Mail Room: The Strange

This is a strange game.

There is the familiar, which would be the Cypher rules and Earth itself.

But from there, everything goes off the rails. Parallel realities, dimensions, wars for control, planet-eating monsters, and dimensional alien factions. The game centers around a "Men in Black" style organization sworn to defend Earth. Still, it goes anywhere and everywhere into realms of cosmic realities and the nature of imagination.

We aren't being "attacked from the outside" by vampires, demons, zombies, aliens, elder gods, or ghosts - we are being attacked from inside our minds. Our very imaginations are under assault, and our dreams in this world can create real places in others, which the denizens of these places between time and space live in this fractal-like reality.

It reminds me a little of the Palladium game Beyond the Supernatural, a very cool game in its own right. But where this makes a hard left turn is in the structure of reality and how The Strange's metaverse pulls in every idea from our heads - in horror and fiction - and twists that reality into something where threats to the Earth happen, alliances must be made, and the stakes are either really personal or world-spanning.

Where BTS is more of a traditional "monster of the week" game, TS goes conceptual, imaginary, and almost spiritual in scope and concept.

And you can pull in fiction as well? The game can become reality-warping genres like The Last Action Hero, and fictional characters can become self-aware and invade and possibly visit Earth. If you want to go there, Jack the Ripper could escape fiction and roam the streets of modern London, and you can call on the help of Sherlock Holmes to track him down.

Want to go more pop culture than that? Go ahead, have Lara Croft meet Batman. Stumble into the world of Sonic the Hedgehog. Visit World of Warcraft and have one of the powerful magic-using villains or dragons escape. Darth Vader teams up with Skeletor. Shaggy realizes he is just a cartoon. Actual Cthulhu shows up, and Lovecraftian monsters escape fiction and have been real all along.

Parts of your mind are valid places in the campaign setting.

Even your experiences in other games, like a 5E campaign, you loved are on the table. The rules will be Cypher, but the feeling will be the same.

The game puts size limits on realities (called recursions) and rules how fast they can grow, but honestly, you are free to ignore those if you wish or make little "mini settings part of a larger imagined world" in those self-contained spaces. I see why they do this, to limit the scope. If you created a High Noon movie reality, the size of that would be the movie's setting, and everything outside it would be "assumed to be there" by those in that bubble, and travel in and out would be possible through retcons. A character could "visit Philadelphia" for a few months and return to the bubble with memories of everything that happened there and possibly with visitors from there. Still, the bubble's reality dictates that the town is the heart of the recursion.

Then, this is mixed with the game's "connective tissue" and lore. The universe's structure and those who live between the walls of reality seek to alter it and run the game's main stories. I need to dive into this part more; the possibilities blow my mind.

This is a fantastic game, very mind-expanding, and unforgettable.