Off the Shelf: The Strange

This game, I never expected to pull from storage, but the Tales of the Valiant universe model of the Labyrinth is eerily similar to the infinite, connected worlds concept they present here. The Strange is a strange game, where you can play someone from Earth, an alien, or someone in a fictional universe who "wakes up" and realizes their whole life has been this strange simulation, and things are not really as they seem. You can visit or be any character from any game, movie, TV show, book, or any other product of imagination.

The game is truly "out there" in terms of its scope and the odd, between-the-cracks, strange universe of aliens that inhabit these realms and the forces present in the setting.

The Labyrinth is like that in structure, minus the aliens and between parts - this is just the connected spaces and pathways. But the concept of strange, interconnected, vastly different, and sometimes worlds from fiction are the same. Sometimes these are entire game worlds from other games, such as a D&D world or Pathfinder's Golarion. They will all follow the "home system" of Tales of the Valiant (or 5E), but the concept of interconnected settings through a strange and shifting system of pathways is the same.

Even the fact that worlds can be dreamed into existence is the same, though with the Strange, there is usually a world age involved where they get larger over time (or not). In the Labyrinth, worlds can be destroyed, appear, disappear at will, or stay around forever. They can be of any size. They can just contain a favorite adventure. The inhabitants of these places typically don't know they are in some sort of interconnected world.

Where the Strange comes in is that they have a fantastic system for designing interconnected worlds, worlds from fiction, and other worlds that follow all sorts of different rules. In some worlds, magic may not work normally, or at all. Some worlds have mad science. Some worlds have psionics. Some worlds exist with strange physics, or a set of rules that do not let modern devices work at all. 

Recursions (this is what they call worlds) can have special traits, or even grant foci (special powers) to everyone inside the world, such as a world that grants superpowers. You could have a world where reality gives everyone magic spells and powers.

If you get deep into the Labyrinth and its worlds, picking up a copy of The Strange as a companion book to use for creating worlds is a great idea.

The Strange uses the Cypher System as its resolution engine, and everything is abstracted and given one number as its "power level" - like you may say a monster is Power 5 (but it defends on a 6 and attacks on a 4), and the system figures the rest out. So the system can model longswords and laser rifles just as easily as it does orcs and walking sci-fi battle walkers. In 5E, you will need to create monsters with the ToV system, and then approximate strange weapons and technological items.

The Cypher System is truly an elegant and cool system that can do anything, but with a heavy layer of abstraction. 5E is 5E, very specific and with special case rules everywhere, and you're buying books to fill those gaps. In Cypher System, you can just wing everything and have it work out fine. A heavy laser cannon is a heavy weapon that knocks 2 points of defense off its target if it does not have a "heavy armor" trait. I made all that up, but it works just fine in the game.

The Cypher System is one of those "desert island games" that can entertain you endlessly.

In the Strange, you may step into a world or reality, and it alters your powers and appearance to match what the world is. Your party could be dressed as fantasy heroes in a Medieval world in one reality, step into another, and then become gangsters, private eyes, and gun molls in the 1920s. Your wizard's magic would be converted into powers that match reality, such as those of a mad scientist (if the world supports that).

I wish this game sold better and was more well-known; it is quite the mind-altering trip to play and very fun if your game master is deeply into pop culture.

But using The Strange as an assistant to create worlds and create ideas for the Labyrinth is a great idea. It gets you thinking about what special rules and laws of physics each world has, outside of the standard ToV and 5E rules, and a world based on a science fiction epic or sitcom will have different physics and rules, where some things can and cannot happen in those worlds.

Now, the concepts of creating "world attributes, traits, and foci" in Tales of the Valiant are outside the system, as the game's "reality model" is "everyone acts like a 5E character and the 5E rules are the rules of everywhere in the Labyrinth." If you are a level 14 rogue, you will be one in any world in the Labyrinth, and nothing will touch your powers that much. The base ToV rules will be the same everywhere, unless GM Fiat takes over.

In The Strange, these worlds can change you, introduce special rules, limit magic, give you powers, alter your powers into new forms, or mess with physics. Mitch Buchanan can meet Michael Knight. You can stumble into Alice in Wonderland, and things work in strange ways there. You can visit a world filled with robot life only on a dying world, and everyone in the party becomes robots that are seen to live in that world. You can stumble into GTA 5. You could be playing heroes in the Forgotten Realms. You could find yourself in Conan, Tarzan, or John Carter's Mars. You can care about the interconnected places and plots, or not.

These are cool concepts, worth exploring.

Again, we can do so much more when we abandon the "Wizards' IP" and not limit ourselves to their ideas being superior to yours. Gothic horror is a vast world, encompassing multiple places and being much more diverse, not just Ravenloft.

