My thinking was, well, this week is going to drift into October and Torg has a whole horror realm, maybe I can pick a couple of horror-ish Torg adventures to round out the week. Hey, look at Central Valley Gate (1992), that sure looks like a horror scenario. A small town with a terrible secret? I bet that will be easy to write about.
As usual, I was wrong. I have no idea what this module is about, let alone what Central Valley’s terrible secret is. I guess it’s the gate? There is so much lore casually dropped throughout this module regarding the fragile alliances of like seven different factions, I had no real hope of parsing the goings-on. For the players, it starts with rescuing a woman from some bikers and it ends with defending her town from some bikers as well as some dinosaur people and some technodemons. Thankfully, by the end, the players have probably allied with agents of Nippon Tech and a company of Victorian infantry? Gods below, check out this sentence, the very first of Act Two: “The Storm Knight and Victorians arrive in Redside during the middle of an attack by a sizable force of edeinos, gospog, stalengers, and a pair of benth-controlled baragons.” What?
I’m pretty sure the point of Torg is to just give artists an excuse to draw the weirdest ass characters standing next to each other.
“The Storm Knight and Victorians arrive in Redside during the middle of an attack by a sizable force of edeinos, gospog, stalengers, and a pair of benth-controlled baragons.”
Channeling their inner Lewis Carroll!
It really does have “Jabberwocky” vibes to it!
If someone ever sat down and compiled a concise, exhaustive glossary of terms and concepts in TORG, I never saw it. I’d love to see one.
Over-egging the pudding by far. You should never have more than three cosms (besides Core Earth) in one adventure.
But that art of the Victorian soldiers versus biker gang is awesome!
Honestly what that sentence reminded me of was the kind of overfilled prose that I love saying while running Ultraviolet Grasslands. I guess the difference there is that the details are relatively unimportant and just intended to tell the players “this world is really weird and incomprehensible, act accordingly.”