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Thread: FATAL: A Campaign Journal

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    Bugbear in the Playground
     
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    Default FATAL: A Campaign Journal

    Before we Begin:
    This thread is exactly what it says in the title; a campaign journal for a tabletop roleplaying game. Let's make this a thread that doesn't need the mods to constantly doublecheck for inappropriate content. Please use your best judgement when replying.

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    We’ve all heard the horror stories of the game that is FATAL, its nine-hundred-plus pages of disturbed prepubescent content vile enough to have earned the system the title of ‘worst RPG of all time.’ But ever since I read the rather scathing reviews as well as Byron Hall’s rebuttal, I came to the conclusion that Mr. Hall had a point, and not the one perpetually pushing at the zipper of his jeans. The reviews were always amusing and appalling in equal measure, but one after another they failed to do the most important thing, the thing that Mr. Hall mentioned several times in his refutations.

    None of them had actually PLAYED the game.

    Don’t get me wrong –why would any of them want to, especially when just flipping through the FATAL book was enough to make them want to wretch, when the ‘historically-accurate’ text of the game molested everything that remained pure and good about RPGs.

    But the fact remains that Bryon Hall was right – you can’t claim a review as a valid assessment of a product if you’ve never played it. Exalted, at a glance, turns many players off immediately, and yet it has a huge fan following. White Wolf’s ‘Scion’ series looks amazing, but a few game sessions of actual tabletop play reveal that it was poorly tested. Could it be, then, that FATAL does indeed have merits as a game, that actually using it as a system and not an object of mockery could result in something worthwhile?

    Ever since then, the five little words on the back cover of FATAL (written in blood-red underneath the image of a nude woman strapped to a sacrificial table looking bored and confused, or perhaps as if she just smelled something unpleasant and was wondering who did it) have haunted me: Play FATAL, if you dare.

    And so, with much hesitation and lots of internal apologies, I gathered a few friends (who, I am told, are seriously rethinking that position after this game) and introduced them to the system we’d be using for the next several weeks. To my astonishment, none of them had ever heard of it, which only made things infinitely more tempting.

    Join me as I GM a game of FATAL for my unsuspecting pals. Because you never know; it MIGHT be good.

    <- Byron Hall, creator of FATAL RPG
    Last edited by Dust; 2010-05-24 at 06:56 AM. Reason: Title change