I’m having a look at a retro RPG I’d like to run sometime soon. It’s called Teenagers from Outer Space and it’s pretty great. The first edition came out in 1987 and it looks like it; the art, the writing, the cultural references are all very VERY 1987. It’s great. I found it afew places, here’s the easiest spot to find a copy.
The game was a product of R. Talsorian Games Inc. which you most likely know of for its Cyberpunk series. R. Talsorian was founded by Mike Pondsmith, who is rightly recognized as an industry giant and is a very talented and imaginative person. He was and is still the principal designer and writer for Talsorian.
Teenagers from Outer Space was was of Talsorian’s earliest games. It’s a rules-light old-school RPG that focuses on creating a fast paced, easy going role playing experience. It’s meant to be easy to pick up and play, and even inexperienced players should be able to run a game with relative ease. There’s no math apart from simple addition, the only dice are afew d6, and character creation is fun and intuitive.
The game itself borrows heavily from 70s and 80s anime tropes, although the first edition does not play this up. Subsequent editions were released in the 90s, and they brought some of these anime elements to the forefront in a bigger way. I’m preparing to run a game and want to write a little about that.
What I really Like About TFOS
How 80s it is, first and foremost. I love retro-futurist works, and this game is surely that. However, its retro-futurism seems unintentional, the source material feels like it’s just trying to be really 80s pop-culture, the way teenagers in 1987 were trying to be really 80s pop-culture (it was just called trying to be “cool” at the time as I understand it).
Pondsmith wrote Cyberpunk, after all, so we know his capacity to imagine colourful futures isn’t in question. And yet we meet aliens whose alien technologies are amazing ghetto-blasters, and walkmen that can project holograms to put you in a music video, or amazing portable phones that can call anybody IF you know their phone number.
A review I read suggested it would be easy to update to 2016 by writing in cell phones, social media, and gluten-free organic free range vegetables. But that’s exactly what I don’t want. I want a hamburger to cost $1.20 ($2 if you want fries and a cola) and everyone to be reckless and uninhibited and free the way that small towns in America felt in 1987 (or, at least, how we want to imagine they felt in our collective memory). I want you to have to find a payphone if you need to tell your mom and dad you’re going to be late. I want your biggest worry to be getting a date or if your mom will find out you got a D in math.
One of the things that does a really good job of building immersion is the photocopied paper money players get as their allowance each week. Physical money is now pretty outmoded, but in the 1980s it was the way most people bought most things – bank cards mostly only worked in ATMs to let you pull out cash. It’s a really effective prop for role-playing and immersion because it makes the players pretend to do the thing that their characters are doing.
I also like the relatively simple system that discourages power gaming. The player has a series of core stats that are each 1d6, but a player can reallocate points if they like. Characters then get to add 1d6 points to any “knacks” they want – skills tried to specific traits. For example, a character could have a wheelie knack of 2 on their driving skill. When they roll to do a wheelie, they roll, add their driving score, then add 2 to the result for their knack.
Rolls are always made opposed – you roll 1d6, add any applicable bonuses, and then the referee rolls 1d6 and either adds the appropriate stat and knack for an NPC, or else picks a difficulty level for the task you are trying to perform between 1 and 10 and adds that. You aim to beat the referee’s roll to see if you do whatever it is you were trying to do.
The mechanism to dial power gaming back is called “It’s Too Much”. It’s an ingenious mechanism; if the player beats the referee by too much (a secret number), it’s Too Much. Trying too hard isn’t cool for 80s teenagers, in this game that’s because it has unforeseen results.
So if you roll too well to convince the hall monitor you really need to get to the hospital to see your mom, they might drop what they’re doing to drive you there. If you roll too high on your driving stunt, maybe your 360 turns into a 540 and you’re facing the wrong way in the middle of the race. The referee has to come up with these things on the fly, which is challenging, but ultimately pretty good. It creates immersion – teenagers are used to keeping their heads down – and encourages players not to take their stat rolls too seriously or power game their knacks. Instead it encourages players to build on their weaknesses rather than play to their strengths, which is kind of cool too I think.
Another really great thing is that characters don’t die. They have a Bonk index, and after too many “bonks” a character is stunned for a turn, afew more if badly bonked. After that, they just get back up and get going. Players are encouraged to take risks and be silly, because there are no stakes. I love that, player death is the worst mechanic, and it’s really rare that player death in a game has much to do with poor play by the player dying (more common are bad luck or inexperience with that particular game, which is the worst reason to punish a player).
What I don’t Like
Some kind of 80s quirks are really great, and some are kind of problematic. For example, the players have a stat called “Relationship with Parents” which is cute and I love. But, the rules are clear that each player has a nuclear family with a binary Mom and Dad. No queer or divorced couples. On one hand, that borrows from the source material, the protagonists tended to have fairly archetypal nuclear families in 70s-80s anime (other family arrangements being more likely for antagonists and side characters). But i don’t like that kind of erasure. Why should it matter in game if your family is non-nuclear, especially in such a rules light game?
The game comes with a series of “episodes” with pre-written outlines, most of which are not very good int he first edition. Tropes like the rap-man from the rap-planet shows up, we need to makeover the tomboy, ninjas that practice “gong-foo”, girls that are into your male character that you reject for no explainable reason (and the much more problematic reverse situation), help the nerdy guy get a prom date, love potions, sexy art teachers, the gang is all here. And, to be fair, those were the tropes the audience was interested in. But it is hard to find much of this source material I would feel comfortable including in a game I run.
The art illustration is sufficiently ripe with fan-service in the way that 70s and 80s animes were – sexy teenage girls in 80s bikinis, crop tops, high rise jeans, short-shorts, and so on. The art teacher is depicted in a form fitting black dress, skirt hitting above the thighs, knee length boots, and an edgy haircut 80s haircut. The caption reads beneath her illo reads “Miss Marae is the Art Teacher. Art is an extremely popular course in your High School. Three guesses why, and the first two don’t count.” And yeah, teenagers are horny, but I’m not very comfortable with this. I’m not sure how to approach inserting sexuality into the game, both unwanted attention and objects of desire.
There are some mechanical things that need fixing as well. Players can choose to be an alien or a human teenager. Aliens get up to 3 powers by rolling 1d6 3 times (although on a 1, they get no power, so there is a 0.46% chance of having no power at all). Aliens also get flying saucers instead of cars, which are faster and have a bunch of cool attachments the human teens’ cars can’t have. Human teens get to roll on a 2d6 table for human-specific perks, but there’s a 55% chance of getting nothing at all. So I re-wrote the table to make sure humans get at least something; they have a chance at the 2 coolest powers in the game already, but nobody would play one with the default rules. I also lowered the price of upgrading your car, and made some cool human-unique cars upgrades.
I’m also creating a handy little booklet of the items for sale, because I don’t want players each trying to look through the one book – they will get to it at different times, and it will take too long. I want to keep momentum at character creation. Because it’s so fun and does such a good job of getting you excited to play, I want to drop you quickly into playing the teenager you’ve invented.
Overall I’m very excited to give this a crack, I’ll run a one off this week if I can and write about it here.
Jack Speyside 