The Strange

The Strange (along with its Cypher System core) is one of the best "collected reality" games. What the Strange does, that Cypher doesn't, provides a framework for a million different ideas and imagination-based mini-worlds that may not be strong enough to stand alone but should be explorable by sentient beings.

This is a "what if an ancient alien data network was in space and absorbed imagination to create fictional worlds to visit" setting. It lets you "slot in" any idea into it and makes that piece of fiction - or just a strange place - visitable by outsiders. Each micro-world can have its own inhabitants, and those living there can gain self-awareness and sentience.

This is like a world based around the events of one Sherlock Holmes movie, and those events - and the actions in it - keep repeating themselves exactly as the movie plays out. If someone went to a store and bought two oranges one day, it happens the next time the recursion is reset. People live in them thinking they are entire worlds, and these places can stay locked in those loops of action and reality.

Then, the population starts getting sentient, called the spark, and more "free will" is introduced. Different things can happen, and the story can diverge. The world can expand from a few visitable locations to an entire city or larger. The story can change, and the world can progress or stay locked in an era. It could morph into a Steampunk world; who knows?

And as characters visit these places, they can assume the identities and roles (and looks) of those that live there. A muscle-bound Conan-like barbarian in a fantasy world could become a burley, bowler-wearing, handlebar-mustached street boxer in the Victorian era of Sherlock Holmes.

A lot of the problems of other generic systems are solved with this framework. Can a world stay locked in a particular piece of fiction, repeat, and never change? Yes. Do I need a "new Earth" for every fictional world I visit? No. Can a world be relatively small and focused yet still seem like an entire planet to those who live there? Yes. Can the world's inhabitants stay "locked" in their reality, and could they find a way to gain self-determination and break free? Yes, and yes.

Can you recycle your old gaming systems and settings and slot them in as recursions into this framework? Of course, yes! Do they need some messy, infinite, silly-structure "multi-verse" that is ultimately unmanageable and ruins your game? No.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

You could say The Strange is a "multi-verse," but it is not by definition since it provides a framework for collecting ideas that are inherently limited in scope and size. Multi-verse in the current context implies "the connecting tissue between multiple complete worlds." The Strange is a framework for expressing fictional worlds in a limited context.

You have far more control in a framework like The Strange than you do a messy, too-bit-to-imagine multi-verse. And worse, a multi-verse also implies multiple versions of the same person exist, infinite versions of Earth at every moment across time, whereas The Strange does not.

The Sherlock Holmes recursion does not need its own Earth, nor does "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."Alice In Wonderland does not need an entire world to get lost in. Things can be "just what they are" and not go beyond that.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

There is one "you" in The Strange, one life; spend it wisely and carefully. You can't "jump a timeline" and rescue another version of yourself somewhere else cheaply and ignore narrative context and consequence. Like the modern do-anything MacGuffin nanites and sci-fi, the multi-verse in modern entertainment has become synonymous with "crap writing." We will get to Nanites when we talk about Numenera. They are done right there compared to how they are used as lazy sci-fi plot putty these days.

The fictional places you create are "boxed in" and under control. The critical topics of self-awareness and self-determination are central to the setting. This isn't a "lazy collection of game settings and Earths" and some "funky planar soup" between them; it is a thoughtful framework of how the mind and imagination work and how these places can be explored in a larger context with an overarching narrative - and the smaller, individual stories are important too.

And an interesting backstory here explains everything, yet it doesn't. You are free to take it in any direction you can dream of.

The Strange is everything, yet it is very few.