TardisCaptain's Blog of Holding

If you are looking for my 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge after action report with completion graphic, it will be posted when I’m caught up from being put behind by real-life events. If you made it to 31 characters, email me or privately contact me on one of the message boards or social media and I’ll make sure you get the graphic. Thank you for participating.

Day 26 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’ll be using a roleplaying game I didn’t know existed until just recently, The Strange. This book was written by Bruce R. Cordell and Monte Cook and published in 2014 by Monte Cook Games. I had picked it up at the 2024 SaltCON-Spring. It wasn’t the first book that I owned from this game, the supplement The Strange In Translation: The Strange Character Options. was sent to me when I was still enrolled in the Random RPG Book Club.

Today I had an opportunity to take the physical book with me while I was on a road trip with my wife. I figured that while I was away from my computer, I could at least get a little bit of information in my head before creating a character for this game. A game with just the title “The Strange” does very little to tell me what it is. The description on the back of the book helped a little. Basically there is another series of universes with different laws of physics connected by a network called “The Strange”. Humans who are “The Quickened” know of this network and how to travel to other Recursions (aka other realities) where allies and enemies can be found. I started reading at the front of the book and I was amazed. There were two pages at the beginning that were written like a new-employee orientation for a global group called “The Estate” and how they protect the Earth from other Recursions. It also details how they use tools called Cyphers that reminded me of a type of Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver or a Neuralyzer from the Men In Black series. Then the next two pages gave brief descriptions on how to play the game, what Task Difficulties are and how they work. Then the next four pages past that was a brief description of combat, weapons, special rolls, experience points and even more on Cyphers. With the brief descriptions were page numbers where more detailed information could be found. With just 15 minutes of reading I was able to turn to my wife who was driving and summarize what I had just read. She responded that just from my explanation she could see herself playing this game. This is what I’ve been trying to explain to publishers of roleplaying games. Give us a brief description of how the game runs at the very start and leave the heavy in-universe descriptions for later and your readers will bless you. Just from these ten pages I felt confident enough to try to dive into the character creation that started on page 16.

The first thing that is described is the character stats. These are Might (think health and strength), Speed (which also includes agility), and Intellect (knowledge and personality). Each attribute has two components, a Pool and an Edge. The Pool is is the basic measurement of the attribute with the higher the better. The Edge is…. something. The book says “When something requires you to spend points from a stat Pool, your Edge for that stat reduces the cost.” In the example it talks about a mental blast ability and if it has a cost of 0 then you can use it for free. But if there is a cost you have a finite amount of times you can use that ability. The examples didn’t really help here so I’m just going to go on and pray that the book explains things a little bit better in the next few pages. Next is something called Effort and they sounds like luck or fate points. For a beginning character, you have to spend three points (are these from the pool mentioned above?) in order to apply Effort. I really wish I had a GM familiar with the rules to explain this to me as the book is starting to go off the rails here. Keep it simple guys. (flips a page) Come on, tell me what I need in order to generate my stats for this character (flips another page). OK I guess the Tiers are the equivalent of character levels, everyone starts at Tier 1 (makes sense) and that a Tier 1 character is still a hero that can do more than the average Joe (again that makes sense). Oh come on! I’m three pages after the definitions of the stats with no information on how to generate these stats. They’ve given me averages, but nothing that states what my unnamed glob of clay has right now. There’s text on spending experience and increasing capabilities? OK, I take it back what I said at the beginning, this isn’t an example that I’m going to hold up about how to write an RPG book. (Walks away before I declare that this post is over and that I’ve failed to create a character)

After I returned from getting a drink I sat down again. On page 20 there’s another “To create a character” entry. Ugh, fine. To create a character I have to ad lib a statement of “I am a (fill in an adjective here) (fill in a noun here) who (fill in a verb here).” This is the character’s descriptor The noun is the type (aka Class), the verb is the character’s focus (which is what?). There are three types, Paradox, Spinner and Vector. I’ve been flipping pages all over the place already, let me go find the classes and see what the smeg these are. Ah, vectors are the action-oriented types, the Paradox seems to be the mad scientists, super sorcerers gang and the Spinners are facemen, manipulators, something? However in looking at the descriptions each class has a starting pool for the stats. This would have been good to know 15 pages earlier.

And I just looked at how long this blog post is already. If you are still reading this, bless you. I hope you are not as frustrated as I am. Because I don’t want this to turn into a copy of War and Peace, I’m going to kill it now and declare this a character creation fail. As I was shutting things down (I didn’t fill in anything on the character sheet so I didn’t scan anything) I did find a character creation walkthrough on page 412. GAAAAHHHHH!!!!! With all of the other good “see page xx for more information” side notes that you had for everything else you couldn’t have put something about that in there? Yea, I am so done.

Afterthoughts:

When I first purchased this book at a SaltCON game swap, I thought that it would be just a quick use for the challenge then onto the trade pile. After reading how well the first 10 pages were set up in this publication, I was very tempted to keep it to show as an example of good RPG book writing. But after my attempt to make a character, I’m on the edge on keeping this book or putting it in the trade pile. It seemed to be right there (holds thumb and finger close together) but just couldn’t push it over the edge.

