Has anyone here played Immortal?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal:_The_Invisible_War
Oh hey this. I had the old promotional for it. There was a thread here some time ago that touched on it. Its a pretty obscure RPG despite its frequent advertising in various gaming mags.
I remember a big full colour ad in Dragon. It was like someone combined the re-name everything approach from Dangerous Journeys, the narrativist elitism of Vampire the Masquerade, and the unreadable colour presentation of a teen beat magazine.
edit*Which reminds me, Timeship did the renaming and arrogance first and probably, not better, more worser maybe?
Quote from: David Johansen;1128022I remember a big full colour ad in Dragon. It was like someone combined the re-name everything approach from Dangerous Journeys, the narrativist elitism of Vampire the Masquerade, and the unreadable colour presentation of a teen beat magazine.
Lets not forget the photo art for most if not all the ads.
Oh yeah! I was an early adopter when I "discovered" them at LA's Strategicon. I sucked up all their books when they were first printed and ran a 10 person game with a core group of friends and an expanding roster of acquaintances when I was in my early 20s. It went over like gangbusters. I don't think it aged particularly well, but it had some very interesting ideas and could probably be tuned up and revamped. It most definitely fell into the White Wolf Vampire-Werewolf-Mage cultural taste bucket. For all that, it had an interesting take while still relying on well known pop-culture tropes. It took the self-indulgent "My PC is my idealized self" thing and just RAN with it, which surprisingly made it kinda work.
One of the major issues was that the core book spent too much time on the PCs and the setting and very little time explaining how to play or what the hell the PCs were supposed to... you know... do after their initial awakening. Sadly my Immortal books were sacrificed with much of my then collection during a very regrettable phase in my late 20s when I wanted to be "taken seriously". Probably the hardest part to revamp without it turning into major cringe was the concept of the himsati as an actual form the PC could take, rather than a kind of totemic animal. The tension between immortal and human society would need to be addressed as well. It was never taken all that seriously in the books, which wasted too much time drifting into martial arts action and meta-plot railroading towards the end. Isn't that, sadly, the trap for so many publishers?
I'm still trying to decide which was worse, was it the multiple fonts on every page, or that every page was laid out using every photoshop filter they had, making it impossible to read?
Second edition, according to one of my friends, was slightly better because they blew all the budget getting Claudia Christian to be their poster girl. Apparently they made the 1st edition metaplot a dream that the immortals got caught in.
there is a third edition that is free to download, that is apparently supposed to be good, but I haven't read it.
Quote from: Brendan;1128049Oh yeah! I was an early adopter when I "discovered" them at LA's Strategicon.
Did you run demos at Strategicon? Because that's how I discovered the game. It was fun and I received the core book as a convention tournament prize. I didn't run it, but I played in about a dozen con games before the game just vanished. I remember liking Immortal more than Vampire tabletop, but not as much as Palladium's Nightbane.
Quote from: Brendan;1128049It took the self-indulgent "My PC is my idealized self" thing and just RAN with it, which surprisingly made it kinda work.
That's what I liked about it. I never got to play it though. I was the only one in my circles who had the core book.
Here's a balanced review of it:
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/8257/roleplaying-games/rpgnet-reviews-immortal-the-invisible-war
Quote from: Spinachcat;1128102Did you run demos at Strategicon? Because that's how I discovered the game. It was fun and I received the core book as a convention tournament prize. I didn't run it, but I played in about a dozen con games before the game just vanished. I remember liking Immortal more than Vampire tabletop, but not as much as Palladium's Nightbane.
No, sadly I did not. Although I think I ran a pickup game outside one year. I was pretty low on sleep at that point :) Played a fair amount of Vampire too, but was never exposed to Nightbane. You're right that it pretty much just disappeared. I had one adventure they published with a CD of scene music. I wish I still had all those books - as ridiculous as the over the top CG art and un-necessary glossy pagers were.
Quote from: Roguish;1128108That's what I liked about it. I never got to play it though. I was the only one in my circles who had the core book.
Here's a balanced review of it:
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/8257/roleplaying-games/rpgnet-reviews-immortal-the-invisible-war
Nice, thanks for the link. It's a fair review. Also, I just found a new copy for less than $10. Did I order it? Of course! Will I ever run it again? Ehhh... not so sure. Reading the article has reminded me of all the things I just plain ignored when running the game. Maybe I'll make a blog post or a video about how I would change it if I were in charge of a new edition or something.
Anyway, thanks for the post man - what a trip down memory lane.
Did that one have a spot where it tells you you need seven or eight dice of specific colors, but you don't have to roll more than one at a time so who gives a shit what colors they are?
Quote from: Manic Modron;1128170Did that one have a spot where it tells you you need seven or eight dice of specific colors, but you don't have to roll more than one at a time so who gives a shit what colors they are?
Yeah and they sold a custom die pack for that. It was one of the first with a custom figure for a number, I believe. But you could run it with any old D10 set. There were situations where having different colored dice could speed up play or simplify it, as you could roll against several basic attributes at once. It's been 20+ years so my memory is a little fuzzy, but as the review linked above points out, the mechanical system was actually quite fast, elegant, and well integrated with the setting. It was just a little too over-styled and poorly organized.
The website is still up, but I don't know for how long. The index page went missing sometime in the last few weeks. http://invisiblewar.com/main.html
The author is apparently AWOL or something, and there's no community for it anywhere I can find.
