The Gaming Den

With the snow keeping me inside, I've been looking through my old RPG stuff to dig out some classics. I came across something I haven't looked at in years--Torg. Torg was a multi-genre game from West End Games (the Star Wars d6 people) that came out in 1990. I figured the basic boxed set for be good material for a OSSR.

Full disclosure--I played the hell out of Torg in middle school/early high school in the early 90s. In fact, I've probably MCed more Torg than any other game, given how much I gamed when I was younger versus now. So, I have many fond memories of Torg. Still, re-reading the box set reminded me of the problems with the system and the fluff, as well as pointing out stuff that I didn't notice the first time around.

Premise
In the spring of 1990, Earth gets invaded by six different dimensions. These dimensions, or “cosms” in Torg-speak, each bring with it their own realities that overlay the reality of Earth. So, while dragons are not possible in the normal reality of Earth (i.e. the “Core Earth cosm”), they are possible in the fantasy cosm of Aylse, and thus dragons arrive in the places where Aylse has invaded (as it happens, the British Isles and Scandinavia). The six invading cosms are:

- Aylse: Ye Olde Generic Fantasy, located in the UK and Scandinavia
- The Cyberpapacy: All of the bad parts of medieval Catholicism (inquisitions, witch-burnings, etc.), plus all of the cyberpunk tropes. Located in France.
- The Living Land: A Lost-World style place with dinosaurs and lizard people. Located in North America.
- The Nile Empire: 30s-style pulp super heroes, complete with weird science rayguns and such, with a bit of ancient Egypt thrown in. Located in Egypt and surrounding area.
- Nippon Tech: 90s Japanese stereotypes come to life—soulless corporate raiders, plus ninjas. Obviously, Japan.
- Orrorsh: 19th Century gothic horror. Located in Indonesia and the surrounding area.

Over the course of the line, the metaplot would add a seventh cosm--Tharkold, a "technohorror" cosm--and two pseudo-cosms, a sci-fi cosm and a slightly different take on the Lost World idea.

Each of the six invading cosms is led by a Big Bad known as a High Lord. High Lords invade other cosms in order to drain them of their “possibility energy,” which gives the High Lords their powers but also fuels Storm Knights (a.k.a. the PCs) to fight the High Lords. In an unprecedented (and, as it turned out, short-lived) act of unity, these six High Lords banded together under the leadership of the Gaunt Man of Orrorsh to invade Core Earth. As it happens, Core Earth is the most possibility rich cosm ever discovered, containing enough energy to allow the Gaunt Man to become the Torg—a God-like immortal bad guy.

You have to give them credit--it's a very ambitious and interesting premise. The promise of the game is that you can have a party consisting of a D&D-style wizard, a Shadowrun-style street samurai, and a four color superhero who go out and fight vampires in Victorian England. And, Torg delivers on that promise--more or less. The problem is two-fold. One, the premise is probably too ambitious, and the designers were not able to consistently develop these big ideas into usable game material. Second, and related to that, the ideas can't really keep up with the mechanics, and often cool ideas are rendered into rules that don't really work in-game.

The Box
The Torg boxed set contains five things: the Rulebook, the World Book (which describes the six invading cosms, plus has the 24 character templates—basically archetypes from Shadowrun), the Adventure Book (which has MC advice as well as an introductory adventure), the Drama Deck (a set of cards that are used during play), and the first edition of the Infiniverse Campaign Newsletter.

Before diving into the Rulebook, a quick word on the Infiniverse Campaign. The idea was to have an ongoing metaplot for the game, but one that would be dependent on feedback from players of the game. A MC would subscribe to the newsletter, which would come every month and have a bunch of adventure seeds and plot elements. The MC would then fill out a sheet in the back which would summarize how the MC’s group handled the different elements, and his sheet would be tallied along with all the other submissions to determine which direction the metaplot goes. For example, if most campaigns reported that their groups defeated the plot by the Gaunt Man to do XYZ, then XYZ would not have happened in the “official” Torg metaplot.

This was pretty innovative and revolutionary stuff at the time. Remember, this is before Vampire or Shadowrun got their metaplots cranked up, so the whole notion of an ongoing story was kind of exciting. It didn't really work, though. It would seem that the interactive component gives players some agency with regard to the metaplot. But that agency is really illusory--a particular group could be "out voted" by the other groups with regard to a particular plot development, and would be stuck in the same situation as Vampire or Shadowrun groups that got their storyline nuked by designer fiat. Also, success or failure of the metaplot still depended on the content being generated by the designers. The first couple of years were pretty good, if uneven, but it really went to crap at the end of the run.

