TORG by Evil Mastermind

TORG by Evil Mastermind

Markdown Content:

TORG by Evil Mastermind

1. tl;dr
2. The Other Basics
3. Gamemastery
4. Interactions, violent and otherwise
5. Metaversal metaphysics
6. Storm Knighting 101
7. It's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit.
8. Having faith. And focus.
9. Gearing up, template creation, and finishing the main rulebook.
10. Keep on rocking in the Still World.
11. The Cyberpapacy
    1. CyberCatholicism For Dummies
    2. A Cybertour of CyberFrance
    3. Paris Liberté with Cheese
    4. World Laws and/or Reality Storms
    5. The GodNet 1.0 (functionality in next release)
    6. Sk1llz and m1r4cl3z
    7. Cyber_____
    8. Cold chrome, hot lead, premade templates
    9. The GodNet, v2.0: now with functionality!
    10. The GodNet, v2.0: killer apps
    11. The Cyberpapcy: End of File
12. Nippon Tech - Mission Statement
    1. Economic realities
    2. Exciting new business opportunities!
    3. Welcome to the Kanawa Corporate family!
    4. High-level Operational Procedures
    5. Training retreats
    6. Coffee is for closers.
    7. Work Sites, Assets, Human Resources, and the Exit Interview
13. Welcome to the Nile Empire...now DIE!
    1. Bullet Lists of the Nile Empire
    2. You don't buy pulp powers, you just rent them
    3. Gizmos and gadgets: Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' (what?).
    4. Nile magic agic agic agic
    5. Miracles, monsters, machines, and men of mystery
14. Orrorsh
    1. Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child
    2. The architects of fear
    3. Victims
    4. The Architecture of Fear
    5. Seeking the Truth
    6. A series of unfortunate events
    7. Ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties
    8. Tools of the trades, and the tradesmen who use them
15. Aysle - Darkness and Light
    1. A world of the purplest prose
    2. The Olde And the New
    3. Laws of the Land
    4. The science of magic
    5. Grimoires and Prayers
    6. Fantastic Beasts, and also monsters
    7. Arms & Equipment Guide; Player's Options
16. The Living Land
    1. Prehistories
    2. Nature reclaims its own
    3. State of the Union
    4. Obfuscating mechanics
    5. The myriad gifts of Lanala
    6. Off the beaten path
17. A brief stopover in Core Earth and metaplot points in-between
18. Tharkold
    1. A history of violence
    2. To Live And Die In L.A.
    3. Basic Training
    4. Soldiers and civilians
    5. Lock and load
    6. Mass production...in the FUTURE!
    7. The Grid, Templates, and the Future
19. Core Earth Pit Stop
20. The Land Below
    1. As Above, So Below
    2. Are we there yet?
    3. Merretika
    4. Savage Natives
    5. Mechanics of the Lost Temple
21. The final metaplot update
22. Space Gods
    1. The Lights In The Sky Are Friends
    2. Sarila Is
    3. We invaded you, please help us
    4. The mind is the limit
    5. Biology and related sciences
23. War’s End
    1. The Final Countdown
    2. Two Minutes To Midnight
    3. The End Of The World As We Know It
    4. The End

tl;dr

posted by Evil Mastermind Original SA post

Back on April 15, 2013, I started something big. Very big. Possibly too big. But now, it's time to revisit and revise, to remember and reword, and to finish what I started over a year and a friggin' half ago. But to do that, we need to go back to where it all began...

The Storm Has A Name - Let's Read TORG

Part 1: tl;dr

TORG. Man...TORG.

Where the hell do I start with this?

TORG was a huge game line in the early to mid 90's, back in the day where boxes sets were still a Thing and having a ton of supplements was not just expected but was the standard way of doing things. I've said many times in the past how it's the epitope of 90's design both mechanically and in terms of the metaplot. It's the poster child for setting bloat. It had great ideas handled in a really bad way. It’s the culmination of rules-as-physics (and metaphysics) Hell, a large part of the metaplot didn't even happen in-game, it happened in a novel trilogy that came out before the game itself did because, as you'll see, the game designers really wanted to be writers. It has Jeff Mills, the worst NPC ever.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The hardest thing about talking about TORG is that there's no easy "in". It's a huge, sprawling, heavily entangled mess. It's a mess I admittedly love, it's one of my favorite settings ever, but everything in both the crunch and fluff is so heavily intertwined it's ridiculous. TORG is the embodiment of "rules as physics", because the setting has a lot of metaphysics that are modelled in the actual game mechanics, and in a few cases the metaphysics informed the game mechanics themselves.