Break your mind free of the D&D dungeon, and there is so much more out there to do, and games that let you express your imagination much more vividly.

Cypher: The Better 5E

If 5E existed for a million years, I am betting Cypher System is what it would end up as.

This is a game I never thought I would understand since the layers of abstraction felt so utterly alien to me that I would not figure out how to create a character. I packed the book away and felt like the purchase was a waste of money. Then, I pulled it out and made an honest effort to determine what was happening.

People hyping this game up as a game they could not live without was what made me put the work in. Best thing since sliced bread! I never understood what they were talking about. Character creation was a mystery. The system seemed far too abstract to have meaning at the table. Everything from monsters, weapons, and powers seemed overly abstract.

And then it clicked.

Cypher simulates the 5E table-play loop perfectly. People sit around the table, managing resource pools, improving characters at milestones, trying to keep their player characters alive, finding treasures, solving puzzles, dealing with challenges, and rolling a d20.

Everything superfluous or distracts from that loop was tossed out. All the d20 scaffolding and cruft are gone, and many of the 'fake invented terms' were tossed out to keep the core gameplay loop streamlined and focused on the fun parts only.

Challenge Rating? Hit dice? Hit points? Difficulty Class? Saving throws? Proficiency bonus? Advantage? Modifiers? Lists of dozens of chained conditions? Action economies? The d4, d8, and d12? Multiclassing? One-level dips? Spell level? Inspiration? Bastions? Average party level? Flat-footed? Attack of opportunity?

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Fake, invented lingo meant to distract you. Most of it is worthless transitory values meant for exposed system math. It is like you asking me what the price of a cereal box is and me answering, "X equals 5.99!" Many of these terms were invented for 10% edge cases and then enshrined as the game's language - and then, they decided to load more rules onto the term. By default, games should be written in natural language, and special terms should be saved for things without easy replacement.

Forget the false lingo of D&D and Pathfinder and free your mind. Of course, you are replacing that lingo with Cypher's lingo, but the lingo on this side is more logically consistent and less rooted in a wargame-y, arbitrary past. You are also not dealing with 50 years of cruft and trying to keep things familiar yet modern.

You want to sit around a table and roll a d20 with friends.

Cypher gets you there in a single book with a core mechanic. The character creation and customization are on par or better than 5E. With one of the genre books supplying focused options and a few more customizations, you have a better and more complete game than a shelf full of 5E books draining your wallet dry. And Cypher is a generic game, so it really does everything.

Challenges are generic, as monsters can be just a level challenge, and that's it. The deeper you go here, the better it gets. Altering individual values for deviations from the norm is how you make monsters unique. A goblin may be a "level 1" challenge but does 2 points of damage. They may deal more surprise damage and set traps like a level 5 creature. Using the 'team up' (swarm) rules from Numenera/Strange, you can put them in four-goblin groups and have them attack as two levels higher (with a +2 damage bonus). With ingenuity and customization, monsters become deadly fast.

The resource pools are amazing. If you want depth, use a realistic wounds module and track that damage separately from the effort spent. When playing solo, watching those resource pools run dry and knowing what will happen when you lose one or two makes the tension rise. Finding a safe resting spot becomes critical for survival, and I am not talking about some closet in a dungeon somewhere.

You start cherishing and burning those XP to survive with player intrusions and rerolls.

And those start running low, and you get really worried.

Oh, and the players and referee share in narrative control. When those pools of resources run low, your characters are in danger of failing or dying. You are burning XP to shift the narrative in your favor, and you will feel the tension and excitement rising far more than listening to the door of room K23 and spending an hour fighting six goblins (and short-resting the consequences off). The more the referee awards XP, the more fluid the narrative becomes, and all sorts of amazing things can happen.

Cyphers themselves toss monkey wrenches in every situation. They are flat-out unique toys that encourage emergent behavior and roleplaying, often offering alternate solutions to problems other than 'blast them with a spell' or 'kill them all with weapons.' 5E is so limited in emergent gameplay, and the characters are almost internally focused on personal power that they become blind to alternate solutions to problems. We have murder hobos in 5E because that is what the game encourages and rewards.

Want a more fantasy-focused experience? Play the sister game Numenera; you have a world far better than anything 5E can dream of. Numenera does a science fantasy and extra-planar setting far better than the tired 5E 'great wheel' setting, and it does it with a sense of mystery and wonder - and is entirely unpredictable in terms of opponents and challenges. This setting is on par with Dungeon Crawl Classics in terms of 'I do not know what I am looking at' in terms of monsters and threats. Numenera beats the tar out of 5E's 'happy planes' and 'fantasy multiverse' offerings, where you must buy the earlier edition books to run the setting.