Next up--the Rulebook.

Welcome aboard, adding link now...

I read some of the TORG novels, but I think they had no finish.

Preliminaries

The Rulebook begins with a Table of Contents that reveals that the book is divided into Player and MC sections, with the obligatory insulting message telling players to "read no further unless you want to spoil the fun!!!!!" That's stupid, but also pretty standard at the time, so I suppose it's not worth getting upset about.

Things improve when you get to the actual text. After the obligatory one page "What is Roleplaying?" introduction, there is a one page section entitled "To the Point" which lays out the basic mechanics. The core mechanic is to roll d20 and compare the result to the "Bonus Chart" which converts the roll into a positive or negative modifier.

The dice explode on a 10 or a 20, with the results added together. The final modifier is added to the relevant skill, and then that result is compared to a difficulty number to determine success or failure. For some tasks (like calculating damage), once a character succeeds the final modifier is added to a damage value and compared to a resistance attribute or skill to determine how much damage.

Consulting a chart on every task really slows the game down upon first play-through. Once you get the hang of it and memorize the chart, it moves relatively quickly. Not to worry though--the Bonus chart is the first of many charts that will be consulted.

Having the dice explode 1 out of every ten rolls makes the results very swingy (especially combined with all of the ways you can get additional rolls). The Bonus chart is weighted in such a way to reduce the swinginess a bit by spreading most of the bonuses between rolls of 15 and 20. It also does create a high action feel, where characters can accomplish amazing feats. Still, it makes it hard to figure out appropriate opponents for the players, since it is so hard to predict the character's capabilities, or the capabilities of their opponents.

Character Creation

The basic character creation method is to select a template, which is basically the same concept as an archetype in Shadowrun. There are 24 templates in the back of the Worldbook, and pretty much every Torg splatbook had some additional templates in the back. Each template has preset attribute levels, pregenerated equipment, and one skill picked as a "tag" skill. The player then distributes 13 skills points or "adds" among a list of skills, and gets together with the other players to figure out how the characters know each other (a small thing, but a good idea to work out ahead of time, particular since Torg characters are often literally from different dimensions). That's it.

The seven attributes are Dexterity, Strength, Toughness, Perception, Mind, Charisma, and Spirit (with 8 the normal human level and 13 the human maximum). Like most skill based games, Dexterity is king as it impacts your combat skills, but Spirit is actually the second most important attribute. That's because Spirit is tied to the Reality skill, which is used to do all sorts of stuff related to jumping from cosm to cosm. Skills level is the relevant attribute + number of skills adds, so most starting skills are in the low teens and below.

There are a couple of problems with the templates in the Worldbook. First, some of them are weaksauce trap options. It's not so much that there are characters with limited direct combat abilities. That's true, but Torg is pretty good about making different character types useful. The real problem is that some of the templates are just better than others that are filling the same conceptual space. The worst offender is the Tribal Shaman, a wizard who is saddled by being a Core Earth character, and thus limited to BS weak spells. The Curious Mage from Aylse is the same concept--a wizard--but gets access to all the spells. No one should take the Tribal Shaman when they can take the Curious Mage. That's bad design.

A bigger problem, which I will complain more about when we get to the Worldbook, is that the designers hadn't finished designing all of the rules for each cosm when the Boxed Set came out. As a result, a number of the templates from non-Core Earth cosms are not fully compatible with the rules found in the various cosm splatbooks. Some of these problems can be easily fixed. For example, Aylse characters get a randomly determined free magic skill and spell knowledge--a significant upgrade to the Curious Mage, but easy to tack-on after the fact. On the other hand, there is the Gypsy Soothsayer (because you can't have a 90s game without a vaguely racist portrayal of the Roma people) from Orrorsh. The tag skill this template is Divination Magic--which is a problem since the Orrorsh sourcebook completely reworks the magic system for Orrorsh and makes that skill a contradiction in the Orrorsh cosm. It's fixable, but it makes the game feel somewhat half-assed.


I'll skip the rest of the player's section (as it is all duplicated in the MC section), and move on to the main rules portion.