The one thing that I wish the publishers had done in this book was provide a checklist or step-by-step guide to the character creation. I think it would have made the process proceed faster. The book started out so well then suddenly went into overly descriptive mode while trying to create a character which bogged things down. The Strange/Cypher System seems like a simple mechanical system, but the book got too bogged down in trying to teach the game in the character creation chapter. (additional: I did find a walkthrough on page 412 after I had given up on making a character for this system, but it was too late since I needed to move on)

I’ve got an opportunity to play a Cypher System one-shot at SaltCON. I think after I’ve had a chance to play that game I’ll decide if I want to keep the book. I don’t think that I’ll homebrew for The Strange. The Cypher System seems to be a generic sandbox like GURPS and others and I doubt that I’ll homebrew for that either.

Additional Notes:

You’re probably reading this on/after February 1st and wondering where my after action report is. Well if you’ve been a regular reader on my blog, you know that various real-life issues had struck in January causing some delays. I’m still playing catch up and when I have my 31 scheduled characters done, I’ll write up an after-action report. I’ve seen a proof of the 31 characters completion graphic and I’ve sent some requests back to the artists. It will be available soon.

Coming Up Next:

For Gold & Glory

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

On Day 24 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge I’m going to be using the original 1st edition of Metamorphosis Alpha. Some sources state that this is the first science fiction roleplaying game. It was originally published by TSR in 1976 and was written by James Ward. I had picked this up in a bundle sale from Goodman Games where they were releasing some new material for this game. The first edition was included in the bundle.

In the original document (the PDF scan provided by Goodman Games had some weird page numbers) the Developing Characters section started on page 9. I’m instructed to roll 3d6 for several abilities down the line. These are Radiation Resistance, Mental Resistance, Dexterity, Constitution, Strength and Leadership Potential (if the character is Human). Since I’m going to make a mutant, I did not roll for this last one. Mutants roll for a physical mutation and a mental mutation. The book instructs me to roll a D4 to see how many mutations the character receives. There were 30 physical mutations and 12 defects (for some reason they were numbered together from 1-42). The total number of both mental mutations and defects came up to 45 (37 and 8 respectively). I’m going to vary from the rules and instead of picking my own mutations, I’m going to randomly roll because I feel that it would have happened that way in the game universe. For physical it was easy, the d4 gave me two mutations to ‘pick’ and I rolled a d30 twice (as long as they didn’t conflict and came up with Gas Generation (um…… no…. don’t say it) and Shapechange (that is how it’s spelled on the list). I rolled a d12 so the GM could pick the one defect and it came up with Near-nearsightedness. For the two mental mutations, had to get a little creative. I used the d30 and a d7 from my Dungeon Crawl Classics Dice Set #7 along with a d6 all rolled at the same time. If the D6 came up with a 5 or 6, then I added the D7 to the D30 for the final number. Yea, I’m probably putting too much thought into this. But for some reason, it seemed fitting. This resulted in Density Control (Others) i.e. I can slow other people down, and Mental Paralysis i.e. I can mentally disrupt the nerve centers of another being causing non-movement. If I do this for more than three melee turns in a row, the target will die. The ‘gm’ rolled a d8 to give the character the mental defect of Multiple Damage. Basically if the character takes any damage it could be doubled or tripled. Ouch.

Then the character development steps just end. The brief description combines both character creation and instructions for the GMs to “set the stage” and running a set of “continuing adventures and experiences”. I continued reading and it went into combat (wow, it looked complicated), random monsters, treasure. Oh, there was an original character sheet on page 29 (of the original document) but I’ve already printed out one that had come with the bundle for first edition. The sample characters shown in the development process don’t have any hit points, but the original character sheet has one. Ah I tracked it down under the Constitution description. Roll a D6 for each point of constitution the character has. And apparently it was explained under the example of a Human type character but not the other character types.

I guess the characters would find equipment in the adventure. Yea, this is really basic. But I have to remember that this was printed in the mid 1976. I’m going to give the character the name of Drixxian. Here is the character sheet.

Afterthoughts:

In the 70’s several RPGs were written by those in the wargaming community and these rules seemed to follow the same format. Broken down by sections and sub-sections all identified with a letter number combination. It looked very technical, which isn’t a bad thing, but something I’m not use to seeing very often in my RPG books.

The scan provided by Goodman Games was the original text with some changes. If there was new information from an Errata, then there was a side note saying “See page ## for entries on ____”. I can see where Goodman Games was trying to make this a usable document. With how much care they had put here, I wish they had made bookmarks in the PDF.

I was getting the urge to re-write the rules when I see potential, but confusion. But I know it would be redundant since there are other editions already available.

Additional Notes:

So I posted my GI Joe RPG character on the Renegade Game Studios discord server and one of the games writers responded to me in two different posts.

“The art on the cover seems to indicate that it’s either their own “universe” or a comic series recently released.” The universe is based on Hasbro’s evergreen takes on the characters, which is basically “80s unless recently updated”. It primarily draws from the toyline lore, but dips into the various cartoon and comic series.

This is a solid concept and you went through the steps basically correctly, with one big misstep: Your Skills. When you increase an Essence Score, you get Skill Points that you can invest into Skill Ranks. So your Strength 2 means you should have two Skills at d2, or one Skill at d4 (or 2 Conditioning). You do have some Skill Ranks, but they don’t match the Essence Scores they’re tied to, so I’m not sure how you got them.

So apparently I missed a few items and the character of Spacebar should have some additional skills. This made sense because being a member of a special tasks force is usually filled by well-rounded individuals. But I also guess this is why making characters with someone who is familiar with the game would help. However before someone can become familiar with the game, they’d have to do the same thing I’m doing and crack open the book and read through the process. Again I want to say how grateful I am that the people who have worked on these games have responded to my posts. They do clear things up or lead to more insight.

Coming Up Next:

Twilight 2000 2nd Edition

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.