I still have my copy of the first edition core book, but all the pages fell out of it, because the glue they used to bind it was crap. I also, somewhere, have (or had) a photocopy of an adventure that was published in one of those old quarterly game order books that game stores would get. the books had product numbers and brief descriptions of all the games they distributed, and one had like a 10 page adventure in the back to act as kind of an ad for the game.
From what I can remember, the PCs were part of a large group of newly awakened Immortals that was mostly made up of NPCs, and one of them, a Peri (one of the 'clans' that was made up of weapons) was killing other Immortals because he was remembering flashbacks of being Jack the Ripper's knife or something.
Quote from: Roguish;1128017Has anyone here played Immortal?
I played in the 1990s and knew some of the publishers. We played one or two campaigns, and they were fun---very much a part of the mid- to late-1990s zeitgeist.
Quote from: remial;1128097there is a third edition that is free to download, that is apparently supposed to be good, but I haven't read it.
Hadn't heard about this version, will dig around for it. Thanks!
Allan.
Quote from: grodog;1128584I played in the 1990s and knew some of the publishers. We played one or two campaigns, and they were fun---very much a part of the mid- to late-1990s zeitgeist.
Hadn't heard about this version, will dig around for it. Thanks!
Allan.
The link is here: http://invisiblewar.com/main.html
I haven't touched working on the game in 10 years. Didn't even know the site was down until recently, I just left everything up for folks who wanted to grab the information. Like BoxCrayonTales said if you navigate to http://invisiblewar.com/main.html you can get to everything still. Hosting company looks to have made a change that broke the original primary index main page.
I only found this because I was going thru some old links in my browser's favorites... LOL
Himsati - aka Rick Don (author 3rd Ed Immortal)
Quote from: himsati on September 04, 2020, 10:01:04 PM
I haven't touched working on the game in 10 years. Didn't even know the site was down until recently, I just left everything up for folks who wanted to grab the information. Like BoxCrayonTales said if you navigate to http://invisiblewar.com/main.html (http://invisiblewar.com/main.html) you can get to everything still. Hosting company looks to have made a change that broke the original primary index main page.
I only found this because I was going thru some old links in my browser's favorites... LOL
Himsati - aka Rick Don (author 3rd Ed Immortal)
Hey there! Fancy seeing you here.
I'm a bit sad to hear that you gave up on writing Invisible War. I only heard about it some years ago while looking for alternatives to World of Darkness. I definitely thought IW handled the secret history concept better, namely by allowing the PCs to have been personally involved in it rather than (as usual for WoD) juvenile modern day upstarts. That's the same reason I liked Nephilim too.
Have you considered selling Invisible War on DriveThruRPG for posterity? Or are there legal issues?
Legally the IP was owned by its original creator. And once I got the main books for 3rd Edition up and most of the remaining player base had switched over, I just felt it we kind of owed it to allow those books to roam free and not put them up for charges. The original books I don't even think the original creator of the game has the files needed to recreate them; there were a lot of issues with the original publishing company that he and I both worked for that put out the 1st Edition and the 1st book of the 2nd Edition (the one where the company CEO decided to change everything to sell the idea as a TV show because we knew people who worked on the Babylon 5 TV Show. That's how Claudia got involved in 2nd Edition as the "cover model" and a main character in the backstory to it.
Unfortunately the CEO did a poor job of trying to constantly take over finances for the company and drove it into the ground.
Think I heard something of the proposed TV deal way back? Was it in the late 90s?
Mismanagement has ever been the bane of gaming companies. Either intentional or just from lack of knowledge on the problems of running your own company.
Ive known several who leaped into running their own business thinking it was profits all the way. Then learning the hard way just how costly game publishing is and how little the publisher tends to get in the end.
Yep, in the late 90's... Company had the IP for the Babylon 5 CCG (along with Terminator, Aliens/Predator, Lara Croft and Wheel of Time) and our CEO got in comfy with some of the production level people on the B5 show and pitched the idea. They said it was too complicated and that it needed to be simplified for a TV audience... and that is how Immortal 2nd Edition was born. It was a forced rewrite of the game universe that only had cryptic references to the old 1st Edition... Then when it didn't go over because a) the first game book was so slim and half of everything you needed was missing (hence why I created on my own time a Book II and III to help out) and b) $$$$ started running out.... it got dumped. That's when the original creator of the IP gave me permission as the company shut down in 2002 to go ahead and do the 3rd Edition that I just put out for free. Lots of people got screwed out of being paid for artwork, salary, etc. when the CEO finally closed the doors. He took checks for artists and such and rewrote them to pay his personal phone bills and stuff. It was pathetic.
Rough.
Was the third edition completed? The website seems to say that the third book wasn't finished.
I don't trust the website hosting because it could vanish at any time. Without a big e-retailer that's always a risk.
Anyway, there's always kickstarters. Plenty of revivals and anniversary editions were crowdfunded.
Quote from: Omega on September 06, 2020, 10:37:51 PM
Mismanagement has ever been the bane of companies. Either intentional or just from lack of knowledge on the problems of running your own company.
FTFY. Nothing reaffirms my belief that people are stupid quite like reading about spectacular financial idiocies. It's not JUST gaming companies :)
I feel bad for himsati though.