Gaming - TORG, Part 1 - A Brief History, Overview, and Where I'd Use This Game

TORG (short for That Other Role-Playing Game) is a kitchen-sink RPG developed by West End Games in the early '90s, famous for a high concept and a terrible execution.  It was picked up a few years ago by Ulisses Spiele and re-released as TORG Eternity, a vast improvement on the ruleset - as in, it was actually playable and doesn't require a slide rule or abacus.  Because I don't generally deal in negative examples, I won't spend a lot of time on my problems with old TORG, but please believe me when I say that Eternity is a massive improvement that makes the Possibility Wars actually possible.  Because TORG is not a household name, I think it needs some background description before I get into why this is on my mind.

The Possibility Wars are a central conceit of TORG - the idea that there are an infinite number of possible worlds, and that the force of those possibilities power reality.  There are Sinister Forces (tm) who wish to siphon that possibility energy for themselves, and heroes and villains who have the ability to manipulate possibilities in such a way that, for instance, a bullet misses.  It was an early character-point or reroll mechanic, and while the implementation of everything in Old TORG was clunky, this particular mechanic was a novel way of giving a narrative power to rerolls or roll improvement.  The term for this character point is a "Possibility," and the collective term for all characters, hero or villain, able to manipulate Possibilities is "Stormers."  That hardly sounds heroic, so in-universe, one of the earliest on Core Earth - more on that in a moment - coined the term "Storm Knights" for heroic Stormers.  In contrast with these "Possibility-rated" characters, most of reality is made up of Ords, or ordinary people.  Ords conform to the reality around them, for whatever the strongest local version of that reality may be.

TORG's setting is deliberately pulpy, without getting into the pulp cosm of Nile Empire.  As part of a vast-interdimensional conspiracy, a number of other realities, here called cosms (such as the above-named Nile Empire) invade Earth to seize its Possibility energy, with the result that "free" Earth is now referred to as Core Earth.  The Big Bad of each cosm calls themselves a High Lord, for instance, and the thing they used to manipulate Possibilities is called a Darkness Device.  With enough meta-knowledge, in other words, it's hard to see a lot of subtlety.

At the same time, the original write-up, even if it was in Late-80s, Early-90s Hammer-Subtlety Design, took pains to paint the various competing High Lords as if they were playing a variation of the old Great Game, where the various European powers never competed directly, but constantly competed indirectly for their colonial empires.  Each of the High Lords had their identified friends and enemies among the other High Lords, and it was deliberately structured to allow playing them against each other.  Since narrative complexity isn't a modern invention, it was, and is, entirely possible to play this sort of more subtle game in TORG, or play it as a straight-up action movie.

Each of the cosms is written up as a sort of X meets Y - Cyberpapacy is, as the name suggests, Cyberpunk meets the Spanish Inquisition.  Tharkold is a post-apocalyptic nuclear hellscape with actual literal demons.  Nile Empire is '30s pulp meets Egyptian mythology.  Each cosm has invaded a region of Core Earth, and most of the people and things inside that region has been transformed to match the invading reality - so, in the Cyberpapacy, a Peugeot in Paris gets turned into an electric car with a self-driving AI that can't be overridden without being reported for heresy; in Israel, a Merkava gets turned into a Maus, et cetera.

The cosms have defining characteristics, called axioms, and rules by which they operate, called laws.  The axioms are things like magic, social development, spiritual development, and technology.  Thus, Pan-Pacifica, which is Rising Sun meets Akira, right down to the biotech horrors, has a higher than average social and technological axiom, but lower than average magic and spiritual, and its world laws deal with things like betrayal, revenge, and assimilation.  If a thing does something that doesn't work with the local axioms, or wouldn't work in the user's home-reality axioms - like a dwarf from Aysle (post-Tolkien High Fantasy) firing a machine gun (Core Earth, or "Near-Now") in the Living Land (Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert Howard fantasy) - this may cause a Contradiction, and may cause the character to shift to local reality.  One of the old background NPCs, a villain from Nile Empire, did this so often even he wasn't really sure which reality he belonged to any more.

You will note that I've said very little about the mechanics; that's because I'm much more interested in story than mechanics and unless the mechanics are actively bad, like Old TORG, they aren't that big a deal to me.  However, TORG's approach to difficulty is a little non-standard and takes some getting used to, so here goes a brief explanation.  TORG uses a d20 for everything, though the die result is compared to a modifier chart and added to a skill or attribute to find the total result.  Difficulty numbers are scaled against that result, not the die roll; rolling a 12 (modifier: 0), and having an 8 in the relevant skill, produces a final total of 8.  Skilled characters may roll up on 10 or 20; unskilled rolls only roll up on 20 (so if you roll a 20, then you roll up; if that's a 2, the result is 22).  Possibilities may additionally be spent to buy a roll-up, with a minimum of 10 on that roll.  There is no top cap to the rolls, and a roll above 60 on the die is baked into the rules as a Glory roll, and can have in-universe effects beyond merely "you shoot the orc real good" - as an example, I have seen a character's battle with bureaucracy to get a motorcycle turn into a glorious story of sticking it to The Man.

So - all of that aside, what's TORG good for, what's it not good for, and what impact does this have on design?

TORG is excellent at culture clashes.  The idea that an electric samurai from Osaka was waylaid by demons while flying to Berlin, and now has to struggle her way across a nuclear wasteland while maintaining her sense of self while assailed by opponents including reality itself trying to rewrite her understanding of the universe - there is room in there for some serious storytelling.  You could build a whole campaign around just the contrasts between the characters and their local reality, and every TORG cosm book, old or new, includes a smattering of characters who are Core Earthers stubbornly clinging to their reality in the face of the new invading cosm.

It's pretty good at Big Damn Heroes stories; even Storm Knights from other realities are interested in stopping the rampant exploitation of Possibility energy, and the importance of the characters' deeds inspiring others is baked into the rules.  Players are encouraged to play for drama and take big risks, because the odds are pretty good that at worst a neutral result will come out of it and there is always a small but worthwhile chance that an apparently trivial action will wind up having literally world-defining effects.

It's less good at small, local stories.  That's not to say it's bad at it; you could just as easily run a game describing the efforts of townies in Oxford, suddenly dealing with the fact that the University has a school of magic, and the idea of that Merkava crew from earlier trying to get back to Core Earth is a pretty good one-shot idea.  It is just better at global, world-spanning adventure across multiple realities than it is at small local affairs.  This isn't the system for something like Pathfinder's Sandpoint, or the world of Dogs in the Vineyard.  If you want to run "dedicated fantasy world" or pulp or cyberpunk or whatever other dedicated setting, with or without character points, there are other games that do those, individually, better than TORG does, but good luck running post-apocalyptic noir gothic cyberpunk zombie pulp games in them.

Now, why is this on my mind?

It so happens that a friend of mine is the lead author on the Tharkold cosm book.  He's also their line admin now.  It's also about to be his birthday.  So I've been asked to run a TORG game, and I've been trying to narrow my thoughts, because in case this hasn't conveyed it, it's a big world.  This post is mostly organizing my thoughts on that game, what it does well, and what notes I want to hit in that game.  The conflict of old and new realities, and between conflicting visions of the same end goal, is something TORG does well both at a local and meta level, and it also lends itself well to big, sprawling adventures across multiple continents and realities.

CORRECTION - Turns out he's the line admin, not the developer.