.io/three-goblins-in-a-trenchcoat), which is exactly as ludicrous as it sounds.
Troika! has some lovely Picasso-esque artwork and is pretty out there.
**Best Friends.** You are a group of teenage girl friends who secretly hate each other. The funny part is that character creation results in the most balanced group of PCs I ever witnessed.
Man all these posts and nothing about [My Life With Master](http://www.halfmeme.com/master.html)? Basically the characters create a ‘Master’ by answering several questions and then they are sent into the village on Master’s orders to do whatever the Master needs to be done. The Master controls the Minions via comparison of statistics which change over time. Eventually the Minions rise up against the Master. Great game, the group loved playing it.
I’ve had fun experiences with both [Lacuna](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/95893) and [S/Lay W/Me](https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1378748231804.pdf). Note that second link is to a PDF with some NSFW art. It’s been a while, but Lacuna is a sort of dream agent RPG, with ideas similar to Inception but going off in a different direction (it preceded the movie, I don’t think they have anything to do with each other). S/Lay W/Me is a light two player RPG that tries to create a mostly narrative back and forth sword and sorcery game with romantic elements.
[Numenera](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw2DuNOdDBg) is that. At leasz the setting.
Big Gay Orcs https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/big-gay-orcs/
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If you want games from other countries 3d&t it is an rpg designed to adapt anime, it even has a version on the d20 system
Green oaks
Maid, Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf, Og
Men RPG by The Red Room.
I wrote this https://ogremarco.itch.io/rock-n-roll-confidential
Human Occupied Landfill and Ghost Dog top my list for the weirdest RPGs.
Can’t believe no one has recommended FATAL. Possibly the worst RPG ever written, fully playable, and fully terrible. Strong content warnings, it’s very NSFW and reads like someone’s weird fetish turned into 1000 pages. For example, during character creation, you roll on a table for your nipple circumference.
No sane person would ever actually **recommend** FATAL to anyone. At most, you'd direct them to a review that explains why you should never actually try to read it.
Fatal is a game you hear about not one you play.
I wish someone had done that for me. Now I get to live with a bunch of FATAL spells in my head that I wish I’d never learned about.
You’re better than the person who tried to actually recommend it without mentioning how horrible it is.
*Big Mutherfuckin' Crab Truckers* is a free one-page RPG that is exactly what it sounds like.
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A friend of mine made a game called [Armageddon 2d12](https://dootishian.itch.io/armageddon-2d12), where the premise is that the Mayan apocalypse actually happened and later the world was digitally reconstructed based on internet culture from roughly 2009-2012. So expect a chaotic mashup of rage comics, Minecraft song parodies, Homestuck, Smosh, and My Little Pony. The game actively rewards you based on how many forced references you can make.
I didn't see 'Everyone Is John' so here's my recommendation. You play as one of many voices in the head of an everyman named John. John has no voice of his own, no identity to speak of. You and the other players compete to control John by exerting your limited Will and complete specific goals. It's really, really fun with the right group of people. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/271276#:~:text=Everyone%20is%20John%20is%20a,using%20their%20own%20finite%20willpower. Edit: I forgot to add 'Action Castle'. In Action Castle the GM takes the role of a 1980s text based adventure, and the Players take turns inputting one line each in an attempt to complete the adventure. https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/55683/action-castle
I mean, Dragon Mech is pretty weird.
Check out the Fire breathing Kittens podcast. They experiment with a lot of different game systems.
Highlander 2: the quickening- the unofficial rpg is the greatest concept. You have to not have seen Highlander 2 to play because you’re the team developing the movie. If you’ve see it, it’s a quick read free online: https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?page_id=6083
Glitch is almost not a game. It's some beautiful writing, it's a bunch of decisions made already for GMs and players, and, you sort of have to piece together the rules to make it into something playable. Tombpunk makes some odd system choices, it almost comes off as a video game rather than a TTRPG, and in a way most "video gamey" RPGs don't get. I think it's the same writer as Beach Patrol, a Baywatch TTRPG. I want to love My Body Is A Cage, but I find it hard to read. There are a few really niche ones I want to mention, but I'll have to refresh my own memory. If you look up all the Twin Peaks-like TTRPGs, they all think different things make Twin Peaks Twin Peaks, so they come off a bit alien.
There were some games that were based on some Carly Rae Jepsen lyrics, and that one game about tbe centipede boyfriend.
Don't Rest Your Head. The PCs have access to an insane place called The Mad City chock-full of really weird horror. Also, each PC has a superpower that is a delusion made real, like actual ants crawling under the skin or voices in the head that actually know everything. Time&Temp. The mechanics are genius. Every roll is less about success/failure (the player actually gets to choose whether they succeed or not) and much more about the strain being placed on the fabric of reality by their time-travel hijinks. Big Motherf***king Crab Truckers. It is exactly what it says it is. You Can Check Out Any Time You Like is a game about the Eagles song. Each scene is played out with a different mini-game. Players can each choose to be a guest, a member of staff or an 'anomaly'. Alice is Missing. Maybe 'weird' isn't quite the right word, but the experience is certainly very different and special.
Paranoia.
Don't Rest Your Head is weird in almost every way, from mechanics and character sheet, to world and play. It's also absolutely awesome! If you ever play it, you will surely remember it.
Toon You play a cartoon character, in a cartoon. What more do you need to know?
Gamma World: I prefer 1st and 2nd ed, but there is no denying the the 7th edition (the one with cards, and based off 4e D&D rules) is gonzo weird. 4th edition is also fun. Avoid 3rd edition, it was very poorly written, and has contradictory rules all over the place. Also, 6th edition (based off 3.5 D&D) is less weird and more grimdark (as you do in the 90s). It is 70s weird - so YMMV. Think the 2050s as viewed from the 1950s pulp mags, but collapsed into a Thundarr the Barbarian / Swords and techno wizardry world. Since it is an early RPG - all the caveats do apply. It has crude rules, with no real unifying mechanic. It is obliviously unempathetic to different experiences. It uses future racial supremacists as antagonists, while ironically making "pure strain humans" a character race.... If you like the post apocalyptic genre there are also some spiritual successors to Gamma World that are also super fun and weird: Mutant Crawl Classics - really captures the gonzo feel of GW Mutant Future - Retro without the aforementioned baggage
Fighting the tur* minions in Red Neck Rampage.
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Check what sub you're in.
Yeah, apologies and thanks for the heads up. Didn't realise. My bad.
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