Dammit, I'm getting ahead of myself again. Hell, I haven't even talked about what the game's about yet. Let's start with the basics.

TORG was first released by West End Games in 1990, and is a multi-genre game about an invasion of Earth by multiple alternate realities in an attempt to drain the world of "possibility energy", allowing the man who organized the invasion in the first place to ascend to multiversal godhood.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, the game is called TORG because in early development it was called "That Other Roleplaying Game" and the acronym stuck.)

The core of TORG was a boxed set that came with three books (the core rules, the Worldbook that barely described all the different realities, and a starter adventure), a cool looking d20, and a custom deck of 160 cards that were needed to play the game.

The Torg die. I still have mine.

The TORG line ran for about 5 years, and ended up with just over 50 books on top of the core set. Over half of them were adventures, which were all tied into the overall metaplot and caused a lot of the problems that arose in the later years of the line. In addition, there was a monthly newsletter you could subscribe to that had updates of what was going on in the metaplot, adventure seeds, and so on.

And that raises another problem: I can't talk too much about the mechanical side of things without giving you folks at least a base understanding of the setting and metaplot. So let's start there...

FAIR WARNING: There is a lot of backstory here, and most of it won't make sense until we get to other parts of the system later. Just bear with me.

The cover of the boxed set and core rulebook. Pictured: Dr. Hachi Mara-Two and Father Christopher Bryce, two of the characters from the novels

Legends. They speak of The Place, in the Time of Nothing. The Void was alone in The Place, possessed by an unending hunger but unable to sate it. Then Eternity entered The Place, full of dreams and possibilities locked within its infinite instant with no method of release. Void and Eternity met, and The Maelstrom was formed.

The Void tasted the essence of Eternity, and it became aware of what it craved. Eternity boiled away into the Void and billions of possibilities were destroyed. Whole galaxies came and went as the Void fed. The Maelstrom endlessly tossed out possibilities that were destroyed in the whirling currents of creation. But, eventually, two possibilities survived.

The Nameless One, a being that took after the Void, was destruction personified. Apeiros, created from realized possibilities, was of Eternity's image. The two waged a war of creation and destruction - Apeiros setting possibilities free, the Nameless One feeding on their power. But as fast as the Nameless One could feed, Apeiros could create. There could be no victor. Then the Nameless One invoked the Void.

With no other course available, Apeiros left The Place. It appealed to Eternity and saw an infinite number of possibilities opened before it. Apeiros took them all, diffusing the possibilities throughout the new place — throughout the cosmverse.

The Nameless One, now alone in The Place with the Void, vowed to hunt down Apeiros and Eternity, no matter how long it took. It used what limited creative powers it had learned during its war against Apeiros to create the Darkness Devices. Then it sent these items of evil into the cosmverse to perpetuate acts of destruction and capture the dispersed shards of Eternity.

Legends. They tell of the discovery of the first Darkness Device, and how it elevated its possessor to High Lord and then led him to other cosms to destroy and drain possibilities. Thus was born the first of the Possibility Raiders; thus was spoken The Prophecy — there would arise a High Lord with the knowledge and power to absorb so much energy as to become immortal, all powerful, a god. And this High Lord would be called the Torg!

And thus the multiverse was created.

A central idea of TORG is that the core building block of a reality (or "cosm"), the fundamental unit of energy, is the Possibility. Possibilities are what allow worlds to grow and change, what allow people to find their own destinies and shape the world around them. But every world could also potentially have a Darkness Device: an ancient artifact that could steal possibilities from the world and give them directly to its owner, who would become the High Lord of that world. The High Lord could then take that energy and use it to travel to other realities, raiding other worlds for their possibility energy.

One of these High Lords was a figure known only as "The Gaunt Man". He was the High Lord of the world of Orrorsh; an alternate Earth where the Victorian empire never ended, and controlled a world beset by monsters and horrors out of nightmares. The Gaunt Man's overall goal was to become the Torg, and in pursuing this goal he spent centuries travelling through the multiverse, finding other worlds and stripping them of possibilities. Once he had enough possibility energy, we would only need a large amount of physical energy (of the "major geological catastrophe" variety) to complete his transformation into the Torg and attain control of the multiverse.

