🚀 Tales from the Floating Vagabond is a comedy RPG focusing on events of escalating ridiculousness and deeply rooted in (frequently bawdy) parody of pop culture. The laws on nature are flexible, resembling Looney Toons more than the real world (perhaps similar to the Toon RPG). It is probably the closest we’ll ever get in tone to a Samurai Cat RPG (RIP Samurai Cat).

You can be pretty much anything in Floating Vagabond. The titular bar is floating in space, but it is a nexus between worlds. Want to be a barbarian? That’s fine. So is an adventuring archaeologist, a space pirate and an anthropomorphic dog detective. Characters are defined by a handful of ridiculous skills and their shtick, a special power. My favorite was the trench coat effect, which lets you pull literally anything out of your trench coat.

Floating Vagabond was, in 1991, a very funny game. I am keen to play it again to see how it holds up – parody has a tendency to age badly. Flipping through the first couple pages of the book, I see references to Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Nixon and the movie Arsenic and Old Lace. I suspect that reading Floating Vagabond would be baffling to anyone even a little younger than me.

If the art looks familiar, it’s because you saw James Holloway’s comedic chops yesterday in my Paranoia post. He does the whole book and, to my knowledge, the entirety of the Avalon Hill Floating Vagabond line. Dude’s a comedy illustration machine.