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Author Topic: Pariah  (Read 1252 times)

RPGPundit

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Pariah
« on: November 17, 2006, 02:38:19 PM »


Pariah: A Review
or "I Can't Believe Its Not X-Men!"

Pariah, by animalball games, reviewed by RPGPundit.

First, the basics of the PDF itself. Its 66 pages long, and its got a good production value, like the previously reviewed Sandbox Hill.  Its cover is in colour, and it has numerous original black and white illustrations throughout.

The cover of the PDF calls it Pariah: A game of emerging psi-powers.  I call it "Diet X-men".

The basic concept of the game is that you play human beings, the default being adolescents, but there's everything needed to run adult characters instead, that are "blessed" or "cursed" with psi-powers in a world that fears and suspects them.

So, its the standard schtick that Marvel has been milking till its bone dry for the last thirty years.
Only you won't find any teleporters or guys who turn their skin to steel or nutcase canadians with retractable claws among these PCs.  The power level in Pariah is definitely downscale. You are able to have powers that give you some edge, but you will not be Magneto or even Cyclops.

The powers you have are more akin to the "low level psychics" that some people claim to have in real life, the sort of thing Penn & Teller are around to debunk.  Only in the game world, they are very much more obvious and very much known, and feared.

So you play a kid (or an adult) who can read people's auras, or manipulate electrical currents, or move things with his mind, or see glimpses of the future. And you must band together to protect yourself from a world that is very hostile to you.

As for the system, well, nothing new here, it runs on the FUDGE system.  FUDGE was a "universal toolkit" for creating custom-tweaked rules for whatever setting you wanted to run, and the authors do an adequate job of adapting it to the needs of the setting they've created here.
If you like Fudge, you won't have any problem with Pariah, you'll think its really well made, in fact.
Unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of Fudge.
To start with, Fudge relies on the use of four six-sided dice that have two minus signs, two blank sides, and two "plus" signs.  So the system depends on dice that the typical gamer doesn't have. You can modify normal D6s, or you can just get used to counting 1s and 2s as "-"s, 3s and 4s as "blanks" and 5s and 6s as "+"s.  But its still annoying to me.

Second, as a generic system Fudge just isn't that appealing.  There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but I think that D20, or GURPS can do better in a more rules-complex way, and something like Over the Edge can do better in a rules-lite way.  Of course, GURPS and OtE weren't available to make a commercial PDF out of, and since the guys at Animalball tell me this was the very first game they ever designed, it may have predated D20 in the design stages (the product is copyright 2001, so I assume it was done by then, but I get the feeling it was started much earlier).

Anyways, on the plus side I could tell you that if you are FUDGE-fan, this product is a must-buy for you.

Back to the game itself:  The powers are very well designed, well balanced, and there are options for starting out with a whole "group" of powers (ie. "Telepathic Manipulation", which includes about five separate abilities) or to specialize in one "limited power", being able to use only one ability of the group but with a higher level of power (ie. limiting yourself to only the "Suggestion" power out of "Telepathic Manipulation"). Power use causes fatigue.
None of the powers are grossly unbalanced compared to the others, and there are guidelines including for designing new abilities of a similar vein.

The first 27 pages or so are for the rules. The rest of the PDF consists of the sample campaign.  As I mentioned, you can use the Pariah concept in the context of playing Adult "gifteds", or government agents, or whatever you like. But the sample setting, which is quite thorough and well written, presumes you are playing teenage "gifteds" who are housed at the Randall Institute.

The Randall Institute, on the outside, and when they are selling the idea to your PCs, seems like Professor X's school, a place for teenage "gifteds" to be safe and to learn how to control and use their abilities.
In reality, its anything but; its actually a prison, where a branch of the government is experimenting on these "gifted" kids and keeping them locked up against their will. A crafty GM will start out with the "trick" version, with most PCs (or their parents) actually choosing to send their kids there, thinking it will be helpful for them.   A few PC kids may be wards of the state or juvenile delinquents, sent there forcibly but still initially under the impression that it isn't actually a gulag.

Gradually, however, things turn sinister and the PCs realize that their NPC caretakers (with one or two exceptions) are actually very self-serving malignant people who see them as a threat to be studied and used.  Then the PCs have to figure out a way to survive and possibly escape.

The setting material includes totally detailed descriptions of the facilities, schedules, the NPCs who run the Institute, the teachers (including one that is well-intentioned and may try to help the PCs), the maintenance staff (including one who works for a secret "Gifted Liberation front" and will try to bust the kids out), and a number of "gifted" kids that can act as pre-made PCs or as NPCs.

The campaign is complete, with a number of scenario ideas, a timeline that is highly mutable depending on what the PCs do and when they do it, who they contact, etc.; and a number of variable resolutions to that campaign, with some ideas of how things can move on to a "sequel".

The overall style of play is obviously meant to be very grim and dark, where the players never know who they can trust, feel isolated and persecuted (hence the title).  The players might respond by uniting, by being their own friends and family, protecting each other; but I could just as easily see that the PCs could turn on each other, try to sell each other out for better treatment or protection; and cleverly the writers of the game take both possibilities into account in their sample campaign.

In summary, I quite enjoyed the setting; the system, as I mentioned, is not my favourite, but they apply the Fudge rules-set well.  And there is enough here setting-wise to make this game well worth looking into for that angle alone.

RPGPundit November 8 2005
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Pelorus

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Pariah
« Reply #1 on: November 18, 2006, 02:57:06 AM »
Linkage?
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RPGPundit

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Pariah
« Reply #2 on: November 18, 2006, 01:22:59 PM »
Linkage to what? The game?
Here:
http://www.animalball.com/ab%20store.html

RPGPundit
LION & DRAGON: Medieval-Authentic OSR Roleplaying is available now! You only THINK you've played 'medieval fantasy' until you play L&D.


My Blog:  http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/
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Dark Albion: The Rose War! The OSR fantasy setting of the history that inspired Shakespeare and Martin alike.
Also available in Variant Cover form!
Also, now with the CULTS OF CHAOS cult-generation sourcebook

ARROWS OF INDRA
Arrows of Indra: The Old-School Epic Indian RPG!
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Pelorus

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Pariah
« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2006, 04:47:14 PM »
Thankew muchly
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brettmb2

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Pariah
« Reply #4 on: November 20, 2006, 11:47:05 AM »
I thought this was published by Rogue Publishing. Did something change?
Brett Bernstein
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