I’m taking a look at Mayfair Games’ satirical, ultra political RPG Underground (1993) the same week as Election Day. Must be a coincidence. Or a conspiracy.

The game’s influences will give you a good idea of what you are getting into. There’s comics, particularly those by Alan Moore. There’s the political upheavals of the time, like the Los Angeles riots of 1992. There’s Aeon Flux. And don’t forget the music of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine.

Artists Geoff Darrow, Peter Chung and more go a long way in making the world seem violent and awful. The year is 2021 and everything is completely fucked. Daryl Gates and Rush Limbaugh are the former president and VP. Scientologists have turned Germany into a theocracy. South America is the wasteland battlefield for countless wars perpetrated by corporations (the Cola Wars are a literal thing in Underground).

That’s where players come in. The corporations used technology from a crashed UFO to give soldiers low-level super powers (and programmed them to kill using a virtual reality environment modeled after golden age superhero comics). With the wars over, the soldiers have returned to a society that neither wants nor trusts them (see also: Vietnam). Players take the role of these weird superhero-themed vets.

Satire is easy to misread. I’d say about a third of Underground hits sour notes but I can forgive it because the point of the game isn’t to be a nihilistic cyberpunk asshole, it’s to get upset enough about something in the fictional world to focus your character’s efforts on changing it. Usually by blowing stuff up. Which feels kind of domestic terrorist-ish. Like I said, it isn’t perfect. A lot of the book is going to feel off to modern audiences (the depiction of mental illness in particular is not great and there is a lot of talk about class while glossing over race, for instance) but something about the spirit of the book seems dead on. I’d totally play a new version of this to hash out all the bile and anxiety of 2019 socio-political life.