This is Torg, Greg Gordon and Bill Slavicsek’s 1990 RPG about alternate realities invading Earth. Players take the roles of Stormknights (anything from a cyborg to a wizard to an intelligent giant star fish) and try to fend of the invasion, primarily through their ability to warp the fabric of reality.

The idea of using parallel dimensions in an RPG in order to smoosh all sorts of genres together into one game was really big at this moment in time – Shadowrun came out in 1989, Rifts in 1990. Shadowrun retains some cultural cachet, but I think this sort of slipstream genre mashing has aged poorly overall. I love Torg, and I own nearly the entire line, but a lot of it strikes me as deeply silly nearly 30 years later.

I mean, in development, West End Games referred to it as The Other Roleplaying Game and couldn’t think of a better name come time for release, so they just called it Torg. That says a lot.

Anyway, Torg was designed to be cinematic and used a lot of the film-terminology-as-game-mechanic in the same way Star Wars did. This is augmented by the Drama Deck, which deals cards that can effect play in unusual ways to players at the start of a session. An open-ended rolling system also encouraged crazy results. I played it exactly once and it was a ridiculous blast.

There is downside. Each book expanded the rules, sort of like GURPS, with new tech and skills, which lead to power creep over time. There are a lot of puns. The slipstream of genres often translates in play to a clash of cultural stereotypes (some of which are explicitly encouraged in the game materials, like NipponTech’s ugly portrayal of the Japanese stereotypes of the time). The overall production quality across the line is rather low, with lots of crummy illustrations and sub-par editing. Finally, it was designed as a living game, with an ongoing meta story that required the purchase of lots of books and a high barrier to entry later in the line’s lifetime.