Torg: Eternity · 5:33am Jun 17th, 2017
So apparently this is something I'm doing these days. Talking about Tabletop RPGs and their associated Kickstarters that I'm interested in. Today I'm bringing Torg: Eternity to your attention.
So here's the deal. Earth, our world, is suffused with "Possibility Energy," which seems to be shorthand for "we're potentially awesome, and that potential can be quantified as an energy that other people in the multiverse want to take from us."
In fact, we have so much of this energy that multiple groups of people from different universes -- or Cosms -- have come to our world to kick our asses and steal it from us! And when I say "come to our world," I mean they're forcing their realities onto portions of ours and terraforming the invasion location to be more comfy for themselves.
These invading cosms are things like the Nile Empire (guess where they're invading), a universe that behaves like Pulp media (Indiana Jones, etc). Then there's Pan Pacifica (over in the Asia/pacific rim region) that's like a cyberpunk universe. The Living Land is a "Land of the Lost" sort of thing full of dinosaurs and shit that's taking over the coasts of North America.
Your player character is what's called a "Storm Knight," and as I understand it they're people from our world, or from those other worlds, who have the ability to interact with the different cosms better than your average person, and thus can fight and/or aid the invaders.
Stuff like that.
Sound weird? It sounds weird to me too! This is apparently a sequel to a game that came out in the 80s/90s and was reasonably popular at the time. Judging by the Kickstarter's performance, I guess that's so! I dunno, I never played it, but the hype machine got me and I backed it based entirely upon that.
The fact that most of the pledge tiers get you most/all the old books in PDF form doesn't help.
So yeah. Thought I'd share this because it sounded fun.
I played a lot of TORG back in the day, and I loved it. The system was funky. It had some rules that didn't make sense, and it definitely suffered from power creep, but the whole idea of the different cosms and the realities that came with them was amazing.
I've been thinking for a long time about writing a crossover story in the TORG universe where Chrysalis finds the Alicorn Amulet, but it's basically a darkness device from the TORG world. Suddenly, Chrysalis is a high lord, and able to potentially conquer Equestria, or to send down Equestrian reality onto Earth if she desired. I don't have time to write it, but I want to.
I still have most of the TORG books sitting on my gaming shelf in my living room. I leaf through them every so often. Man, they have some bad art...
4573564
Yeah, it looks pretty cool. I can say though that the new developers have said that they're redoing a lot of the funky systems. Possibility is now separate from XP for instance.
4573570 There were pros and cons with the possibilities being the one-stop shop for game currency. I did end up hording them for leveling, though. Probably for the best to separate it out from XP.
One thing TORG had that I loved was the drama deck. The GM flipped over a card from this deck each round, and whatever was on that card impacted the scene. It was very versatile and added unpredictability to the whole thing. Players had cards, too, and we could use those card to do amazing things.
TORG also had this system where the players mailed back the results from they gaming sessions, and then the results were compiled with the most common results become the new reality. The boundaries of the cosms shifted, empires rose and fell, new powers came to be, etc. TORG wasn't a perfect game, but the scope of the thing was epic.
And man, if you ever managed to pull out a stele... They were the dimensional anchors that kept the invading cosms in our reality. They were laid down over the map in triangular patterns. Pulling out a stele basically pushed back this new reality. It was incredibly difficult. So difficult that our group never managed to do it, but just hoping and trying was super fun.
4573572
Yep, all that seems to still be in. The Drama Deck is bigger I think, and they put in Cosm Cards, which I don't strictly get yet. And they've said they're gonna do the player driven plot thing too, though no details yet. Probably gonna be online feedback forms, I'll wager.
4573572
They actually did an AMA on reddit, come to think of it
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/6hf9t0/we_are_the_designers_of_torg_eternity_amaask_us/