System Mastery – System Mastery

Sometimes we get a book and we aren’t sure the exact percentage of RPG that’s going to be in there, so we end up reviewing like, a show synopsis or a treatise on life, and this is one of those times.  Snarfquest is a comic strip that ran in Dragon Magazine in the early 80s, and here is a D20 version of it for you to hear about.

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In retrospect we probably should have saved this for episode 175.  Anyhow this is a short comedy game mixing Dungeons and Dragons with hip-hop flavor pulled from the 80s and 90s.  We review it!

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Happy episode 150!  Still can’t believe it’s gone on this long.  Here’s D&D 5e.  It’s a game.

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Every once in a while we’ve both got so much else going on that we have to rely on what we call “The Emergency Stack”, a collection of books short enough that we can read them quick and get everything else done that week too.  Well, right now we’re swamped, so we grabbed KAMB off the stack.  It’s got everything you’d want, packed into a tiny package.  Jokes, Kovalic art, stats that spell out beer, you name it!

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Well, so we can probably do a whole hour of laughy laughs on the … wait, Vietnam War?  Is that right?  Okay then.  Recon is from 1982, and it is about playing soldiers murdering each other in a jungle.  Have fun with it!

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Sorta 40k, sorta Vampire, maybe a little Dune in there?  Anyway it’s a space RPG where there’s a church that’s basically Catholicism through a greasy mirror and a bunch of surprisingly recognizable races.  Apparently there was a good 4X video game set in this world once?  Cool.

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Hey who wants an old-fashioned case of the Heartbreakers?  Because that’s what we’ve got right here.  And it’s a doozy!  In that it’s one of those small-batch ones that you never did hear of and it’s got almost no web presence.  Check out this high-res picture I found of the cover!

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Straight from one bleak future to the next, only this time it’s kids.  Why it’s almost as dystopic as the movie Kids!  Basically the future is dream robots that put all the adults to sleep and it’s up to plucky young rebels to battle it out in dream-logic robosuits.  All that and some squick too!

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So a decade or so after D&D, Gary Gygax had a brand new idea.  What if cyborgs with dustbuster crotches defended the world from giant bugs made of erectile tissue?  Also what if there were a spectacular amount of boring graphs in there?  The result… was history.

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With Jef still recovering in the hospital, Jon turns to fan-favorite guest Claire to join in and help review this RPG based on a comic book. It promises two things up front and delivers on none of it. Booo.