Numenera can be played on a wide range of flavors and feelings. You could play this as straight fantasy and have an almost Forgotten Realms feeling to the world, with ancient science making infrequent and mysterious appearances. You can play this as a better Gamma World than Gamma World. You can play this as a Heavy Metal science fantasy experience. You could play this as a sci-fi game and world. This can be played more like Rifts. This could be a horror world. A world with mechs. Thundarr the Barbarian works nicely here. A cyberpunk setting. There is a little bit of Minecraft in here. There is a space game hidden in here.

The range of flavors and ways this can be played boggles my mind. What GURPS is to universal rule sets, Numenera is to science fantasy settings - it does it all.

Combine this with The Strange? You can have characters from TV, movies, and fiction running around in your universe causing trouble - and those universes bleeding into others and taking them over to an infinite degree. These can be rebooted to be used again fresh. You can use the system to play characters inside one of those realities and have it break free from the limitations of that recursion.

You can even play characters from fiction, TV, anime, and movies. They can escape their world like something out of Last Action Hero and find themselves fighting for their lives in another movie or fictional universe. Want to have the characters from One Piece fighting Jason Vorhees at Camp Crystal Lake? Want to be a Mulder and Scully X Files agent stuck in the middle of that fight? The Strange does that.

I feel bad for the 5E players stuck in dungeons, railroad adventures, and those planes that reinforce stereotypes and Western religious paradigms. What would a place of ultimate evil look like if you were banned from using Hell, demons, and the Abyss? Who would live there? These players will never know how fantastic, frightening, unique, and alien the universe can be. They will be forever stuck worshipping the Keep on the Borderlands and thinking the Tomb of Horrors is the ultimate deathtrap dungeon.

I love those adventures but give them a rest.

Do something new.

Try something else.

If I sell all my 5E books, I would not miss them with this trio of games replacing that core gameplay experience. The character builds are better, the gameplay loop is better, the resource management is a revolution of thinking, and the shared control of the narrative allows the players to help shape the story.

Cypher is the ultimate sitting around a table and rolling a d20 with friends game.

The Divine Comedy in The Strange

I see what you did there.

So, Hell Frozen Over, a recursion in the main rulebook, is essentially the Divine Comedy, or a version of Dante's Inferno. Only it is all ice. With carnivorous demons. And ice that heals you. And a mastermind demon named Treachery who lies to you. And powerful artifacts under the ice.

It is a strange "meta version" of Hell that sidesteps having Hell in The Strange and also from forcing everyone in the setting to deal with those concepts (and religion) when the game took the more middle-of-the-road path and sidestepped the issue. I get why not everyone wants Hell in their games, and this could turn into the Doom video game far too quickly with a "heavyweight" topic like that intruding on every other idea, work of fiction, and fun idea that can happen in The Strange. This was an intelligent dodge, but the concept of Hell being a fictional place sucked into The Strange is too good of a story to pass up for me.

It also brings up some reasonably dark topics. First, you get something like Event Horizon combining Hell and high technology.

Would Hell, even a fictional version, become a significant force in The Strange? Honestly, this would be a game I play once, and once only, as "The version of The Strange that ended up with Hell." It is a concept that is primarily all-or-nothing but could be done well. Better than most fantasy games have treated Hell, most notably the horrible job D&D has done with the concept as a sort of suburbanized and isolated place that never influences anything and the merging of demonic heritages with the planar background soup (and how they took the succubus and incubus out of the demonic heritages).

But this is The Strange; you could have a serious "Hell as a recursion" and have it exist, possibly influence several associated recursions, and still firewalled off from the rest of the central "The Strange" game universe. You could firewall it off and have it be a significant force in its sphere of influence. So honestly, you could have the best of both worlds - keeping your primary Strange Cosmos-verse book standard while creating a separate "server cluster" for Hell and its associated recursions.

This is imagination we are dealing with, and The Strange is a place where you can define the structure - or not - and just say how things will interact.

So firewalled off, I could do this and have it take over and spread influence through several recursions. I would also use this firewall structure for other "high pollution" ideas, where the spillover from crossing recursions could seriously change the game's narrative.

Or say the entire game universe, The Strange and all, is a recursion; run it once and see how it ends up, possibly have it destroyed, and then reboot the whole game again and start fresh.

Once your mind opens up and you can imagine all the possibilities, you will understand that The Strange is not a "metaverse framework" but more of a way of thinking and managing imagination and how it blends and interacts.

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.

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.

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.

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.