This is the kind of crap people who know nothing about RPGs make up because they think that’s what RPGs are all about. Guide: Here we gather, we who seek admittance into the Secret World of magic and wonder, we who seek entry into the worlds of legend, we who shall be eldritch for our allotted time.
I have no time to type in all the balderdash, especially as I’m writing this on a laptop which is slowly but surely cooking my testicles, because we have a blackout and this is all I can do and I want to write as much as I can before the battery dies and I have to try to fall asleep, but here’s a sample: Players (again, in unison): Oh when shall the pizza arrive? Players (as a Greek chorus): Oh when shall we begin the game? “Legendmaking”, and the final capper comes from the fact they include a cermony - that the players are expected to perform - to open and close the game. The second score in the Pretension Trifecta is that they claim it’s not roleplaying, it’s… wait for it. The back of the game screams “It’s More Than A Roleplaying Game”, and goes on to note it features “communal protaganists”, “tips on achieving epiphanies” (!), “dream control methods” (No…. One such was (perhaps still is, I think they’ve published recently) “Visionary Entertainment Studio”, and,in 1997, they published the first of the Everlasting games, “The Book Of The Unliving”.īefore we get to chargen, though, let me justify my charge of “Pretension”.
While the banner of hippy-dippy New Age psychobabble has moved on to those games published under the “Indie” banner, notably disciples of Ron Edwards and the Forge, back in the good old 1990s, the Usual Suspects were White Wolf (which has, since the departure of Rein-splat-Heigan, finally mostly grown out of it, though not their unreadable layout issues)… and their hordes of wanna be imitators.
You’re playing magical elves in fairyland. This group tends to look down on “hack&slashers” or “D&D players” and usually blathers on about things like “recapturing the collective storytelling experience” or “tapping into Jungian archetypes” or “voyages of internal self discovery”. The equivalent in tabletop RPGs is the attitude that there’s something special, mystical, or otherwise meaningful about playing. But no matter how much they try to act as if there’s something manly about ganking n00bs, it still boils down to pretending to be magical elves. I usually bring this up in online game boards, especially those catering to the PVP crowd, because they tend to act all rough and tough and macho and claim to be “HARD-CORE!” because they like games where they can “kill” their opponents and “risk” things, and look down on “WoW kiddies” and “roleplaying weenies”. When you are roleplaying, what you are doing is pretending to be magical elves in fairyland. I say “seems” because, like 90% of my games, I have never even tried to create a character. It produced four volumes and some supplements, though, and it seems to be workable. It’s a lot like a mid-90s White Wolf game, except with worse art and layout, a more poorly designed system, and the “pretentious poser git” factor turned up to 11. So I put that one on hold, and decided, mostly on a whim, to haul out “Everlasting”, a game which manages to be just about as pretentious as Numenon while still having an obvious game there. I couldn’t really figure out where the game started and the weird self indulgent pseudo-philosophical text stopped.
As far as I can tell, Numenon is a game about playing imaginary half-human, half-insect creatures that exist in some vague sort of… uhm… I’m not sure. Originally, my plan for this next installment was something called “Numenon”. And, no, it’s not from White Wolf! Welcome to Everlasting: Book Of The Unliving! Lizard skips the half-human dream insects and decides to look at a late nineties game where you play angst ridden undead in a world filled with all sorts of supernatural entities, using a dice pool system and filled with pretentious posturing.
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