The physical energy would be easy; a large enough act of destruction would take care of that. The hard part was finding enough possibility energy. He could drain worlds as he found them, but that was time consuming even for an immortal like himself.

Then, in his travels, he discovered Earth.

Earth was unique in The Gaunt Man's travels because it had more possibility energy than any world he'd ever encountered. This one world alone could finally provide him with the needed energy to become the Torg, but this power was also an incredible disadvantage to him.

Through the use of a Darkness Device it was possible to create "maelstrom bridges" between two realities, allowing High Lords to send invading armies from one reality to another. However, it's a multiversal law that two realities cannot exist in the same place at the same time. When one reality invades another, the invader "pours in" like oil poured into water. Then there is a contest of realities, in which possibility energy surges from the invading cosm, then from the defending cosm, then back to the invading cosm, until one reality is triumphant; either the defending reality pushes the invader back to its own dimension, or the attacking reality overwrites the defending one. High Lords can use their Darkness Devices to sustain and absorb the surge from the defending cosm, preventing their reality from being pushed back. But because Earth had so much possibility energy, the defensive surge from Earth would be too large to be handled by Orrorsh alone. The invasion would be repelled and the bridge destroyed almost as soon as the invasion started.

Unwilling to let such a little thing as certain defeat stop him when he was so close to his goal, The Gaunt Man researched and experimented for years to come up with a plan: invade Earth with multiple realities at once. In his travels, he had come across other "Possibility Raiders", other High Lords who used their own Darkness Devices to travel to and conquer other worlds.

The problem was determining how many allies he wanted to bring to the invasion. He needed help, true, but he also wanted to ensure he was sharing his power with as few "allies" as possible, as well as making sure they were people he could easily manipulate. At the same time, he needed to have enough realities invade that Earth's reality couldn't effectively push back against all of them at once. He determined that an invasion force of seven realities would be optimum, and set out to gather his invasion force:

• There was the Gaunt Man himself, High Lord of Orrorsh , the world of Victorian horror.
• His former chief officer Uthorion . Uthorion was the High Lord of Asyle , the fantasy cosm. Uthorion was actually a spirit possessing the body of the world's queen, Lady Pella Ardinay , and was slowly corrupting Aysle itself.
• Another of the Gaunt Man's former lieutenants, Kranod , was also brought in. Kranod was a "techno-demon" from Tharkhold , a harsh world of perpetual war between techno-demons and humans, where magic and high technology were merged.
• Baruk Kaah , fanatic and High Lord of the primitive cosm The Living Land , was tapped because his reality was the strongest in spiritual strength out of all the Gaunt Man's options. Baruk Kaah is an edinos; a race of lizard-people who worship life and physical sensations. Like pain.
• The Gaunt Man also recruited Pope Jean Malraux I , High Lord of Magna Verita . Pope Malraux had conquered many realities in the name of God, changing them to dark, medieval worlds like his own where only the Church held sway and science was forbidden before "cleansing" them with holy fire. His world was referred to as The False Papacy by the other High Lords, but never to Malraux's face.
• Next was the costumed madman known only as Dr. Mobius , the insane "supervillain" of the pulp cosm of Terra and self-proclaimed Pharaoh of the Nile Empire . Even though he was not High Lord of his homeworld, his Empire spanned nine different realities.
• Lastly, negotiations came to a close with 3327 , the CEO of the Kawana Corporation and High Lord of the world known as Marketplace . In this reality, also known as Nippon Tech , the laws of capitalism and profit were as powerful as the laws of physics.

Clockwise from the left: 3327 (a.k.a Ryuchi Kanawa), Uthorion, Baruk Kaah, Cyberpope Jean Malraux I, The Gaunt Man, and Dr. Mobius

The invasion took years to plan, but one of the advantages of being bonded to a Darkness Device is effective immortality. The High Lords sent advance agents ahead through smaller bridges called "dimthreads" (that only exist for moments and would not cause major disturbances in Earth's reality). These agents were able to keep their home realities wrapped around themselves, and subtly prepared Earth for their masters' invasion.

The Gaunt Man led the attack, dropping a maelstrom bridge into Indonesia and bringing with him an army of monsters, horrors, and unwitting British armed forces. As Orrorshian reality slowly overwrote Earth's reality in Indonesia, technology started to break down as the rules of a "Victorian" reality took hold. Dangerous storms surrounded the islands as Earth's reality fought back against the invading cosm.

To the outside world, all that anyone knew was that Indonesia was being buffeted by wh